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an auxiliary unit he's got for pulverizing the bone segments so it's less obvious what you've got." He raised his eyes to meet mine. "When I was in high school I worked afternoons at Lou's place. I wasn't going to mention his name. Fuck it, what difference does it make? My father wanted me to become a doctor, he thought this would be good training. I don't know if it was or not, but I was familiar with the place, the equipment."
    "Does your cousin know why you wanted to use his place?"
    "People know what they want to know. He couldn't have figured I wanted to slip in there at night and give myself a rabies shot. We were there all night. The unit he has is pet size, we had to do several loads and let the unit cool down in between. Jesus, it's killing me to talk about it."
    "I'm sorry."
    "It's not your fault. Did Lou know I used the cooker? I figure he had to know. He has to have a pretty good idea what kind of business I'm in. He probably figures I killed a competitor and wanted to get rid of the evidence. People see all this shit on television and they think that's how the world works."
    "And he didn't object?"
    "He's family. He knew it was urgent and he knew it wasn't something we should talk about. And I gave him some money. He didn't want to take it, but the guy's got two kids in college so how can he not take it? It wasn't that much."
    "How much?"
    "Two grand. That's pretty low-budget for a funeral, isn't it? I mean you can spend more than that on a casket." He shook his head. "I got the ashes in a tin can in the safe downstairs. I don't know what to do with them. No idea what she would have wanted. We never discussed it.
    Jesus, she was twenty-four years old. Nine years younger than me, nine years less a month. We were married two years."
    "No children."
    "No. We were gonna wait one more year and then-- oh, Jesus, this is terrible. It bother you if I have a drink?"
    "No."
    "Petey says the same. Fuck it, I'm not having one. I had one pop Thursday afternoon after I talked on the phone with them and I haven't had anything since. I get the urge and I just push it away. You know why?"
    "Why?"
    "Because I want to feel this. You think I did the wrong thing?
    Taking her to Lou's place, cremating her.
    You think that was wrong?"
    "I think it was unlawful."
    "Yeah, well, I wasn't too worried about that aspect of it."
    "I know you weren't. You were just trying to do what was decent.
    But in the process you destroyed evidence. Dead bodies hold a great deal of information for someone who knows what to look for. When you reduce a body to ashes and bone chips, all that information is lost."
    "Does it matter?"
    "It might be helpful to know how she died."
    "I don't care how. All I want to know is who."
    "One might lead to the other."
    "So you think I did the wrong thing. Jesus, I couldn't call the cops, hand them a sack full of cuts of meat, say, 'This is my wife, take good care of her.' I never call the cops, I'm in a business where you don't, but if I had opened the trunk of the Tempo and she was there in one piece, dead but intact, maybe, maybe, I'd have reported it. But this way--"
    "I understand."
    "But you think I did the wrong thing."
    "You did what you had to do," Peter said.
    Isn't that what everybody always does? I said, "I don't know a lot about right and wrong. I probably would have done the same thing, if I'd had a cousin with a crematorium in his back room. But what I would have done is beside the point. You did what you did. The question is, where do you go from here?"
    "Where?"
    "That's the question."
    IT wasn't the only question. I asked a great many questions, and I asked most of them more than once. I took them both back and forth over their story, and I wrote down a lot of notes in my notebook. It began to look as though the segmented remains of Francine Khoury constituted the only piece of tangible evidence in the entire affair, and they had gone up in smoke.
    When I finally closed my notebook the two Khoury brothers