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myself awkwardly from where I’d laid the tulips crossways to her headstone. “Had a little problem hauling furniture, Beth.”
    You’re getting kind of old for Pepsi Generation moving parties, aren’t you?
    “The ones in front of a rented van where beautiful people are smiling and the dog catches a Frisbee in its teeth?” That’s what I had in mind. A pause. But that’s not the whole story, is it?
    “No.” I told her about Pearl Rivkind and William Proft. Sounds like you think you did the right thing and made a mistake, all at once.
    “Maybe not the only mistake, either.”
    The furniture moving again?
    “Only partly, Beth. It’s more Nancy and me.”
    Another pause. How do you mean?
    “There’ve been some... I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes everything’s just right and other times I’m not sure we’re on the same wavelength.”
    What does she say?
    “About what?”
    About your... wavelengths.
    “We haven’t talked about it.”
    Sure you have, John. You just don’t realize it.
    I looked away from the grave toward the edge of the harbor below us. A Styrofoam board was crashing against the rocks, so weathered and battered it was hard to picture what it had been before going into the water.
    John?
    “Still here.”
    But trying not to be?
    I looked back, not toward the headstone, but below that, to where she was. “What do you mean?”
    You have a way, you always did, of closing off things you don’t want to hear.
    I shook my head. “Beth, I wouldn’t have gotten this far, not as an MP or a claims—”
    I don’t mean professionally, John. I mean personally. You close off and miss things.
    “Like what?”
    Like whatever you and Nancy should be resolving.
    “Which is?”
    That’s something you’ll have to see for yourself. With her. I watched the hunk of Styrofoam bounce off a few more rocks and started to empathize with it.

    “John, how you doing?”
    I looked at Elie, holding a clipboard behind the counter at the Nautilus club I’d joined a while before. He was the manager, his black hair, olive skin, and blue eyes the kind of mix he’d told me was typical of his Lebanese background. “Not so good, El.”
    His face darkened. “When I didn’t see you for a while, I figured it had to do with that gang... thing.”
    I’d been involved in a bad situation, a shoot-out with some members of a street gang into drug-pushing. “This is different, El. There’s something wrong with both my shoulder and my knee.”
    “What happened?”
    I told him.
    “Gee, John, I don’t think you’d better work out till you get things looked at.”
    “You know any good doctors?”
    “Mostly just people at the Sports Medicine clinics. There are a couple of them, but you don’t really have a sports injury, you know?”
    “I know, but I’ll need to be able to run and work out after whatever some doctor does to me, so I may as well start there.”
    He tore a sheet of paper off his clipboard. “Let me give you the one I’d go to.”

    I went back to the condo I was renting from another doctor doing a two-year residency in Chicago . Changing suits, I called the number Elie gave me, reaching a receptionist who sounded frazzled. She said they had a cancellation for later that same Wednesday and did I want it. I said I did. Then I walked downstairs, carefully, and got the Prelude out from the parking space behind the building.

    “Yeah?”
    I opened the door that had LIEUTENANT ROBERT MURPHY on it. He was sitting behind his desk, the penholder in front of him sporting a miniature American flag. Murphy wore a crisp white shirt with short sleeves, his black skin contrasting with it and the gold-toned watch and wedding band. His paisley tie was snugged tight against the collar button, the pen in his hand hovering over a report he seemed to be revising.
    “Cuddy. Forgive me for not getting up.”
    “That’s okay, Lieutenant. Mind if I sit down?”
    “Go ahead. Actually, it’s kind of kismet, you