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arrived.
    B O D Y C O P Y
    “Hi, Donald,” she said.
    She was wearing bright red lipstick. Tremaine noticed it and noticed again the little glimmer of sadness in her eyes.
    This time he knew where it came from.
    “Hi, Nina.”
    They sat down. A waiter came over, and Nina, too, ordered a cup of coffee.
    Tremaine said, “I’ve done a little research on your uncle.
    He was an impressive guy.”
    “Thank you. His whole life was advertising.”
    He couldn’t tell if she was implying something.
    “I don’t mean that in a negative way,” she said.
    There was his answer.
    “When I was little,” she said, “I used to come out here in the summers, and he’d just let me hang around the agency while he worked. It was great because there was all kinds of stuff to play with. Tons of pens, and all kinds of paper and scissors and things. And lots of people, too.”
    “Did you stop coming out after a while?”
    “High school, you know. I felt that spending time with my friends in Connecticut was more important than spending the summer in an ad agency. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but I’m sure I would have learned more if I had kept coming out here. All we did in high school was talk about boys and try to get people to buy us beer.”
    “Same. Except replace boys with girls and beer with beer, booze, pot, and cigarettes.”
    Nina said, “You can smoke cigarettes and still surf com-petitively?”
    “I didn’t smoke that many cigarettes.”
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    Michael Craven
    “What about the other stuff?”
    “Let’s get back to the case.”
    Nina smiled.
    Tremaine said, “What about after college? Did you keep in touch with your uncle then?”
    “He offered me a job. But I was married by then, living in Connecticut.”
    She paused for a second and said, “I’m not married now.
    I got divorced pretty recently.”
    She paused for another second and said, “That sounded weird.”
    “It’s okay. I’ve been married. And divorced. It never sounds right when you talk about it.”
    “Thank you. People don’t realize that. I’m actually writing a book about it. That’s the length I’ll go to so I don’t have to talk about it and sound weird.”
    Tremaine laughed. And did his best not to indicate that he, in fact, had read some of her book.
    Nina said, “Anyway, I’d talk to my uncle on the phone and stuff still, but at the time of his death, it had been years since I’d seen him.”
    “What about your mom? Did she see him?”
    “Not really. They were friendly, but my mom was seven years younger than Roger. And lived three thousand miles away. After she married my dad, she started raising a family, and my dad was working long hours and Roger’s ad career was always going a million miles an hour . . . Everybody was busy. The years went by and they just kind of got used to not really seeing each other.
    It’s kind of sad when I think about it. You know, I’m 40
    B O D Y C O P Y
    sure they loved each other, but they didn’t see each other much.”
    “So neither you nor your mom really knew him—in a personal way—at the time of his death?”
    Nina paused and then said, “Yeah, that’s true. I had never thought of it that way, but I’d say it’s true. We knew his history, and we knew a lot about his business, his agency, partly because we talked about it a lot after the murder. But you’re right, we didn’t really know him anymore. I could see how hurt my mom was when Roger was killed. Maybe there was some regret.”
    Tremaine said, “At the time of his death, your uncle held two titles at his ad agency. I know he came up with ad campaigns, but what exactly was his role?”
    “It’s confusing, kind of, if you haven’t worked in the business. Ad agencies, basically, are split into two sides, the business side and the creative side. Roger was the head of both. He was the president and the creative director. But really, he was the creative director. Which means he was the boss of all the writers and art