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mind.
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œThing is, nobody saw anything. Pierce and your paisan ”—and again, the knowing leer—“were standing right next to him. Workmen are all over the place. Bam, bam, somebody drops Henderson and disappears. Nobody seen nothing.”
    â€œWorkmen doing what?”
    â€œPutting up the flags and stuff.”
    They were standing on the stage now, the flags and stuff hanging above them. A podium behind which Henderson would never stand was under a huge banner that stated LESTER MEANS LAW . Neither of the detectives knew what that meant.
    â€œHow many workmen?” Carella asked.
    â€œA dozen or so. I have the list.”
    â€œNone of them saw anything?”
    â€œI got some of my people out talking to them now. But I doubt we’ll get lucky.”
    â€œBut they were all there working when he got shot, is that it?”
    â€œThey were all on the stage here, putting up things, testing mikes, whatever they do.”
    â€œNobody in the wings?”
    â€œJust the shooter.”
    â€œLet me get this straight…”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œHenderson is onstage with his people and a dozen workmen…”
    â€œIs the way I got it.”
    â€œâ€¦when six shots are fired.”
    â€œTwo of them taking him in the chest. Four went wild.”
    â€œAnd by the time anyone reacts, the shooter is gone.”
    â€œThat’s the long and the short of it,” Ollie said.
    Â 
    HE TOLD THE uniformed guard in the gate house booth that he was here to see Mrs. Henderson, and the guard checked his clipboard list, and then picked up the phone when he didn’t see Carella’s name on it. Apparently Pamela Henderson gave the okay; the guard told him it was the first house on the right on Prospect Lane, and then waved him on through.
    It was a lovely spring day.
    Carella drove on winding roads past men and women in white playing tennis under clear blue skies, boys and girls on the fields behind stolid Smoke Rise Academy, playing soccer and baseball in their gray-and-black uniforms, their vibrant voices oddly recalling a youth he thought he’d long forgotten. The Henderson house was a vast stone structure set on a good two acres of wooded land. He parked the car in the gravel driveway, walked to the front door, and pressed the bell under a brass escutcheon that read simply “26 Prospect.” A uniformed housekeeper answered the door and told him she would fetch Mrs. Henderson.
    Pamela Henderson was a woman in her mid-forties, Carella guessed, tall and slender and exuding the sort of casual confidence women of wealth and influence often did. But she was not an attractive woman, he realized, her eyes somehow too small for her face, her nose a trifle too large. Newspaper reports would undoubtedly describe her as “handsome,” the death knell for any woman who aspired to beauty.
    Poised and polite, already wearing black—albeit jeans and a cotton turtleneck—she greeted Carella at the door, and led him into the living room of her home perched on the river, afternoon sunlight streaming through French doors, a glimpse of the Hamilton Bridge in the near distance, the cliffs of the adjoining state bursting with the greenery of spring. Her eyes were as green as the faraway hills. She wore no makeup. A simple oversized gold cross hung on the front of the black cotton turtleneck.
    â€œI understood from the newspapers that a…different detective was investigating the case,” she said, hesitating slightly before the word “different,” as if disapproving of either the false information in the papers or the unexpected turn the investigation had taken.
    There was a certain formality here, a strict observance of the rules of sudden death and subsequent grief. Here were the stunned widow and the sympathetic but detached investigator, together again for the first time, with nothing to talk about but what had brought them to this