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you kill Nicola Hornyak?” he asked, as if still discussing old friends and family.
    “No!” I shouted, bewildered by his change of pace, momentarily losing my cool. “I wasn’t even here. I was out of town. On a—”
    “—Fishing trip. Yes. Mr. Weld told me. But that may have been a clever piece of subterfuge. It’s convenient that your girlfriend’s brutal murder coincided with your absence.”
    “I was with a friend,” I growled. “Bill Casey. He’ll vouch for me. He was with me the entire time. We even shared the same tent.”
    “I know.” The Cardinal smiled. “I just wanted to see how you react when riled. You can learn a lot about a man by the way he responds when subjected to slanderous accusations.”
    There was a knock on the door and Ford Tasso entered. “Algiers,” he greeted me. “Heard about the mess. How you holding up?”
    “Quite remarkably,” The Cardinal answered for me. “He takes loss firmly on the chin. Barely fazed by it.”
    “I’m fazed,” I said sourly. I didn’t like what he was doing. I hadn’t been especially close to Nic but I was hurting from what had happened. The Cardinal was acting like it was some big joke. That pissed me off.
    “Look at his face,” The Cardinal chortled. “He’d love to throttle me.”
    “Go easy on him,” Tasso said. “Finding a partner in the Fridge would have knocked the wind out of the most seasoned of us. Frank told me he didn’t even know she was missing.”
    “You two are back on speaking terms?”
    “For the time being.” Tasso joined The Cardinal on the other side of the desk and glanced at the notes in his employer’s lap. “The cops don’t know about Al,” he said. “Want us to keep him under wraps?”
    The Cardinal sniffed. “Makes no difference whether they know or not.”
    “How about you, Algiers? Want us to hush things up?”
    “Bill knew I was seeing her,” I said.
    “Bill?”
    “Bill Casey,” The Cardinal explained. “The pair were away fishing when the incident occurred.”
    “And he knows about you two?” Tasso frowned. “Then we can’t keep it to ourselves. Howard Kett’s handling the case.” Kett was Bill’s superior officer. Bill didn’t have much time for him—Kett was a grade-A prick—but would feel compelled to reveal information as important as this.
    Tasso and The Cardinal discussed other business for a couple of minutes, while I sat there like a stuffed squirrel. When their discussion came to an end, Tasso departed. He offered his condolences one final time and slipped out.
    “You weren’t listening, were you?” The Cardinal challenged me as soon as his right-hand man was out of earshot.
    “What?”
    “While I was chewing the cud with Mr. Tasso, I kept an eye on you. You tuned us out.” He tutted. “You shouldn’t be so courteous, Al. Have you any idea what certain people would pay to be where you are, to have been present while I was in congress with my number one aide? These are the types of opportunities one should seize, not turn one’s nose up at.”
    “I’m not interested in seizing,” I responded. “That’s why I’d be no good as a replacement for Frank. I’m not an organizer.”
    “A pity. I had high hopes for you. Your father was far more ambitious.”
    I shifted my chair a couple of inches closer to the desk. “What did my father do for you, exactly?”
    “Collected debts. Encouraged stubborn shopkeepers to see things my way. This was thirty, thirty-five years ago. We were still quite primitive back then.”
    “Do you know what happened to him?” I asked. “Why he vanished?”
    “Your mother never told you?”
    I shook my head. “She never spoke about my father. I think she was afraid of him. Whenever I asked, she said he was a bad man and I was to forget him. She died when I was a teenager, before I could make more mature inquiries.”
    “You never tried tracking him down?”
    “I asked about him but nobody knew anything. Bill did some checking for