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ringer and muted the volume on my answering machine. It was imperative that I head off Mary Lee and her questions. I was too tired to hear anyone’s theories but my own.
    I turned on a local radio station for the old fogies and settled down in my bed. The sounds of Glen Miller filled the room and I shut my eyes, thinking of Bill Butler and how good he would have looked in a World War II uniform. I needed music from another decade right then. I felt transported and hoped it would last.
    I finally fell asleep listening to Johnny Mathis. Helpless as a kitten indeed.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    I woke at five the next morning when the paperboy scored a bull’s-eye on the window near my bed. It was still dark outside when I retrieved the newspaper. The cold October morning put a sting into the concrete of the stoop beneath my feet. I couldn’t find my second bunny slipper. I wondered briefly if Jack had taken it, but no—a slipper fetish was too imaginative for him.
    The murder took up the entire front page. Every one of those reporters had managed to score a by-line. Shrimpboat Shorty had insinuated himself in not one, but three photographs. Bill Butler was nowhere to be seen. Rats. There was no statement from the Mary Lee Master’s camp anywhere. I knew why. She never let a word out the door unless she checked it first and she’d probably been too busy downtown fending off questions to approve any official release.
    Mary Lee’s opponent, Stoney Maloney, had been more on the ball. The N&O ran his statement on page two, across from a handsome campaign photograph of him at a recent rally. Stoney had the look of a winner. He was tall with a strong build, a square jaw, clear eyes, Roman nose, and a full head of prematurely silver hair, carefully cut so that no offending strands dangled beneath his collar to provoke the church-going folks. He stood at a podium, hands spread wide, leaning toward a microphone. The camera had captured him as he was making an important point and people always look better when they’re not posing. If only he could manage to be as impressive in person as he appeared in photos. He had a wooden side to him, a stiffness in public, a sort of reserve not often found in politicians. Maybe he just hated pretending to be someone he wasn’t. Or maybe he had a stick up his ass.
    I read his statement carefully. Depending on how you looked at it, it was either a very fair response or a carefully crafted ploy. I wanted to believe it was genuine but I knew that Stoney was taking no chances: he had surrounded himself with “paid political operatives” as the old-timers like to say, media specialists imported from New York and backed by a war chest big enough to buy television time every damn night of the autumn. One of his consultants, Adam Stoltz, was only twenty-eight years old and already rumored to be the next generation’s Roger Ailes. Whether this was a compliment or not depended entirely on the speaker.
    Still, the official statement had a down-home quality to it and I was willing to give Stoney the benefit of the doubt. The gist was that Stoney was aware that his opponent had been detained for questioning by the authorities and that a body had been found on the premises of her home. He wanted to let people know that the victim had been a minor contributor to his campaign—as he had contributed to virtually every pro- business campaign in the state—but that Stoney had not known him personally. Just the same, his heartfelt condolences went out to the victim’s family. He did not mention that Thornton’s family consisted of an embittered ex-wife and two alienated college-age children who had long been embarrassed by their father’s immature excesses. Stoney then went on to say that he had always found Mary Lee Masters to be a woman of integrity, one who played fair and exhibited a deep moral foundation. He was positive she was innocent and felt sure that the authorities would clear up the mystery. He hoped