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forehead, scrubbed at it. "I screwed a woman from the office. Once." Lucas let the silence grow, and Dunn finally launched himself from his chair, walked to a box, opened it, took out a bottle of scotch. "Whiskey?"
    "No, thanks." And he let the silence go.
    "We're talking about a major-league cookie, this chick, in my face five days a week," Dunn said. He made a Coke-bottle tits-and-ass figure with his hands. "Andi and I had a few disagreements--not big ones, but we've got a lot going on. Careers, busy all the time, we don't see each other enough... like that. So this chick is there, in the office--she was my traffic manager--and finally I jump her. Right there on her desk, pencils and pens all over the place, Post-it notes stuck to her butt. The next thine I know, she gets her little handbag and her business suit and shows up at Audi's office to announce that she loves me and I love her." He ran his hands through his hair, then laughed, a short, half-humorous bark. "Christ, what a nightmare that must've been."
    "Doesn't sound like one of your better days," Lucas admitted. He remembered days like that.
    "Man, I wish I hadn't done it," Dunn said. He lipped the bottle of whiskey in his hand, caught it. "I lost my wife and a pretty goddamn good traffic manager on the same day."
    Lucas watched him for a long beat. He wasn't acting.
    "Is there any reason you might've killed your wife for her money?"
    Dunn looked up, vaguely surprised: "Christ, you don't fuck around, do you?"
    Lucas shook his head. "Could you have done that? Does it make sense?"
    "No. Just between you and me--there isn't that much money."
    "Um..."
    "I know, Tower Manette and his millions, the Manette Trust, the Manette Foundation, all that shit," Dunn said. He flicked a hand as if batting away a cobweb, then walked across the room, stepped through a doorway and flicked on a light. He opened a refrigerator door, dropped a couple of ice cubes in his glass, and came back. "Andi gets a hundred thousand a year, more or less, from her share of the Manette Trust. When the kids turn eighteen, they'll get a piece of it. And they'll get bigger pieces when they turn twenty-five and forty. If they were... to die... I wouldn't see any of that. What I'd get is the house, and the stuff in it. Frankly, I don't need it."
    "So what about Manette? You said..."
    "Tower had maybe ten million back in the fifties, plus the income from the trust, and a board seat at the Foundation. But he was running all over the world, buying yachts, buying a house in Palm Beach, screwing everything in a skirt. And he was putting the good stuff up his nose--he was heavy into cocaine back in the Seventies. Anyway, after a few years, the interest on the ten mil wasn't cutting it. He started dipping into the principal. Then he got into politics--bought his way in, really--and he dipped a little deeper. It must've seemed like taking water out of the ocean with a teacup. But it added up. Then, in the late seventies and eighties, he did everything wrong--he was stuck in bonds during the big inflation, finally unloaded them at a terrific loss. Then sometime in there, he met Helen..."
    "Helen's his second wife, right?" Lucas said. "She's quite a bit younger than he is?"
    Dunn said, "I guess she's... what? Fifty-three, fifty-four? She's not that young. His first wife, Bernie--that's Andi's mother--died about ten years ago. He was already seeing Helen by that time. She was a good-looking woman. She had the face and real star-quality tits. Tower always liked tits. Anyway, Helen was in real estate and she got him deep into REITs as a way to recoup his bond losses..."
    "What's areet ?" Lucas asked.
    "Sorry; real-estate investment trust. Anyway, that was just before real estate fell out of bed, and he got hammered again. And the crash of eighty-seven... Hell, the guy was the kiss of death. You didn't want to stand next tohim ."
    "So he's broke?"
    Dunn looked up at the ceiling as if he were running a calculator in his