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tiny house. "I mean, I know
they loved him, too. But I don’t really want to hear their
condolences or display my grief I just want to sit by myself and be
sad."
    "You’ll do fine."
    Cindy reached out and touched my hand. "I’m
getting used to you saying that."
    "Did you want me to keep looking into this
thing? We still don’t know where Mason spent the last week."
    "I’ve thought about it, and I decided that if
he’d wanted me to know where he was, he would have told me. If he
took that secret with him when he left, that’s the way it should
stay."
    "The cops will probably have a few more
questions."
    Smiling, she said, "I’ll be fine." Cindy
Dorn leaned toward me and kissed me lightly on the cheek. "Maybe
you’ll stop in sometime? I’ve grown sort of fond of you, Harry
Stoner."
    She opened the car door
and walked slowly up the walk, past the hawthorn tree, to her door.
As I pulled away, another woman, with blond hair and a long face,
came out the door and put her arm around Cindy, guiding her inside.
    ***
    The next day, a gray Saturday afternoon, Mason
Greenleaf was buried at Spring Grove Cemetery. His death and the
funeral were well publicized in the papers. I didn’t go to the
graveside or to the wake that was held at Cindy Dorn’s house
following the service. But I thought enough of the woman to call her
Saturday night. Someone else answered the phone at her house. I could
hear the other mourners murmuring softly in the background. When the
girl came on the line, I said the usual things. Sorry about her
lover, if I could be of any help. I felt stupid saying them, but she
seemed pleased that I had called.
    After I hung up, I went to a bar in Northside, close
by the house of an old friend, a free-lance writer. I was hoping he’d
be at his usual spot at the bar. He wasn’t there, so I drank for a
while on my own, listening to the bar talk and nursing a Scotch. I
didn’t want to get drunk, but there didn’t seem to be much else
to do. It had been that way for so long that I’d stopped thinking
about it, stopped admonishing myself. Night came, and if I didn’t
have some sort of surveillance job or if none of the small circle of
women that I slept with—Jo Riley, Lauren Sharp, and a few
others—were free, I drank.
    You get to a certain age, mid-forties, and it comes
to you that this is it, that whatever chance it is that you’ve been
waiting for, the woman, the money, the peace of mind, has come and
gone without you even noticing, like a hand that was dealt while you
were away from the table, that somebody else bet and folded for you,
that you never got to play. You feel cheated—most of us do. But the
truth is that everything that’s necessary happens to everyone. The
trick is showing up. Somewhere in some magazine I thumbed through in
some outer office, where I sat waiting for a client to call me in, to
find whatever necessary thing it was he thought he’d lost, I read
that opportunity used to be pictured as a woman rushing past you,
with her hair streaming out in front of her face. If you grab her
hair as she approaches, you get a good grip. Once she passes by,
there is nothing to hold on to.
    That evening I held on to my glass of Scotch. And I
didn’t think about Cindy Dorn, whom I liked well enough to reach
out for, but whom I already knew I was going to let pass by and
regret. The next day, Sunday, I slept in with a hangover. Around two
o’clock I made my way into the shower. As I was toweling off, the
phone rang. I padded out to the bedroom before the answering machine
clicked on, and picked up. It was Jack McCain.
    "We got criminalistics on Greenleaf," he
said.
    "It took you long enough."
    "There were comp1ications," McCain said.
    "Like what?"
    "Like for one, his family wasn’t crazy about
us doing an autopsy. Have you talked to that bunch?"
    "I missed them."
    "It was like they just wanted it to go away
without any fuss. Anyway, we finally got permission from Greenleaf ’s
brother. Turned out