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gazing would doubtlessly
cause me to blush and drool. I wondered if Gus had a pair of
handcuffs. Would he be willing to demonstrate interrogation
techniques, say, in a private setting with some Barry White music
playing? After the pages were marked, Gus passed the notes to Bill
and asked him to review them, to see if anything unusual struck
him. Bill admitted to having reviewed the notes prior to the
meeting. “It’s standard stuff, Detective. Mrs. Maxwell left the
majority of her estate to her daughter and son, with additional
provisions for her grandchildren.”
    “ Mrs. Maxwell had recently lost her
husband when she came to you.”
    “ Yes, as I said, she was a new
widow.”
    “ I realize this was a long time ago,
but did anything strike you as odd about her behavior? Anything
that maybe isn’t in your voluminous notes?”
    Bill took this comment in the good-natured
spirit it was given. “Trust the notes for my impressions. What
about you, Carol?”
    I came out of a reverie of Barry White’s
voice singing “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.”
    “ She was depressed, as Bill said,” I
said, sincere and pure as the driven snow in both thought and deed.
“I remember her behaving like she didn’t expect to live much
longer.”
    The men stared at me.
    “ Sorry if that sounds like assumptions
made after the fact. I do remember thinking that. She wasn’t much
older than my own mother and didn’t seem to be sick or anything,
but she still talked as if she didn’t think she’d live for more
than a few months. I felt sorry for her. I figured it was
grief.”
    “ She’s right,” Bill said to the
detective. “I remember that, too; that Adrienne was very sad, as if
she were carrying an invisible weight. Maybe it finally weighed her
down too much.”

*****
    To me, it didn’t seem that we did Gussie much
good. My hopeful daydream of being able to provide him with the
clue that solved the case deflated like a leaky balloon. I had no
recollection of Adrienne’s having lurking grandnephews eager to get
their hands on her fortune to pay off gambling debts, nor of
thirty-year-old suicide pacts she had made with a secret society,
nor of threatening letters hand-delivered to her by an obscure
courier service. But all of those things would have been neat. I
imagined Gussie being impressed and grateful, asking if I’d ever
considered being a detective myself.
    But I did get to haul him over to the copy
machine. Bill was the one who suggested it. “Take the detective
with you, Carol, so he can make sure he gets everything he wants
from the file.”
    That was fine with me. It counted as a second
date.
    “ If we don’t stop meeting this way,
people will talk,” I said to Gus as I set out the file to be
dismantled, copied, and reassembled. I caught his expression of
pleasant-enough confusion, as if he were bewildered by my behavior.
Uh-oh, perhaps I was coming on too strong. Some men didn’t like
that. Maybe detectives were too macho—was anybody really macho
anymore?—to like for a woman to flirt. My brain made a rush to
think of an apology, something to do with the early hour and an
antihistamine I’d taken for allergies, but instinct told me just to
be honest with this one. I’d had my share of mind-games in
relationships, thank you very much stupid ex-husband, and this had
given me a sixth sense about good times for cutting to the chase.
“You know, I’d stop making all these insinuating remarks if you’d
just ask me to lunch.”
    I began loading pieces of Adrienne’s file in
the machine. I could make copies and talk at the same time with
ease. The copy machine is an excellent place for gossip; all the
secretaries here had learned that trick early on. We could talk as
much as we wanted while copying, without receiving any dirty looks
from the middle-management menace I called Junior Gestapo Brent,
because technically we were still working hard. Two or three of us
could gather and have lengthy discussions