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you’re a shrink,” I said, “you think you know everything.”
    “I think I know you,” she said, “and it has nothing to do with my profession.”
    “Good point,” I said.
    I drank some champagne and ate salmon roe, and thought how to phrase it. Susan was quiet.
    “It’s that there’s an, I don’t know, an official version of everything. But the objective data doesn’t quite match it. I don’t mean it contradicts it, but…” I spread my hands.
    “For instance,” Susan said.
    “Well, the home. It’s lovely and without character. It’s like a display, except for his bedroom; it’s as personless as a chain hotel.”
    “His bedroom?”
    “Yeah. That’s another thing. They have separate bedrooms separated by a sitting room. His shows signs of use-television set, some books on the bedside table, TV Guide. But hers…” I shook my head. “The kids’ rooms are like hers. Officially designated children’s rooms, and appropriately decorated. But no sense that anyone ever smoked a joint in there or read skin magazines with a flashlight under the covers.”
    “What else?”
    “He goes to the office every day early, stays late. There’s nothing to do. His secretary, who is, by the way, a knockout, is catching up on her reading.”
    “This is subtle,” Susan said.
    “Yeah, it is, though it’s not quite as subtle when you’re experiencing it. He talks about his children without any sense that now and then they might, or might have sometime, driven him up the wall. They’re perfect. She was perfect. His love was all-encompassing. His devotion is unflagging.”
    “And there’s a legal limit on the snow here,” Susan said.
    I nodded. “Yeah.”
    “That Camelotian hindsight is not unusual in grief,” Susan said.
    “I know,” I said. “I’ve seen some grief myself.”
    “It’s a form of denial.”
    “I know. What I’m trying to get hold of is how long the denial has been going on.”
    “Yes,” Susan said.
    “And what’s being denied,” I said.
    Susan nodded. The fire hissed as some sap boiled out of the sawn end of one of the logs. The salmon caviar was gone. The champagne was getting low.
    “So what are you going to do?” Susan said.
    “Start from the other end.”
    “You mean look into her past?”
    “Yeah. Where she was born. Where she went to school, that stuff. Maybe something will turn up.”
    “Wouldn’t the police have done that?” Susan said.
    “On a celebrity case like this, with an uncertain victim, maybe,” I said. “But this victim is a well-known pillar of the community. Her life’s an open book. They haven’t the money or the reason to chase her back to her childhood.”
    “So why will you do it?” Susan said.
    “I don’t know what else to do,” I said.
    “You want to eat?”
    Susan drank some of her champagne and looked at me over the rim of her glass.
    “How attractive was Tripp’s secretary, exactly?” Susan said.
    “Quite,” I said.
    Susan smiled.
    “How nice,” she said. “Perhaps after we’ve eaten buffalo tenderloin and sipped a dessert wine on the couch and watched the fire settle, you’ll want to think about which of us is, or is not, going to ball you in the bedroom until sunrise.”
    “You’re far more attractive than she is, Buffalo gal,” I said.
    “Oh, good,” she said.
    We were quiet as I put the meat on the grill and put the corn pudding in the oven.
    “Sunrise?” I said.
    “The hyperbole of jealous passion,” Susan said.

chapter eleven
    I SAT WITH Lee Farrell in the near empty squad room at Homicide. Quirk’s office was at the far end of the room. The glass door had Commander stenciled on it in black letters: Quirk wasn’t there. There was only one cop in the squad room, a heavy bald guy with a red face and a big belly, who had a phone shrugged up against his ear and his feet up on the desk. A cigarette with a long ash hung from his mouth and waggled a little as he talked. Ash occasionally fluttered off the end and