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literally seen it all. I cannot be intimidated, manipulated, or charmed. I am sorry for what happened to Sergey Pontecello, but it was only the final, though surely the most dire, misfortune to befall him. I will not feel guilt or remorse or suffer the insult of recrimination.”
    “That’s fine with me,” I said. “I’m a lot simpler than you. I hardly know anything about human behavior, least of all my own. I just want to know one single, solitary thing.”
    She leaned across the table and moved her ice water out of my reach.
    “And that would be?”
    “Shouldn’t be hard for you to guess.”
    Superiority flowed at me from across the table. If I hadn’t been holding on to my chair, I’d have washed away.
    “You want to know who killed Sergey Pontecello. If, in fact, he was.”
    I gave her the thumbs-up.
    “I do.”
    Then I got up and walked back through the patio as if I did it every day. Right after I knock back a couple bottles of beer and read all the funny papers.
    As I drove away from the Gracefield, I felt my mood tilting toward the dreary. It wasn’t Eunice so much. It was the accumulation of strife. I’m no braver than the next person, but I’m usually late to realize I’min any kind of physical danger. Blood and broken bones I can take in stride, but dead bodies make me want to puke or pass out. Or both.
    Seeing that ridiculous old guy mashed up on the road wasn’t even all of it. It was the way I’d treated him when he was still alive. Not poorly, exactly. But dismissively. That’s what I did. I dismissed him.
    I knew why. It was a bad habit of mine, which made me feel that much worse. Whenever I get a client who’s got a little money or wants to act like they do, I have this reflex reaction. Like, you got all this money, what do you need me for?
    But then I think about Burton Lewis, who’s the best person I know. And a lot of my wealthy clients turn out to be great people. Just like some working folk can be completely unscrupulous, evil assholes.
    It’s prejudice, pure and simple. And I know where I got it from. My old man. He always had a bug up his ass about people he suspected of putting on airs. Financial or otherwise. I don’t know if it was an Irish thing or a class thing or what. The funny part is he had a good education, and did fine with his business. We were well-off compared to a lot of people, and he didn’t mind spending a little money on the house and cars and things such as new TVs and stereo components.
    My father had been born poor, so maybe that was it. The hardscrabble stuck to him. And some of it shook off on me.

5
    As soon as I got back to the office, I lit a joint and stuck my face in the computer.
    In about twenty minutes I found Fuzzy, Eunice and Antonin’s adopted son, whom they’d named Oscar, which is why they shouldn’t have been surprised that he picked up a nickname. I was an open-minded kid, but even I would have given shit to a boy named Oscar.
    I not only found Fuzzy, but I also found his personal Web site, blog, and a half dozen other sites where he starred as a frequent responder under the name FuzzMan. A powerful creepiness factor became apparent after reading only a few entries of his vitriolic commentary. It was a rotten stew of dystopian survivalism, goth anarchist fantasies, and early-twentieth-century bigotry. This sort of ugly rant and rave isn’t hard to find within the blogosphere, but even by that standard, Fuzzy was a standout. I kept going deeper into prior postings, and was charmed to find headings like “100 Ways to Serve Boiled Nun,” “Hey Terrorists, Call Me When You Want to Nuke New York,” and, my favorite, “What Do You Call 5,000 Lawyers at the Bottom of the Ocean? A Good Start.”
    I’m not hip to all the nuances of cyberspeak, but from what I read, there was nothing warm and fuzzy about Fuzzy.
    I’d also nailed down his address, so the logical thing was to take a ride Up Island and pay him a visit. And maybe bring along a