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gave her complexion a slight orange tint, not sallow, but perpetually radiant, as though she had just returned from a week in Barbados. Her lips were the color of smoked salmon. There was a faint band of freckles running across her cheeks and nose.
    She got into the car without saying anything, threw her handbag at her feet, and looked straight ahead through the windshield. Harvey had been winding up to throw her the bad news, but she exhaled loudly and said, “Oh, boy. I’ve been a very good girl since I heard about it an hour ago. I even made a couple of phone calls, like a good reporter.” She turned to Harvey. “I think I’m going to have my cry now.”
    She cried with her hand over her face and her shoulders heaving. Harvey reached over and laid his hand on the back of her neck. She made a small choking sound and then found a tissue in her bag and dabbed at a smudge of mascara. “All right,” she said with one last sniffle. “I’ll be all right now.” She leaned toward Harvey and kissed him lightly on the mouth. He kissed back, thinking, She’s competent even when she cries.
    They drove a few blocks to Atwells and passed under the cement archway that marked the beginning of the Italian section. A large bronze pineapple hung upside down from the apex of the arch.
    “Any idea who could have done it?” she said.
    “No,” he said. He backed into a parking place in front of Angelo’s restaurant. The exterior had new fake fieldstone and stucco facing, but inside, the latticework-patterned wallpaper was peeling in the corners. It was the kind of Italian family restaurant that would have an awkwardly executed oil painting of its original location on the wall, and it did, directly over the vinyl-upholstered booth where Harvey and Mickey sat holding hands across the table.
    “The food would taste better if we had a little conversation to go along with it,” Harvey said.
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “Let’s talk anyway.”
    “Okay, I’ll tell you about New York.”
    “I forgot about that.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “It seems far away now.” She cut a wedge out of her veal chop and, without eating it, put down her knife and fork. “They showed me part of an NBA basketball game on a monitor and wanted me to do play-by-play for them, just like that. It was horrible. I kept confusing Cedric Maxwell and Robert Parish, and I couldn’t think of the word for ‘lane.’ I used a lot other lingo, though—‘nothing but net,’ ‘transition game,’ stuff like that—but I don’t know if they were fooled. Christ, did they cross me up. I thought they wanted me for baseball. But let me tell you, it was great fun doing play-by-play in a tiny room with two guys wearing eight-hundred-dollar suits.”
    She picked up her fork, scrutinized the veal impaled on it, and put it back down. “He’s really gone, Bliss. Oh, Jesus, just like that.”
    “Let’s get out of here, Mick.”
    “Okay,” she said. “It’s just—it sounds so selfish, Bliss, but you never think of yourself as someone who knows someone who gets murdered. Jesus, not a guy like Rudy, anyway.”
    Their waiter was suddenly standing over them. “You don’t like?” he said, observing the barely touched plates.
    “No, no,” Harvey said. “It’s all fine. We’ve got to go, though. Something happened. Can we have the check?”
    The waiter glanced at Mickey, who held her face in her hands, and looked back at Harvey. “No check,” he said. “You don’t eat, you don’t pay. Next time you pay.”
    They drove back in silence to Harvey’s apartment and took off their clothes as matter-of-factly as two people removing their coats at a party, and faced each other in the dark living room. Her body was well-tanned except where her bikini had left two pale lozenges across her breasts and a scarf of white across her groin.
    “Do I still look good to you?” she said.
    He held out his arms. “Come here.”
    She moved across the floor, her breasts nodding,