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later.”

CHAPTER 7
    Robinson shuts the door – Conte goes to his desk to make notes on the serial rapist story and sees immediately that it hangs on the credibility of a single point – that one of the victims actually spoke to the wife of the chief of police, in spite of Coca’s threat, and that Coca, in the act, in cold passion, told this woman in so many words that he was victimizing other wives of police officers. Conte considers three theories. The so-called victim who spoke with Millicent Robinson is Coca’s cast-aside secret lover, eager for revenge. Or Robinson has made it up because he wants Conte for some reason to inject such fear into Coca that he, Michael C, will be rendered harmless. The first theory required Conte to believe that Coca was stepping out on his wife, when all public sightings suggested that after many years of marriage Coca was still (unfortunately) besotted with Denise. The second theory required Conte to believe that Coca posed a life-altering threat to Robinson. Conte wanted to believe the first, hell hath no fuckin’ fury like a woman scorned, because it might give him a chance with Denise, were she lost in an unhappy marriage. But he could not believe it. The third theory: There’s a hidden darkness in Michael Coca and Conte’s best friend has not lied to him.
    Antonio Robinson will be at Saint Anthony for another hour and then repair to the rectory with Silvio Conte for their Sunday coffee with Father Gustavo. Eliot can count on perhaps two hours alone with Millicent Robinson. If the second theory is correct, she would need to sustain under indirect probings a believable lie.

    The Robinsons live in a freshly painted ranch-style house of the 1960s – clapboards in white, shutters in high-gloss black – on Deerfield Hill in north Utica. A hint of the Adirondacks beyond. It’s an area of well-kept and not-so-well-kept single-family dwellings, where the neighbors allow their dogs to run and shit freely; where actual deer devour gardens and shrubs and the nice people keep on planting them; where raccoons pry open tightly closed garbage bins, take up residence, and have cute families in a number of vulnerable attics in the not-so-well-maintained houses, whose clapboards at the roof line are rotted; where the Robinsons are regarded as the neighborhood’s great good fortune, a black bulwark against creeping lower-class black and Hispanic crime and falling home values because he’s the big-shot head cop and he paints his house every two years, doesn’t he? Where everyone – the comfortable and those clinging to the bottom edge of the middle class – have sweeping views of the wicked city spread out below.
    Millicent Robinson greets him at the door. Slim, lovely, with dramatic cheekbones, small breasts (big enough to fill one’s mouth) and a smile that would melt the heart of themost hardened racist. She says (but where is it, that shattering smile?), “Hello, stranger. Tony told me you’d be coming to see me today at this time.”
    Conte is tongue-tied, red-faced.
    She says, “I’ve made sandwiches in anticipation. Coffee? Tea? Or me?” She laughs the laugh of a person with a much bigger body. Deep, room-filling. “How are things down on Mary Street? The minorities having their day at last?”
    Conte replies with a hug and “Hi, Millicent. Thanks. I’ll take a sandwich and herbal tea if you have it.” He hasn’t seen her in a while. Follows her into the dining room where two places have already been set and a bag of ginger-twist tea – his favorite – already sits in an empty cup against which leans a three-by-five index card printed upon in big block letters: ELIOT. He thinks, Am I already in over my head? Am I already drowning?
    She puts on his plate a tuna salad sandwich in the Italian style – olive oil, onions, capers, spicy Sicilian olives – and pours boiling water into his cup. A half sandwich, a glass of red wine for herself. She says, “For Tony, I had to