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money I bought it with.” He glanced at his wife again. “Wouldn’t you, sweetie?”
    There was nothing to say to that, and she just looked at him, her head lowered a little and the soft plump apex of her upper lip thrust out, and for a second I saw what she must have looked like when she was very young.
    “It’s a matter of retracing your wife’s steps,” I said, in the plodding tone I’ve learned to mimic from all the years I’ve spent around cops. “Checking the places she went to over the past few days, the stores she was in, the restaurants she visited.” I could feel Clare’s eyes on me, but I kept mine on Cavendish, who was looking off through the open doorway and nodding slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.” He glanced about the place again, blinking distractedly, touched the rim of the empty glass on the table with a fingertip, then sauntered out, whistling to himself.
    When he was gone, his wife and I just stood there for a while. I could hear her breathing. I imagined her lungs filling and emptying, the tender pinkness of them, in their frail cage of glistening white bone. She was the kind of woman to make a man think thoughts like that. “Thank you,” she said at last, the barest murmur.
    “Don’t mention it.”
    She laid her right hand lightly on the back of the wrought-iron chair, as if she were feeling a little weak. She wasn’t looking at me. “Tell me what you’ve found out,” she said.
    I needed a cigarette but didn’t think I should light up in this lofty glass edifice. It would be like smoking in a cathedral. The urge reminded me of what I had brought with me. I took the ebony cigarette holder from my pocket and laid it on the table, next to my hat. “You left it at my office,” I said.
    “Oh, yes, of course. I don’t use it much, only for effect. I was nervous, coming to see you.”
    “You could have fooled me.”
    “It was myself I needed to fool.” She was watching me intently. “Tell me what you’ve found out, Mr. Marlowe,” she said again.
    “There’s no easy way to put this.” I looked at my hat on the table. “Nico Peterson is dead.”
    “I know.”
    “He died two months ago in a hit-and-run over on—” I stopped, and stared at her. “What did you say?”
    “I said I know.” She smiled at me, holding her head to one side in that slightly sardonic way, just as she had done the previous day, when she had sat in my office with her gloves folded across her lap and the ebony holder held at an angle, without her husband there to give her the jitters. “Maybe you should sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”
    “I don’t understand,” I said.
    “No, of course you don’t.” She turned aside and put her hand to the glass her husband had drunk from, moved it an inch to one side and then returned it to where it had been, standing on its own ring of dampness. “I’m sorry, I should have told you.”
    I got out my cigarettes—the air in here had suddenly stopped feeling sanctified. “If you already knew he was dead, why did you come to me?”
    She turned back and gazed at me in silence for a moment, judging what she would say, how she should put it. “The thing is, Mr. Marlowe, I saw him the other day, in the street. He didn’t look dead at all.”

 
    5
    I liked the idea of the outdoors. I mean I liked the thought of it being there: the trees, the grass, birds in the bushes, all that. I even liked looking at it, sometimes, from the highway, say, through a car windshield. What I didn’t much care for was being out in it, unprotected. There was something about the feeling of the sun on the back of my neck that made me uneasy—I didn’t just get hot, I got worried, in a twitchy sort of way. There was also the sense of being watched by too many eyes, trained on me from among leaves, from between fences, out of the mouths of burrows. When I was a kid I hadn’t been much interested in nature. Streets were where I did my boyhood wanderings and experienced my youthful