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air about him. I had the impression that he was doing something else while talking on the phone to me, because from time to time I could tell that he put his hand over the mouthpiece while I was talking to him. His answers to my questions about coverage, the possibility of payment for lost business, and so on were discouragingly vague.
    Finally, in exasperation, I asked him bluntly, “Am I or am I not covered for this?”‘
    “You are covered for this, Ms. McClintoch,” he replied, “unless, of course, you, your partner, or anyone in your employ is found to be guilty of a felony.”
    A felony. How nice. “Then I will expect payment promptly,” I said tartly before hanging up in his ear.
    I told Moira what he’d said, and she made sympathetic noises, but she changed the subject immediately and began to tell me droll little stories about how Brian had been traumatized by meeting her friends the previous day. I gathered the relationship had not survived drinks with her friends, but she didn’t seem perturbed about it. Even in my painkiller-induced grogginess, I was beginning to wonder what exactly was going on that I was missing. It did not take long to find out.
    PC Chu went off duty soon after that but was immediately replaced by PC Mancino, a fresh-faced young man who insisted upon calling me ma’am, and who told me several times how proud he was to have worn blue, to use his expression, for seven years now. I took this to be his way of telling me that he was older and more experienced than he looked.
    Shortly thereafter he was joined by his sergeant, Lewis he said his name was, and if he had a first name, he didn’t reveal it. He struck me as a man who had no perceptible imagination or sense of humor, and who was on top of that a stickler for detail. He began by asking Moira to leave, which she did, reluctantly, telling him she would return in forty-five minutes, implying by her tone and her glance that he should be gone by the time she got back. Moira is not to be messed with, I’ve learned, and as Sergeant Lewis seemed in imminent danger of finding out for himself.
    Lewis talked in phrases punctuated by emphasis rather than sentences, almost as if he thought he was restricted to a finite number of words in his lifetime and didn’t want to run out before his final exit. He also had a disconcerting habit, whether by design or just because his mind worked that way, of asking questions in what appeared to be an entirely random order. He asked, in my opinion, an inordinate number of questions about where I’d been from 7:35 on, and with whom, and what I had done from the time I’d left the bar in the Four Seasons until the police and fire truck had arrived at the shop. None of my answers seemed precise enough to satisfy him. PC Mancino took laborious notes.
    I told him in great detail about drinks in the bar, who had been there, when people had arrived, and then added, “I’m sure my friends can confirm all of this for you.”
    “Taken
their
statements already,” he replied noncommittally.
    “All right, then,” I said. Why exactly would he need to do that? I wondered. Only minutes into the interview and I was beginning to realize that Lewis and I were not going to get along. Here one of my dearest friends has been badly hurt, I said to myself, some stranger has ended up dead in my store, which just happens to be in flames at the time, and this fellow wants to know how many drops of vermouth there were in my martini and where I parked my car.
    “Southwest corner Yorkville and Avenue Road.
Then
what?”
    “I realized I’d forgotten my keys, left them at the shop, so I went back hoping to catch Alex before he left. As I’ve already told you,” I added. This was the third time he’d asked for some clarification on a matter I considered perfectly straightforward.
    “These your
keys!”
Lewis asked, oblivious to my dislike, pulling a black-and-white photo of a key ring from his briefcase.
    I