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going in and out of advantage, but the final point was always hers. We played two sets and I didn’t win once.
    In the sauna afterward, she asked again what she could do for me.
    “Background,” I said, “I guess. My partner and your brother were lovers.”
    “I thought so, but I wasn’t sure. Especially when she turned out to be female.”
    “Peter was gay?”
    She shrugged her naked shoulders. “I don’t know, really. I guess not if he was seeing your partner.”
    “Let me go over this again. You don’t know whether your own brother was gay or not?”
    “I didn’t see him much.” She was silent for a bit. “He had women friends, yes. It was just an idea I had—that he might be bi. Didn’t it occur to you?”
    “It did, come to think of it.”
    “Well, if you want to know for sure, I can’t help you.”
    “You don’t seem very broken up about his death.”
    “Why should I be?” She stepped into the shower and turned it on, spritzing the fancy hairdo, then working shampoo in. “I hated him. I’ve hated him ever since I can remember. Whoever killed him did me a good turn.”
    “Why did you hate him so much?”
    “Rebecca, did your family encourage you to become a lawyer?”
    “Not exactly. They wanted me to be a doctor.”
    She laughed, and the sound was rather nasty. “You can’t identify with me at all, can you? You have no idea what I was up against.”
    “I don’t really see what you’re saying.”
    “I haven’t said it yet.” She washed the soap out of her hair. “Would you say I have business sense?”
    “No more than, say, the president of IBM does. How many mil’ are you worth, anyhow?”
    She looked right at me, and I noticed how small her eyes were—that hairdo really did wonders. “Several,” she said. “And I made every penny without the slightest encouragement from my warm, loving Italian relatives.”
    “But Peter was poor—how could he have helped you?”
    “By not existing, that’s how!” She spoke venomously. “It’s true what he told that reporter—he’s got about as much of a head for business”—she looked around—“as that bar of soap.” She kicked it and it skidded across the tiled floor. “But just because he had a wing-wang, and I didn’t, he got the starter.”
    “Wing-wang?” I was feeling a little lost. Also, I was starving.
    “Because he was a boy, dammit! Let’s go.”
    I followed her out to the anteroom and lay down on one of the benches. She rang for a hair dryer and began reshaping the sculptured cut, using her comb viciously, as if she were angry at her own hair. “You don’t know anything about Italian families, do you?”
    “Maybe Jewish families aren’t that different. But I don’t have any brothers.”
    “Well, be glad of it—I’ll bet you’d have wound up a social worker if you did.”
    “My sister—” I began, but she interrupted.
    “I could never get my parents to see what I was, do you understand that? I guess Peter had the same problem, only in reverse, but that wasn’t my concern. I had my own troubles. I wanted to be appreciated for being who I am, smart like Anita, not cute and flirty like someone I wasn’t. It was wrong. It was unfair.”
    “I get the idea you resented it.”
    “Resent! I would have killed—” She stopped in mid-sentence. Oddly, she let the hair dryer drop and her voice shook. “I
didn’t
kill him. I thought there was nothing I wanted more than to get that starter and start up the Martinelli Bakery again.” She seemed not to believe her own words but to be trying them out to see if they fit. “But now, I don’t know…”
    “You don’t know what?”
    “I
think
I miss Peter. I
think
I’m sorry he’s dead.”
    “I thought you were glad.”
    “I am, but I’m not, too—does that make sense?”
    “It’s a little complex.” I started to get dressed.
    “I really hated him, you know that? I wanted to humiliate him the way my parents always humiliated me—I wanted to show