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killing’s not her style.”
    “Oh, you got firsthand knowledge about that, Matthew?” Fidge unhooked his top button to free his moose-sized neck from his deer-sized collar.
    “You know what, Sergeant Fidgery, You’re a dirty old man.” We exchanged more grins. “I just can’t see her bumping off her old man,” I said, feeling myself slipping deeper into the brand of cop and street vernacular spoken in my modern-noir novels. “If she plugged ‘im, it woulda been in the heat of passion or anger, and she would’ve been looking him straight in the eyes. She’d have no interest in pillows to muffle the shot. She’d wanna hear it. She’d wanna smell the cordite. Even then, I can’t see her doing it.”
    Sergeant Fidgery wedged his thumbnail between his two front teeth. He must have gotten whatever he was after because his eyes crossed when he looked just before licking his nail.
    “People aren’t as predictable as the characters in your novels, Matthew. You told me once that characters have to act consistent with their personalities.”
    “Their true personalities,” I retorted, “which might be very different from the ones they show the world.”
    Fidge ignored my cleanup of his comment and continued. “That’s swell in those books of yours, but not necessarily in real life. Real folks often act outside the mainstream of their lives. They go off the deep end and kill or rob and run. Hell, you know that. You were a damn good cop long before you started writing. Bottom line: This guy Talmadge was a respected, retired businessman. Somebody’s gotta pay and the bill’s got his wife’s name on it.”
    “Fidge, shady businessmen are like politicians and madams, they get respectable only after they get dead.”
    Fidge held up his mug in a silent offer of more coffee. I shook him off and waited while my former partner refilled his cup from a pot sitting on a hot plate atop another gunmetal-gray table butted into the corner. He carried his cup to my side of his desk, slid his backside over its top edge, leaned toward me, and spoke low. “It’d be like old times to discuss this case with you, but damn it, you know I can’t, really can’t.”
    He circled back around his desk and before finally sitting down, placed his cup randomly among the brown rings commemorating the countless cups that had sat near him before this one.
    “No problem, Fidge, we won’t talk about it. I’m just saying she didn’t do it. Women like her see their bodies as tools and marriage as an investment. For them, no man is worth prison. They don’t ever see themselves as jilted or betrayed. They just move on, seduce a new honey, and figure the next one’ll be a better deal.”
    My ex-partner smirked like he’d known a few, or maybe like he had fantasized knowing just one.
    “Fidge, that scene just didn’t add up. You got her using a pillow for quiet. You got her using a scarf to avoid prints, and showering after the shooting. You have her planning it down to tossing a cup of coffee against the bedroom door to illustrate her shock at finding her husband dead. Then you see her as leaving the deadbolt latched till you arrive and telling you it had been locked all night. That’s half smart, half super stupid. She would’ve unlatched the dead bolt before you arrived, and said, ‘Gee, that’s odd, Sergeant Fidgery, it’s usually locked. My husband must’ve let someone in after I went to bed.’ Come on, Fidge. I admit you got a nice bundle of circumstantial, but you’ve also got contradictions galore. I doubt they’ll dance together in front of the grand jury.”
    Fidgery hooded his eyes and again gave me his case-closed shrug.
    A year or so before I shot my way out of the department, we had a case where an older husband was killed. His wife, a real looker, a graduate of Plastic Surgery U., had been a suspect, but Fidge refused to believe anyone that angelic could kill. Well, she had done it and Fidge endured being razzed until