She shook her head a few times, then nodded. “He... he said he’d take care of it, talk some sense into her fool head. That’s all. I figured no man could do... that to his wife.”

His wife?

She looked at me. “She never could have won. Not against all them. Not her. She... couldn’t.”

I sat on the floor beside the couch and held up the photograph. “Is this Socia?”

She looked at it long enough to nod, then buried her head back in the couch.

Angie said, “Simone, where’s the rest of it? Is it in the safety-deposit box?”

Simone shook her head.

“Then where is it?” I said.

“She wouldn’t tell me. She just said, ‘In a safe place.’ She said she put just the one picture in the safety-deposit box to throw them off the scent, case they ever follow her there.”

I said, “What else is there, Simone? Do you know?”

She said, “Jenna said they were ‘bad things.’ That’s all she’d say. She’d get all tight lipped and antsy if I asked her about it. Whatever it was, it shook her up every time she talked about it.” She raised her head and looked past my shoulder as if someone stood behind me. She said, “Jenna?” and began sobbing again.

She was trembling violently and I didn’t think she had much left in her. I’d done my damage, and she’d do the rest to herself in the days and years ahead. So, I let my anger go, let it flush out of my heart and body until all I saw before me was a trembling heap of humanity on a sofa. I reached out and touched her shoulder.

She screamed. “Don’t you fucking touch me!”

I pulled the hand back.

“Get the hell off my floor and the hell out of my house, white man, and take your whore with you.”

Angie took a step toward her on the word “whore,” then stopped and closed her eyes for a second, then opened them. She looked at me and nodded.

There wasn’t anything else to say, so we left.

FOURTEEN

We were halfway back to Boston, avoiding any conversation about Simone Angeline or the scene in her apartment, when Angie sat up suddenly in her seat and said, “Aargghh,” or a reasonable facsimile. She stabbed her index finger into the eject button of my cassette player hard enough to send Exile on Main St. past me like a missile. It bounced off the back of the seat and fell to the floor. Right in the middle of “Shine a Light,” too. Sacrilege. I said, “Pick it up.”