Vanna Landau, the ASA, was a small woman who leaned across the table as if trying to make herself bigger by taking up as much room as possible. “Now just what were you doing on the land?”

In between coughs and sneezes, I explained in as mild a voice as I could summon.

“Spying on Larchmont Hall in the middle of the night?” Landau said. “That is trespassing, at a minimum.,,

I pinched the skin between my eyebrows in an effort to stay awake. “Would it have been better if I’d done it in daylight? Geraldine Graham was worried when she saw intruders around the house late at night. At her son’s request, I went over to take a look.”

Larry Yosano, the young lawyer, was trying to rub sleep out of his own eyes. “Technically, of course, it’s trespass, but if you’ve ever dealt with Mrs. Graham, you’d know that she’s never really acknowledged that she no longer owns Larchmont. She’s a strong personality, difficult to say no to.”

He turned to me. “Lyons Trust is the titleholder. They’re ‘he ones you should call if Mrs. Graham sees a problem with the property.”

I didn’t say anything except to ask for a Kleenex. One of the deputies found some paper napkins in a drawer and tossed them across the table at me. “Or the police,” Lieutenant Schorr said. “Did that ever occur to you, Ms. Private Eye?”

“Ms. Graham called the New Solway police several times. They thought she was a crazy old woman making stuff up.”

The New Solway cop, whose name I hadn’t heard, bristled. “We went out there three times and saw nothing. Yesterday, when someone really was on the property, we responded to the alarm within fifteen minutes. Her own son even says she could be making stuff up because she wants attention.”

I sat up at that. “I met with Ms. Graham yesterday afternoon. She didn’t strike me as delusional at all. I know she’s old, but if she says she’s seeing lights in that house she is. What about the man in the pool? If nothing else, him being there proves someone was using that abandoned estate for something.”

“I don’t think Mrs. Graham makes things up,” Yosano agreed, “but she doesn’t listen to advice. We, for instance, advised her to move away from New Solway when she sold, but her ties to the community are very deep, of course.”

I had a picture of the hapless dot-com millionaire, fending off Geraldine Graham’s efforts to help him run Larchmont the way her mother had done. The young state’s attorney seemed to feel the interview was slipping away; she demanded to know my relationship to the dead man.

“We kissed once, very deeply…” I waited until one of the deputies had eagerly written this down before adding, “… when I was doing CPR on him. His mouth was full of the crud in the pool and I had to clean that out first … Did you get that? Need me to spell any of the words?”