He paused. “All right. I’ll move that up the priority list, but what does your fairy tale have to do with the mess you’re in now?”

“Renee hightailed it up here to silence Benji, so he couldn’t identify her. But Geraldine Graham and I both heard him say he’d seen her put Marcus Whitby into the pond when he was up in the Larchmont attic.”

“Yeah, hearsay testimony of a dead terrorist. I’m not even going to try to take that into court.”

“Well, try some real evidence, then, with some real police work.” My temper was fraying. “Before Renee returns to Chicago as a triumphant heroine who killed a terrorist, it would be great to nail down Calvin Bayard’s nurse and the housekeeper, and find out how much of the nurse’s phenobarb is missing. Whether Renee’s prints are on the bottle. Whether they saw Renee last Monday night when she claimed to be in Chicago. Also, someone might have seen Renee go into Taverner’s place the night Taverner died. Also, someone might have seen Whitby go to Renee’s apartment last Sunday.”

“That’s a lot of mghs,” Bobby objected, adding with heavy humor, “and a hundred `mites’ don’t add up even to a flea.”

“The golf cart is pretty damned concrete.” I tried not to shout.

“Don’t swear, Vicki, it’s ugly in a woman. I told you we’ll look at the cart. We’ll do it today, but for the rest of it, you know I don’t like playing with your theories, especially not when they cross jurisdictions like this. And even more especially not with a wanted man like Sadawi involved.”

“And especially not with a family like the Bayards. But the Grahams will back me up on this. And I’m going to sic Murray Ryerson on it; if the police don’t find evidence, he will. It’s even possible one of the DuPage deputies will have the guts to go to the Bayard house if I tell her what I just told you.”

“I don’t stand for your threats any more than I do your insinuations, Vicki.” Bobby’s temper was also wearing thin. “You know damn well that my work is always by the books, regardless of who or what a suspect is. And you know, too, I’m going to have to talk to Jack Zeelander in the federal

attorney’s office about what happened to Sadawi, and I’m not going to feed him your line about the helpless orphan boy. You hear?”

“Oh, Bobby, if you were here now, if you could see Catherine Bayard, lying like Juliet in the tomb, you wouldn’t-“

“Okay, Vicki, calm down. You’ve had a long day, you’ve seen too much blood, you need to go to bed. I’ll tell Zeelander Sadawi’s dead and we’ll leave the rest until we’ve got some ballistics. Okay?”

“Thank you, Bobby.” His sudden switch to kindness made me want to cry again, which I couldn’t afford right now. “Will you talk to the officer in charge here, see if you can move him along? Ms. Graham’s lying down with this wound in her foot, and she’s ninety-one. She needs a doctor. I need a bed.”