So instead she pictured the darkened, ransacked shop, and Margot striding in, hand up, holding a golf club. Margot didn’t golf, but her husband had been an avid golfer, which made it kind of strange that he had joined the Lafayette Country Club, with its piddly nine-hole course. Of course, the Lafayette was a very prestigious club, and with such a pretty building. And the setting was quite beautiful, the lake on three sides. Irene had been out there once, as a guest.

But that wasn’t relevant. It was the golf club that was relevant. Widows, Irene (who was a spinster) speculated, were inclined to hang on to some of their late husbands’ favorite things. So at the back of a closet in that apartment was Aaron’s golf bag. What was it Margot had grabbed? A mashie? A nine iron? Irene had heard those were the names of golf clubs. Too bad Shelly—whose former husband was a golfer—didn’t want to speculate on this; it would have been very enjoyable.

Joe Mickels drank his coffee and thought. Awful the way Margot had died, he’d agreed six or seven times with people about that. And murder was an ugly thing, to be sure.

But she was gone, really, truly, wholly gone. Forever; and he no longer had to scheme to find ways to make her move out.

How long should he wait before he served notice on the sister to vacate? Not too soon, or the whole town would come down on his neck, and he didn’t need any more ill will. But there was a lot to be done, arrangements to be made. Clear the building, remove anything salvageable; find a contractor who wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg to tear that old place down. It could be done by Christmas, surely. And maybe by spring the architect’s drawings would start coming to life. He meant to put up a high-rise with stores on the ground floor, offices on the second and third, condos above that. First high-rise in Excelsior, a historic building from the git-go. And cut deep in the stone above the entrance: THE MICKELS BUILDING.

And it would make money, more money than he’d made to date, which was already more money than anyone but his accountant knew, more than most people saw in their lifetimes. What a kick it was, making money. The first two million were the hardest, that was what old Aaron Berglund used to say. But he was wrong; what was hardest was parting with hunks of it trying to make more of it. Mickels hated parting with money, even more than he hated pretending he was basically doing good, improving the community, helping his fellowman, and that the money was just sort of a side effect.

As a local radio host liked to say, B as in B, S as in S.

He was making money, first and foremost. If others rode his coattails, or got good out of what he was doing, that was fine, sometimes it was even necessary, but that wasn’t what he was doing.