He gave me her name and asked me not to contact her until after his death. Then I was to call and tell her how much she had meant to him. Well, of course I did not abide by that wish to the letter. I tried to contact her immediately because I knew I was losing Ronnie and I felt that something was terribly wrong. My hope was that this friend might be able to help. If they had corresponded with each other, for example, then maybe she could enlighten me.”

“And did you reach her?”

I asked, recalling Marino’s telling me that Jennifer Deighton had been in Florida for two weeks around Thanksgiving.

“No one ever answered the phone,” Grueman replied. “I tried on and off for several weeks, and then, to be frank, because of timing and health fortuities relating to the pace of litigation, the holidays, and a god-awful ambush of gout, my attention was diverted. I did not think to call Jennifer Deighton again until Ronnie was dead and I needed to contact her and convey, per Ronnie’s request, that she had meant a lot to him, et cetera.”

“When you had attempted to reach her earlier,” I said, “did you leave messages on her answering machine?”

“It wasn’t turned on. Which makes sense, in retrospect. She didn’t need to return from vacation to face five hundred messages from people who can’t make a decision until their horoscopes have been read. And if she left a message on her machine saying that she was out of town for two weeks, that would have been a perfect invitation for burglars.”

“Then what happened when you finally reached her?”

“That was when she divulged that they had corresponded for eight years and that they loved each other. She claimed that the truth would never be known. I asked her what she meant but she would not tell me and got off the phone. Finally, I wrote her a letter imploring her to speak with me.”

“When did you write this letter?” I asked.

“Let me see. The day after the execution. I suppose that would have been December fourteenth.”

“And did she respond?”

“She did, by fax, interestingly enough. I did not know she had a fax machine, but my fax number was on my stationery. I have a copy of her fax if you would like to see it.”

He shuffled through thick file folders and other paperwork on his desk. Finding the file he was looking for, he flipped through it and withdrew the fax, which I recognized instantly. “Yes, I’ll cooperate,” it read, “but it’s too late, too late, too late. Better you should come here. This is all so wrong!”

I wondered how Grueman would react if he knew that her communication with him had been recreated through image enhancement in Neils Vander’s laboratory.