He did feel a twinge of concern for a moment, but then it floated away on the tide of his conviction that he would convince the police that he was the most upright citizen they’d ever met.

“Detective,” he was saying a few minutes later when they’d been ushered back to an interrogation room. He stood and shook the detective’s hand.

“You know each other?” Ms. Powell didn’t get up, but she nodded to the detective as if she’d met him before.

“We met at the hotel, Vespers, right, Mr. Bernardo?” Detective Sterling sat down opposite them.

Manfred gave him a much closer look than he’d given when he’d first met the detective. Sterling was dark and stocky, and his close-cut hair was graying. He’d put on a pair of glasses with metal rims, which glinted in the overhead light, giving him a strangely old-fashioned look. Another man entered at that moment and took the seat by Sterling. They were wearing what amounted to a uniform: white short-sleeved shirts, blue patterned ties, and khakis. But the other detective was very tall, at least five inches over six feet, and older, too, with snowy hair. He did not wear glasses, and his blue eyes were sharp and intent in a weathered, red, lined face.

Yet Manfred was not afraid. He could feel Ms. Powell tense, though, and she said, “Well, a detective who does not seem to have met my client yet. Hi, Tom.”

Tom smiled at Ms. Powell. “Maggie. Hey, buddy, I’m Tom Freemont.”

Manfred smiled back at him as they shook hands. “Good to meet you, Detective. What can I do for you all today?”

“You’ve gotten all kind of snarled up in something, Mr. Bernardo,” said Detective Sterling. Just us good and simple folks, trying to understand. “We need to straighten that out, make sure we understand exactly what’s happening.”

Manfred tried to look intelligently interested.

Ms. Powell said, “Are you charging my client with anything?”

“No, not at the present time.”

“Then what do you need to know about? What crime are you thinking he may have committed? Because I sure haven’t heard of anything. Did not Rachel Goldthorpe die of natural causes?”

“We’re still waiting for the test results to come back. Maybe a combination of age, weight, high blood pressure, and a bad case of pneumonia all wound up together and killed her.” Detective Freemont flipped open a folder and glanced at the contents. “We have to say there was no immediately obvious cause of death.”

“So you don’t think my client had anything to do with the death of Mrs. Goldthorpe.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So you believe she was murdered?”

“We don’t know at the present. But, all right, at this time we don’t suspect Mr. Bernardo of murder,” Freemont said baldly.

“Then what?” Magdalena Orta Powell looked puzzled and vexed. She pulled it off beautifully.