“Oh. One of those Irish!” The same perky, musical voice. She was the Maryellen he’d fallen for, charming, sometimes suggestive. She patted his hand. “Good for you. I have my adventures, too. Right now it’s the man who owns the carpet store. Before him was the son of the movie theater owner. All safe. They don’t want to get involved. Meeting on a regular basis is just fine. I keep my life in compartments. Click, click, click, like mail slots. It’s better that way.”

“Married?”

“The current one is. I don’t care about that. He takes me places.” She narrowed her eyes. “It’s not how big it is, but how hard!”

“Let’s talk about the Mafia.”

Her head tilted back and she laughed again. “I don’t know anything about the Mafia. I’ve been here.” Her eyes sparkled. “Really. My life is very carefully defined. I don’t go east past Millerton, south past Poughkeepsie. Really, Frank, I don’t know what that man had in mind.”

“You know about the annulment proceedings,” he said.

“Oh, yes. Better to pretend it never happened. It never should have happened. I remember. We had good times, though, too. You must never forget that.”

“I remember a lot of drunken brawls. Whether it was a sex brawl or just a plain brawl, it was drunken. I’m sober now.”

“I still drink. Socially. There’s nothing in the house. I never cared about drinking. You taught me that.”

“You drank before you met me.”

“I mean drinking, as in making a career of it! It would have been different without the drinking. It would be different now. Wouldn’t it?”

He stared. He remembered a fight about drinking and telling her he had found booze in her room before they were married. Had she forgotten that? Did she think he had? Her anger had blazed up, then vanished, like the flash of a firecracker. It was gone now. Her facial expression said that all he had to do was take her into the bedroom. All effect, Ann Elizabeth had said. Functional? New York had fifty thousand dimestore lawyers who could get her chewing the witness stand in five minutes. Devlin asked himself if thinking that was only a back-door way of beginning to believe all of her bullshit. How could this woman “act sane”? The Brennans were ignorant? They knew her, from the childhood tantrums on. Maybe Ann Elizabeth knew about that much and more, and had a different definition of functional. The woman Devlin was looking at could brush her teeth and maybe remember to feed the cat, but she was still the same woman who could not help stirring up trouble: told that he had a girlfriend, she had instantly turned seductive. “No, I don’t think it would be any different.”

“You love me! You do! Admit it!”