“So, what then?” he said. “You were here because why? Picking up your laundry? Part-time job delivering pizza? What?” It was one of the biggest shocks of a very unsettling day to hear Coulter revealing a faint patina of wit. I had thought of him as an exceedingly dull and dim lump of dough, incapable of anything beyond filling out an accident report, and yet here he was making amusing remarks with a very professional deadpan delivery, and if he could do that, I had to assume he might have an outside chance of putting two and two together and coming up with me. I was truly on the spot. And so, throwing my cunning into high gear, I decided to go with the time-honored tactic of telling a big lie wrapped in a small truth.

“Look, detective” I said, with a painful and somewhat hesitant delivery that I was quite proud of. Then I closed my eyes and took a deep breath —all real Academy Award stuff. “I'm sorry, I'm still a little fuzzy. They say I sustained a minor concussion.”

“Was that before you got here, Dex?” Coulter said. “Or can you remember that far back, about why you were here?” I can remember” I said reluctantly. “I just...”

“You don't feel so good” he said.

“Yeah, that's right.”

I can understand that” he said, and for one wild, irrational moment I thought he might let me go. But no: “What I can't understand” he went on relentlessly, “is what the fuck you were doing here when the fucking house blew the fuck up.”

“It's not easy to say” I said.

I guess not” said Coulter. “Cause you haven't said it yet. You gonna tell me, Dex?” He popped his finger out of the bottle, took a sip, pushed the finger back in again. The bottle was more than half empty now, and it hung there like some kind of strange and embarrassing biological appendage. Coulter wiped his mouth again.

“See, I kind of need to know this” he said. “Cuz they tell me there's a body in there.”

A minor seismic event worked its way down my spine, from the top of my skull all the way down to my heels. “Body?” I said with my usual incisive wit.

“Yeah” he said. “A body”

“That's, you mean —dead?” Coulter nodded, watching me with distant amusement, and I realized with a terrible shock that we had switched roles, and now I was the stupid one. “Yeah, that's right” he said. “Cuz it was inside the house when it went ka-boom, so you would have to figure it would be dead. Also” he said, “it couldn't run away, being tied up like that. Who would tie a guy up when the house was gonna blow like that, do you figure?”

“It, uh ... must have been the killer” I stammered.

“Uh-huh” said Coulter. “So you figure the killer killed him, that it?”