WAXEY DROVE DINAH BACK to Finca Vigía in the red Cadillac Eldorado. Under the circumstances, perhaps it ought to have been me who took her home. I might have been able to offer Noreen some support in dealing with her daughter’s grief. But Waxey was eager to get out from under Meyer Lansky’s shrewd, searching eye, as if he felt the Jewish gangster suspected him of some involvement in the murder of Max Reles. Besides, it was much more likely that I’d only have been in the way. I wasn’t much of a shoulder to cry on. Not anymore. Not since the war, when so many German women had, of necessity, learned to cry by themselves.

Grief: I no longer had the patience for it. What did it matter if you grieved for people when they died? It certainly couldn’t bring them back. And they weren’t even particularly grateful for your grief. The living always get over the dead. That’s what the dead never realize. If ever the dead did come back, they’d only have been sore that somehow you managed to get over their dying at all.

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when I felt equal to the task of driving down to the Hemingway house to offer my sympathies. Despite the fact that Max’s death had done me out of a salary worth twenty-thousand dollars a year, I wasn’t sorry he was dead. But for Dinah’s sake I was willing to pretend.

The Pontiac wasn’t there, just a white Oldsmobile with a sun visor I seemed to recognize.

Ramón admitted me to the house, and I found Dinah in her room. She was seated in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, watched closely by a glum-looking water buffalo. The buffalo reminded me of myself, and it was perhaps easy to see why he was looking glum: Dinah’s suitcase was open on her bed. It was packed neatly with her clothes, as if she were preparing to leave the country. On a table by the arm of her chair were a drink and a hardwood ashtray. Her eyes were red, but she seemed to be all cried out.

“I came to see how you are,” I said.

“As you can see,” she said, calmly.

“Going somewhere?”

“So you were a detective.”

I smiled. “That’s what Max used to say. When he wanted to needle me.”

“And did it?”

“At the time, yes, it did. But there’s not much that gets to me now. I’m rather more impervious these days.”

“Well, that’s a lot more than Max can say.”

I let that one go.

“What would you say if I told you that my mother killed him?” she said.

“I’d say that it might be best to keep a wild thought like that to yourself. Not all of Max’s friends are as forgetful as me.”