She puffed silently on her cigarette, considered this idea for a moment, and then shrugged, as if she’d thought of a way, after all. Her voice was soft. In the moonlight she looked as lovely as ever. Seeing her, I was filled with a dull ache of longing, as if the scent of the mamoncillo’s greenish-white flowers contained some sort of magical juice that made fools like me fall in love with queens like her.

“Dinah’s gone back to the States,” she said, still not quite coming to the point. “But you knew about that, didn’t you?”

I nodded. “Is this about Dinah?”

“I’m worried about her, Bernie.”

I shook my head. “She’s left the island. She’s going to Brown. I don’t see what you could possibly have to worry about. I mean, isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Oh, sure. No, it’s the way she suddenly changed her mind. About everything.”

“Max Reles was murdered. I think that might have had something to do with her decision.”

“Those gangsters he associated with. You know some of them, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Do they have any idea who killed Max yet?”

“None at all.”

“Good.” She threw away her cigarette and quickly lit another. “You’ll probably think me crazy. But you see, it crossed my mind that, perhaps, Dinah might have had something to do with his murder.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For one thing, my gun—the one Ernest gave me—it’s gone. It was a Russian revolver. I had it lying around the house somewhere, and now I can’t find it. Fredo—Alfredo López? My lawyer friend has a friend in the police who told him that Reles had been shot with a Russian revolver. It sort of made me wonder. If Dinah could have done it.”

I was shaking my head. I hardly liked to tell her that Dinah had suspected that her own mother might be the murderer.

“There’s all that, and there’s the fact that she seemed to get over it so quickly. Like she wasn’t in love with him at all. I mean, didn’t it make any of those Mafia guys suspicious that she wasn’t at the funeral? Like she didn’t care?”

“I think people thought she was probably too upset to go.”

“That’s my point, Bernie. She wasn’t. And this is why I’m worried. If the Mafia comes around to the opinion that she did have something to do with Max’s murder, then maybe they’ll do something about it. Maybe they’ll send someone after her.”