I said, “How would you like to hear the real story of what went down Sunday night?”

“Sure.”

I gave it to her—the whole megillah, from the charade at the warehouse and all the in’s and out’s of that, to how Vincent had confessed to the killings of Casey Shannon, Roger Kraft, Jasmine Jordan, and Gino Mazzini. And of course how he’d copped to the whole Plan B that the phony hit-and-run had put into play—the Jekyll and Hyde routine, after the faked concussion.

She frowned through some of that.

“It’s awful,” she said, “what you did to him.”

“Yeah. I can be kind of a shit sometimes. Anyway, that’s it. Well, there are a few things I left out.”

She sat forward a little. “What did you leave out?”

I shifted on the sofa. “Funny running into you here. I had it in mind to look you up. Go over a few things. But the truth is, honey, I don’t have a scrap of anything.”

“A scrap of anything what?”

She was staring at me.

I stared back.

“Proof,” I said, “that you were Vincent’s accomplice in this, or anyway much of it. He had several accomplices, of course, but you I think were the key one. And that makes you an accessory to murder. At the least.”

She wasn’t looking at me now. “Does it really?”

I pointed at her and got her attention back. “I bet you were the one who threw off the light switch in that apartment building in Tudor City, when Chris Peters and I were looking for that floppy disk, with Vincent waiting in the hall to intercede. I’d love to have that disk, by the way, because it might clear up the last two murders—the girl your honey raped and strangled, and the broker he ran down in that parking ramp, God knows why. I wonder how long homicide had been his hobby? How many others there are?”

The red lips were tight now. “You’re cruel.”

“Is it cruel when a doctor delivers a diagnosis? And mine is that young Vincent was a sociopath or maybe a psychopath—the finer points of homicidal lunacy elude me. I was absent that day. But you, honey—you’re no sociopath, or psycho, either.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You? You’re just plain greedy.”

“Is that right.”

I gave her the really nasty grin. “Your late husband was a lunatic who didn’t realize he was one—and figured he could beat a murder rap by pretending to be what he actually was, then talk his way out, or fake another head-trauma injury, curing him this time. And in a year or two, he’d be graduated from the laughing academy. That itself was lunacy, of course, and you knew it—and sat on the sidelines urging him on, with dollar signs in your eyes.”