“What exactly do you do for them?”

“Get paid for deep psychological insight.”

“What’s your insight about me?”

“That we can learn to play nice.”

She whistled silently. “You’re a playful fella?”

I said, “I can be.”

One eye opened. Her right index finger traced the outline of the ring on her left hand. Round-cut diamond, huge, white, lots of fire.

“Nice.”

“D Flawless,” she said. “I think the cut brings out its best qualities, don’t you?”

She took my hand, placed it on the rock. Her skin was cool, soft. She’d used some kind of cover-up for age spots and the blemishes floated like water lilies in a deep vat of milk.

I said, “I think everything about you works quite nicely.”

She drew away. “Sonny, I’ve been bullshat by the best. Don’t even try.”

“Aw shucks,” I said.

I angled the laptop toward her.

She said, “If you’ve got a game, name it. If you’re going to waste my time by making me sit through the crap I did when I was too young and too stupid to know any better, I’m cutting this little chat short.”

She sprang to her feet. “In fact, if you don’t get your ass in gear right now, I’m going up to my room and fetching my Glock. I’m sure you know what that is, seeing as you’re a police groupie.”

“Lightweight, well made,” I said. “Model 19?”

“A 22 and I know how to use it. You may be cuter than most girls can stand—you may know how to play dress-up—what is that, Brioni—no, Zegna, I know the stitching, Mark bought them like candy. But to me you’re a punk and you’ll stay a punk and that’s how my police will view you when I tearfully tell them how you wangled your way past my retarded maid then tried to attack me.”

I said, “That sounds like one of your movies. So does the crack about someone thinking you’re crazy. Wasn’t that what Mona tried in Death Is My Shadow? Acting nuts so no one would suspect premeditation?”

“Piece of crap,” she said. “That review was too kind.”

“I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

Click.

She said, “Oh, Jesus, you’re an idiot.”

But she stayed there, eyes fixed on the screen.

Once an actress.

Text gave way to a slide show.

Leona as Olna in a white dress. Malevolently lovely face wrapped in a matching scarf. Graceful fingers clutching the stem of a Martini glass.

Olive and pearl onion bobbing in a crystalline bath.

Olna wearing that same outfit plus oversized sunglasses.

Olna, bare-shouldered and strategically draped by a bedsheet, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder. The barest suggestion of teeth between glossed lips. Heavy-lashed eyelids drooped in postcoital torpor.