He strode away to a door halfway down the hall. I glanced about as Diesel and I followed him. The hallway at Ranelagh wasn’t that different from the one at River Hill. Beautiful Oriental rugs, antique furniture, and paintings adorned the space. The effect was gracious and elegant.

The study was more of a library, I thought, as I gazed at a couple of book-lined walls. A large desk occupied one quadrant of the room, but a leather sofa and two chairs sat before a fireplace. Morty Cassity motioned for me to have a seat on the sofa while he took one of the chairs. I expected Diesel to sit with me, but he took up position beside our host’s chair instead. Morty seemed pleased with the attention. Thank goodness for a smart cat, I thought.

“Again, my apologies for intruding, Mr. Cassity,” I began.

“Morty, please. Charlie, right?” He didn’t pause in his attentions to the cat.

“Right. Well, Morty, I’m really sorry about the loss of your wife. She was, um, she did a lot for the community.” I winced inwardly at the awkwardness of that, but I couldn’t bring myself to heap fulsome praise on the dead woman.

Morty cast me a sharp glance. “Vera was a giant pain in the ass to everybody, me included. She spent a lot of money trying to get people to like her and think she was a Somebody with a capital S.” He grimaced. “I’m not saying that the money didn’t do good. Of course it did, but she didn’t do it out of the generosity of her heart.”

I wasn’t prepared for such bitterness, even though I knew he hadn’t been happy with his marriage. I couldn’t think of any way to respond to him that wouldn’t sound hypocritical or idiotic. No point in trying to defend Vera, even if I had wanted to.

My host left off his attentions to Diesel and leaned back in his chair, arms across his chest. “Sorry if I’m shocking you, but I’m too tired right now to give a horse’s patoot what anybody thinks.”

“I understand,” I said. “It was all a great shock.”

He snorted. “Only that it didn’t happen years ago. Vera made enemies the way rabbits reproduce. Somebody’d finally had enough, I guess. It wasn’t me that knocked her down the stairs, though.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said, though it sounded fatuous to me.

“What have you got in the bag?”

I extracted the plaque and stood to hand it to him. “The award that the mayor presented last night. The Ducotes’ housekeeper found it this morning.”

Morty accepted the plaque and stared at it for a moment. Then he reached and stuck it on the seat of the other chair near him. “Vera was livid. You have to give it to those two old busybodies, though. They figured out a way to get Vera off their backs publicly.”

Someone else figured out how to do it permanently, I added to myself. Was it you, Morty?