“Mick found out she was fucking the major wiseguy, but that left him with a dilemma. I mean, that’s not a can of worms you want opened in divorce court, or anywhere else. So he couldn’t take the normal legal steps. However, he used to talk privately about wanting to strangle the bitch, twist her head off, feed it to his dog. Apparently, he would also say this to her from time to time. One of those times, she made a video of him telling her in colorful detail, after a few drinks, how he was going to feed her sensitive body parts to his pit bull. Guess what happened then?”

“Tell me.”

“The next day she threatened to put the video on YouTube and flush his career and pension down the toilet if he didn’t give her a quiet divorce on her terms with a very generous settlement.”

Hardwick’s thin grin conveyed a kind of perverse admiration. “That was when the homicidal hate started oozing out of old Mick the Dick like pus. He would have gladly killed her at that point, wiseguy connection or no wiseguy connection, if she hadn’t ensured that the tape would go viral if anything happened to her. So he was forced to give her the divorce. And the money. And ever since then he’s been taking it out on every woman who even remotely reminds him of his wife. Mick was always a little touchy. But after he got that divorce deal rammed up his ass, he turned into two hundred and fifty pounds of pure vengeance, searching for targets.”

“You’re telling me he framed Kay Spalter just because she was fucking around like his wife?”

“Worse than that. Crazier than that. I think his blind hatred for anyone like his wife made him believe that Kay Spalter actually did murder her husband, and that it was his duty to see that she paid for it. She was guilty in his fucked-up mind, and he was determined to put her away at any cost. He wasn’t going to let another unfaithful bitch get off scot-free. If that meant suborning a little perjury here and there in the interest of justice, so what?”

“You’re telling me he’s a psycho.”

“Mild way of putting it.”

“And you know all this how, exactly?”

“I told you. He has enemies.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Someone close enough to the man to hear things gave me the details of his bile and bullshit on the job, snippets of phone calls, comments here and there, what he said about women in general, about his ex-wife and Kay Spalter in particular. The Dick got carried away sometimes, wasn’t as careful as he should have been.”

“This ‘someone’ have a name?”

“Can’t reveal that.”

“Yes you can.”

“No way.”