“On our tenth wedding anniversary, Carl invited a few other couples to have dinner with us. He drank too much and got on his favorite drunk theme: ‘You can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take Brooklyn out of the girl.’ And that night it escalated into some grandiose bullshit about how he was going to run for president after he became governor of New York, and how I was going to be his link to the common man. He said he was going to be like Juan Peron in Argentina, and I would be his Evita. My job would be to make all the blue-collar workers love him. He added a few sexual suggestions as to how I might go about that. And then he said this really stupid thing. He said I could buy a thousand pairs of shoes, just like Evita.”

“And?”

“For some reason, that was too much. Why was it too much? No idea. But it was too much. Too stupid.”

“And?”

“And I screamed at him that the lady with the thousand pairs of shoes wasn’t Evita Peron, it was Imelda Marcos.”

“That’s it?”

“Not completely. I also said if he ever talked about me like that again, I’d cut off his dick and shove it up his ass.”

Hardwick, who hadn’t uttered a syllable since his question about beautiful Bedford Hills, broke out into a braying laugh, which she ignored.

Gurney switched direction. “How much do you know about silencers for guns?”

“I know that cops call them suppressors, not silencers.”

“What else?”

“They’re illegal in this state. They’re more effective with subsonic ammunition. Cheap ones are okay—expensive ones are a lot better.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I asked at the firing range where I took lessons.”

“Why?”

“Same reason I was there to begin with.”

“Because you thought you might have to shoot someone to protect Carl?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever buy or borrow a silencer?”

“No. They got Carl before I got around to it.”

“ ‘They’ being the mob?”

“Yes. I heard what you said about the sniper route being an odd way for them to go about it. But I still think it was them. More likely them than Jonah.”

He didn’t see any advantage in debating the point. He decided to go down another path. “Apart from Angel, were there any other mob figures he was close to?”

For the first time in their exchange, she hesitated.

After a few seconds Gurney thought they’d been disconnected. “Kay?”

“There was someone he used to talk about, someone who was part of a poker group he played with.”

Gurney noted an uneasiness in her voice. “Did he mention a name?”

“No. He just mentioned what the guy did for a living.”

“Which was?”