"You're talking about Medora's drinking? That'll certainly throw a family into disarray. At the same time, people have been telling us Charisse was so interested in men, we can't help but wonder was she interested in him?"

"I think I've said enough. If I were you, I wouldn't mention this to Justine. She gets touchy on the subject."

After that, Cornell stubbed out his cigarette, resisting any further attempts to probe. I watched Stacey come at the matter from a number of directions, but, try as he might, he couldn't weasel anything more out of him.

Later, with Stacey at the wheel of the rental car, I said, "What was that about? Talk about resistance."

Stacey shook his head. "I can't decide if he was lying about something and doing a piss-poor job, or trying not to tattle and making a sore botch of that."

"How could he be lying? He didn't say anything."

"Maybe you should talk to Justine – you know, woman to woman."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh yeah, right. Like she'd break down and confide in me."

"Well, she might. Meanwhile, I think we better go by the hospital and see Con. First day without a smoke, he'll be climbing the walls."

"What about you? I haven't seen you light your pipe since you arrived."

"I gave it up; part of the deal I made, hanging on to life."

The CCU nurse we'd been dealing with the night before was off duty and wouldn't be back on the floor until 3:00. Winsome as we were, the current charge nurse, Meredith Snow, couldn't be persuaded to let us break the rules. I sat in the waiting area, with its bare end table and four upholstered chairs, while Stacey went in to Dolan's room for the requisite ten-minute visit. In the absence of magazines, I amused myself by cleaning all the woofies, loose hair, and tatty tissues from the bottom of my shoulder bag. In the process, I came across the Quorum phone book that I'd been toting around for days. I sat and thought about the tarp, wondering how to figure out where Ruel bought his. As the entire phone book, white and yellow pages combined, was about the thickness of a modest paperback, I tried the obvious, looking under "Tarpaulins" first. There were two subheadings: "Renting" and "Retail." I wasn't sure anyone would rent a tarpaulin to wrap up a corpse, but I suppose stranger things have happened. Dolan's theory about the killer involved haste and improvisation, so it was always possible a rented tarp was the closest at hand. Ruel didn't rent his, but someone else might.