“And how’d you know it was his code word?”

She gave me another little shrug.

“Over drinks?” I said.

“Mmm.” She moved past me and headed for the bedroom.

The living room was immaculate. A black leather L-shaped sectional took up a third with a charcoal smoked-glass coffee table in front of it. On the coffee table lay three neatly stacked issues of GQ and four remote controls. One was for the fifty-inch wide-screen TV, another for the VCR, a third for the laser disc machine, and a fourth for the stereo component system.

“Jay,” I said, “buy a universal remote for crying out loud.”

There were several technical handbooks in the bookcase, a few Le Carré novels, and several by the surrealists Jay loved—Borges, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar.

I gave the books and then the couch cushions a cursory once-over, found nothing, and moved into the bedroom.

Good private detectives are notoriously minimalist. They’ve seen firsthand what the random jottings on a piece of paper or the hidden diary can lead to, so they’re very rarely pack rats. More than one person has said that my apartment resembles a hotel suite more than a home. And Jay’s place, while far more plushly materialistic than my own, was still pretty impersonal.

I stood in the bedroom doorway as Angie lifted the mattresses on the antique sleigh bed, lifted the throw rug by the walnut dresser. The living room had been icy modern, all blacks and charcoals and cobalt-blue postmodern paintings on the walls. The bedroom seemed to be following a more naturalistic motif, the blond hardwood floor polished and gleaming under the small antique replica chandelier. The bedspread was hand-sewn and bright, the desk in the corner a matching walnut to the dresser and bureau.

As Angie moved to the desk, I said, “So when did you and Jay have drinks?”

“I slept with him, Patrick. Okay? Get over it.”

“When?”

She shrugged as I came over to the desk behind her. “Last spring or summer. Around there somewhere.”

I opened a drawer as she opened its counterpart beside me. “During your ‘days of unleashing’?” I said.

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“Days of unleashing” had been what Angie called her dating ritual after she separated from Phil—extremely short-term relationships with no attachments, dominated by as casual an approach as was possible to sex in the years since the discovery of AIDS. It was a phase, one she grew bored with far quicker than I had. Her days of unleashing had lasted maybe six months, mine about nine years.

“So how was he?”

She frowned at something in the drawer. “He was good. But he was a moaner. I can’t stand guys who moan too loud.”

“Me, either,” I said.

She laughed. “You find anything?”

I closed the last of the drawers. “Stationery, pens, car insurance policy, nothing.”

“Me either.”