“You’re on the right track, but not quite.” Marge paused. “You being Jewish and all, Rabbi. Maybe you can explain this to me. Yes, Honey wanted to get away from her husband. She had been asking for a divorce for over a year, but Gershon Klein wanted to stay married. Now this is the part I’m confused about. Apparently, if you’re a devout Jew, a wife can’t get a divorce if her husband doesn’t want it. Is that true?”

“In a nutshell, yes.”

“How’s that possible, Pete? We have laws in this country. Equitable laws.”

Decker was quiet. How could he possibly explain it to Marge when he didn’t understand it himself. “She can get a civil divorce, Marge, but she can’t get a religious divorce. Without a religious divorce, a Jewish woman can’t remarry.”

There was a long pause over the line. Then Marge said, “I don’t know about you, but that seems imbalanced to me.”

“Me, too,” Decker admitted. “I think it stinks. Has New York concluded how Gershon Klein died?”

“He drowned,” Marge said. “Rather he was drowned.”

“What kind of water was in the lungs?”

“It was fresh water, not seawater. They think he drowned in a bathtub. And they think Honey did it.”

“It would have been hard for Honey to get him into a bathtub,” Decker said. “Gershon had stopped bathing a while back.”

“Stopped bathing? Why? Now that couldn’t be religion.”

“It had nothing to do with religion,” Decker said. “Sounds like the guy was undergoing a breakdown. Go on.”

Marge said, “The next part is speculation but I’ll run it by you anyway. New York seems to think that Honey had intentions of calling it in as an accident. But she suddenly panicked.”

“I can see that,” Decker said. “It’s one thing to drown your husband in a frenzy of anger. It’s another thing to explain away a dead body.”

Marge said, “New York thinks she dragged the body out of her house—”

“This had to have taken place at night.”

“I would think so. Anyway, she dragged the corpse down to her husband’s office and left.”

“The body was shot.”

“Yeah, they figure Honey purposely shot the body, trashed the office to make it look like a robbery, then told everyone that Gershon was out of town in Israel.”

“Then Honey called up Rina,” Decker continued the story. “She made arrangements to be out of town when the body was discovered.” He became angry. “She chose to stay with a woman whose husband’s a cop. Got to give it to her. That took balls.”

“Or some screws loose,” Marge said. “Honey had to have been stupid to think that someone wouldn’t catch on.”