We crossed the lot to the front door and I rang the bell.

The woman who answered the door was about five foot nothing. Her hair was pale blond and cut short. Her makeup reminded me of pictures of Japanese geisha. Exaggerated bow mouth painted with glossy bright-red lipstick, white pancake makeup, and pencil-thin black eyebrows. She was wearing a magenta velour warm-up suit and white tennis shoes.

“Are you Margaret McCurdle?” I asked her.

“Yes. You aren’t more wives, are you?”

“No.”

“Thank goodness,” she said. “I can’t keep track of them anymore. I don’t know how Dirk does it. He has wives coming out of the woodwork.”

I gave her my card. “I’m a bond enforcement agent,” I told her, “and I’m looking for Dirk.”

“Good luck,” Margaret said on a sigh. “I’ve given up looking for him. He went out for ice cream two weeks ago and never came back. And now it turns out I’m wife number four. I read about it in the paper. I suppose I should get a lawyer, but they’re so expensive.”

“What’s it like being married to a bigamist?” Lula asked her.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “He told me he was still managing his company in Des Moines. So he would show up on Thursday night in time to set the garbage out for Friday pickup. And then he would leave early Sunday. He was very attentive, and he was always a gentleman. And he was excellent in bed.”

“No kidding,” Lula said. “You and McCuddle have a lot of sex?”

“No, but we talked about it.”

“Do you know where he is now?” I asked her.

“Jail?”

“Not yet,” I said.

Lula and I said good-bye to Margaret McCurdle, and I drove us a half mile to Ann McCurdle’s house on Sycamore Street. Ann lived in a small ranch house in a neighborhood filled with small ranch houses. Her house was pale gray, with blue shutters and a blue door. Her yard was tidy, and it looked like someone had just mulched around her azalea bushes.

“This is fascinating to me,” Lula said, “because I’m a student of human nature. That’s why I was such a good ’ho. I took an interest in my clients. And now here I am seeing all these bigamist wives living in all these different kinds of houses. Don’t you think it’s fascinating?”

Actually, it wasn’t high on my list of things that fascinated me, but I thought it was nice that Lula was fascinated.

I rang Ann’s doorbell with Lula hovering behind me. I rang a second time and the door was answered by a wiry old lady with a paintbrush in her hand. She had gray hair the color and texture of steel wool, her bifocals were crooked on her face, and she was dressed in white orthopedic shoes and a shapeless cotton creation that was somewhere between a dress and a bathrobe.

“Mrs. McCurdle?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me and everybody else.” She craned her neck to look past Lula. “This isn’t another one of them television interviews, is it? I’m painting my kitchen, and I don’t have my hair fixed.”