I introduced myself and gave her my card. “I’m looking for your husband,” I told her. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

She pushed a clump of hair back from her face and left a smudge of lemon yellow paint. “I don’t know where he is, and if you find him, I want to know so I can hunt him down and wring his neck. He started painting my kitchen this stupid yellow color three weeks ago and never came back to finish.”

“It’s gonna be real cheery when you get done,” Lula said.

“Cheery, my behind,” Ann McCurdle said. “Every time I look at it, my blood pressure goes up. I’m popping pills like they’re M&M’s.”

“So I guess marrying a bigamist didn’t work out for you,” Lula said.

“It could have been worse. Just when I was getting sick of him, he’d go off on a two-week business trip. That’s the secret to keeping the magic in a marriage,” she said. “You don’t see too much of each other. Men are only interested in one thing anyway. S-E-X. And then after they get it, they go to sleep and snore.”

“I noticed that,” Lula said.

I thanked Ann McCurdle for her help, and Lula and I went back to the Jeep.

“Maybe bigamists aren’t as fascinating as I thought,” Lula said, cinching her seat belt. “According to the newspaper, none of these wives knew there were other wives. Now that I’m meeting them, I could see how that could happen.”

I motored out of the lot and turned onto Klockner Boulevard. “His first wife lives in the Burg. I thought we’d try her next, since it’s on our way back to the office.”

The Burg is an odd-shaped chunk of Trenton bordered by Hamilton Avenue, Liberty Street, Chambers Street, and Broad Street. I lived in the Burg for my entire childhood, and my parents still live there. Houses are small, yards are narrow, cars are large, windows are clean. This is a neighborhood of hard working second-generation Americans. Families are extended and proudly dysfunctional. Although dysfunction in Jersey might be hard to measure.

Tomasina McCurdle lived one block in from Hamilton in a single-family house with brown clapboard siding and brown trim.

“This house looks like a turd,” Lula said. “How could someone live in a all-brown house? You’d think you were going into a turd every day. It’s just my opinion, but I’d find that depressing. When you had company over, what would you tell them? The directions would be to turn off Hamilton and park in front of the house looks like a turd.”

I had to admit, it wasn’t the most attractive house I’d ever seen, but turd seemed harsh. Truth is, the bottom half of my parents’ house was brown, and okay, if I was being honest, it wasn’t such a great-looking house, either.

I knocked at the door and a sturdy woman answered. She was early seventies, short black hair shot with silver, wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in a green pants suit, large pearl earrings, lots of perfume.