Fifteen minutes later, still poking around under the car, my phone rang again. Elizabeth. She wanted to see me. She said she had exciting news. Amazing progress. We needed to meet. It had to be tomorrow. I tried to make it Saturday so it would be just one trip. No. Had to be tomorrow. OK. I ended the call and returned to poking about. Then I heard a car coming up the road.

I was accustomed to solitude as well as silence. I don’t count the company of cats. I don’t think my company means much to them, except for the food. I’d already had four visitors this month. Three who’d made it all the way up to my house. Any more, and I’d have to be on the Woodstock tourist maps and put up a sign, The concert wasn’t here and neither was Bob Dylan. I got out and brushed myself off. I thought that maybe I should have a gun to greet a prospective guest, then decided it was probably me that was getting out of hand.

It was a blue Ford Explorer. Not particularly new.

A black woman was at the wheel. I recognized her. Edwina Walker, Winston’s widow, his second wife. She was about fifteen years younger than he’d been. She’d been here before. Long ago, with Winston. She’d always made me think of some of the black women I’d known as a child, like Mrs. Ferrer, my teacher from fourth to sixth grade. They were determined to be four times more proper and twice as bourgeois as any of their white peers. And they were, but still didn’t get as much credit as they deserved or the opportunities they’d earned. A generation later they would be Michelle Obama, Venus and Serena Williams, Oprah Winfrey, and Condoleezza Rice. That’s who she reminded me of, Mrs. Ferrer, who taught us never to put anything smaller than our elbow in our ear and not to try to put our pants on standing up, because her husband got a heart attack that way.

I walked up to her car, greeted her, held the door open to help her out.

—

This thing was getting terribly complicated for a murder that I didn’t commit. That nobody committed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

WHAT A WIFE KNOWS

“When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it.”

DASHIELL HAMMETT, THE MALTESE FALCON
Hammett had been a detective, the real thing, a Pinkerton, before he became a writer. He said, “All my characters were based on people I’ve known personally or known about.” So that ethos, you could figure there was actually something to it.

“I’M NOT INTERRUPTING? IS THIS a bad time? Should I have called first?”