She stepped closer. “You look hurt. How can a man your age be so sweet? You are.” She kissed his nose. “I should have pinched something else. You know me, all right. A few minutes and you have me hurrying to get ready.” She kissed him again, he patted her, and she hugged him. “A few minutes,” she said.

In the living room he removed his belt and shoes and untied his tie and opened his collar. He had to find the souvenir book and the insurance file. The material in the souvenir book was as clear to him as his memory of his own experiences, but he did not want to trust himself. He could not work on the facts. He could not move around the facts for new perspectives. One thought: he could go back to his own beginning in the case and force himself to remember everything he had seen and done.

He spent a longer time than necessary looking at the old portrait of MacIver. There was no doubt of it, he could not remember him from the war. He tried to imagine MacIver as he had been moments before and after he had sat still for the photographer. How had he carried himself? Leland would have no more interest in him today than he had then. MacIver’s had been an unpleasant, unfriendly face. Cheerless, unpromising—and secretive? Leland still had the option of calling Matthews, the wingman, for what he knew, but while it seemed like a better investment now, Leland continued to lean away.

He felt himself continuing to lean toward the old mistakes. He caught himself thinking that he was looking at the face of a thief and a suicide. He put the book aside. Of all the people he knew, the only one who had ever seemed close to self-destruction was Karen. And years ago, not now. There had been a time when death had been able to make her cry. It was still never far from her thoughts—a hideous burden; it only occasionally occurred to him. She was the one who had forced him to see death as a way to escape. When he thought of how her problems had pressed on her, he had to wonder how close she had come, or even if she had actually tried it. The terrible thing was the ease with which a life could be taken. A step off a high place. With a gun, a contraction of a finger. If the idea had courted a man, if a man had been afraid of it for years, then all it took was a kind of suck of curiosity. Leland got up and crossed the room to his belt, moving quickly. It took one second to get the pistol out of the holster. Two, three seconds at the most to cross the room and get out the gun. It was infinitely easier to tweak the life out of oneself than to rip it out of another.