She laughed. “Oh, yes. Joytown was your district then, wasn’t it?”

“Fifth Precinct. It didn’t take you long to get picked up in the stolen car, did it?”

She shook her head as she swallowed. “One of the fellows came around with a car that he said was his and I, dope that I was, believed him. Three of us. We were picked up at Northport. Don’t ask me what we were doing up there in December.”

“You just glide over that, if you want to,” he said.

“Dr. Roberts used to say that I shouldn’t. People would hold fewer surprises and I would feel better getting rid of it. That was true then, when I was in therapy, and saw a lot of people who were in therapy, too. It isn’t true now when I meet all kinds of people, so-called healthy people. It makes them uneasy, as if I had cancer. Am I getting through?”

“Perfectly.”

“Listen, sometimes I call him Dr. Roberts and sometimes Wendell. He was always Dr. Roberts to me before we moved next door to him, and then I started calling him Wendell. I’ll say both when I’m not thinking of it.”

“I won’t be confused. How did you happen to move next door to him?”

“An accident. I’ll tell you about it, but I want to go on. Funny, I probably wouldn’t if your rates were less, so Colin was right.”

“You’ll have to explain that,” he said.

“Colin was sure that cost had something to do with the amount of effort a person would put into thereapy. The more you paid, the harder you worked. This is similar—the success of it depends on how much I contribute. I want to tell everything so you can help me get value for my money.”

“I see.” Leland thought it was a curious, cynical insight for a man married to a woman who had been in therapy. MacIver had passed this crack and he had bought her a car. They seemed to be on opposite ends of the scale. And this man had died a violent death.

“The night we were arrested,” she said, “my father came up to the station. My mother couldn’t. She couldn’t face it. As soon as he saw me he hit me, hard, across the mouth. They had to tell him not to do it again.”

“Is he from the other side?”

“Oh, no. Sounds that way, doesn’t it? His parents were, and so were hers, but they both came from Bay Slope. Do you know where Our Lady Mother of Heaven Church is? On Roswell Avenue?”

“Yes.”