MacLeish stood up. He didn’t even look back. My palms started to sweat. When was the last time I’d been nervous to be alone in a room with a strange man? I couldn’t remember. That thought brought me back. There wasn’t a man alive who couldn’t be manipulated if you could find the right pull. Wear the con like a coat, hide in the spotlight, Jo.

Lafferty stared at me, not smiling and not friendly, until he finally said: “So tell me what happened. With the dead girl and the producer and the Lady.”

I stared at the tape recorder. Lafferty hadn’t bothered to turn it back on.

“Now, let’s be clear with each other,” he went on. “For whatever reason—and I’m a nice man, I won’t ask questions—our monthly stipend got lost somewhere. Okay, that happens. It’s not great business, but we have bigger problems now. Now, we have a body. Two bodies. Good people.”

I scoffed, trying to remember what a confident woman would say. “Define good. Klein was rich, certainly. I didn’t—”

Lafferty tucked his finger against his lips, the universal shhh sign, and shook his head. “It doesn’t really matter to me what you did or didn’t do. You’re going to keep selling the story that Howard wasn’t one of your girls? Or, rather, the Lady’s girls.” At the mention of the Lady, Lafferty’s gray eyes took on a brighter glow.

“Here’s a theory,” Lafferty said. “The two of you were working Hiram Klein, had yourselves a little party. All three of you together. Something went wrong, and he winds up dead. The two of you move the body, but Ellen gets squeamish, wants to call the police. You can’t have that. Now the dead bodies perform a miracle and multiply.”

I was still watching the tape recorder, looking for a little red light. Could they have rigged it to record without suspects ever knowing? They had it out on the table. You couldn’t pretend you weren’t informed about it. I licked my lips. I could see myself, suddenly, as he saw me: so confident, thinking I was such hot shit with my photographs—but what was that worth if he knew I’d been involved in Ellen’s murder? Nothing.

“If that was the case,” Lafferty went on, “you’d be looking at twenty years, give or take, a jury sends you, twenty-five years max. You’re pretty, you can cry on command I’m sure—so no jury gives you max. You might even get light, ten, fifteen years. No priors, after all. Some sob story about no money, no man, had to do what you could. All sorts of ways it could play, if that’s how things go. But that’s still likely a decade of your life we’re talking about. If that’s how things go.”