I had a flash, a sudden certain vision of a younger Lou sitting in this same chair, scared but not too much, in control of the situation, or trying to be. A plume of blue smoke from her cigarette covering her face like a veil.

“Then why isn’t Lou here, answering these questions?”

“Because Lou isn’t the one who was with Ellen Howard at the St. Leo. And because she has an airtight alibi for the night Ms. Howard died.”

Airtight. I tried not to picture his fingers on Lou’s body. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Tell me what you want to know.”

Lafferty cracked his neck, his eyes flicking up to the one-way glass above us. “I want your boss’s name,” Lafferty said. “I want anything you know about her. I want her address, I want her shoe size, I want her sitting here across from me. Or else I book you as a suspect in the Klein murders.”

It was no different than what I’d half expected from the moment MacLeish left me alone, but I still felt my stomach drop at the threat. “Then I guess I’ve made my decision,” I said. “But I want MacLeish in here, too, when I tell it.” I wanted a friendly face. I wanted no confusion about the deal I was getting.

Lafferty’s eyes flicked, almost imperceptibly, to the one-way glass. “I’ll be right back,” Lafferty said.

I took a moment to gather myself, breathed deeply, thinking about it all. Six years before, Lou had had a run-in with the cops—a case gone bad, probably, and she’d made an arrangement. Maybe more than one. Lou had taken so many lucky gambles in the Lady’s name.

When Lafferty came back, he brought with him a glass of water and MacLeish, looking unhappy but resolute. I tried to make eye contact with the detective, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes, instead stood behind his boss and smoothed his salt-and-pepper hair, brushing up the bristles of it, over and over.

Lafferty set the water down very delicately, as though he were worried about it splashing my face, a new form of police brutality. “Your boss,” he prompted. Neither one of them went for the tape recorder.

I hesitated, unsure where to start.

“Give it up,” Lafferty said. “Why are you protecting her? We know what happened. She gave you the order to kill Ellen once Klein was dead, didn’t she, Jo? Couldn’t have those loose ends around. Had to make sure that everything stayed on the up-and-up for your little staffing agency. So she told you to kill Ellen Howard, and stage the bodies to look like a murder-suicide. And this is the woman you’re protecting, Jo? The woman who made you a murderer?”