She seemed fairly normal, if a little stiff and pale. Better posture than I’d ever seen, spine perfectly straight like she’d been impaled on a board. Her hands were trembling on her lap, but otherwise, she didn’t seem that fragile. In shock, maybe.

From the living room, I could see a dark lump on the bed, spread-eagled, a thick black stain beneath him, turning the sheets a gluey, rusty color.

“Ellen, what did you do?”

“Is he . . . Is he really dead?”

I stepped into the darkened bedroom. Klein was in the center of the bed. Freshly dead, he looked like a mannequin, waxy and unreal. The back of his ruined head lolled off the side of a pillow. Blood had puddled onto the Berber on his side of the bed, and I could see small clumps of bone and viscera on the fog-gray walls, as far up as the crown molding. That satin headboard was a goner.

I’d never seen a dead body before.

“Yes,” I said, after a moment, leaving the doorway and turning back to Ellen. I didn’t need to take his pulse to be sure. I wasn’t going to touch that thing with my bare hands. “He’s dead.”

That’s when Ellen unspooled, my pronouncement unlocking shudders that started in her toes and moved up, until I could see even that poufy blonde hair start to dance on end. The whole time, she was chattering away, telling me what had happened, giving me every excuse.

“. . . said I was some dumb kid, a bimbo, not even worth the Viagra . . .”

How long had he been dead? How long had she waited to call me? I stared at the smudgy browning streaks on the Lucite coffee table between us, faint enough to have been chocolate if I didn’t know better, if there hadn’t been a man oozing behind me in the bedroom. Where had those streaks come from—Ellen herself? Had she touched the body? Had she been stupid enough to touch him?

“. . . and then he, he, he, he choked me, and we’d never done that before and I tried to act like it . . . was fine, but he wouldn’t stop, he was laughing, and then it was over and I don’t know, I think I . . .”

I forced my attention back to Ellen, trying to get a read on her. Her face was so pale it was almost blue. She was gouging at the threads of the couch cushion underneath her legs rhythmically with her nails. Her eyes wouldn’t settle on any one thing, but her glance kept being tugged back to the bedroom.

All those slaps. And that wife he wouldn’t leave. I wondered which had mattered more to Ellen, in the moment.