“He send you?”

“No. This is my idea.”

The volatile eyes seemed to change like some unstable element. I was recalling more about him than I had thought: a nineteen-year-old boy at our engagement party who seemed somehow uninvited, a stray yet the center of a chemistry that kept Lydia glancing toward him, Kris Ann a careful distance she maintained wherever Jason moved. He had made an impression then, and after that—when I had seen nothing of him and heard nothing good—almost none. But the man who stood now in the doorway had the primal force of a prophet or a Mansonite. “You’ve got five minutes,” he said at last, and moved grudgingly aside.

His apartment was cramped—a small living room with a kitchen nook off that and one bedroom—and its contents a riot of confusion. On the far wall a poster of Ho Chi Minh watched from above the color television. A half-finished macrame lay on the couch to the left, there was a cocaine spoon on the coffee table, and I stood on a costly looking Persian rug. A bookshelf of bricks and boards held a revisionist history by Eugene Genovese, some Herbert Marcuse, and a gothic romance, in paperback. In the kitchen, a blue-jeaned girl with long brown hair washed dishes by a spice rack and copper teapot. I figured those, and the paperback, were hers.

“Hello,” I said.

She turned, eyes turquoise and unsure. She was tall and pretty, with tawny skin and small delicate features. Her body stretched with a young girl’s leanness to sudden full breasts, and there were tints of honey in her curly hair. “Hi,” she said in a near whisper and turned quickly back to her dishes.

I felt Jason’s eyes warning me off, as clear as speech. He stood in the center of the living room, thumb stroking one side of his beard. “I hear you found the old lady.” His voice was slow and guttural and half-curious. “The cops said her neck had these purple welts.”

He could have been discussing a dead hamster. But I couldn’t make him out. His neck was bent to the side, his body rigid, and each word seemed molten and heavy. There was something old about him, and terribly young. I nodded. “That’s right.”

Jason stared at his feet. “Yeah, well, that’s how I found out, you know—from the cops. By the time old Henry called, the pigs had been all over me. He must have thought they’d trap me first.”

I caught the edge of hostile pride. “That’s my doing,” I told him. “They were on the way before Henry got home. I had the will with me when I found her. You did know about the will?”

“No.” The pulse throbbed in his temple. “The old lady made noises but she never said she’d done it.”