My head and throat ached and my right hand had swollen. I was feeling it for breaks when Mooring appeared, dressed for golf and looking annoyed. Without preliminaries he asked, “What do you want?”

“Ten minutes or so.”

He gave his watch an irritated glance. “I’m due in twenty.”

I hesitated, still shaken, doubtful now that I had come this far. But Mooring’s executive crispness seemed less real than calculated. “Your golf can wait,” I told him. “This can’t.”

He looked me over, taking his time. Then he nodded curtly and led me through the kitchen. His wife sat behind a butcher-block counter sipping a daiquiri. She had circles beneath her eyes and too much lipstick. Her gaze was wary and unsurprised, as if she knew me but had forgotten how.

“Hello,” she breathed, emitting a ragged nimbus of cigarette smoke.

I said hello. Mooring steered me quickly past her, through the family room and down four oak stairs into something unexpected: a greenhouse in the shape of an A-frame, refracting trapped sunlight that made me squint. The room was hot and steamy, its greenery—rubber trees, a ten-foot corn plant, some snake cactus that looked ready to strike—an oppressive jungle of exotica, completed by the babble of a rococo fountain.

Mooring said, “You could have come to my office,” in a low, flat drawl.

I couldn’t square him with the house. He stood by the corn plant about ten feet away, his back to the sun, hands placed on his hips in a pose of impatience. He was trim, though as with slim men in their forties he carried himself carefully around the middle and there was a subtle hardness in the face, a closeness of skin to bone. He had gray eyes set over broad cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and a cleft jaw beneath an angry slash of a mouth whose stamp of drive and temper warred with the vaguely feline look of a cynical diplomat. His overall presence, shrewd and carefully governed, clashed with his surroundings. I guessed there were reasons besides his wife that he didn’t want me here: the place embarrassed him. “You were out,” I answered. “So I came here.”

“Then tell me what’s so important.”

The fountain splashed in an unnerving rhythm. Quietly I said, “Your relationship to Lydia Cantwell.”

His mouth thinned. “If you’re referring to that scene with my wife, I’ll ask you to be gentleman enough to forget it. When she’s not”—he searched for the word—“responsible, she imagines things.”

I realized that Mooring was unsure of what she’d said. “Then why doesn’t she imagine something else?”

His voice lowered and became almost confiding. “Because she’s a jealous woman. Frankly, we started with almost nothing and she feels inadequate next to women like Lydia. It’s an old story, one I’m sure you’ve heard before.”