Bast materialized with a note pad. Rayfield took out a black notebook and asked, “Mrs. Cantwell invite you?”

I noticed that his hair tonic lent him a not unpleasant whiff of the barber shop: the smell of my father. “Not exactly,” I answered. “I was on the way home from the office.”

“Then she wasn’t expecting you.” His flat drawl might have passed for witlessness if I hadn’t lived in the South, or caught the sharpness of his eyes.

“I’m not sure—she’d talked yesterday with my father-in-law.”

“But you didn’t call her.”

“No.”

“Then why’d you come?”

“Private business. Law business, that’s all.”

“What was it?”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. That’s covered by the attorney-client privilege.”

Bast’s eyes rose from his notes. “Give me the semen slide,” someone said in the living room. Rayfield drawled, “She’s dead now, Mr. Shaw,” in a voice so flat and uninflected that his words held the barest trace of irony.

“Not just her. The family.”

His eyebrows raised. “Dead?”

“No. Clients.”

“Just who are we talking about?”

“Her husband, for one. Henry Cantwell.”

Rayfield paused, head angled to look at me as if revising some impression. His thumb began clicking the ballpoint. I noticed then that his hands were at odds with the rest of him: pale and delicate, with long piano-player’s fingers, his nails fastidiously trimmed. In a monotone he asked, “You a friend of Henry Cantwell’s?”

From the side Bast glanced hastily at Rayfield. “His friend, and lawyer,” I answered.

Rayfield’s pen stopped clicking. His tone was cool, accusing. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” Then it hit me that Henry might be dead or in trouble. It hit me hard, like sudden knowledge in a man not smart.

“What’s the problem, Mr. Shaw?”

“Nothing.”

“Then where is he?”

I turned to Bast. “There’s an envelope under the front seat of my car—the Alfa Romeo. You’d better get it.”

Bast looked to Rayfield. But Rayfield was staring at me, voice now taut as he asked, “Did Henry Cantwell do this?”

“Get the envelope,” I repeated to Bast.

Rayfield kept staring. But Bast nodded and went through the front door. In the minute it took him to come back Rayfield said nothing, his eyes never moving until Bast gave him the envelope. He pulled the document, reading its caption. “Her will?”

“Her new will. She never got to sign it.”

He flipped its pages as Bast read over his shoulder. He finished, said nothing, and started again, more slowly. “Take another smear,” said someone near Lydia. I reached to stub my cigarette in one of her ashtrays, jabbing twice before it went out. Finally, Rayfield asked, “Isn’t there a son?”

I nodded. “Jason.”

“But not in here.”

“No. Not in there.”

Rayfield looked up. “How old’s he now?”

“Mid-twenties.”

“Know where he lives?”