It was Burton all right, skin shining with perspiration and in need of a shave. The man’s disguise was hardly brilliant. As I gaped at him, I wondered how anyone could mistake him for a woman, and yet an instant earlier, he had been someone I didn’t know. He removed his coat in a single gesture and then, with a flourish, pulled off his hat and wig. His makeup was still on, however, which gave him a clownlike appearance. Either he had forgotten this or perhaps the ghoulish paint didn’t matter to him. From one of his bags, he withdrew a manila envelope and handed it to Inga, who had remained sitting in her chair.

“It happens,” he said to Inga, bending over to speak to her, the hem of his blue dress brushing against her shins, “that an opportunity presented itself to me in the form of an inheritance, and in this new financial state, I asked myself whether any good might come of it, aside from my own enjoyment of the greater comforts I am able to afford now that I am, shall we say, slightly flush, and it seemed that I might make up for that Thursday evening many years ago when I”—Burton took a deep breath—“when I humiliated myself in your presence.”

Inga lifted a hand to Burton’s rouged face and stroked it. “Don’t say that. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered.”

“Open it,” he said, and then, in a voice more excited than I had ever heard him use, he burst out, “I bought them. The letters. They’re yours. That’s my gift, my . . . my atonement.”

Inga glanced down at the slender envelope in her lap. She turned it over. “I’m scared to read them.” She grimaced. Looking up at Burton, she said, “Should I be?”

“I’m afraid that I’m not in a position to answer that question,” he said. “I am ignorant of their contents.”

My friend, the cross-dressing amateur detective, had spied, snooped, shadowed, eavesdropped, and deceived, but his code of honor had kept him from reading the letters he had spent good money to procure. When he turned to me, I gestured toward my breast pocket and then my own cheeks and mouth to encourage him to wipe off what he could of the now very moist and gleaming pink stains on his face. He dutifully pulled out the omnipresent handkerchief and began to push it up and down his cheeks and across his mouth.