Rafe was sleeping when she knocked on his door. The knocking, in his dream, became Ringo Starr trying to wake Paul McCartney so they could finish recording “Octopus’s Garden,” a song he had liked when he was six. His dreams never made any sense. She knocked again and called his name. Then he was up. “Catherine?” He walked to the door in his underwear.

She walked in wearing a maroon dress—office wear—and, incongruously, what looked like slippers. She was carrying a small suitcase.

“Are you moving in?” he said. “Did you change your mind?”

“What? No.”

Actually, he realized, he’d never asked her to move in. He’d just asked her to see him again, to be with him again (and, sure, to have sex with him again), maybe to give his life something it was lacking, although he’d never actually said that. But now, half awake, he liked the idea of her coming to live with him. They could both just get back into his bed. She could unpack in the morning, then they could make plans for the future, maybe a bigger apartment.

“You remember my client, Pleski?” she said. She had come inside and was standing by the couch.

“Pleski?”

“The one you said was a crook? The one you said was a murderer?”

He was more awake now. “I think I just said that was a possibility. Why?”

Good question. Why he was standing here in his underwear discussing Pleski in the middle of the night? They should at least sit down. “Do you want to sit down? Do you want a drink?”

“Anything but Scotch,” she said.

“I have vodka.”

“Vodka.” She sat on the couch and Rafe went to the kitchen. While he was pulling the Russian Standard out of his refrigerator, he looked back at her. She’d always been a little high-strung. Animated, he used to think. Lively. Now she just looked like a nervous wreck.

He handed her a glass and asked, “What’s in the suitcase?”

She took a swallow. “Six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. In cash. I saw the man who tried to snatch my purse. I tried to get him to steal this, too. But he ran away.”

“What? Why?”

“I wanted it to go away. It’s from Mister Pleski, what’s in the suitcase. If I don’t launder it for him by Friday, he’ll implicate me in money laundering. And a murder.” She took another swallow. “That’s what he said. We were at Les Armures.” She took another swallow.

“Murder? What murder?”

If Catherine heard him, she didn’t let on.

“Of course he can’t do that without implicating himself, so it doesn’t really make sense, but he might get caught, there’s always a chance he might get caught, and then . . .” She paused. “He brings me into it.”