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me) were on the first floor. Her quarters, and Pearl’s, were on the second. When Susan opened the door to her living room, Pearl bounded about giving and receiving wet kisses, torn with her passion to greet us both at the same time. But, being a dog, she quickly got over her bifurcating ambivalence and went back and sat on the sofa with her tongue out and looked at us happily.
    Susan got me a beer from her refrigerator and poured herself a bracing glass of Evian, and we sat down together at her kitchen counter. Pearl sat on the floor beside us in case we moved into eating.
    “So where to now,” Susan said.
    “One thing is I’ll ask KC to go through the breakup, see if he might have experienced it as her leaving him. Second, I figure that Louis has fooled around before.”
    “I think you can bank on it,” Susan said.
    “So I’m going to see if I can find a few former girlfriends and see if there’s been any stalking. If he’s a wacko, KC can’t be the only one he’s been a wacko with.”
    Susan nodded and sipped some Evian. I drank some beer.
    “How about the other case?”
    “I’ve got a stack of back issues of the magazine that Lamont published: OUTrageous .”
    “As in OUT of the closet?”
    “Yes. I’ll read through that and see if there’s a suspect. I’ll look at the plans for future issues, which I also have, and see if there’s any suspects there.”
    “And if there aren’t?”
    “Then I’ll try to establish whether there was or was not a relationship between Nevins and Lamont, and if there was why people didn’t know and if there wasn’t why people said there was.”
    “And if that doesn’t work?”
    “I’ll ask you,” I said.
    “For some psychoanalytic theory?”
    “Can’t hurt,” I said. “What I think we should do is go take a shower and brush our teeth and lie on my bed and see what kind of theory we can develop.”
    “I’m pretty sure I know what will develop,” I said.
    “Should we shower together?” Susan said.
    “If we do, things may develop too soon.”
    “Good point,” Susan said. “I’ll go first.”
    “And Pearl?” I said.
    “In the living room with the TV on Fox – loud. She loves to watch Catherine Crier.”
    “Anyone would,” I said.
    And Susan disappeared into her bedroom.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
    KC Roth poured some white wine into her glass.
    “I was about to have lunch, I could make us both something,” she said.
    “Thank you, no,” I said. “Just a couple questions.”
    “Did you see him?”
    “Vincent?”
    She smiled as if I had prayed aloud.
    “I saw him,” I said. “Handsome devil.”
    “Oh isn’t he,” she said. “What did he say?”
    “He said he didn’t stalk you.”
    “What else.”
    She was sitting on the pink sofa in the bay window of her beige living room. I was back in the uncomfortable gray chair.
    “Nothing of consequence,” I said. “Could you run back over the breakup.”
    Her eyes filled. She sipped some more white wine.
    “I don’t think I can,” she said.
    “Well, let me help you focus. Who said that you would no longer sleep together.”
    “What difference does it make?” she said. “It’s over.”
    There were tears now on her cheeks. She wiped them with the back of her left hand.
    “It might make a difference,” I said. “I know it’s painful, but think back. Who decided that you’d stop making love.”
    She drank wine again and looked down at her lap and answered me so softly that I couldn’t hear her.
    “Excuse me?” I said.
    “I did,” she said. “I told him that if he wouldn’t leave his wife then I wouldn’t fuck him until he did.”
    “Negotiating ploy?” I said.
    She looked up and her eyes though teary were harder than one would have thought.
    “I was desperate,” she said.
    “But you meant it.”
    “Well, he had to lose something too,” she said. “He couldn’t have everything. I have to leave my beautiful house and my beautiful daughter…” Now she was not just teary,