Her eyes came into focus and I felt she was finally taking in what I was saying. "I'm sorry. Of course. I won't say a word to anyone."

I told her briefly about Bobby's last message on my answering machine, and about the blackmail scheme, which I still didn't understand. I deleted mention of Sufi's part in all of this because I was still worried Glen would take matters into her own hands and do something dumb. She seemed volatile right now, unstable, like a vial of nitroglycerin. One minor bump and she might blow.

"I do need your help," I said when I finished.

"Doing what?"

"I want to talk to Nola. So far I still don't have confirmation on this and if I call or stop by out of a clear blue sky, it's going to scare the shit out of her. I'd like you to call her and see if you can set something up."

"For when?"

"This morning if possible."

"What would you want me to say to her?"

"Tell her the truth. Tell her I'm looking into Bobby's death, that we think he may have been involved with some woman last summer, and since you were gone, you thought maybe she might have seen him around with someone. Ask her if she'd mind talking to me."

"Won't she suspect? Surely, she'll figure out that you're onto her."

"Well, for starters, I could be wrong. Maybe it's not her. That's what I'm trying to determine. If she's innocent, she won't care one way or the other. And if she's not, let her cook up a cover so she'll feel secure. I don't care. The point is, she won't have the balls to shut the door in my face, which is what she'd probably do if I went over there unannounced."

She considered briefly. "All right."

She got up and crossed to the telephone on the night stand, punching in Nola's number from memory. She handled the request as deftly as anything I'd ever heard, and I could see how good she must be at fund raising. Nola couldn't have been nicer or more cooperative and in fifteen minutes I was on my way back to Horton Ravine.

By day, I could see that the Frakers' house was pale yellow with a shake roof. I went up the driveway and pulled onto the parking pad to the left of the house, where a dark maroon BMW and a silver Mercedes were parked. As I was not feeling suicidal, I leaned out of my car window, looking for the dog. Rover or Fido, whatever his name was, turned out to be a great dane with rubbery black-rimmed lips, complete with strings of slobber hanging down. From that distance, I swear it looked like his collar was studded with spikes. His food dish was a wide aluminum bowl with bite marks around the rim.

I got out of the car cautiously. He ran up to the fence and started barking bad breath in my direction. He stood up on his hind legs, his front paws tucked over the gate. His dick looked like a hot dog in a long, furry bun and he wagged it at me like a guy who's just stepped out of a phone booth to open his raincoat..

I was just on the verge of insulting him when I realized that Nola had come out on the porch behind me.

"Don't mind him," she said. She was wearing another jump suit, this one black, with spike heels that made her half a head taller than me.

"Nice pup," I remarked. People always love it when you say their dogs are nice. Just shows you how out of touch they are.

"Thanks. Come on in. I have something to do first, but you can wait in the den."

Chapter 22

The interior of the Fraker house was cool and spare; gleaming dark wood floors, white walls, bare windows, fresh flowers. The furniture was upholstered in white linen and the den into which Nola ushered me was lined with books. She excused herself and I heard her high heels tap-tap-tapping away down the hall.

It's never a good idea to leave me in a room by myself. I'm an incurable snoop and I search automatically. Having been raised from the age of five by an unmarried aunt, I spent a lot of time as a child in the homes of her friends, most of whom had no children of their own. I was told to keep quiet and amuse myself, which I managed in the first five minutes with the latest in an endless series of coloring books we brought with us when visiting. The problem was that I was terrible at keeping in the lines and the pictures always seemed dumb to me-little children frolicking with dogs and visiting farms. I didn't like to color chickens or hogs, so I learned to search. In this manner, I discovered people's hidden lives-the prescriptions in the medicine cabinets, tubes of jelly in bed-table drawers, cash reserves in the back of coat closets, startling sex manuals and marital artifacts between the mattress and box springs. Of course, I could never quiz my aunt afterward about the extraordinary-looking objects I came across because I wasn't supposed to know about them in the first place. Fascinated, I would wander into the kitchen, where the adults in those days seemed to congregate, drinking highballs and talking about achingly dull things like politics and sports, and I would stare at women named Bernice and Mildred whose husbands were named Stanley and Edgar, and I would wonder who did what with the long doodad with the battery stuck in one end. It was not a flashlight. That much I knew. Early on, I discerned the sometimes remarkable distinction between public appearances and private tastes. These were the people my aunt forbade me to swear in front of no matter how we talked at home. Some of the phrases she used, I thought might have application here, but I could never confirm this. The whole process of education for me was learning the proper words to attach to things I already knew.