bounced off Jane and landed at the foot of the stairs. They both looked at her for a moment. Her feet made a quivering run, almost as though dog-paddling, then stopped.

“She dead?” Jane asked.

Leslie said, “Gotta be. I swatted her like a fuckin’ fly with a fuckin’ bowling ball.”

“Elegance!” Jane snapped.

“Fuck that…” Leslie was breathing hard. He squatted, watching the old lady, watching her, seeing never a breath. After a long two minutes, he looked up and said, “She’s gone.”

“Pretty good. Never made a sound,” Jane said. She noticed that Leslie’s bald spot was spreading.

“Yeah.” Leslie could see hair, a bit of skin and possibly a speck of blood on the wood of the finial ball. He stood up, turned it just so, and slipped it back on the mounting down in the banister post, and tapped it down tight. The hair and skin were on the inside of the ball, where Coombs might have struck her head if she’d fallen. “Fingers?” he asked. “Break the fingers?”

“I don’t think we should touch her,” Jane said. “She fell perfectly…What we could do…” She pulled off one of Coombs’s slippers and tossed it on the bottom stair. “Like she tripped on the toe.”

“I’ll buy that,” Leslie said.

“So…”

“Give me a minute to look around,” Jane said. “Just a minute.”

“Lord, Jane…”

“She was an old lady,” Jane said. “She might have had something good.”

OUT IN THE CAR, they drove fifty yards, turned onto Lexington, went half a mile, then Leslie pulled into a side street, continued to a dark spot, killed the engine.

“What?” Jane asked, though she suspected. They weren’t talking Elegance here.

Leslie unsnapped his seat belt, pushed himself up to loosen his pants, unzipped his fly. “Gimme a little hand, here. Gimme a little hand.”

“God, Leslie.”

“Come on, goddamnit, I’m really hurtin’,” he said.

“I won’t do it if you continue to use that kind of language,” Jane said.

“Just do it,” he said.

Jane unsnapped her own seat belt, reached across, then said, “What did you do with that package of Kleenex? It must be there in the side pocket…”

“Fuck the Kleenex,” Leslie groaned.

7

THE NEXT TWO DAYS were brutal. Kline was hot, and Lucas had no time for the Bucher case. He talked to Smith both days, getting updates, but there wasn’t much movement. The papers were getting bad tempered about it and Smith was getting defensive.

Reports came in from the insurance companies and from the Department of Corrections; the halfway house was looking like a bad bet. The St. Paul cops did multiple interviews with relatives, who were arriving for the funeral and to discuss the division of the Bucher goodies. There were rumors of interfamilial lawsuits.

Despite the onset of bad feelings, none of the relatives had accused any of the others of being near St. Paul at the time of the murder. They’d been more or less evenly divided between Santa Barbara and Palm Beach, with one weirdo at his apartment in Paris.

All of them had money, Smith said. While Aunt Connie’s inheritance would be a nice maraschino cherry on the sundae, they already had the ice cream.

LUCAS HAD three long interviews over the two days, and twice as many meetings.

The first interview went badly.

Kathy Barth had both tits and ass: and perhaps a bit too much of each, as she slipped toward forty. Her daughter, Jesse, had gotten her momma’s genes, but at sixteen, everything was tight, and when she walked, she quivered like a bowl of cold Jell-O.

While she talked like a teenager, and walked like a teenager, and went around plugged into an iPod, Jesse had the face of a bar-worn thirty-year-old: too grainy, too used, with a narrow down-turned sullen mouth and eyes that looked like she was afraid that somebody might hit her.

At the first interview, she and Kathy Barth sat behind the shoulder of their lawyer, who was running through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo: “…conferring to see if we can decide exactly what happened and when, and if it really makes any sense to continue this investigation…”

Virgil Flowers, a lean, tanned blond man dressed in jeans, a blue cotton shirt with little yellow flowers embroidered on it, and scuffed black cowboy boots, said, “We’ve already got her on tape, Jimbo.”

“That would be ‘James’ to you, Officer,” the lawyer said, pretending to be offended.

Flowers looked at Lucas, “The old Jimster here is trying to put the screws to Kline.” He looked back at the lawyer. “What’d you find? He’s got some kind of asset we didn’t know about?” His eyes