21 It had been a restful night, for a change. The clock read 7:17. Betty got out of bed. She would have breakfast with maman, as she had resolved the night before. But she no longer felt the need to discuss Cary Seligman’s sexuality with her. She had dreamt about Cary. There had been erotic dreams. But in the dreams with Cary there had been only talk. The male figure in the erotic ones, though nameless, had been someone much more like Tom Radnovich. Cary would be her friend, she now knew, but not her lover. At least, if he wanted to be her friend and not her lover. She needed to find someone more like Tom – pleasant personality and good in bed – in Montreal. Well, maybe need was a bit strong. But she would be on the lookout. She switched her cell phone on, and the text-message indicator gave her an impatient beep. The message was from Marni: pls call @ gzt asap. Marni answered on the first ring. “Hi, Betty, I’m glad you called so quickly. After talking to you it occurred to me that you should be the one to write the story about Daniel’s case.” “Me? But...” “But it wouldn’t be objective? I wasn’t thinking about a news story but an op-ed piece. The way you told it to me last night, but maybe fleshed out with some background and some other details. You’ve been in touch with the detective who cracked the case...” And I’ve just dreamt about fucking him, Betty said to herself. “Detectives,” she corrected Marni. “See?” Marni laughed. “I know you care about details. What do you say? It would be your start in journalism.” Betty was already imagining herself at her computer, composing the article. Last October 15, my brother, Daniel Wilner, was shot dead in a bar in the Bronx, New York. Should she mention that that it happened shortly after he had been in Montreal for his sister’s wedding? And that after nine months the marriage had fallen apart? Or that it happened almost exactly twenty-five years after their father had been killed while covering the Yom Kippur War? Or both? Details, details... “I’d love to do it, Marni. I’ll do an outline today and e-mail it to you. The same format as Daniel’s Albanian article?” “Sure. That’s great, Betty. No need to rush, though. And if we do get a news story, we’ll link to it. By the way, I might add a little note from the editor about what a great dancer Daniel was.” Marni laughed again. “I’m kidding. I danced with him at your wedding, remember?” Betty remembered. But what occupied her mind was the idea of her start in journalism. Of course she needed some journalistic experience if she were to publish a magazine. She would be, it suddenly occurred to her, the third Wilner journalist. And the other two had met untimely ends. Des fins prématurées. But they were reporters. She would not be a reporter. Betty Wilner, intrepid girl reporter. Like a female Tintin. Tintine. She smiled inwardly. Pas moi, chéri. It ain’t me, babe. Claudia Quintero wasn’t sure what had woken her up, the alarm or the headache. Her first thought was, I’m hung over. But then she remembered that she had imbibed only half of her drink, and that she had felt no influence of alcohol while driving home. Maybe it had just been bad gin. Could it have been Albanian gin? She would take a Tylenol and she would be okay. But she didn’t feel like getting up. She had worked for eight consecutive days. And a very intense eight days they had been. She had been going to take the following two days off, Wednesday and Thursday. But it might be a good idea to change it, and stay home on this Tuesday. She reached over for her cell phone, which, as usual, had been plugged in to the charger but not switched off, and called the precinct to tell the desk sergeant (who happened to be the recently promoted Barry O’Keefe, her academy classmate) that she wasn’t feeling well. If Lieutenant DePalma needed to talk to her, he could call her back. In any case, she could use another day away from Tom Radnovich. Not that there was anything wrong with Tom Radnovich. But at this moment, with the two-count case of The People of New York against Omar Murova closed, it was time to put it to rest, while Tom gave her the impression of not being quite finished with it. In general, though, as male partners went, he was a good as it could get: smart and respectful, a good listener who treated her as an equal though he outranked her: he was Detective Second Grade, she was still Third Grade. Not that a detective’s grade level, in the NYPD, really signified rank, the way rank was observed in Britain, or at least in the novels – which Claudia so much enjoyed reading – by P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter and Elizabeth George, where a Detective Inspector or a Detective Chief Inspector would have as his (and it was bloody always his, until Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison came along on television) very junior partner a Detective Constable or Detective Sergeant who would call him “Sir” (or her “Ma’am”). No, in New York it was only a matter of seniority, expressed in such ways as who would bear the primary responsibility for submitting reports, or whose decision would prevail in case of a disagreement over procedure. But Tom Radnovich had never pulled rank on her in that way. If he wanted his opinion to prevail, it would be by arguing it as forcefully as he could. Claudia was sure that he had done the same with Orsini, who was already Detective First Grade. Rick DePalma had strongly implied to both her and Tom that solving the two cases would entail promotions for both of them. Going up to Second Grade would mean, for her, a salary like that of a sergeant. With the raise she might consider getting a new car. She loved her Paseo and, with the regular maintenance that she gave it, it was holding up quite well for its 95,000 driven miles. She thought that the Paseo defined her in the way that the fictional British DCIs were defined by their Lancias, Jaguars or Bentleys. In Colombian Spanish dar un paseo didn’t mean just ‘take a walk’ but also ‘take a ride,’ and she liked to say that she was going to dar un paseo en mi Paseo. She would have liked to get a new Paseo. To her chagrin, Toyota had stopped selling the model two years earlier. But she had recently heard that it was still available in Canada, though it wouldn’t be after this year. Maybe she could visit Betty Wilner in Montreal, buy herself a car, and drive it back to New York. Wasn’t she selling the bear’s skin before hunting it down? Or, she corrected herself, counting her chickens before they were hatched? Not really: she had more than enough in her money-market account to buy a car. Better yet: she had more than enough credit on her Visa card, and she would get all those frequent-flier miles! And if she waited too long, she might never get another new Paseo, and whatever new sporty coupé Toyota or anybody else might come up with, it would never replace it. Suddenly she realized that she was feeling great. The headache was gone, with no medication necessary. Should she go to work after all? She had already called in sick. She could rescind that call. Or maybe not. She realized that what was driving her was the idea of flying to Montreal in order to buy a car. Was that something that could be done in one day? She had never done anything so impulsive in her life. At least, not anything that mattered. Going to bed with a guy she had just met was a bagatelle in comparison. She bounded out of bed, started her coffeemaker, and began making a list of phone calls that she would make after nine o’clock. ”So,” Detective Tom Radnovich said with a laugh when he saw Lieutenant Rick DePalma entering his office, “that promotion you talked about?” “The paperwork is on the captain’s desk,” the lieutenant said, smiling as he stopped in his doorway. “First grade for you and second grade for Quintero. I hear the brass is impressed.” “That’s nice. Where is my partner, by the way?” “She called in sick. She was going to take tomorrow and the day after off, so we agreed that it would be today and tomorrow instead. She didn’t specify what she had, but O’Keefe said she sounded sleepy.” “Okay, I’ve got some relatively old cases to write up.” “Sure. And there’s this new kid Joe Fuentes.” Fuentes wasn’t exactly a kid – he was at least thirty – but he was new to detective ranks. “I’m partnering him with Musgrave, but he’s off today, so we’ll let Joe tag along with you if you get called on a case.” “If it isn’t one Hispanic it’s another, is that it?” “This is the South Bronx.” DePalma began to pull his office door shut, and Tom went to his desk, taking a slight detour so that he could walk past Joe Fuentes’ desk and say hello to the new kid. The Wilner case is finally closed, he said to himself as he sat down. And so is the Begović case. But for some strange reason the normal feeling of satisfaction that came with the closing of a case, especially a difficult one like these two (which to him had become one case), wasn’t quite there. No question about it: he had become emotionally drawn into the case. Of course there were the four women that he had met through it. But this had happened before, meeting a woman through working a case. There was Voula. There were... No, no point in reminiscing over old cases. There were Megan, Betty, Yasmina and Alida. Each had affected him in a different way. Strangely enough, the one that he had first gotten the hots for, the one who had brought him out of a state of sexual torpor, was the one that he had not had sex with. But sex was not what the double case was about. Well, yes, it was, for Omar. But only incidentally so for Tom Radnovich. For him, as usual, the case had been a puzzle to be solved. And the solution, in the end, had proved too simple to be satisfying. It would have been different if it had been a movie script. Movies thrive on false leads (the coded names in Daniel’s computer files), mistaken identities (Shkodra and Shkodran!), and accidental discoveries like Betty’s finding of the gun hidden in a tissue box. Except that in a movie, or in a novel, what would have seemed at first to be simple personal murder would turn out to involve high-level politics or organized crime (or both). This case had gone the other way. In his spare time, Tom Radnovich decided, he would compose an outline of the case as if it were a – what do they call it? – treatment? No, that’s the long one. A synopsis, that’s it. It was time to look back at other cases. And, a little later, to call Claudia. The Claudia who had called Betty had sounded nothing at all like Detective Claudia Quintero. Not the informative Claudia Quintero who had briefed her on the developments of Daniel’s case in the lobby of the hotel, and on the phone before that. Not the discreetly quiet Claudia of the walk in Lower Manhattan. Not the briskly efficient policewoman who had come to Old Nick’s within a minute of Betty’s call. Claudia, Betty thought, was eight or ten year older than she. But this morning, on the phone, she had sounded like an excited undergraduate. Or at least like Betty herself when she got into a giddy mood. Except that she didn’t giggle. She had two days off, Claudia had gushingly told Betty, and she had decided to fly to Montreal in order to buy herself a car, which she would drive back to New York the next day. It was only as an afterthought that she explained that the car she liked, a Toyota Paseo, was no longer sold in the States but still available in Canada, but it was being discontinued there too and very few models were left. Her Toyota dealership in Queens had told her that they would arrange with one located near the airport in Montreal not only to have a car ready for her but to pick her up at the airport and put her up in a nearby guesthouse. They had already done this for other customers. She would drive back the next day, but would Betty like to have dinner with her that evening? She could pick her up with her new car if Betty gave her directions to her house. But once Betty told Claudia what an amazing coincidence her call had been, since she was about to write an article about Daniel’s case and needed to go over the facts, Claudia immediately became her serious self. She would not have the file with her, she explained. She had been on the reopened case only for a week, and what she knew of the very complex Lejla Begović case, which was inextricably connected to that of Daniel, was only from the fill-in that Tom had given her, since it had never been her case until she got Omar’s confession. If Betty wanted that as part of her story, she would need to talk to Tom Radnovich. They had agreed that Claudia would pick Betty up at 6:30 and go out to a restaurant of Betty’s choosing. And then, after clicking off, Betty began to think. She had accepted the theory of Daniel’s accidental death in a shootout, and also that of his being the target of a deliberate shooting by one or both of the gangs. But something had struck her as fishy about the final version of the case: that Omar had somehow managed to place Daniel at the precise location where he would be hit in the course of the shootout that Omar would provoke by firing the gun in the bathroom. At least one of the bullets that hit Daniel, she now believed, must have been aimed at him. Megan had once told her of the low mathematical probability that two bullets fired at random would hit the same target. What this now meant was that someone else, present at the shooting, had to be involved. Who? One of the Gremnik Boys or one of Steve Lusha’s men? From the way that, according to Claudia, Omar’s brother had reacted when he found out what had happened, it would seem that the brother had nothing to do with it, and it seemed unlikely that young Omar would have his own alliances in the gang without his brother being involved. What about Steve Lusha, then? I am so sorry about your brother, beautiful Miss Wilner. Some nice Albanian wine? Something about Steve’s oily effusiveness had struck her, if only subliminally, as phony. But what could he have had against Daniel? Well, Daniel had written about Albanians. There was that Heq qafe article that she had recently e-mailed to Marni, after suitably emending it. But the emendations had included the line As I already wrote in these pages, so he had written other articles on the subject, maybe in ways that Steve hadn’t liked. But what were these pages? There was only one thing to do: open the Published subfolders of DW/Articles, starting with Published_98, and scan them for content, or at least look at the titles. She would do it later in the afternoon. At that moment she felt the need to get out of the house. She had to go back to the rental agency with a check, and as long as she was in the area she would have lunch, and then drop into some boutiques. It was time to look for some décolleté. No. Her curiosity was too strong. She went to her computer and started prospecting. And very quickly she struck gold. The file newly named 1998-05-23 contained an article titled simply Albanian Gangs, beginning like this: In New York City, Albanyites are sometimes jokingly called Albanians. I want the readers of the Times Union to know that when I write about Albanians I mean those who are ethnically Albanian, whether from Albania, Kosovo or other places. If some of them also happen to be Albanyites, it is entirely coincidental. This was it! Albanyites! The Times Union was obviously a paper in Albany, New York, and Daniel had probably submitted his article there so he could make the Albany-Albania joke. Very Daniel. She printed the article and placed the output on her desk to read when she returned from her outing. Everything had worked out for Claudia Quintero with incredible smoothness. Her travel agent, Connie Martínez, working with a consolidator operating in Bogotá, found her a flight to Montreal, for that same afternoon, at less than half the fare that the airline would have charged her. And, at the Toyota dealership where she had bought her car and continued to have it serviced, a salesman told her that she was not the only New Yorker who was going to Canada to buy up the final stock of Paseos, and they had an arrangement with a dealer in Montreal, near the airport. She called Betty again to confirm the plan. “Could your miraculous travel agent also find a ticket like that for me, for Thursday?” Betty asked. “You mean, from Montreal to New York? I doubt it.” “No, I mean from New York to Montreal, just like you. I’d like to hitch a ride to New York with you in your new car, so I can talk to Tom in person.” “That’s great! But shouldn’t you inform him?” “Of course. Let me know if you can get that flight for me. Anytime on Thursday is okay. I’ve got to be home on Friday to pack up all my stuff, because I’m moving on Saturday. Into my own place!” “Congratulations!” There was a ticket available only for the same early-afternoon flight on Thursday, on American Airlines (actually American Eagle) out of LaGuardia, that Claudia was to take shortly. She called Betty back immediately. She got voicemail, and left her the message with Connie’s telephone number and an admonition to call as soon as possible. She packed her things, including a dress to wear for eating out in a restaurant, had a quick lunch and walked to 83rd Avenue to catch the Q33 bus to LaGuardia. While seated on the bus she called Tom Radnovich. She guessed that he would be on lunch break, and she was right. “Hi, Claudia! I meant to call you, but I got hung up! How’re you feeling?” “Fantastic! I got over whatever was bothering me after I called in sick, and then I just decided to take the day off, as well as tomorrow, which I was already taking off, but I’ll be back Thursday. Right now I’m on the way to LaGuardia and then I’m going to Montreal!” “What? Just like that?” “For a reason. I decided that I need a new car, and you know I like my Paseo, but now I can get one only in Canada. So I’m flying out today and driving back tomorrow.” “Wow!” “And, not quite coincidentally, our friend Betty Wilner will be coming with me. She needs to talk to you. Tomorrow evening. She’ll call you about it.” “She just can’t stay away from New York!” “Maybe from you! You’d better watch out!” Tom chuckled. “Tomorrow evening, you say?” “Yes. Are you free?” “I guess so, if I skip my workout. Do you know how long she plans to stay? And where? With her new friend the lawyer, maybe?” “She’ll tell you all about it.” “Well, thanks for the warning. I’d better get back to the precinct. My phone’s flashing.” “Bye, Tom! See you Thursday!” As soon as Claudia clicked off, her voicemail indicator beeped. The message was from Betty: she had made her flight reservation, and was excited about seeing Claudia in the evening and riding down to New York with her tomorrow. It had been a strange case. Tom wished that Claudia had been with him, since the people involved were Hispanic, though the woman who was the suspect in the case was a Nuyorican in her thirties speaking fluent South Bronx English. Just like Joe Fuentes, who had gone with him on the call. But Joe had a few things to learn about keeping his distance from the people that a detective investigates. This was not the same as community policing. He would learn. They all did. The woman had killed her husband. He had been in his fifties, and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer a year before. Incurable. Inoperable. Unbearable, according to her. But, with his Catholic upbringing, he had been unable to bring himself to suicide, and so had begged his wife, in a written note, to kill him while he was in deep, sedated sleep. Or so the woman claimed, having produced the typewritten note with her husband’s signature. She had done it by injecting him with potassium chloride. Mercy killing? Assisted suicide? Illegal in New York, of course, but a sympathetic jury might go lenient. Yet something seemed fishy. The man had been an upper-class Dominican, owning a fair amount or property in the Republic. But according to Joe Fuentes, the language of the note was the kind of Spanish that he would write, not an educated man from Santo Domingo. For one thing, there were too many borrowings and word-for-word translations from English. And while the signature looked authentic, it was of the florid kind that would not be too hard to forge. It might even have been traced. It would have to be examined by a handwriting expert. And then there was the matter of the will. A new one had been written some six months earlier, reducing the share of the man’s estate that would go to his children (from his first marriage) from two-thirds to one-third and correspondingly increasing that of the young wife, “in appreciation of the loving care that she has given me in my illness.” It would also be necessary to find out from doctors just how grave the man’s illness had been. The woman already had a lawyer in place – it was the one who had drafted the will, in itself a suspect coincidence – and clammed up after the initial admission. Arraignment was going to be later that afternoon. While he was writing up the preliminary report, Tom checked his voicemail. Sure enough, there was a message from Betty Wilner. “Hi, Tom, it’s Betty. I guess Claudia already told you that I’ll be going to New York with her tomorrow. I’d like to see you tomorrow evening. There are a couple of things I’d like to talk to you about. And I’d like to stay over at your place. I hope that’s okay with you. Bye!” Stay over? As a guest, or as a bedmate? His guest facilities were limited. The arrangement with the kids was that they slept in their sleeping bags (or on them, on warm summer nights), Brian in the bedroom – sometimes on the floor and sometimes on Tom’s queen-size bed – and Lindsey on the living-room sofa. He didn’t think that that was what Betty had in mind. The prospect of sleeping with the beautiful Betty again excited him. After the miscommunication with Yasmina he had thought that he was ready to retreat back into a figurative monastic cell for a while, but now he felt far from ready. He had the impression of having given Betty some physical discomfort the first time. It sometimes happened that, after extensive foreplay, his organ swelled to more than its normal size, and that first time with Betty had been one of those times. It had also happened with Yasmina on their first date, but Yasmina seemed to like size, and he thought that he had detected a tinge of disappointment when it wasn’t there the second evening. It had not happened with Voula or Julia or Alida. And, as a matter of fact, the occasions of what a doctor had once jokingly called “sporadic hyperphallia, to give it a medical name” had occurred, with any one woman, only the first time. When Tom had told him that, the doctor had renamed it “sporadic primocoital hyperphallia.” Tom thought that it might happen in order to make up for the times when in similar situations he couldn’t get it up (“primocoital impotence”). But, he now thought, it was too soon to presume, until he actually talked to Betty. He stepped outside the station and called her back. She answered on the first ring, but he felt oddly shy and couldn’t bring himself to say any more than that it was fine for her to stay over. “Thanks, Tom!” she said. “See you tomorrow!” He would find out her intentions once she was there. Amelia Klein had been right, as usual. Twenty-four hours after the tramadol injection the pain was down to a tolerable level, and the bleeding was down to less than half of the previous volume. Not only that, but the anxiety she had been feeling while awaiting the test results felt like no more than curiosity. But the most remarkable effect of the drug was on Sam. Could it have been the sedative equivalent of a contact high? At lunch he was back to his chatty, sweet self, and promptly at two o’clock – did he know how to tell time already? – he began to yawn. After she put him down in his crib he looked at her through the slats and said, “Hi, mommy” before shutting his eyes. It was now obvious. For the last several days, while Megan had been experiencing her anxiety, Sam had been reacting to it. In his infantile way, perhaps, he had felt responsible for it, and believed that he could change it by changing his behavior. Never underestimate the mind of a child, Doctor Cantalupo was fond of saying. And now that mommy was back, at least relatively, to her placid self, Sam could be himself again. For the first time in – how long had it been? five days? – Megan Kenner felt capable of attentive thinking about matters other than her physical condition. And she thought about the surprising resolution of the mystery of Daniel’s killing, as told by his sister. Surprising because, on the one hand, he had been hit (improbable as it might be) by two bullets fired at random in the course of a shootout between gangs. As first supposed. But, on the other hand, the shootout had been deliberately provoked with the intention of having him killed, or at least injured. The perpetrator had admitted as much. It was from jealousy over a girl. And later the same guy had strangled the same girl. It seemed too neat. And too simple. All the intrepid reporting that Daniel had done in Kosovo, the confidential phone calls in which he had given her the real names of the war criminals to whom, in print, he had given pseudonyms... They must have known that he had been writing about them. And even if his articles had not yet appeared in any major publications – he was in no rush, he had told her, to get into the big leagues – the Albanian gangs, with their ties to the KLA, had their tentacles spread out. The last time that he had visited her he had shown her some threatening mail he had received in response to an article on Albanian gangs that he had published in a paper in, of all places, Albany, New York. Betty was still thinking about Daniel’s article. She had finished reading it half an hour earlier, and immediately e-mailed Marni the message that she needed to do some more research before she could work on her essay. She was still in her jeans and her old J’♥ ST-LAURENT tee-shirt when Claudia drove up behind the wheel of her shiny new metallic-blue car. When she went out to greet Claudia as she stepped out of the car, Betty saw that Claudia was wearing heels and a dress that was similar to, if not as low-cut as, one that she had just bought. It had not occurred to her, unaccustomed as she was to the practice, to regard a restaurant outing with a woman companion as a dress-up occasion. “You look fabulous,” Betty said. “Thanks. I’m not only off duty but out of New York. When I’m in town I never know when I might be called in on a case, so I have to dress a little more professionally.” “I just bought a couple of dresses like this, but I haven’t worn them yet, except to try them on.” “Put one of them on!” “Come into the house,” Betty said. “My mom is out with a friend.” It was, Betty knew, with Tina Leblanc, not the new male friend whose name Betty didn’t know yet, but about whom she would probably talk with Tina. “Help me choose which dress to wear.” “Is one of them more revealing than the other?” “Yes,” Betty said after recalling her reflected images in the mirrors of the two shops. “Then wear that one! As they say in my culture, ¡si lo tienes, lúcelo! If you’ve got it, show it! It’s not quite as strong as ‘flaunt it,’ but... anyway, we can then be bosom buddies!” They laughed together. “Where would you like to eat?” Betty asked. “Your choice, my treat,” Claudia said. “No way! You’re in my precinct, officer! The specialty here in Saint-Laurent” – Betty pointed at the legend on her shirt – “is Lebanese. Are you familiar with that food?” “Where I live in Queens there’s everything. Within two blocks there’s probably fifty different cuisines. And yes, I love Middle Eastern. So go get dressed, and let those Arab types drool over us!” It turned out, at the same place where Betty had had her solitary lunch the previous day, to be a dinner of girl talk. Early on in the conversation, Betty sought an opening through which to insinuate the suggestion that Omar might not be the sole killer. It began promisingly enough. Claudia reminded Betty of the time when she told her that she identified with her because both women had lost their fathers when they were little. She later realized that she was mistaken – that Betty, born after her father’s death, was more like Claudia’s sister Martha, and Claudia was really more like Daniel. When Betty asked what had happened to their father, Claudia said that he was murdered by some unknown party or parties, and it was the fact that the murder had never been solved that ultimately led her to become a detective. “Believe me, Betty,” she said, “knowing is better than not knowing, and it’s good that we’ve found the perpetrator.” “But are you sure that it was only Omar? Just because he confessed, you know...” “We’re never sure of anything, Betty. But we have a plausible scenario, we have a confession, and no evidence that Omar is covering for anyone.” “It’s just that... never mind.” She was going to bring up the matter of probabilities, but she didn’t see how that would change Claudia’s mind. After all, improbable things happen, though rarely, and very improbable things happen too, though very rarely, and you can’t rule out one particular happening just because it’s very improbable. Where had she heard that argument? It was back at McGill, when a fellow student – Randi Ness, as a matter of fact – had once tried to convince her of the reality of Biblical miracles. “You’re right,” Betty went on, “it’s better to know than not to know, even if you’re not absolutely sure. Was your father’s death ever investigated?” Claudia laughed. “Yeah, they went through some formalities, but they were afraid of the same fate. They were my father’s colleagues. You see, he was an investigating judge, sort of like a prosecutor...” “I know, they have them in France. They’re in all the French crime movies.” “When I came to this country – I mean, to the US – I thought that I would become an investigating judge, until I found out that there’s no such thing here, I mean there, and it’s detectives who investigate crimes. So here I am.” Claudia laughed again. She had a deep, womanly laugh, and Betty suddenly felt self-conscious about her tendency to giggle. Another assignment to self: develop a mature laugh. And then, somehow, the talk turned to the men in their lives. Betty told Claudia about Gérard and Paul, but since Claudia knew about her and Cary, Betty refrained from mentioning that brief liaison unless Claudia asked about it. Claudia, in her turn, talked about her three-year marriage to a poet who had turned Wall Street financier, and her many relationships before and after. She casually mentioned a six-month-long affair with Tom Radnovich, before they had become partners, giving no indication that she knew about Betty’s one-night stand with Tom a week or so earlier or that she suspected another one coming up. And then she talked about her last, a guy named Tony who, amazingly enough, had many years ago been Cici’s boyfriend before Daniel. “Small world,” Betty said with a laugh that she hoped was more like Claudia’s.