"So, Mr. Kenzie, why in the h.e.l.l do you care what happened to her before before she offed herself?" she offed herself?"

I sat back in my chair. "You ever feel like you screwed up and want to make things right?"

"Sure."

"Karen Nichols," I said, "left a message on my answering machine four months ago. She asked me to call her back. I didn't."

"So?"

"So the reason I didn't wasn't good enough."

She slipped on her sungla.s.ses, then allowed them to slide down the bridge of her nose. She peered over the tops of the rims at me. "And you think you're so cool-do I got this?-that if you'd just returned her call, she'd be alive today?"

"No. I think I owe her a little for blowing her off for a bad reason."

She stared at me, her mouth slightly open.

"You think I'm nuts."

"I think you're nuts. She was a grown woman. She-"

"Her fiance gets. .h.i.t by a car. Was that an accident?"

She nodded. "I checked. There were forty-six people around him when he tripped and they all say that's what happened-he tripped. A patrol car was parked a block away on Atlantic and Congress. It moved on the sound of impact, reached the scene roughly twelve seconds after the accident. The guy whose car hit Wetterau was a tourist, name of Steven Kearns. He was so devastated, he still sends flowers to Wetterau's hospital bed every day."

"Okay," I said. "Why'd Karen Nichols fall completely apart-lose her job, her apartment?"

"Hallmarks of depression," Joella Thomas said. "You get so locked into your own funk, you forget your responsibilities to the real world."

A pair of middle-aged women with matching Versace sungla.s.ses pushed up on top of their heads paused near our table, trays in hand, and looked around for an open seat. One of them glanced at my near-empty cup of coffee and Joella's crumbs and sighed loudly.

"Nice sigh," Joella said. "Come from practice?"

The woman seemed not to have heard her. She looked at her friend. Her friend sighed.

"It's catching," I said.

One woman said to the other, "I find certain behaviors inappropriate, don't you?"

Joella gave me a big smile. "'Inappropriate,'" she said. "They want to call me a c.o.o.n, so they say 'inappropriate' instead. Fits their self-image." She turned her head up at the women, who looked everywhere but at us. "Don't it?"

The women sighed some more.

"Mmm," Joella said as if they'd confirmed something. "Shall we go?" She stood.

I looked at her crumbs and teacup, my coffee cup.

"Leave it," she said. "The sisters here will get it." She caught the eye of the first sigher. "Ain't that right, honey?"

The woman looked back toward the counter.

"Yeah," Joella Thomas said with a broad smile, "that's right. Girl power, Mr. Kenzie, it's a beautiful thing."

When we reached the street, the women were still standing by the table, holding their trays, waiting for valet service apparently, practicing their sighs.

We walked a bit, the morning breeze smelling of jasmine, the street beginning to fill with people juggling armloads of Sunday newspaper with white bags of coffee and m.u.f.fins, cups of juice.

"Why'd she hire you in the first place?" Joella said.

"She was being stalked."

"You dealt with the stalker?"

"Uh-huh."

"You think he got the message?"

"I did at the time." I stopped and she stopped with me. "Detective, was Karen Nichols raped or a.s.saulted in the months before she died?"

Joella Thomas searched my face for something-hints of dementia possibly, the fever of a man on a self-destructive quest.

"If she was," she said, "would you go after her stalker again?"

"No."

"Really? What would you do?"

"I'd relay my information to an officer of the law."

She smiled broadly, a stunning flash of some of the whitest teeth I've ever seen. "Uh-huh."

"Really."

She nodded to herself. "The answer is no. She wasn't raped or a.s.saulted, to the best of my knowledge."

"Okay."

"But, Mr. Kenzie?"

"Yeah."

"And if what I'm about to tell you leaks to the press, I'll destroy you."

"Understood."

"I mean, annihilate you."

"Got it."