I couldn't tell her. I didn't know. Intuition suggested the question.

The rest of me just groped for patterns.

"So you think she's faking it," I prompted.

"I'm starting to." Slowly Ginny's voice unclenched.

"I'm not there twenty-four hours a day. For all I know, she threw the rocks and dumped the shit herself. And she could hire the phone calls.

I'm starting to wonder if she retained Professional Investigations to help her make Anson look bad, corroborate her story, so she can crucify him in the divorce.

"I can't see how the pieces fit any other way."

Without thinking about it, I said, "If the calls don't stop now, you're probably right."

Her silence sounded like, Huh? so I went on, "I don't know how smart Sternway is, but I'll bet he's pretty clever. Like I said, I've been around him a lot.

"And I'm there because Marshal recommended me. Sternway knows that, of course. He can assume that I talk to Marshal. Also he probably knows that Mai hired Professional Investigations. Marshal could confirm some of her accusations by checking with me.

"Presumably Sternway can't know I share an apartment with Mai's protection. But he doesn't have to be Heisenberg to realize that I could be a danger to him.

"If he's making the calls, he'll stop now. He'll want me for an alibi."

"So if the calls keep coming," Ginny finished for me, "they aren't from him."

I didn't try another nod. While I could still talk without thinking, I said, "If I were you, I'd search her house. Sometime when she isn't there. Really dig into it."

Right away, I felt her bristle. I could read her with my eyes closed.

She sat eight feet away, but the nerves in my skin were sensitive to her abrupt ire.

"What in hell for? You don't think maybe that violates our client-investigator relationship?"

More ethical questions.

"Sure it does." What else was I going to say?

"But you might find something interesting."

Prying wasn't actually unethical. It was her job. Ethics only came into it if she learned something that affected her decisions.

Besides, she'd never hesitated to research her own clients before.

But apparently she didn't see it that way this time.

"Like what?" she demanded.

Suddenly I was angry. Too much lurked beneath the surface, waiting for one of us to make a mistake. It wore me out.

"Ginny," I sighed, "if I knew that, I wouldn't be lying here like this.

I'd be fucking prescient, and goons like Turf Hardshorn wouldn't lay a hand on me."

"Turf Hardshorn'?" she echoed. "

"Turf'?"

I didn't stop.

"If you think she hired someone to make those calls, maybe you can find out who. Hell, even crazy people fill out their checkbook registers.

Or maybe she keeps buckets of shit hidden away somewhera, just in case.

I don't know.

"You said you wanted to talk to me. If I had a better suggestion, I'd say so."

For a minute she didn't respond. A couple of cars went by outside, muffled and fuming. My pulse yearned in my chest.

Then she muttered, "Damn it, Brew, I hate it when you do that."

I heard a familiar exasperation in her voice, the kind that meant she wasn't seriously angry. Not at me, anyway.

"Do what?" I countered.

"Make those leaps. I can't follow them. And you're right way too often. Half the time when you're around I feel like I've had a lobotomy without noticing it."

All at once the pressure in the room evaporated. I had the giddy sensation that someone had lifted a set of free weights off me. Despite our difficulties, she was by God trying to get along with me.

I felt so relieved that I about lost consciousness.

For a while I didn't say anything. Instead of trying to make sense out of her, I concentrated on letting my aches and disappointments recede into the couch. With my eyes closed, I could almost imagine what it might feel like to be at peace.

But Ginny wasn't done. When she'd chewed her exasperation small enough to swallow, she said in the same careful tone she'd used earlier, "So tell me. How does it happen that you're spending so much time with Anson Sternway?"

I knew what she had in mind as soon as she said the words. Bridging a rift like ours wasn't something that you could tackle on just one side.

You had to work for the middle from both ends. She'd made a start. Now she was asking me to do my part.

And I wanted to respond. I'd been wanting her to back me up for hours now.

Probably I should've told her about Bernie. That was what mattered to me most. And if nothing else it would explain how I got myself beat up. But I couldn't. Somehow the way Alyse Ap-pelwait had looked at me prevented it. Between us there was nothing at stake except how I felt about her husband.

Nevertheless Ginny had opened a door for me, and I didn't mean to let it swing shut.

"It's like this," I began.

"After the tournament, a developer named Alex Lacone hired me to improve security for his current project, a development he calls Martial America. It's a karate complex he's got four schools so far, and he's trying for more. Sternway's his martial arts consultant.

"The problem is those chops, the antiques at the tournament." Belatedly it occurred to me that Marshal might not have told Ginny anything about my job. After all, he hadn't revealed much about hers to me.

"They're either priceless or just valuable, depending on whether or not they're genuine."

Too drained to go into detail, I gave her a brief background sketch of the chops, the tournament, and Lacone's insurance dilemma. Then I explained, "The chops haven't been authenticated yet. That's supposed to happen soon. The insurance company has a local expert in mind to appraise them."