"h.e.l.lo? Detective Palace?"

It's Naomi Eddes, and she sounds nervous, and at the sound of her voice I feel nervous, too, like a kid.

"Yep. This is me. Hi."

I can feel McGully looking at me, so I stand up from my desk, step over to the window.

"What's up?"

"I just-" The phone crackles for a second, and my heart leaps in terror against the possibility that I've lost the connection.

"Ms. Eddes?"

"I'm here. I just-I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case."

"Good evening," she says, and I say, "Good evening," and then we spend a second or two looking at each other. Naomi Eddes is in a bright red dress with black b.u.t.tons running down the center of it. I look terrible, I'm sure. I'm wis.h.i.+ng now I had stopped to change from my day-at-the-office, my gray jacket and blue tie, to something more appropriate for dinner with a lady. Truth is, all my jackets are gray, all my ties are blue.

Eddes lives in a neighborhood in Concord Heights, south of Airport Road, a new development where all the streets are named for fruits, and where the asteroid recession took hold halfway through construction. She's on Pineapple, and everything from Kiwi moving westward is half finished: bare wooden frames like dug-up dinosaur bones, half-tiled roofs, vandalized interiors, never-used kitchens stripped for copper and bra.s.s.

"You can't come in," she says, and steps out onto the front stoop, her peacoat draped over her arm, tugging a hat down over her bald head. It's a kind of hat I've never seen before, a kind of girl-style trilby hat. "Place is a mess. Where are we going?"

"You said-" she's walking to my car, I follow her, slipping a little on a patch of black ice on the driveway, "-you said you might have information relevant to my case. To Peter's death."

"I do," she says. "I mean, I think I do. Not information. Just, like, an idea. What happened to your face?"

"Long story."

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

"That's good."

It's true, my wounded eye has been fine all day, but as I'm saying the word no an intense pulse of pain seizes the right side of my face, radiating outward from the eyehole, as if the injury is punis.h.i.+ng me for lying. I blink the good eye, endure a wave of nausea, and find Naomi standing at the shotgun door in an old-fas.h.i.+oned way, waiting for me to open it for her, and I do, and by the time I come around to my side and slide in, she's reaching for the dashboard computer with fascination, almost but not quite touching the screen.

"So, what is your idea?"

"How does this work?"

"It's just a computer. You can keep track of where every other member of the force is, at any given time."

"What does WC stand for?"

"Watch Commander. What's the idea you had, about the case?"

"It's probably nothing."

"Okay."

She's looking out the window, or at her own ghostly reflection in the window gla.s.s. "Why don't we talk about it at dinner?"

Eddes vetoes the Somerset Diner out of hand, and basically what's left are the bars and the pirated fast-food joints and the Panera. I've heard of a fine-dining place still open in Boston where the owners have bribed their way out of price controls, where you can get the whole white-tablecloth experience, but from what people say, it would cost all the money I've got left.

Naomi and I end up at Mr. Chow's, looking at each other over a pot of steaming jasmine tea across a grease-stained linoleum table.

"So how's it going?"

"What?"

"Sorry, how would you say it, in cop language?" A small teasing smile. "What is the status of the case?"

"Well, we did, actually, apprehend a suspect."

"You did? And how did that go?"

"Fine."

I could tell her more, but I don't. The suspect attacked me with a scale model of the New Hamps.h.i.+re state house. The suspect was a drug dealer, and either was supplying or was supplied by the victim. The suspect is dead. Ms. Eddes seems satisfied not to know, and anyway our food comes quickly, a ma.s.sive lazy Susan laden with dumplings, soups, and cashew chicken. The words Chow! Chow! flash in pink neon on the window just past our table.

"What was your idea about the case?"

"You know what?

"What?"

I knew she was going to do this. Put it off, delay, elide. I feel oddly as if I know her so well.

"Let's have an hour."

"An hour?"

"Henry, please, I really ..."

She looks at me with clear-eyed sincerity, her face washed of all her teasing swagger. I like it intensely, that clear-eyed face, her pale cheeks, the symmetry of her shaved head. "I know I called because I said I had something to tell you. But to tell you the truth, I was also thinking how much I would love to just, you know, just eat dinner with a human being."

"Sure."

"You know? Have a normal conversation. Eat dinner without talking about death."

"Sure," I say again.

"To the extent that this activity is still possible, I would like to try it."

"Sure.

She lifts her wrist, slim and pale, undoes the little silver buckle of her watch, and places it on the table between us. "One hour of normalcy. Deal?"

I reach out and let my hand rest for one moment, over hers.

"Deal."

And so we do, we sit there and we eat what is really pretty mediocre Chinese food and we speak about normal things.

We talk about the world we grew up in, the strange old world from before, about music and movies and television shows from ten and fifteen years ago, 'N Sync and Beverly Hills, 90210 and The Real World and t.i.tanic.

Naomi Eddes, at it turns out, was born and raised in a suburb called Gaithersburg, in Maryland, what she calls America's Least Remarkable State. Then she went to community college for a couple of semesters, dropped out to be the lead singer in a "terrible but well-meaning" punk-rock band, and then, when she figured out what she really wanted to do, she moved to New York City to finish her bachelor's and get a master's degree. I like hearing her talk when she gets going, there's music in it.

"What was it? What you really wanted to do?

"Poetry." She sips her tea. "I wanted to write poems, and not just in my little journal in my room. I wanted to write good poems, and publish them. Still do, in fact."

"No kidding."

"Yes, sir. So, I got into school, went to New York, I waited tables, I saved my pennies. Ate ramen noodles. All the things you do. And I know what you're thinking.

"What's that?"

"All this, and now she works in insurance."

"Nope. Not what I'm thinking at all."

What I'm actually thinking, as I organize a tangle of thick noodles onto my chopsticks, is that this is the sort of person I've always admired: the person with a difficult goal who takes the necessary steps to achieve it. I mean, sure, it's easy to do what you've always wanted to do, now.

The little hand on Naomi's watch makes its way around to the hour, and slips past it, and the lazy Susan gets empty, stray noodles and empty soy-sauce packets littering our plates like shed snakeskins, and now I'm telling her my whole story: my father the professor, my mother who worked at the police station, the whole bit, how they were killed when I was twelve years old.

"They were both killed?" asks Naomi.

"Yeah. Yep. Yeah."

She puts down her chopsticks, and I think, oh h.e.l.l.

I don't know why I told the story. I lift the teapot, dribble out the dregs, Naomi is silent, and I cast about the room for our waitress, motioning with my hands at the empty pot.

You tell a story like that, about your parents being killed, and people end up looking at you really closely, right in the eyes, advertising their empathy, when really what they're doing is trying to peer into your soul, see what kind of marks and stains have been left on there. So I haven't mentioned it to a new person in years-don't mention it as a rule-I am not a fan of people having opinions about the whole thing-not a fan, generally, of people having opinions about me at all.

Naomi Eddes, however, to her credit, when she speaks she just says, "Whoa." There is no glimmer of scandalized fascination in her eyes, no attempt at "understanding." Just that breathy and honest little syllable, whoa.

"So, your parents are murdered, and you dedicate your life to fighting crime. Like Batman."

"Yep," I say, and I smile at her, dip my last dumpling into a row-boat of ginger-scallion sauce. "Like Batman."

They come and clear away the lazy Susan and we go on talking, the neon flas.h.i.+ng and flas.h.i.+ng and finally flickering off, the ancient married couple who run Mr. Chow's coming around with the long push brooms, just like in the movies, and then, at last, they lift the chairs around us onto the tables, and we go.

"Okay, Detective Palace. Do you know what a contestability clause is?"

"No, I do not."

"Well, it's kind of interesting. Maybe not. You tell me."

Naomi adjusts herself in her folding beach chair, trying to get comfortable. I would apologize again for the fact that my living room has no proper furniture, just a set of beach chairs in a semicircle around a milk carton, except that I've already apologized repeatedly, and Naomi told me to stop.

"The contestability clause in a life-insurance policy means that if a policy is taken out and the subject dies within two years, for any reason, the company gets to investigate the circ.u.mstances of death before paying out."

"Okay," I say. "Do a lot of life-insurance policies have these clauses?"

"Oh, yeah," says Naomi. "They all do."

I refill her wine.

"And are they being enforced?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Huh," I say, scratching my mustache.

"Tell you the truth, people with Merrimack policies are lucky," says Naomi, "because a lot of the bigger companies are totally frozen shut; they're not paying out at all. What Merrimack is saying is, yes, you can get your money, because we issued the policy and that was the deal, asteroid or no asteroid, basically. The big boss, in Omaha, has a Jesus thing, I believe."

"Right," I say. "Right, right." Houdini comes in, sniffs the floor, stares suspiciously at Naomi, and darts out again. I've made a bed for him in the bathroom, just an old sleeping bag I cut open, a bowl for water.

"But the company line is, we're going to make absolutely sure that we're not being bilked, because a lot of people are cheating. I mean, what an easy way to get squared away until the end, right? Fake Mom's death, big payday, off to the Bahamas. So that's the policy, right now."

"What is?"

"Investigate every claim. Every contestable claim, we're contesting."

I stop, the wine bottle frozen in my hand, and suddenly I'm thinking, Palace, you dunce. You total dunce. Because I'm picturing the boss, pale jowly Gompers, settled in his big chair, telling me that Palace wasn't doing actuarial work anymore at the time that he died. No one's buying life insurance, so there's no data to a.n.a.lyze, no tables of data to draw up. So Zell, like everyone else in that office, was working on clearing suspicious insurance claims.

"It's kind of harsh policy, when you think about it," Naomi is saying, "for all the people who weren't committing insurance fraud, whose husband or whoever really did kill himself, and now they're going to wait an extra month, two months, for the cash? Brutal."

"Right, right," I say, mind rolling, thinking about Peter, Peter in the McDonald's, his eyes bugging out. All along the answer was right there. The first day of my investigation, the first witness I interviewed, it was laid at my feet.

"What I'm wondering is," Naomi says, and I'm right there with her, "I'm wondering if maybe Peter found out something, or he was close to finding out something.... I don't know. It sounds silly. He stumbled into something, and it got him killed?"

"Doesn't sound silly at all."

Not at all. Motive. It sounds like motive. Palace, you total absolute dunce.