"Yes."

"I am wise."

"Good-looking, too," I said.

"But G.o.d-d.a.m.n it..." she said.

"Doesn't mean you can't feel bad when you lose one."

Susan nodded.

"Go ahead," I said. "Feel bad."

Susan nodded again.

"I've been fighting it," she said.

"And losing," I said.

"Yes."

"Give in to it. Feel as bad as you have to feel. Then get over it."

Susan stared at me for a while. Then she put her head against my shoulder. We sat for a time watching the street traffic. I listened to her breathing.

"That what you do?"

"Yes."

"Even after Candy Sloan?"

"Yes."

She fished another olive from the jar and put it in her martini. She had already drunk nearly a fifth of it.

"And," I said, "there's always you and me."

"I know."

A squirrel ran along Susan's front fence and up a fat oak tree and disappeared into the thick foliage. Pearl followed it with her eyes but didn't raise her head.

"You're a good therapist," Susan said after a while.

"Yes, I am," I said. "Maybe we should open a joint practice."

With her head still against my shoulder Susan patted my thigh.

"Maybe not," Susan said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

It took me three days to boil the cla.s.s lists down to people I could locate, and another two days to find people on that list who remembered Mary Toricelli. One of them was a woman named Jamie Deluca, who tended bar at a place on Friend Street, near the Fleet Center.

I went in to see her at 3:15 in the afternoon when the lunch crowd had left and the early c.o.c.ktail group had not yet arrived. Jamie drew me a draft beer and placed it on a napkin in front of me.

"I didn't really know her very good," Jamie said. "Mary was really kind of a phantom."

Jamie had short blond hair and a lot of eye makeup. She was wearing black pants and a white shirt with the cuffs turned back.

"What kind of a phantom?" I said.

"Well, you know. You didn't see much of her. She wasn't popular or anything. She just come to cla.s.s and go home."

"Sisters or brothers?"

"I don't think so."

While she talked Jamie sliced the skin off whole lemons. I wondered if the object was to harvest the skin, or the skinless lemon. I decided that asking would be a needless distraction, and I had the sense that Jamie would find too much distraction daunting.

"Parents?"

"Sure, of course." Jamie looked as if it was the dumbest question she'd ever heard. "She lived with her mother."

"Father?"

"I don't know. When I knew her there wasn't no father around."

"Her mother still live in Franklin?" I said.

"I don't know."

"Her mother's name is Toricelli."

"Sure. I guess so."

"Who'd Mary hang out with?" I said.

"Most of the time she didn't hang with anybody," Jamie said. "She didn't have a bunch of friends. Just some of the burnouts."

"Burnouts?"

"Yeah. You know, druggies, dropouts, the dregs."

"Remember anybody?"

"Yeah. Roy Levesque. He was like her boyfriend. And, ah, Tammy, and Pike, and Joey Bucci... I don't know some of those kids. I think she just hung with them because she didn't have no other friends."

"Got any last names for Tammy and Pike?"

"Pike is a last name. It's a guy. I don't even remember his first name. Everybody called him Pike."

"How about Tammy?"

"Wagner, I think. Tammy Wagner. Kids used to call her Wags."

"You know where they are?"

"No. I moved in with my boyfriend soon as I graduated. Pretty much lost touch with the kids I knew."

"Boyfriend from Franklin?"

"No. Brockton. I met him at a club. He didn't last."

"Sorry to hear that."

"It's all right, he was a loser anyway."

"Lot of them around," I said, just to be saying something.

"Least he didn't knock me up," she said.

I nodded as I was glad about that, too.

"What was Mary like," I said. "Was she smart in school?"

"No. She was pretty dumb. Kids made fun of her. Teachers, too, sometimes."

"She ever get in trouble?"

Jamie shook her head and smiled.

"She was too boring to get in trouble," Jamie said.

The early c.o.c.ktail crowd was beginning to drift in. The demands on Jamie made it harder to talk with her.

"Anything else you can tell me about Mary?" I said. "Anything unusual?"

Down the bar a guy was gesturing to Jamie. He had on a black shirt with the collar worn out over the lapels of his pearl gray suit.

"No," Jamie said as she started to move down the bar. "She was just a kind of dumb phantom kid, you know? Nothing special."

That would be Mary.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

I was in my office reading Tank Mcationamara and preparing to think about Mary Toricelli Smith some more when my door opened carefully and a woman poked her head in.

"Mr. Spenser?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She came in quickly and shut the door behind her.

"Remember me?" she said. "Amy Peters? From Pequod Bank?"

"Who could forget you," I said.

I gestured quite elegantly, I thought, at one of my two client chairs. She sat and crossed her legs, holding her purse in her lap with both hands. I smiled. She smiled. I waited.

"I... I... don't know quite how to do this," she said.

"I can tell."

"It's... I've been fired."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It was... they said I had no business talking to you the way I did."

"What would be the business of a PR director?" I said.

She smiled and shrugged. "I don't even know what I said to you that was so bad," she said.

"Who exactly is "they"?"

"Mr. Conroy. He called me into his office and questioned me quite closely about our conversation."

"And?"

"And when he was through he told me I was fired. The bank, he said, would give me two weeks' pay. But as of this moment I was through."

"What was the thrust of his questioning?" I said.

"He wanted to know what we talked about."

"Specifically," I said.