I wouldn't ever claim to be the kind of person who appreciates art, or at least not the kind of art you find in a gallery or a museum. Sure, art makes the world a more interesting place, I understand that, but my personal tastes don't extend much beyond the art of a really good sunset or a well-made corned-beef sandwich or somebody pitching a no-hitter. Also, some kinds of interesting I can do without.

I guess it says something that I thought the body on the floor was a more interesting kind of interesting than the painting behind him on the wall.

The painting was three fat horizontal stripes of different blues on a black canvas. At least six feet square; it filled almost the whole wall. The card beside it said Michael Rider. Untitled (1971). NFS. Private collection of Thomas Hiller.

The body on the floor was the private collector, Thomas Hiller, and he had one well-placed bullet hole in his head. Small caliber, angled up from the side, so close there were muzzle burns on his temple. It wasn't suicide because the gun was on top of a display case a good twenty feet away, by the rear door, still wrapped in the cloth that it had been fired through, and he couldn't have put it there.

The two main doorways to the room -- on either side of the big Rider painting, leading into the other, larger room of the gallery where the party was happening -- had begun to fill up with people staring. I was prepared to keep them back, but I didn't have to, they weren't coming any further in. I didn't think it was out of reverence or respect. Not that kind of people.

"Are you investigating?"

Lily Rowan's voice beside me, with that tone she had that made you think she knew a good joke you didn't, and she wasn't telling.

"Not if I can help it," I told her. "But you might want to go make sure nobody leaves."

"Louise is already doing that," she said. "She's annoyed. She thinks this was a very rude thing to do."

- - -

Lily knew better than to poke me too hard, because I'd only been there because of her. She isn't exactly a patron of the arts -- she'd rather put her money into other causes -- but she has good taste (and I'm told this by other people too, just so you don't think I'm biased), and people like Louise Brega invite her to things like this, in hope she'll find something to buy that meets her standards. She accepts the invitations once in a while, in hope of the same. Or because she's bored. She hates to be bored.

She'd laid it out for me as I was having a look around the partiers, when we arrived. "Everybody in this circle is either somebody who bought or sold the right things decades ago and has been coasting on it into their old age, or is someone who's starving to death and hoping that one of the old people will buy their work. Nobody under forty in the art world has any money."

Louise Brega was in the first group. Somewhere in her eighties, still able to get away with wearing a sheath dress, still wearing the short straight bob that she'd had, Lily said, probably since birth. At one time it was black. Now it was completely white. She carried herself like she was twenty-five, and she got away with it because she made you think she believed it.

She slid up beside me as I was watching the body get carried away. "Lily says you aren't quite retired yet."

"Lily says a lot of things."

"I need you to find out who killed him."

I looked at her eyes. She wasn't just annoyed. She was angry. "Bad for business?"

"This gallery wouldn't exist without Tom, Mr. Goodwin," she said. "And he was a friend. Maybe my oldest friend." She met my look and bounced it back hard enough to hurt. "If it had been one of my enemies on the floor in there, that would have been 'bad for business.' This is somewhere way beyond that."

"All right," I said. If I hadn't, Lily would probably have talked me into it anyway. I wasn't going to try to take on two determined women. Not at the same time. "Are you going to close tomorrow?"

"We're dark on Sundays anyway. Kris and I will be here in the morning cleaning up."

"I'll come around. I'm going to want a copy of the guest list."

- - -

The Brega Gallery only had the two galleries. That sounds strange, now that I read it back. Showrooms. Display rooms. Rooms with art in them. One was much bigger than the other, as I said. The "small gallery" mostly was for that enormous Rider painting and a few other works that were also not for sale. The permanent collection, you might say.

The main gallery was full of works by an artist whose name I've been told four times and I've even got it written down somewhere, and my mind just won't hold onto it. Since as far as I can tell my memory's just as good as it's ever been, I think my brain just refuses to file it. I thought their paintings were horrible, so maybe that's why. That's who the party was for. You could call it a 'reception' if you like that better.

The main gallery was a rectangle. One of the short walls had the front door to the gallery, out to the street. The other short wall had the two doors to the small gallery. Along one long wall, but closer to the street door, were doors for toilets and a cloakroom. There was a service-window arrangement for the cloakroom. There hadn't been someone working it that night, because it was summer and there were no cloaks, and the ladies had kept their clutch purses clutched.

There was only one door in the other long wall. It led into the parts of the gallery where the public were not invited. Brega had an office and so did Kris Schott, who was called the gallery manager, Brega being the gallery owner. I didn't ask about the division of labor, but Schott was clearly Brega's employee. A sturdy woman with a big face, one of those Eastern European looking types. Probably nearing sixty.

There were also rooms for art storage, full of things in strange-shaped crates or wrappings, and a tiny kitchen area with enough room to squeeze in a small table and two chairs, which was getting most of the morning cleanup because it had been the staging area for the party's refreshments. Then, if you kept following the back hall, you reached the back door to the building, with a sign on it that said ALARM WILL SOUND.

"Where will the alarm sound?" I asked.

"Right now, nowhere," Schott replied. "We've got it off because we're taking out all this trash. When it's on, besides making a huge noise in here, it goes to a security service."

I opened the door and looked out at a tiny loading dock with several trash cans in it. The alley was wide enough to let a full-sized truck trailer back up to it, but the driver would be worried about his side mirrors.

"Was it on last night?"

"Yes," she replied. "The small gallery was closed and we didn't want someone coming in to steal the Rider."

"You worry about that a lot?"

"Another painting from that same series sold for one hundred eighty million two years ago," Brega said, sailing by with an armful of empty champagne bottles. "They were some of his last works."

"Sure, but you could never fence it," I said.

"You wouldn't need to," Schott replied. "It'd vanish into some rich bastard's study and no one would ever see it again."

The hallway didn't end at the back door, though. It took a corner, and extended to another door -- the rear door of the small gallery. I went in and took another look around. Untitled (1971) looked even bigger now, like it was taking up the whole room. It felt like it was looking at me, and not liking what it saw very much.

The rear door, I had noticed last night, was marked STAFF ONLY on this side. Not that that made much difference. Murderers usually don't pay attention to warning signs.

"I guess with the party happening, it'd have been hard to notice someone going into the small gallery," I said when I rejoined Schott and Brega.

"The doors were locked," they both said, one while fishing under the table for an empty box, the other washing something at the sink.

"Oh. Then how'd Hiller get in there? No, wait, he'd know his way around, wouldn't he?"

"He had the run of the place," Schott agreed. I heard a little bit of an edge when she said it, which I told myself to look into later.

"He'd often go in there just to look at the Rider," Brega said. "Sometimes for hours. I don't think he ever regretted letting us display it -- he didn't want to keep it to himself, but he also needed ..."

"Visitation rights?"

"Something like that," she said. "It meant a lot to him."

"Now, when you went in there, last night ..."

"I was looking for him. Nobody had seen him for a while and there were some guests who wanted to meet him. It was easier to unlock the doors than go the long way around."

"Doors, plural." I remembered there had been people in both doorways. Staring.

"It's an electric lock," she said. "One key, unlocks both."

"Who had a key?"

"Kris and I," she said.

"Back door alarm?"

"Same. Front door, same. There's two keyrings, and only two."

"Who else at the party would have known the layout? I mean, would have known that they could have gotten into the small gallery the long way."

"Hm," she said.

"I guess there could have been someone who had the nerve to ignore the sign and look around," Schott said. She was talking about the door from the main gallery into the back rooms, which also had a STAFF ONLY sign. "And we had someone to pour drinks and help with the food, and she was in and out of the kitchen all night ... but I don't know when she would have wandered off, because if she was ever anywhere but the kitchen or out at the table for more than a minute or two, I'd have noticed. They were keeping her busy."

"I did notice a lot of champagne bottles getting tossed out."

"It's a loss leader," Brega said.

"So, if we think random party-goers wouldn't have wandered into the back hall ... you two, Hiller, and maybe the woman pouring drinks?"

"Claudia was here," Schott said. It was for Brega, not me.

"Oh, you're right. Claudia Hiller," Brega explained. "Tom's wife. But she left before any of ... that ... happened."

"She knows her way around too?"

"Just as well as he does. Did." She sighed. "This is going to be hard to get used to."

"No offense," I said, "but ... he was over eighty, right? I mean, I'm not saying that means he had a foot in the grave, just ... seems to me like it's something you get prepared for, at that age."

"You give it another twenty years, sonny," she said. She smiled when she said it, but it was only a little bit of a smile. She stared across the room for a moment. "He was eighty-nine. He was looking forward to making it to ninety. I'm eighty-four. He hadn't made peace with it and I haven't either. I don't think I will."

I didn't know what to say to that. I've never had the spare time to think about death much. "How old is his wife? Did they get along?"

"About the same as me, I believe," Brega said. "Certainly over eighty. They married in their twenties, and as far as I know, they've never even looked at anybody else. But ask her."

I planned to. It looked like I had my whole list, and it was a short list. I figured with a few conversations, I could probably work the whole thing out in less than a day.

That was probably the wrongest thing I had figured in at least the last ten years.

- - -

"I'm just not sure I'm going to get there," I said.

Lily Rowan and I have the same arrangement we've had almost since the day when she watched me lose a fight with a bull. I don't know exactly what that arrangement is, you understand. I don't ask questions. We see each other. Sometimes it's a few times a week. Sometimes we'll go as much as a month between.

It had been two days since Hiller's death, and I hadn't seen her since then. Now she was lounging halfway across my lap, looking at me with that expression that said she wasn't really concerned about anything and actually meant she was.

"Nobody's confessing?"

"Confessing, hell. I can't even get to motive. None of them had a grudge. Schott didn't like him much, but that was mostly because he hung around getting in her way. You don't kill somebody for that. Brega thought he walked on water. His wife knew better than that, but she loved him anyway."

"Sounds familiar," she said.

"I'm about to have to start working through the guest list," I said, grinning at her to show I caught that, "and I don't figure any of them is going to have any more of a motive. I mean, most of them didn't have any idea who Hiller was." I looked at the ceiling. "I think I might finally be losing my touch."

"You haven't lost a thing, Escamillo," she said, with her eyes half-closed.

I'd been close to hanging it up for a while now. I wasn't there yet, but I could see it coming. It wasn't that I wasn't sharp enough for the job anymore. It was just that the job asks a lot more out of your body than people think. You're on your feet a lot, at least if you do it the way I do it. You do a lot of walking. You spend days standing around watching doors waiting for people to come out of them. It wasn't that I was getting to where I couldn't do that kind of thing all the time. It was that I was getting to where I didn't want to.

"Well, I appreciate it," I said, after we broke off the kiss. "But I'm at a loss, whether I'm losing my touch or not. I don't know where to go from here."

"I hate to ask ..." she began -- and that meant she really did hate to ask, because she usually wouldn't hedge -- "... is this ... would it be worth it to take it to him?"

"I've been thinking about that," I replied.

- - -

Fritz answered the door.

"My god, Archie!"

I'm not a hugger, but we hugged. It was good to see him still kicking around. I knew Horstmann had died a few years ago, and everybody goes eventually.

I hadn't stepped across that threshold in ten years.

"Is he available?" I didn't ask if he was present. I knew that. I also knew it was not meal time, sleep time, or orchid time, so odds were good. But things do change, even Nero Wolfe.

I was shown into the office like a guest. Wolfe looked, lay down his book without bookmarking it (which meant he lost his place; he never sets books down spine-up and open), looked again a beat longer.

"Archie," he said finally, and gave me what, for him, was a long and heartfelt nod. "It is good to see you."

His hair hadn't thinned, but the gray that had always crept around the edges almost as long as I'd known him had completely consumed it. The most surprising thing was that he'd lost weight. I could tell even though he was seated. I thought maybe his face was a little bit rawer too, a little more cheekbone.

He was still wearing dark suits and yellow shirts, he was still wearing a tie in the office even if there was absolutely no one to witness it, and he'd lost not an ounce of his personal dignity. Which, honestly, I found reassuring.

I took the visitor chair. "How are things?" I asked.

He micro-shrugged. "It becomes increasingly difficult to get books. Books in print, that are worth the time it takes to obtain them. I don't concede it is possible to truly absorb a book when viewed through an electronic screen. I find these days I delve into my library more and more often."

He wouldn't have been able to read anything on a screen anyway; there were none in the room. Not a surprise. A man who had successfully rejected television his entire life wasn't likely to be interested in computers. For that matter, I wasn't going to say he was wrong. I used a computer only when I absolutely had to, and television for me was mostly for watching baseball.

"And the orchids? Are they under control?"

"Archie," he said. "While I appreciate the courtesies, I think it best if you just proceed to give me the details." But there was a gleam in his eye when he said it.

"Well, I wouldn't want you to think I wasn't happy to see you just for the sake of it," I said.

He waved that off. "I had no expectations after my retirement. It's always a pleasure, but I believe we both understood it was to be a very seldom pleasure. In all honesty, I find I thrive in solitude. Do you know, I've had no reason to leave this house in eight years? I'm hoping to extend that record indefinitely."

- - -

About twelve years ago -- I might be off by a year in either direction -- Wolfe sued a former client for libel. It wasn't something he cared to do, but it was impossible to ignore. The client had done his best to destroy Wolfe's livelihood and his reputation, going so far as to state -- in print -- that Wolfe's license should be revoked and he should never be permitted to be a private investigator again. This client had been one of that small handful who'd been guilty of the thing Wolfe had been asked to investigate. Not murder; embezzlement, if I recall right. Something financial up at the high levels. The client went to jail for six years. When he got out, and began trying to ruin Wolfe, he still had a big pile of money left that he hadn't stolen.

Wolfe got almost all of that pile.

He simply went into the courtroom and explained the process of the case, his line of reasoning, so on ... why the man did what Wolfe said he'd done, why his punishment was sound, and -- most importantly -- why Wolfe was not in any way incompetent at his job. He further argued that the damage that had been done to his reputation might not be recoverable, that the client might very well have destroyed his career. The court agreed, and compensated accordingly.

I think Wolfe had been looking for a way to retire for a while before then. He'd always insisted that the detective business was just what he had to do to keep himself in books and food and orchids. With the settlement, he suddenly found he had enough steady cash to keep himself in books and food and orchids for the rest of his life. He had completely closed shop less than three months after the verdict came down.

- - -

"Insufficient," he said.

I shrugged, but he didn't see it, because his eyes were closed. I'd just finished giving him the bones -- everything you've heard so far.

"I've done four interviews," I said, "if you think it's useful to hear them."

He opened his eyes to half-mast, fixed them on me, and one corner of his mouth turned up. "Is your memory still up to the task?"

"Try me," I said, smiling back.

"Very well, proceed." He closed his eyes again, prepared to listen.

"I'll start with the dumb one. If you tell me she did it, I'm going to say you've been in that chair too long."

- - -

Juju Lazare was young. Painfully young. Maybe it was just that everyone else in this case was over fifty, but I think she'd probably have struck me that way even if they hadn't been. She was the kind of person where you worry about the first time life's really going to hit them in the face, because it hasn't happened yet, and they're not going to take it well when it does.

"Oh yeah, they call me in sometimes. They don't ever give me a lot of warning, but it's OK 'cause all my stuff is gig work anyway, right? And they pay. So I'll drop whatever else I've got that night and come pour booze for them, sure."

"Poured a lot of booze that night, from what I saw."

She giggled. "Sure did! That's not how it goes most times, though. Usually people get a drink and they carry it around the whole night and barely even touch it. I dunno. I think maybe a lot of people there were kind of, hey, free champagne! Or maybe they thought the art was so bad they needed to drink a lot. Don't tell Ms. Schott, but I thought it was really bad. The champagne was good though. She gave me a bottle to take home."

"I'm amazed they had any left. It sounds like you kept pretty busy."

She nodded emphatically. "It was rough! It's not usually that bad. I had to get Ms. Schott to take over a couple of times just so I could go pee. They went after the food like crazy too -- mostly the cheese. I kept going back for more cheese, and when I'd come back from the kitchen there'd be people stacked up waiting for more champagne."

"I guess she wasn't kidding about starving artists," I commented, mostly to myself.

"You know," she said, "they were mostly like in their twenties and usually those gigs go a lot older, so maybe that's what it was? I have a friend who's trying to make it with her art -- I don't know what she's living on."

"With all those people storming your table," I said carefully, "I guess you didn't get much chance to notice if anything else was going on?"

"Like what?"

"Like someone going into the back who wasn't supposed to."

"Oh!" The light of inspiration. "This is about that guy, right? The one who got shot."

I didn't say the thing I wanted to say just then. Instead I said, "That's right. Did you see him go into the back hall? Or anybody else?"

"Well, I did, a lot. And Ms. Schott did ... I think the owner, maybe ... but, yeah, it was super busy. I don't know for sure ..."

"What did you do when everybody found out about Hiller?"

"Who?"

"Hiller. That guy. The one who got shot."

"I didn't do anything! I didn't even know that was what it was until way later. I stayed at my table, 'cause as soon as I left forty people were going to come up and want cheese and Ms. Schott would yell at me ..."

"Is Ms. Schott that kind of boss? Likely to yell at you?"

"Not really," she said, pondering it. "She just -- she wants everything to be exactly the way she wants it to be, y'know? She might not like it if I really messed up, but she's not like a bitch on wheels or anything."

- - -

"She had no idea who Hiller was," I said to Wolfe, "and though I know there have been some people who were already good liars at her age, if she was pulling my chain, then nominate her for an Oscar."

"I'm not sure I agree that experience makes one a more capable liar," he said, his eyes still closed. "It strikes me that in some ways it makes us less able to lie convincingly. Or perhaps less willing to. Never mind. I agree with you for the moment. Give me something better."

- - -

"You should have talked to Louise first," Kris Schott said. "Now she's going to have to wait until you finish with me, and she's going to be annoyed she needed to stay that long, and she'll be crabby about it for days."

That was on the day after the murder, the Sunday morning when I'd come to inspect the scene. I'd asked to talk to each of them privately.

"She doesn't like to spend time here? Or is it just I'm keeping her from her weekend?"

"She doesn't believe in weekends," she said. "She also doesn't come to the gallery any more than she has to. She's got an office here that collects dust. I wish she'd just admit that; I could use the space."

"Tell me a little more about that. I haven't been able to work out who does what."

"I do it. If it's gallery business I do it. Everything but buying. She's the only one allowed to buy art. Then I have to try to sell it. So she swans around looking for whoever is the flavor of the week, the hot twenty-year-old with no talent but a lot of buzz. And she buys a roomful of their stuff, and a month later I wrap it up and try to squeeze it into the back somewhere to make room for the next thing that doesn't sell. You did say you were keeping this all to yourself, didn't you?"

"I didn't," I said, "but I am. I take it you don't tell her how you feel about this."

"She'd fire me. She's going to keep going like this until she dies and no one's going to tell her any different."

"Or until she runs out of money. If that's how it is, why aren't you bust? The gallery, I mean."

"Oh, we won't go broke any time soon. Whenever the cash gets low, she sells another Rider piece. You know we've got dozens. When he died, the gallery got pretty much everything. Any pieces he hadn't sold in his lifetime."

"That's ... huh. I'm not an art person, but with what she said about the one in the small gallery ..."

"Oh, yeah. Huge amounts of money. Thank Hiller. He's the one who got all those pieces, and he arranged for the gallery to be sole seller. He gets a cut every time we sell one. That's why she won't hear a word about him. When she says he made this gallery, she's not kidding."

"You didn't care for him much."

"I didn't kill him, if that's what you mean. I didn't hate him. But he got to do whatever he wanted around here, and he was always in my way."

"He tried to interfere with your job?"

"No, no! Just ... in the way. Like, don't you have a home to go to? I think he didn't really have much else in his life and so he'd hang around here all the time. Staring at the Rider piece, mostly. He spent a lot of time doing that."

- - -

I paused to see if I was going to get some kind of remark from Wolfe. I got one, but not anything I could have expected.

"Mihails Jātnieks was born in Latvia, though at the time it was part of the Russian empire. His family emigrated to the United States to avoid the horrors of the Russians, and thus escaped the later horrors of war as well. The family changed their surname to Rider at Ellis Island.

"He did not escape the influence of World War II, though, just as none of the rest of us did. It affected him enough that he stopped painting representative art -- urban scenes -- and began to move increasingly into abstraction."

Wolfe opened his eyes. "I've surprised you."

"You like that kind of thing even less than I do."

"Indeed, I have no use for his artwork, but the person and his life story are worth noting. His death was by suicide. He had exhausted his patience with the world. I consider that an object lesson, especially as someone who also left the land of my birth because of intolerable conditions. He never visited Latvia again, despite travelling to Europe several times. I have returned to Montenegro only once, as you know, and that only under conditions of personal obligation."

"You -- ah ..." I wasn't sure what to say to that. "You're the last person I can imagine committing suicide."

"I'll accept that in a positive spirit. But that's the object lesson. To not permit my own patience with the world to become exhausted to that extent."

He didn't say anything else, so I took that as a sign to continue.

- - -

"Did Kris gripe about my buying?"

Louise Brega said it before I had a chance to ask her anything. In fact, I hadn't even had a chance to sit down. I'd been dusting off the chair. Schott hadn't been kidding about Brega's office.

"Ah ... maybe a little."

"I figured. She's not as poker-faced as she thinks. She's good at what she does, but she doesn't understand me and I don't suppose she ever will. I'm not interested in making money. I'm interested in giving young artists a shot. If nine out of ten flame out, that's worth it for the one that doesn't. You didn't like what we were showing last night."

"I'm not qualified to be a judge of art," I replied.

"No one is. That's the thing. Anybody who says they are is lying, to themselves and to everybody else. Good art is art that somebody likes. If one person likes a piece of art, then for that person, that's good art. Even if everybody else despises it. And if your marker for quality of art is 'what rich people will pay a lot of money for,' then you're going to miss a lot, because those buyers have some of the tamest tastes in the world. Their idea of good art is 'will it look nice in my living room,' and never gets any further than that."

"You think that's Schott's marker? What people will pay a lot of money for?"

"I know it. When she looks at that Rider in there, she doesn't see the emotion that went into it. She doesn't see one of the last works of a man who was spiraling somewhere he wasn't going to recover from. She sees one hundred eighty million dollars."

"How did Hiller feel about your policies? Did he think more like you do on this, or more like Schott does?"

"Tom ... it was hard to tell what Tom thought. Especially in the last few years. He'd withdrawn. I don't know if it was mortality or if the rest of his life was changing around him or what. We never really talked about anything but art, even back when he was more talkative. But I think he understood what I was trying to do, even if he thought I was burning through money ... oh, wait! Are you asking because of motive? I didn't kill Tom."

"I didn't say you had." Actually she was lowest on my list. I'd seen the look in her eyes that night. She had been genuinely angry about his death. Maybe even vengeful.

"I wouldn't have killed him even if he had disagreed with me. Disagreeing with me was his prerogative. Running this gallery the way I want is mine. I wouldn't have killed him for any reason, Mr. Goodwin. Even if he hadn't been an old and dear friend, I owed him everything."

"Yes, about that. I've heard a little about the arrangement, but ..."

"Tom felt I was the right person to sell the paintings. He trusted me, and I've never stopped appreciating that. He also took a much smaller cut of the sales than he was entitled to. He owned those paintings. Really, the gallery is the one that should have taken the small commission and most of the money should have gone to him. Instead, he arranged it so that the works were all sold to us for a pittance, plus a commission to him when we resold them. It was incredibly generous."

"Hmm. So he's been getting paid very gradually, then. Did he ever seem to want you to try to sell the Riders faster?"

"He knew better than that. If we'd flooded the market with them, we never would have gotten the same value. Scarcity is important. Even Kris would agree with that."

"Well, I was thinking, as he got older ..."

"As his time grew short?" She shook her head. "If anything, he got less interested in when I'd sell them. He had all the money he needed. Even coming in gradually, even a relatively small cut ... he's made millions."

"He must have had a lot to begin with, too. Even with the prices at the time, it had to have cost him a fortune to buy that much of Rider's work."

"Oh, he didn't buy it. It was bequeathed to him. Rider left him all those paintings."

- - -

"I followed up on that, by the way," I told Wolfe. "She was telling the truth. Rider gave Hiller a massive bequest. Hundreds of works. And he sold them all to Brega for pennies plus a cut later. It'd be the most suspicious deal in the world if it didn't all check out."

"It may not be entirely above suspicion," Wolfe muttered. "Mr. Rider is unavailable to be interviewed."

"You think maybe Hiller wasn't being completely honest about how it happened. Or Brega wasn't."

"Brega has no idea what may have transpired between Rider and Hiller. But it's possible there are others who have. What did Hiller's wife have to say?"

"Not much," I replied.

- - -

Having encountered one long thin octogenarian (that's a word I learned from Wolfe) in Hiller, and another in Brega, I was expecting my third senior citizen to be a similarly lanky model. Not at all. Claudia Hiller was five feet tall in pumps, round and rosy-cheeked, with a shock of curly white hair flowing out in all directions like it refused to stay combed.

"I'm sorry about your husband," I said.

"So am I," she sighed. "I wish I could feel sorrier. Oh, no," she said, seeing my face, "I don't mean it like that. We were just as much in love as we ever were. I think. But it had gotten pretty hard to tell."

"Ms. Brega did say he had become withdrawn."

"Oh, Louise is being polite. That's like her. He and I were barely speaking. And it wasn't hostile, like I said. He was barely speaking to anybody. I couldn't get him to talk about it, and I couldn't figure out what it was. He'd go to the gallery and just be there for hours, staring at that painting. That was all he did anymore."

"She wondered if it was mortality. You know, the end is near, and all that."

"Oh, no. He wasn't afraid of death. I mean, I don't think he wanted to die -- he talked about how he wanted to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. Well, he used to."

"Sorry. I just had to --"

"It couldn't have been suicide!"

"No, it couldn't have. Why? Do you think he was suicidal?"

"I wouldn't have thought so, but lately ... I mean, he wasn't the person I know. You understand? I don't know what was happening in his head."

"I hate to go here, but ... I'm told that Rider died by suicide. Could that -- do you suppose that was --"

"No, no. Michael drank. And took other things. Michael was always looking for a way out. Or at least, during the last part of his life, when we knew him. With him it was really about when, not if. You get me? Tom was never like that. He liked life. He enjoyed where he was in the world."

"You knew Rider pretty well."

"No, I didn't know him well at all. I don't think many people did. He wasn't that kind of person. I don't think Tom did either. But we saw Michael -- socially, I mean -- we did things with him and his wife, when we could get him to go out. And Michael trusted Tom. Which is a good thing, because you'd better trust the person who's advising you about your money, right?"

"I didn't know. That was how they met?"

"Yes. Tom was Michael's financial advisor for, hmm, nearly twenty years. Poor Tom! I hope he's happier now, wherever he is. Do you believe in an afterlife, Mr. Goodwin?"

"I go back and forth," I admitted. "It'd be nice to think so."

"I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't want to be alone. Even if I don't have that much longer. But really, finding someone at my age!"

"I don't know," I said. "I think you'll still find plenty of opportunities out there, if you're interested."

"Oh, you flatterer!" she said, a smile all the way across her moonpie face.

- - -

"And that's the size of it," I said. "I haven't started going through the guest list looking for someone who has an out-of-the-blue motive, like 'you kicked my dog back when we were in elementary school,' because it occurred to me that a stranger just doesn't wash. It had to be someone he knew and trusted enough to get right next to him, so they could press a gun against his head --"

"Motive," Wolfe said, barely audible. His eyes were closed again and for a moment I almost thought he was talking in his sleep. I waited.

"Motive, method, and opportunity. I've told you before that I believe it's usually unproductive to focus on motive, for exactly the reason you just gave. Motive could be anywhere, anything, from any time. Yet here we must focus on motive, because method and opportunity are even less promising. Unless the killer was foolish enough to use a gun of traceable origin?"

"The police don't talk to me very much these days," I said, "but if they'd gotten a lead on the gun I'd have heard about it by now. Anyway, someone who takes the trouble to wrap the gun -- not only keeping off fingerprints but muffling some of the noise -- is probably not going to do something that rookie."

He raised one eyebrow a millimeter, which indicated disapproval of my slang. Without opening his eyes, you understand.

"At any time. Yes." He was muttering again. I realized that he was thinking it through, same as ever. It was just new for any of it to be aloud.

He opened his eyes. "Archie, I have nothing to offer you but an opinion. In that opinion, the motive in this case is not to be found in the present day, nor even in the recent past. I feel -- feel for reasons I can't articulate -- that this motive is somewhere in the histories of Thomas Hiller, and of Michael Rider, especially. I urge you to look further into the nature of their arrangement."

"That might be tricky," I said. "Three of the people who'd know anything are dead, and the one who's still alive doesn't seem to know anything."

"Ms. Hiller mentioned that Rider had a wife."

"She's one of the three dead ones. Her name was Alina. She died six months after he did."

"Hmm. Not under suspicious circumstances, I presume."

"Officially she had a heart attack. Unofficially, she drank herself to death."

"And there is no one else?"

"I guess I can look." I stood up. "Thanks for the help. It was good to see you again."

I was almost to the door when I heard him say it.

"Come tell me."

I turned. "Pardon?"

"How it turns out. When you solve it. Come tell me."

- - -

"I've been doing some research." I almost didn't want to call it that. Back in the day, "research" meant you found someone who knew things and asked them, or spent a lot of time in the library. Looking things up on a computer felt like it hardly counted. Though it was a lot faster.

I was sitting in Schott's office with her and Brega. They both looked uneasy. Well, that's the thing. How It Turns Out usually isn't the good part. It's definitely always the bad part for somebody.

"Rider had a daughter. She was seven when he died? Eight? Her name was Kristina. After her mother died, she lived with her mother's family and more or less disappeared for a few years, but she reappeared when she was in her twenties ..."

"... and sued Tom. Yes." Brega said.

"I'd say something about your not mentioning it," I told her, "but I didn't know to ask, so you're off the hook. She claimed -- now, tell me if this doesn't match the version you heard -- she claimed that Hiller entered into an agreement with Rider under false pretenses. That Hiller told Rider he was going to use the proceeds from the paintings to start some kind of foundation for ... I'm not clear on what, actually. Something Rider thought was a good cause. That's why Rider was wiling to donate all those works.

"But Hiller never started that foundation, and apparently never intended to. He trotted the goods straight to you, and cooked up the arrangement you have."

"One of his daughter's points of complaint, as I understand it," she said, "was that the terms of the deal deliberately favored the gallery, apparently so that I wouldn't ask too many questions."

"And it worked, didn't it?"

"I never believed her allegations," Brega said, leaning back on her dignity. "I don't think Tom would have done something like that. I think Rider bequeathed Tom the paintings because Rider knew he was near the end and no longer cared. He just wanted someone to do something with the works besides burn them or let them rot in storage somewhere."

"Well, the thing is, never mind the intent ... by doing it this way, Tom had full control of the works and wasn't obliged to do a damned thing with the money if he didn't want. And he didn't want to cut in Rider's family. They were left broke."

"That was the gist, yes."

"You're not bothered by that."

"I'm not happy about it," she said, "but it wasn't my arrangement. What was I supposed to do, give Kristina a share of what I made? Actually, I might have done that, but she never approached me. Anyway, Tom's deal with Rider was fifty years ago! There's got to be some limitation on that."

"Oh, legally, probably so. But sometimes, you know, the past comes back and jumps out and startles you. Kristina lost her case."

"She couldn't prove that there had ever been any such agreement between Rider and Tom."

"Right. And after that she vanished again for a while. Next thing I could find, she had married a guy named Schott."

Brega spun around, saying something loud that wasn't really a sentence, at the same time Schott was shouting "Now hold on!"

"Divorced him a couple of years later," I continued over them both, "but kept the name."

"If you're accusing me of killing Hiller --" Schott began.

"The gunshot wound was angled up. Someone had to reach up from below to put that gun to his head. Ms. Brega is nearly as tall as he was. You and Claudia Hiller are a lot shorter. Ms. Hiller left the party well before any of this happened, and couldn't have snuck back in without being seen or setting off the back-door alarm. Nobody else would be able to come close enough to Hiller and do that without him thinking it was strange."

"You'd be surprised about that," Schott said. Her voice was suddenly hoarse. "Louise doesn't know because she's never here. I was always the one who had to deal with him. He'd go stare at that goddammed painting for hours and it'd be like he wasn't here. You could come in and try to talk to him and he wouldn't even hear you. You could fire a gun and he wouldn't notice --" She caught herself, and laughed. One short laugh.

"Kris!" Brega almost couldn't get even that much out.

"He killed my mother, Louise! Or might as well have. When she -- when we -- were left like that ... she couldn't take it. She came apart. He took my mother from me, and she was the only thing I had. I don't think Daddy even remembered he had a daughter most of the time. And I had to watch ... I had to watch them bury her ..."

But if you're thinking she said that with her face in her hands, overcome with despair, near tears, or anything like that, forget it. She was angry. She had just as much anger in her eyes as Brega had when she'd told me I had to investigate the murder. More. Because this was anger she'd had stewing for half a century.

"Did you take this job just to get to Hiller?" I asked.

"No. I took it because I thought this was a way to get at least a little closer to that money. The money that was supposed to be my inheritance. And eventually I could either tell Louise and make a case to get a share of it, or ... well, Louise was probably going to give me the gallery when she died ..."

"If you thought that," Brega said, jaw set, "you were wrong. You don't like art. You're a very good manager but you don't like art."

"Art is bullshit!" Schott screamed. "Art is what my father chose to waste his life with instead of his family! Art is people who can't handle reality spending their time avoiding it by throwing crap at the walls!"

Brega reacted as if she'd been slapped in the face.

"I didn't know until I got here how much time Hiller spent here," Schott said, collecting herself. "It was hard, watching him act like he owned the place, knowing how he got where he was. There were plenty of days when I wanted to put my hands around his throat and just shake him until he came apart."

"But you didn't, until now. Why?"

"He'd just ... he'd gotten so much worse. He was in here more than ever. Staring at that painting. Like he was trying to remind me. Gloating about it. And then he snuck out of the party just so he could go stare at it some more, and I finally couldn't take it anymore."

"You know," I said, "it might not have been like that. From what I get, I've been thinking he was having trouble with his conscience. You get that way as you get old. Your past comes out and jumps at you, like I said."

"That's not good enough," she said. "You don't get to enjoy what you did for fifty years and then get all beat up about it at the very end. It's too late by then."

"Even if you're the one who set him off?"

"Huh?" Wide-eyed. It really hadn't occurred to her.

"Ms. Brega didn't know who you were because she'd never actually seen you. But Hiller had seen you in your twenties. And he may even have tracked you enough to catch the name change."

"If he knew, then maybe he should have apologized! Or better yet --"

"I know, I know, offered you some cash ... what?" She had stopped dead. Literally frozen in mid-thought.

"It would explain ..." she said, much more quietly.

"Tell me."

"Just when I was putting the gun up to him. I don't think he'd even seen me before that. He noticed me, then. And he said something. I wasn't sure. I think ..."

"What did you think he said?"

"'I wondered.'"

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"He deserved to die!" Schott said, trying for the recovery. "He knew he deserved to die!"

"I know you think that," I replied. "Maybe he thought that too. But not everybody thought that. His wife didn't. I don't think Ms. Brega does." I looked over at Brega, who was clenching her teeth like she was scared of what might come out if she didn't.

Neither of them seemed to want to fill the empty space, so I had to, or it would choke us all.

"There was a time," I said, "when I could have a police sergeant here listening to all this impatiently, and at the end, they'd take the murderer away and I wouldn't have to think about it again until the trial. I miss that sometimes.

"I'm not the client, and I'm tired a lot more than I used to be. I don't have an obligation. I might, if I thought you were a threat to anybody else. But as far as I can tell, you only had it in for one person. Who might or might not have deserved it. Though personally I think 'people who deserve to be shot in the head' is a pretty short list and there are a lot of requirements to get on it.

"But I can haul you off if I have to, and if you're thinking about trying something, I want you to know I'm not that tired. If we have to lay hands, you're going to get the rough end.

"This is in your lap," I said to Brega. I know she heard me, but she didn't react. "You decide."

- - -

"If you'd been there," I said, "you could have asked me the odds."

"No more than a forty percent chance Ms. Brega would choose to prosecute," Wolfe said, his hands folded across his somewhat reduced stomach.

"Not bad," I said. "That's about where I was. How'd you get there?"

"You and Ms. Schott had removed Mr. Hiller from his pedestal. She had begun to believe that perhaps he wasn't what she'd thought he was. Though, as a counteracting force, she was near Mr. Hiller's age."

"You think that makes a difference?" I did too, but I wanted to hear him explain it.

"Without offense, you and Ms. Schott were more inclined to dismiss a man's life simply because he was nearing the end of it, and you presumed it to be of lesser value. But Ms. Brega was staring into the same abyss. As am I. We cling to our lives, Archie, even more strongly than in our youth, because our time has become more precious, not less."

"Well, I don't like seeing anybody dead at any age," I replied, "but you've got a point. Anyway, Brega fired Schott, then and there. Told her to hand over her keys and take anything personal she had in the office, because she wasn't going to ever be allowed back into the building. She said if she ever laid eyes on Schott again she wouldn't be responsible for her actions. And the way Schott left, I don't think that will ever be a problem. Do you still believe in justice?"

"Hmm?" I think the question may have caught him off-guard. But it was hard to tell, and very little does.

"Justice. Do you still believe in it? I'm trying to figure out if I let the team down."

"I have never stopped believing in it," he replied, "but I've also concluded that justice as a theory and justice as a practical matter often have a great deal of distance between them. You have no team to let down, Archie. The only consequential part, for you, is whether your own conscience finds your actions acceptable."

That wasn't quite where I'd been going, and he knew it.

"If you're asking whether I find your actions acceptable," he said -- and the corner of his mouth moved, just a little -- "you've done worse."

I stood up, and to my surprise, so did he.

"I'd like to extend you an invitation to dinner, on occasion," he said. "You recall what I said about thriving in solitude? That may not have been completely accurate. Certainly I thrive on it ... but I also find, perhaps, that I need it not to be absolute."

"I'd be delighted," I said.

Wolfe does not shake hands. I nodded to him, and he nodded back, and I went on my way.