“Not I.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
She checked something in the oven, then pulled a stool up to face him. “I don’t get you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you don’t add up.”
“No?”
“No. You’re this extremely polished man; you live in this very impressive house; you dress beautifully; you have something to do with a prestigious law firm, but you don’t actually work there; and yet you’re retired, at an early age, from a blue-collar job that doesn’t produce a whole lot of polished men.”
“I was something of a misfit on the force,” he said.
“That I believe.”
“And I was never allowed to forget it.”
“How so?”
“Well, as my former partner once said to me, ‘Stone, the police force is a kind of mystic lodge, and you never joined.’”
“You didn’t buy into the cop culture?”
“Not really. I found the work fascinating and often rewarding, but, I confess, I was unable to become one of the guys. I knew it, and they knew it. The only cop I was ever really close to was my ex-partner, Dino.”
“Dino Bacchetti?”
Stone blinked. “How did you know that name?”
“I wrote something for New York magazine once, about a case at the Nineteenth Precinct. I interviewed him for it.”
“I’m surprised you got out of his office with your virtue.”
She laughed. “I nearly didn’t; Dino is very smooth.”
“That he is.”
“So you were white bread among the Italians, the Irish, and the Hispanics in the department?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“What, exactly, do you do for Woodman and Weld?”
“Their dirty work, mostly; the odd criminal case, the odd investigation.”
“Now I’m getting the picture.”
“So I add up now?”
“The house doesn’t add up.”
“I inherited it from a great-aunt, my grandfather’s sister.”
“Money, too?”
“Just the house. I did a lot of the restoration myself, but it damn near broke me.”