Breathless

job?”
    “Tomorrow night.”
    “Tuesday evening.”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. Excellent. I’ll be having drinks and dinner with a client from six o’clock till eleven or later.”
    “Your wife looks nice,” Neems said.
    “Yes, she does, she’s a beautiful woman, but I should never have married. I’m not the marrying kind.”
    “I want her.”
    “You want her? No. Not a good idea, Rudy. You were acquitted, but your DNA is still on file from the court-ordered blood sample, it’s still in the system, you don’t dare leave semen behind.”
    “I won’t.”
    Four years earlier, in California, Rudy stood trial for the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl. Liddon was his defense attorney.
    “It’s too risky,” Liddon reasoned, “because I got you off in the Hardy case. They find your DNA, they’ll know I hired this done.”
    He had not merely won a not-guilty verdict for Neems, but hehad also made two straight-arrow police detectives appear so corrupt that they were ultimately fired from the force.
    A network-TV news magazine did a two-hour feature on the case that brought Liddon millions in business. The camera loved him. He was a natural. Now and then he watched a DVD of the program just to remind himself of how good he looked.
    “Judy didn’t have any.”
    Judy was Judith Hardy, the fourteen-year-old who was kidnapped and raped.
    Liddon said, “Didn’t have any what?”
    “Any of my DNA.”
    “She was largely dissolved by acid in a pit on the beach. The best forensic team wasn’t going to get anything from that body.”
    “So I burn Kirsten.”
    Kirsten was Liddon’s wife.
    “Fill the bathtub with gasoline,” said Neems.
    Looking past Rudy Neems, Liddon surveyed the foggy fairway. No one was in sight. The course didn’t open for at least another hour. Nevertheless, this was taking too long. To minimize the chance of their being seen together, they needed to meet in places as discreet as this
and keep the meetings brief
.
    “Bathtub of gasoline?” Liddon said, boggled by the flamboyance.
    “Sink her, burn her,” said Neems.
    “I’ve got a lot of expensive art, antiques.”
    “And a fire-sprinkler system.”
    “Still. A bathtub of gasoline.”
    “Studied it,” Neems said.
    Liddon looked at the manila envelope full of photos and details about the house, which Neems had returned to him.
    “You’ll lose the bathroom,” Neems said.
    “Obviously.”
    “Master bedroom. Some attic.”
    “What about water damage?”
    “Sprinklers only go off in rooms with heat.”
    “Ah. So there’s no widespread water damage. Smoke?”
    “I’ll close the bathroom and bedroom doors behind me.”
    Neems was as dependable as he was soft-spoken. He thought things through, cared about details.
    “I guess the alarm system will get the fire department there in a hurry,” Liddon said.
    “Probably under four minutes. They’re nearby.”
    Because the apron of the putting green sloped up slightly to the surrounding fairway, the contours of the land pulled faint currents of morning air into the depressed green, where they circled, circled, drawing in a thicker knee-high scrim of fog that moved around Liddon and Neems, a slow-motion whirlpool, around and around.
    “You really want Kirsten that much?” Liddon asked.
    Neems nodded. “I gotta have her.”
    “How long will you … take with her?”
    “Two hours. Three.”
    “You’re confident about this?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “It’s kind of wild,” Liddon said.
    “So wild, it’s not the way hired killings are done.”
    “Good point. Well … okay, then.”
    Neems’s smile was so sweet, he would still be good for Christmas pageants. “Two things. First—you sure about Benny?”
    Benny was Benjamin Wallace, Liddon’s three-year-old son.
    “I’m no better at parenting than marriage,” Liddon said.
    “There’s nannies.”
    “I’d either end up with some harridan who ruins the mood of the house or some young thing who files a phony civil suit against me for sexual harassment. Is Benny a problem for you?”
    “Why would he be a problem? He’s three years old.”
    “I didn’t mean a physical problem.”
    “I’m fine with it,” Neems said.
    “All right. Then it’s set.”
    “I just wanted to be sure you were okay with it.”
    “It is what it is,” Liddon said. “What’s the second thing?”
    “Just my curiosity.”
    “I’ve got to get going.”
    “You come to me for this—you had to know I did Judy