Rough Trade

office.”
    “What kind of drag marks?”
    “Parallel heel marks, the kind you’d make if you grabbed hold of someone who was either dead or unconscious by the armpits and dragged them along the ground.”
    “So let me see if I can get this straight. The cops think that in the heat of an argument Jeff strangled his own father with his bare hands and then dragged him across the office and threw him down the stairs?”
    “That’s exactly what they think. They figure Jeff must have panicked when he realized what he’d done and decided he’d better toss his old man down the stairs in order to make it look like an accident.”
    “Oh, come on,” I demanded, “don’t you think that’s a little far-fetched?”
    “You’ve got to remember, Kate. This is the Milwaukee Police Department we’re talking about here. They’re the same guys who rang Jeffrey Dahmer’s doorbell and then took a little peek inside his refrigerator. There’s not a whole lot that they’re going to think is too far-fetched.”
     
    I was already on my way to his apartment when Stephen called me in the car and announced that we needed to talk. I didn’t even bother to ask him what it was about. I was still furious with him for the chickenshit way he’d managed to squirm out of the meeting with Mimi. I didn’t really want to hear what he had to say. I had something to get off my chest, and I figured it was something he’d had coming to him for a long time.
    Our contractor liked to tell stories about other people he had worked for, couples who’d finished building their dream houses just in time to see the divorce papers served. He said it was always the same story: either they ran out of money, or they ran out of love.
    With us it was never going to be a question of not being able to foot the bill; our problem was that there’d never been any love there to begin with. Of course, there’d been a lot of other things—loyalty, shared history, not to mention lust in spades. Still, I hoped that the lack of anything deeper might mean that we could manage a bloodless parting. Of course, as a lawyer, the voice inside my head had long ago grown hoarse berating myself about the foolishness of having bought the apartment with Stephen in the first place. Until he brought me to look at it, I had never so much as left a toothbrush at his house. Now, suddenly, we were bound together by contracts, deeds, and a million dollars’ worth of real estate. “At least,” I told myself as I left my car with the doorman in front of his building, “it won’t be for long.”
    Even so, I felt nervous and uncertain. Unlike Chrissy, I had little experience with the vicissitudes of dating. I’d had too few relationships with men to really have a sense of how to end them. At sixteen Stephen Azorini had been my first boyfriend, and now, more than a decade later, he was still in my life.
    He was waiting for me at the door of his apartment, his briefcase and his overnight bag still at his feet where he’d dumped them when he’d walked in from the airport. He’d loosened his tie, but that was as far as he’d gotten. He was still wearing the same dark suit he’d traveled in.
    Of course, even rumpled he was still handsome. Six foot five, with broad shoulders that all but filled the doorway, he looked much more like a soap opera star than the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. I thought of all the skin we’d shared and found myself feeling a pang of something very much like regret at giving it up.
    “I heard about Beau Rendell on the news this morning,” he said, stepping aside to let me pass. We never kissed hello, even under less strained circumstances. “Have you talked to Chrissy?”
    “I just got back from Milwaukee this afternoon,” I said, slipping out of my coat and laying it carefully over the back of a chair. “I wouldn’t have come back at all if we didn’t have that meeting scheduled at the apartment with Mimi.” I took a deep breath, bracing myself for what I was about to say next.
    “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
    “The meeting?” I asked, wondering if he thought he was going to be able to scoot out from under this with some kind of apology.
    “No, the apartment.”
    “What about it?”
    In response he went over to the table that held the pile of mail that had accumulated during his absence and picked up a large manila envelope. “Have you gotten one of these yet?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. I haven’t been