"We both knew her."
I studied the clipping again. The wife's name was Cornelia, and her age was given as thirty-seven. The children were Andrew, six; Kevin, four; and Delcey, two. Cornelia Sturdevant, I thought, and no bells rang. I looked at her, puzzled.
"Connie," she said.
"Connie?"
"Connie Cooperman. You remember her."
"Connie Cooperman," I said, and then I remembered a bouncy blond cheerleader of a girl. "Jesus," I said. "How in the hell did she wind up in- where was this, anyway? Canton, Massillon, Walnut Hills. Where are all these places?"
" Ohio. Northern Ohio, not far from Akron."
"How did she get there?"
"By marrying Philip Sturdevant. She met him, I don't know, seven or eight years ago."
"How? Was he a john?''
"No, nothing like that. She was on vacation, she was up at Stowe on a ski weekend. He was there, he was divorced and unattached, and he fell for her. I don't know that he was rich but he was comfortably well-off, he owned furniture stores and made a good living from them. And he was crazy about Connie and he wanted to marry her and have babies with her."
"And that's what they did."
"That's what they did. She thought he was wonderful and she was ready to get out of the life and out of New York. She was sweet and cute and guys liked her, but she was hardly what you'd call a born whore."
"Is that what you are?"
"No, I'm not. I was a lot like Connie actually, we were both a couple of NJGs who drifted into it. I turned out to be good at it, that's all."
"What's an NJG?"
"A neurotic Jewish girl. It's not just that I turned out to be good at it. I turned out to be capable of living the life without getting eaten up by it. It grinds down an awful lot of girls, it erodes what little self-esteem they started out with. But it hasn't hurt me that way."
"No."
"At least that's what I think most of the time." She gave me a brave smile. "Except on the occasional bad night, and everybody has a few of those."
"Sure."
"It may have been good for Connie early on. She was fat and unpopular in high school, and it did her good to find out that men wanted her and found her attractive. But then it stopped being good for her, and then she got lucky and met Philip Sturdevant, and he fell for her and she was crazy about him, and they went to Ohio to make babies."
"And then he found out about her past and went nuts and killed her."
"No."
"No?"
She shook her head. "He knew all along. She told him from the jump. It was very brave of her, and it turned out to be the absolute right thing to do, because it didn't bother him and otherwise there would have been that secret between them. He was a pretty worldly guy, as it turned out. He was fifteen or twenty years older than Connie, and he'd been married twice, and while he'd lived all his life in Massillon he'd traveled a lot. He didn't mind that she'd spent a few years in the life. If anything I think he got a kick out of it, especially since he was taking her away from all that."
"And they lived happily ever after."
She ignored that. "I had a couple of letters from her over the years," she said. "Only a couple, because I never get around to answering letters, and when you don't write back people stop writing to you. Most of the time I would get a card from her at Christmas. You know those cards people have made up with pictures of their children? I got a few of those from her. Beautiful children, but you would expect that. He was a good-looking man, you can see that from the newspaper photo, and you remember how pretty Connie was."
"Yes."
"I wish I had the last card she sent. I'm not the kind of person who keeps things. By the tenth of January all my Christmas cards are out with the garbage. So I don't have one to show you, and I won't be getting a new one next month because-"
She wept silently, her shoulders drawn in and shaking, her hands clasped. After a moment or two she caught hold of herself, drew in a deep breath, let it out.
I said, "I wonder what made him do it."
"He didn't do it. He wasn't the type."
"People surprise you."
"He didn't do it."
I looked at her.
"I don't know a soul in Canton or Massillon," she said. "The only person I ever knew there was Connie, and the only person who could have known she knew me was Philip Sturdevant, and they're both dead."
"So?"
"So who sent me the clipping?"
"Anybody could have sent it."
"Oh?"
"She could have mentioned you to a friend or neighbor there. Then, after the murder and suicide, the friend goes through Connie's things, finds her address book, and wants to let her out-of-town friends know what happened."
"So this friend clips the story out of the paper and sends it all by itself? Without a word of explanation?"
"There was no note in the envelope?"
"Nothing."
"Maybe she wrote a note and forgot to put it in the envelope. People do that sort of thing all the time."
"And she forgot to put her return address on the envelope?"
"You have the envelope?"
"In the other room. It's a plain white envelope with my name and address hand-printed."
"Can I see it?"
She nodded. I sat in my chair and looked at the picture that was supposed to be worth fifty thousand dollars. Once I'd come very close to emptying a gun into it. I hadn't thought about that incident in a long time. It looked as though I'd be thinking of it a lot now.