"Perfect." He brightened. "This is meant to be a light meal."

  Yes, I supposed a teaspoon of dinner would qualify as a light meal. That would be about all I could stomach. But I looked into his earnest, wrinkled little face and didn't have the heart to turn him away. Against my better judgment, I invited him in and settled him on the sofa while I took the container of soup into the kitchen and reluctantly heated it in a pan on the stove. I sliced a loaf of Italian bread and shuttled everything back into the living room.

  Mr. Bitterman's jacket was hanging over the back of the sofa, and he was sitting there with his tie loosened and the top two buttons of his shirt undone. His sleeves were rolled up. Everywhere I looked was gray hair and loose skin.

  I slid the tray of food onto the coffee table and tried not to look anymore.

  He did an exaggerated sniff. "That smells delicious. I think this recipe might be a winner."

  I smiled and handed him the bread basket.

  He leaned forward and dipped a slice of bread in his soup. Part of it came out missing.

  I frowned into my bowl.

  "So how was your day, Martha Hudson?" He took a bite of the soggy bread and kept breathing, which was promising but not convincing.

  I went with a slice of bread. Dry. "Honestly, it could have been better."

  "How?" he asked.

  I paused in midbite. "What?"

  "How could your day have been better? What happened?"

  "I don't really want to get into it," I said gloomily.

  "You don't think I can help," he said.

  I shook my head. "I didn't say that."

  "My wife and I talked about everything," he said. "Well, mostly she talked, and I listened, but I was pretty good at it. It seemed to do her good to talk things out. Might do you good too."

  Maybe it would. It had to be better than spending the night inside my own head. Also, I couldn't eat while I was talking.

  "My great-aunt died recently," I said, "and I've been going through her things. I came across something that makes me wonder how she died."

  He paused with a spoonful of soup halfway to his mouth. It seemed to be bubbling. I'd have to remember to boil that spoon. And the bowl.

  "You don't know how she died?" he asked.

  I shook my head. "Not for sure. The medical examiner thought she passed from natural causes—"

  He snorted. I had to agree with him there.

  "—but to me, it looks like…" I trailed off, not wanting to say the M word out loud.

  "She got whacked?" he finished for me.

  I stared at him.

  He tapped his temple. "I'm up with the times. I watch CSI." He handed me the last slice of bread. "What makes you say that?"

  I tore the bread in half and gave him back a piece. "Well, the medical examiner's conclusion isn't supported by the evidence I found at her house."

  "Evidence," he repeated.

  I shrugged, a little embarrassed by the sound of the word when I said it aloud.

  "Well, you knew your aunt better than the so-called authorities did," he said.

  "That's the problem," I admitted. "I really didn't. I didn't know she existed."

  "Neither did they," he pointed out. "Except for the tax collectors, I bet. They always know you exist, especially if you stop sending them money. They don't seem to like it when you shut off the cash spigot. But that's another story."

  A smile tugged at my lips, but I wasn't sure he was kidding.

  The bread slipped out of his hand and disappeared into his soup. He ran his spoon around in the bowl, trying to fish it out. He couldn't find it.

  "Hmph," he said and put the spoon down. "That's funny."

  Nothing funny about it. That was how acid worked.

  "Is there anything I can do to help?" he asked. "I wouldn't mind taking up another hobby. A man can only cook so many hours a day, and it sounds like you could use some help."

  He probably weighed less than I did, couldn't see to the end of his own arm, and it was only a matter of time before his culinary misadventures carried him off to that great chef's kitchen in the sky.

  He was adorable, and I wanted to hug him.

  "I appreciate the offer, Mr. Bitterman," I said, "but I think I'm getting a handle on it."

  He nodded. "Be careful, Martha Hudson. Some things are better left alone."

  Like his edge-of-the-river soup. At least with that, I had a choice.

  Kate's death—not so much.

  * * *

  "I can't believe you went back to see Dr. Watson," Irene said two days later. "What was he wearing? Was he wearing blue? I bet he looks good in blue with those eyes."

  I handed her a box full of papers. We were back in the living room at Kate's house. My house. The sun was streaming through the ancient windows, which would have been pleasant except I could see the dust motes hanging in the air like little allergenic snowflakes. I was settled in front of her ancient rolltop desk. I hoped to find substantiation of Kate's reasonably good health somewhere in there. Then I planned to take it right to the medical examiner's office. But not because I wanted to see Watson's blue eyes. I wanted a new report, one with a different conclusion that would demand Lestrade's attention.

  I also wanted to know why anyone would want Kate dead. But one step at a time.

  "I don't know what he was wearing," I said. "Other than a lab coat. I didn't notice."

  "Right. He's so easy to overlook." Irene dug into the box. "What is all this stuff anyway?"

  "What isn't it?" I mumbled. As far as I could tell, Kate had saved everything from supermarket receipts to electric bills. My glance fell on a handwritten letter from roughly a year earlier, addressed to a state senator. She'd had a graceful cursive that wasn't seen much in the age of 140-character communication. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said of the content of the letter. It was a nasty diatribe against the unreasonable rise of property taxes and the decline in services statewide. It ended with a strong suggestion that the senator resign his post and retreat to a life better suited to someone of his limited intellect and shameful lack of ethics.

  "What's wrong?" Irene had stopped rifling through the contents of the box and was staring at me.

  I shook my head. "Nothing. Just…nothing." I folded the letter in thirds and stuck it back in the desk. For some reason, I found it a little embarrassing, although I couldn't imagine why. Not like I'd written it. If I'd written it, I probably wouldn't have been so polite. "Did you find anything?"

  "Nah, this is just old bills and word-search magazines." Irene closed the flaps and picked up another box. "Maybe this one is where she hid the winning lottery ticket."

  I rolled my eyes. If only. "How'd the meeting go with the boyfriend babysitters the other day?"

  Irene shrugged. "Haven't decided yet. They don't have a business plan. I don't think they know what a business plan is. I'll meet with them again after they have time to do their homework."

  I pulled some more papers out of the slot where the senator's letter had been stashed. More letters. To the mayor, to city council, to the Department of Sanitation, to the chief of police. All of them handwritten beautifully and complaining bitterly about everything from the time of day that household trash was collected (too early) to the number of barking dogs in the neighborhood (too many) to the level of noise in the park down the street (too high) and the city's parking restrictions (too stringent).

  And still more letters. To the Chronicle's subscription department, complaining that her daily newspaper hadn't been left on her top step, as she'd preferred, and hadn't been double-bagged despite the forecast of rain. That a neighbor had walked his barking dog past her house at eleven o'clock at night. And another neighbor had slammed his front door at three o'clock in the morning. And still another had the gall to let his cat wander through her yard and drink from her birdbath. Which, I could guess, had probably been used by insomniac birds who sang in the shower without the courtesy of a complaint department.

  I shuffled through the letters with a sinking heart. My great-aunt Kate didn't seem like she'd been the sweet little old lady I wanted her to be. She seemed like she'd been a mean-spirited grouch. I was starting to feel like she'd left her house to me only so she'd have someone to finally clean it. Although she'd have probably complained about how I did that too.

  "Something?" Irene was watching me again.

  I held up the pages. "She wrote a lot of letters."

  "That's nice," Irene said. "Nobody writes letters anymore. Were they to some long-lost love?"

  "They were to everybody," I said.

  Irene tilted her head sideways in silent question.

  I rifled through the pile. "Newspaper delivery. Noise. Barking dogs. Drinking cats."

  "Well, those drinking cats can be annoying," Irene said. "What are you talking about?"

  I sighed. It was official—I was related to a nut case.

  She held out her hand. "Let me see what you've got there."

  I passed them over.

  Irene flipped through the letters, pausing to scan a few. "Hey, Marty, did you see this?"

  I had my head in my hands and my eyes closed to the monumental job ahead of me. I didn't want to see it. "No."

  "You don't even know what I'm talking about."

  "It doesn't matter," I said.

  "It might." Irene extracted a few letters from the pile and dropped the rest on the sofa. "A lot of these have to do with noise in the park down the street."

  "Parks are public spaces," I said. "They can get noisy. Maybe she should have lived in a bubble." I pulled in a deep breath and let it out. "What am I saying? She did live in a bubble. A dirty, messy bubble."

  "You can hire people to deal with that," Irene said impatiently. "Listen to me. She started out just complaining about the noise, but something changed. She died on the 20th, right?"

  "Right."

  "Well, on the 14th, she was complaining about criminals in the park."

  I lifted my head. "Criminals?"

  Irene nodded. "She doesn't go into detail, but she's pretty insistent that something was going on and that the police should check it out."

  The park was a couple doors down. Criminals might be in the park. Criminals committed crimes. Like robbery and murder. I had no way of knowing if anything was missing, but I knew that Kate was dead.

  I looked at Irene. "Let's go to the park."

  * * *

  The park was called The Panhandle, a small offshoot of Golden Gate Park on the east side. While Golden Gate Park spanned several city blocks, at this end the narrow section had more of a smaller neighborhood feel with a couple of walking trails and a playground. And it didn't look like the kind of place where criminals would gather, unless they were into picnics and sandboxes. Kids played on swings, slides, and seesaws while their mothers sat on wrought iron benches, chatting, reading, knitting, or just looking relieved that another child was occupying theirs for a while. The most sinister thing going on in the playground was a teary controversy over the provenance of a pink plastic bucket. A group of older Asian men were huddled around a cluster of picnic tables, playing chess with the same air of gravitas required of nuclear disarmament talks. To our right, an uber-flexible older woman in shorts and bare feet guided a small group through a yoga session. Ahead, I could hear the clatter of skateboards as a group of young guys, who clearly didn't comprehend that they had bones inside of them that could break, flung themselves with abandon down railings and off of the lip and into the cavernous gully of a skate park.

  Nothing felt spooky or dangerous. The hairs on the back of my neck stayed put. No goose bumps speckled my arms. I didn't feel the urge to keep glancing back over my shoulder.

  And I wasn't alone.

  "This feels nice," Irene said, glancing around.

  I nodded in happy agreement. This was nice, having a park so close. It was good to have trees and grass and flowers to look at in an urban setting. During warm weather, I'd probably be able to hear the singing of birds and the laughter of children right from my living room.

  "Of course," Irene added, "it is still daytime."

  I looked at her sharply.

  She pointed. "There aren't a whole lot of lights."

  Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked upward. She was right. The walking path that snaked through the park would be lit at night only at intervals, leaving more than a few places that would stay in the shadows. Places where angular people in long black coats and cold white faces could lurk, watch, and wait for opportunities to pounce on other unsuspecting people who might be getting home late from jobs as, say, baristas at a coffee bar.

  I shivered.

  Still, looking at the sun-dappled playground, feeling the warm, gentle breeze, and being among all these law-abiding citizens didn't steer my mind toward thoughts of killers.

  "I don't get a dangerous vibe here," I said. "This part of the park isn't that big, and even with so few lights, there aren't exactly a lot of places to hide." I sighed. "I think maybe Kate was just looking for something else to complain about."

  "Maybe." Irene tipped her head toward the chess players. "But it wouldn't hurt to ask around."

  "And say what?" I asked. "Pardon me, but have you seen a murderer lurking behind that tree over there?"

  "I might word it slightly differently," Irene said. "But yes." She took a few steps in the direction of the chess match before pausing. "Are you coming? This is your neighborhood, after all."

  Not really. The Victorian was expensively far from livable, so at the moment my neighborhood was Mr. Bitterman and 2B and cold water from the hot tap and insufficient closet space.

  But we'd already falsified a government document and lied to government officials. Talking to some guys playing chess in the park seemed pretty insignificant by comparison.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets. "I guess so. But you do the talking. If there's a chance these are going to be my neighbors someday, I don't want them to think I'm crazy."

  Irene grinned. "It's bound to happen sooner or later."

  I made a face and followed her over to the picnic tables. Although I wasn't much of a chess player, I understood the basics, and I knew the game took concentration. Which made me wonder about the slim guy who was glowering at us rather than focusing on the board. His eyes were narrowed, his face was pinched, and his mouth was downturned. His dark hair was shot through with silver, but other than that it was impossible to tell his age, somewhere between acne and liver spots. He was dressed in khaki pants that looked to be two sizes too big by the way they bunched at his ankles, and a plaid shirt opened at the neck to reveal a white T underneath. And he was definitely sending out Do Not Disturb vibes.

  So naturally, we started with him.

  "Excuse me," Irene said. "I wonder if we could ask you a few questions."

  "No questions," he snapped.

  Some heads rose around the table, but no one said anything. Guess they were used to his winning personality.

  "Do you spend much time here in the park?" Irene asked him, unfazed.

  He grunted.

  Some heads lowered again, but a few of the men kept watching silently.

  "Have you ever seen anyone who looked suspicious to you?" she asked.

  The man moved his bishop a few spaces. His hands were slim and surprisingly feminine looking, except for the sliver of a tattoo visible at the end of his sleeve. It could have been the stem of a daisy or the tail of a Komodo dragon. He had pretty hands for a man. I wondered how strong they were. Strong enough to kill an older woman?

  "What's suspicious?" he asked finally.

  Irene didn't hesitate. "Someone who seemed to be sneaking around. Or maybe sitting and staring at one of the houses down the street. Or something."

  He shrugged. "People sit. People stare."

  She glanced at me with raised eyebrows. I kind of agreed with her. It wasn't hard to imagine this guy and his shifty eyes sitting and staring right at Kate's door with a garrote in his pretty feminine hand, just waiting for his opportunity.

  Not that it was fair to jump to conclusions, especially when it came to something like murder. But I didn't care much about being fair. I cared about finding out who'd wanted my great-aunt dead and had gotten what he wanted. So I'd already shoved Mr. Happy to the top of my list of suspects. Granted, it was a short list. He was it.

  "Do you recognize any of the people around the park as regulars?" I asked him.

  "We're all regulars," he said. "Go away."

  Irene sighed. "You can talk to us now, or you can talk to Sherlock Holmes later."

  I scowled at her. She really had to stop name-dropping like that, even if it was a made-up name she was dropping. It could only get us in trouble. More trouble than we might already be in if Dr. Watson decided to send the phony PI license over to Detective Lestrade, who did not seem like the forgiving type.

  Mr. Happy looked up at her. "Who's Shirtlock Holmes?"

  "Sherlock," she corrected.

  I shot her an I told you so look. No one was going to take a name that weird seriously. It fairly screamed out "fake!"

  If Irene caught my look, she ignored it. "He's a private investigator," she told Mr. Happy. "He happens to be our boss."

  He went from pale to alabaster before his hand fell away from the chess piece, and he looked away. I remembered an article I'd read once about interpreting body language in a forensic context, and Mr. Happy could have been Exhibit A. Every move he made suggested an attempt to conceal—the lowered eyes, the foot jittering up and down, the hands fluttering around, subtly masking the deep scowl carved into the lines of his face. He acted like a man who felt trapped. Unless he was just an extremely nervous, incredibly irritable type, like a Chihuahua.

  Maybe the fact that he wouldn't look us in the eye and seemed inordinately pale meant nothing at all.

  Or maybe it did.

  Okay, so maybe Irene was onto something with this Sherlock Holmes business. It did seem to open doors that would otherwise be slammed in our faces. Maybe she should print business cards. No telling what kind of information we could get out of people once we handed out cards for an authentic phony private investigator.