“No!” I shouted, bewildered by his change of pace, momentarily losing my cool. “I wasn’t even here. I was out of town. On a—”

“—Fishing trip. Yes. Mr. Weld told me. But that may have been a clever piece of subterfuge. It’s convenient that your girlfriend’s brutal murder coincided with your absence.”

“I was with a friend,” I growled. “Bill Casey. He’ll vouch for me. He was with me the entire time. We even shared the same tent.”

“I know.” The Cardinal smiled. “I just wanted to see how you react when riled. You can learn a lot about a man by the way he responds when subjected to slanderous accusations.”

There was a knock on the door and Ford Tasso entered. “Algiers,” he greeted me. “Heard about the mess. How you holding up?”

“Quite remarkably,” The Cardinal answered for me. “He takes loss firmly on the chin. Barely fazed by it.”

“I’m fazed,” I said sourly. I didn’t like what he was doing. I hadn’t been especially close to Nic but I was hurting from what had happened. The Cardinal was acting like it was some big joke. That pissed me off.

“Look at his face,” The Cardinal chortled. “He’d love to throttle me.”

“Go easy on him,” Tasso said. “Finding a partner in the Fridge would have knocked the wind out of the most seasoned of us. Frank told me he didn’t even know she was missing.”

“You two are back on speaking terms?”

“For the time being.” Tasso joined The Cardinal on the other side of the desk and glanced at the notes in his employer’s lap. “The cops don’t know about Al,” he said. “Want us to keep him under wraps?”

The Cardinal sniffed. “Makes no difference whether they know or not.”

“How about you, Algiers? Want us to hush things up?”

“Bill knew I was seeing her,” I said.