“All right, Caroline,” I said. “Tell me about your sister.”

She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled in a long white stream. “Well, for one thing, she was murdered.”

“Have the police found the killer?”

She reached for her pack of Camel Lights even though the cigarette she had was still lit. “Jackie was hanging from the end of a rope in her apartment. They’ve concluded that she hung herself.”

“The police said that?”

“That’s right. The coroner and some troglodyte detective named McDeiss. They closed the case, said it was a suicide. But she didn’t.”

“Hang herself?”

“She wouldn’t.”

“Detective McDeiss ruled it a suicide?”

She sighed. “You don’t believe me either.”

“No, actually,” I said. “I’ve had a few run-ins with McDeiss but he’s a pretty good cop. If he said it was a suicide, it’s a fair bet your sister killed herself. You may not have thought she was suicidal, that’s perfectly natural, but…”

“Of course she was suicidal,” she said, interrupting me once again. “Jackie read Sylvia Plath as if her poetry were some sort of a road map through adolescence. One of her favorite lines was from a poem called ‘Lady Lazarus.’ ‘Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.’ ”

“Then I don’t understand your problem.”

“Jackie talked of suicide as naturally as others talked of the weather, but she said she’d never hang herself. She was disgusted by the idea of dangling there, aware of the pain, turning as the rope tightened and creaked, the pressure on your neck, on your backbone, hanging there until they cut you down.”

“What would have been her way?”

“Pills. Darvon. Two thousand milligrams is fatal. She always had six thousand on hand.