An Equal Opportunity Death by Susan Dunlap Page A

buying the right this or that. I never knew when it would be advantageous for me to bring a client home or for John to, so the apartment always had to be spotless. It wasn’t our home; it was just an adjunct to our jobs. As we were. I came to that conclusion; John didn’t.” I looked up at Wescott, feeling a bit embarrassed and rather amazed that I had told him so much about my divorce. It wasn’t something I discussed anymore. “It’s hardly an original story. And probably more than you wanted to know.”
    “No. There’s never more than I want to know.”
    Over the blue plexiglass partition, I could hear two women discussing Line Q errors on the computer printout.
    “Anyway,” I said, “I stayed on at work in the city for a while after the divorce, and then I realized I needed to get away. I thought I would come here. I thought I would be moving to a simpler life, a life among wholesome country people. In honor of this metamorphosis, I changed my name from Veronica Joan to Vejay and bought a pickup. The pickup was sensible.”
    “And not the name?”
    I laughed. “Frank kept telling me changing my name was adolescent. Maybe it was. But by that time Vejay was what people called me.”
    “And did you find peace in the country, Vejay?”
    “That sounds like a sappy song title—‘Peace in the Country.’”
    “Well?” He shrugged off a look of embarrassment.
    “I found exactly what you would expect. Instead of down-home folk sitting around the stove at the country store, there were other emigrants from the city searching for the country store. But life here is easier. People are nice. I like my job, and I like the fact that it ends at five.”
    “Did you think this would be a good place to marry and raise a family?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know.”
    “You dated Frank Goulet when you first came here?”
    I drew in a breath slowly, seeing clearly where the line of questions was leading. “So this is an interrogation.”
    “Hardly. Just questions, background.” But there was a steeliness to his voice that had been absent before. And when I said nothing, he added, “You were the last person to see Goulet alive.”
    “The second to last,” I reminded him.
    “Second,” he said. “About your relationship with Goulet …”
    His expression remained unchanged, but instead of the spontaneous interest it appeared to hold a minute before, his face now looked like a mask held in place by nothing but discipline. It was the facade of interest John and I used to use with clients, listening for hours to the expansion plans of West Coast Metal Pipe or Alvin’s Fancy Pickles, trying to figure how much we could get out of them for a p.r. campaign. That was one of the things that had gnawed at me. I wondered how a client would feel if he found out. Now I knew—furious and humiliated.
    “Look,” I said, “if you’re going to treat me like a suspect I’d rather you do it under a bare bulb. I don’t need this pseudo-friend routine.”
    He drew back visibly. After a pause, he said, “Okay. Have it your way. You saw Goulet yesterday. You left mad. Now I want to know about your relationship with him. Clear enough?”
    “I dated Frank when I first came to town. A year ago. Frank dated every new woman. You can check on that.”
    “We will.”
    “I went out with him two or three times. It was nothing serious, nothing to base the rest of my life on, to answer your question.”
    “I didn’t ask that specifically. But you did go out a few times?”
    “Probably three.”
    “Probably?”
    “Probably because a few times we ran into each other in town and had coffee. The point is there was never anything between us.”
    He wrote something on his pad. I could see the small tight marks, but I couldn’t read it upside down. He held the pen poised against the pad when he looked up.
    “Why did you stop dating?”
    “We eased off and stopped, because, as I told you, it was never a big thing. So its ending wasn’t very