Compliments of a Friend by Susan Isaacs

the newspaper accounts, but naturally at the moment I wanted it, the particular brain cell that had this detective’s name on it refused to give it up.
    Well, I could walk right in and ask. And they’d say, Oh, it’s Detective-Sergeant Whatever, and I’d go to his office and just say, Hi, I’m a neighbor of Vanessa Giddings’s and what do you think about this? I know it’s just a theory but …
    Kim! That was his name! Maybe Detective-Sergeant Kim had enormous intellectual curiosity and would reopen the case. On the other hand, maybe he’d think I was demented. Or I’d go inside headquarters, and my heart would be in my throat at the thought that I could possibly see Nelson, so I’d stand before Detective-Sergeant Kim and make hideous gurgling noises.
    Naturally, I was an utter wreck, wanting, not wanting, so I won’t even describe my walking in there and finally being directed to Detective-Sergeant Kim’s office, which took me maybe four minutes but which felt like four years. It normally would have taken half that time, except I kept my head down just in case Nelson walked by, and I had to wait until I sensed the halls clear before I could look up and check out the numbers on the doors.
    “It’s an interesting theory,” Detective-Sergeant Kim remarked fifteen minutes later.
    He was a large man in his late thirties who looked as if he’d gained twenty pounds since the time he’d bought his suit.
    “And I appreciate your sharing it with me, Ms. Singer. Except for one thing …”
    “No one had any reason to want to kill her,” I replied.
    He smiled, a gracious, be-nice-to-upper-middle-class-citizens smile.
    “At least no one had any reason at the time she died. On that score, you’re absolutely right. But what about four or five months before that?”
    “What do you mean?”
    He looked less impatient than perplexed, which I took as a hopeful omen.
    “If she wanted to kill herself, why would she take pills from an old prescription? She had a prescription for Ambien, so if she wanted to go to sleep permanently, why not swig them down with a big glass of vodka?”
    He waited. He crossed his arms over his chest and tried to lean back, except his chair didn’t want to. He gave up and rested his elbows on his desk.
    “Look,” I went on, “say you want to kill Vanessa Giddings. Make it look like a suicide. What do you do? Well, you could slip a compromising letter on her notepaper into a file marked personal papers. ‘I can’t take it anymore. It’s got to end.’ With her signature.”
    “Doesn’t that sound like a suicide note to you?” he asked, still patient.
    I couldn’t tell if he was a naturally easygoing man or a canny cop who used pleasantness as an investigatory technique. If not for the wee wobble of a second chin, I noted, he’d have been handsome.
    “It’s a note that could mean anything has got to end. It could have been to her housekeeper, that she’s ironing on too high a heat and burning pillowcases right and left and it’s got to end. To her secretary, that she’s calling in sick too often. To her boyfriend, that it’s over. Or to her husband, that his philandering or his lying or his late nights have got to end.”
    Kim took a deep breath that looked as if it were meant to propel a sentence, so I talked faster.
    “To her husband’s lover, to end the affair. To her husband’s ex-wife-who seemed more than a little fixated on Vanessa—to stop snooping around town about what she’s doing.”
    “So you’re saying someone got her note and, if it wasn’t the maid with the iron, they snuck into her house and stuck it into her folder?”
    Kim had a square, manly face with intelligent black eyes, and he was even able to raise one eyebrow with the skepticism of a film noir antihero, though the jiggle of his chin subtracted from his coolness quotient.
    “I’m saying whoever put the note in that folder did it months ago, when he or she had easier access to Vanessa’s things,