“But what I need you to understand,” she said, “is that I love my husband. And he loves me. To find out about me would just kill him.”

“I’ll try to prevent that,” I said.

“Have you made any progress?” she said.

“Not much. Do you ever work out at Pinnacle Fitness?”

She nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I have a membership. Why do you ask?”

“Just looking for a pattern,” I said.

“Do you have a picture of him?” she said.

“No.”

“I do,” she said.

“May I see it?” I said.

“I took it when he was asleep,” she said, “with the camera in my telephone.”

“He doesn’t know?” I said.

“No.”

She took an envelope from her purse.

“It’s a bit salacious,” she said.

“Me, too,” I said, and put my hand out.

She smiled brightly again and handed me the envelope. I opened it. In the envelope was a computer printout of a digital photograph of a naked man lying on his back on a bed in what was probably a motel room. It was not my kind of salacious. And even if it had been, Nancy had edited out the groin area with a Magic Marker.

Decorum.

Chapter 6

ALL OF MY CLIENTS were members of Pinnacle Fitness. Which was a pattern. Which gave me something to do. Of course they might also have gone to the same gynecologist, or belonged to the same square-dance club. But a pattern was a pattern. And it was better than having nothing to do. So I walked over to Tremont Street and took a look.

The club was on the top of a newish building across Tremont Street from the Common. Until I was a grown man, I had never even been in any place as glossy as Pinnacle Fitness. It was a monument to the fitness illusion that somehow working out was fun and glamorous. I thought about the gyms where I’d trained as a kid, when I was a fighter.