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“One of Seaboard’s richest men, if not the richest,” I said.

“Old or new money?” He was writing, taking down address and telephone numbers.

“Both. He inherited Groome Securities from his dad, Albrecht Groome. The old man anglicized the name when he came here in the midthirties, a Gentile refugee from Hitler. Heinie, Heinrich, was something of a snob. He Germanized the name back to its original and added the von. He claimed he found it while climbing around in the family tree. He never tired of telling people you pronounced it fon. People began to call him Fonny, which elided easily enough into phony. My own father …” I trailed off, not wanting to go into family history. “Anyway, Heinie, as he was usually called, sold the firm for a very good price and went into the real estate …”

“Next of kin?”

“That would be Merissa, Merissa Bonne. His wife. His third wife, actually. She’s considerably younger. My wife Diantha and Merissa know each other. I think you could call them tennis friends.”

“So you knew the victim himself?”

“Quite well. We served together on a Cold Stream Prep alumni fund-raising committee. I’ve been to his home several times socially. For parties mostly. And, of course, he was Honorary Curator of Greco-Roman Numismatics. He donated some very fine specimens of his own recently. Indeed, that’s why he was named an honorary curator.”

“I suppose his donations helped with his taxes?”

“To say the least. But he was not above the vanity of the thing.” I began to add something and stopped.

As a matter of fact, my relations with Heinie were considerably more involved than the edited version I gave to the officer. Indeed, my last encounter with the man remained freshly and vividly impressed on my mind, making unreal if not surreal the very palpable fact of his violent death. But at the expense of some scruple I decided not to disclose any of my other connections to the victim. They could hardly have been germane to the case.

If the lieutenant caught my hesitation, he didn’t let on. He said, “I see …” He glanced at his watch. “Listen, Norman … You wouldn’t mind accompanying me over to see the widow. It might make it easier on her.” The wryness in his voice told me it would also make it easier on him.

“Of course.” I glanced at Decker.

The lieutenant smiled. “He can come, too.”

So the three of us set out on that fine Sunday morning in May for a drive that took us out to the bypass and then southward, along the coast to Bayville, a gated community on Purdy’s Neck, on which Heinie had made a mighty bundle. It has, I’m told, a very good golf course for those given to that kind of tedium. The new marina, full of sleek white sailboats and cabin cruisers, pennants snapping smartly in the breeze, looks like it belonged in Florida. The old fishing village has been malled, to use a Diantha term, with a lot of little boutiques specializing in authenticity.

As my good friend Father S.J. O’Gould, S.J., has remarked, the human species has become something of a weed, ecologically speaking; he likens us to an “invasive exotic.” Which doesn’t sound like a man of God, though the God of this particular Jesuit is not your run-of-the-mill deity. And, of course, in a hundred years, when some new developer comes along and starts tearing it all down to put in a jetport or whatever, sentimentalists like me will be protesting the loss of the old, the familiar, and the real.

To be fair, Heinie did leave some of the land in a conservation trust, and the gestures toward a bygone bucolia have been tastefully preserved. Perhaps a bit too tastefully.

We pulled up to “Raven’s Croft,” one of the pricier “units” in Kestrel Meadows, where there are no longer any kestrels or meadows. It was a big rambling affair hedged in by dutiful pines and fronted by an immaculately kept lawn with clipped, funereal shrubs, mostly rhododendrons and azaleas, snug against the foundation. I noticed a drive that went around to a garage large enough for a small airliner. It wasn’t the