Murder Suicide by Keith Ablow Page B

living room, framed on either side by six-foot-high fireplaces with limestone mantels carved with angels blowing trumpets.  Above them hung two magnificent oil paintings.  And above them, the ceiling was bordered by intricate crown molding a foot deep, carved with oak leaves and acorns.
    The room was so imposing it took Clevenger a few seconds to notice a slim woman about five-foot-two, standing at an arched window, looking out at ice-covered gardens that glistened in the late morning sun.  She wore gray flannel pants and a simple light blue sweater that almost made her fade into the gray-and-blue-striped wallpaper.  "Excuse me," he said.
    She turned around.  "I’m sorry.  I didn’t hear you.  Please, come in."  She motioned toward a pair of love seats in the center of the room.
    He met her at the love seats.  "Frank Clevenger," he said, extending his hand.
    "Theresa Snow."  She shook his hand stiff, then let hers go limp and fall away.  She was elegant looking, though not beautiful.  Her eyes were the light blue of her sweater, her hair prematurely gray, worn just off her shoulders.  There was an angular quality to her face — her cheekbones and jaw — that made her look as though she was concentrating very hard.  She smiled for an instant, but it did nothing to soften her.  She sat down.
    He sat opposite her.
    "Detective Coady told me you’ll be helping with the investigation," she said.
    "That’s right," Clevenger said.
    "Thank you.  We appreciate it more than you could know."  She laced her hands together beneath her chin, as if praying.
    "I need to learn as much about your husband as possible," Clevenger said.  "I need to understand him, in order to understand what might have happened to him."
    "You mean, whether he committed suicide," she said.  She let out her breath.
    "That’s part of it."
    "Detective Coady said as much."  She leaned forward, placed her hands on one knee.  "You have to believe me:  My husband would never commit suicide."
    Clevenger noticed she wore no jewelry other than a modest diamond solitaire and slim wedding band.  "Why do you say that?" he asked.
    "Because he was a narcissist."
    "That was no compliment, but Snow’s wife didn’t sound bitter.  She sounded like she was stating a fact — her husband was in love with himself.  "He didn’t care about other people?" Clevenger asked.
    "Only so much as they confirmed what he wanted to believe about himself and the rest of the world around him.  He used people like mirrors, to reflect his own self-image."
    "Which was what?" Clevenger asked, glancing at the painting hanging over the mantel behind Snow.  It was the silhouette of a naked woman, standing behind a lace curtain, looking out on a lanterned Boston street at dusk.  It looked familiar, like he might have seen it in a book or something.
    "That he was infallible, all powerful," Snow said.  She settled back in her seat.  "I’ll miss him terribly.  I don’t know how to go on without him.  but I don’t want to candy-coat our lives together.  He was a complicated man."
    "What will you miss?"
    "His confidence.  His creativity.  He was brilliant.  Truly.  Once you’ve been in the company of that kind of mind, it’s very hard to imagine being in any other company.  At least it is for me."
    Not only did Clevenger detect no bitterness in Theresa Snow, he detected very little grief.  She sounded like a newscaster bidding farewell to a famous politician she’d covered for a couple decades.  Self-consumed people aren’t immune to suicide," Clevenger said.  "Sometimes they can’t stand the difference between who they see themselves and how the world sees them."
    "That makes sense for someone who cares about the world around him," she said.  "But John didn’t give anyone that kind of power.  He never wondered whether his thoughts and feelings about himself, or anyone else, were justified.  Maybe that’s why I never saw him depressed.  He always