Los Angeles Noir

THE METHODBY JANET FITCH

Los Feliz

It was cold in Los Angeles. Fifty-eight, sixty degrees. In Nebraska, I’d have been scraping ice off the windshield while the wind bit my face like a Rottweiler, but in L.A., when you have to put a sweater on, that’s winter. The dark deodar cedars brooded over Los Feliz Boulevard, trailing their boughs over the traffic creeping toward Griffith Park and the DWP Holiday Tunnel of Light, all eighty million drive-through lightbulbs of it. Christmas. People complained about being “stuck here” for the holidays, joking about the ribbons on the palm trees, saying how it just didn’t seem like Christmas without the old yule dog. But not me. You’d never catch me whining that I couldn’t get back to Kearney for the holidays, sit around listening to Paul Anka and tracking Aunt Phoebe’s phlebitis.

If you met me, you might think you knew me-a smalltown girl, fresh from state college productions of The Boyfriend and Annie Get Your Gun. Up against Stepford armies of fiveten leggy blondes, former Miss Iowas and Texas, with kilowatt smiles. I’m just five-two, dark-haired, with a small sharp chin and big baby blues. I know, you’d think lunchmeat. But you don’t know me.

I was working the 5-to-11 shift at Orzo, a trattoria on Hillhurst that catered to the Los Feliz/Silverlake hipsters, men in leather jackets and perfect two-day stubble, women with clean hair and long knitted scarves. That night it was busy, customers lined up out the door. Whenever the thermometer plunged below sixty, everybody wanted Italian. A man sat in my section; if I’d seen him on the street I’d have thought he was too broke to eat at a place like this. Dark and bald, in a thick turtleneck and a beat-up leather jacket, about forty-five I’d guess. But there was something about him. I can’t say what it was and I can’t say I liked it. The way he looked at me when I came over and took his drink order.

“What do you recommend?” Brown eyes, with a funny light in them, like he was enjoying a private joke and I was the punch line. He pissed me off. Like me or don’t like me, I don’t give a rat’s ass, but there’s nothing funny about me.

“We have a Barolo, by the glass.” It was fourteen bucks. Even the cuffs of his jacket were worn.

“I think… I’ll have the Classico.” He pointed at the board with a languorous finger, a gay gesture though he didn’t seem gay. He seemed like a straight guy who was being annoying. I guessed him for a writer. They’ve got a look about them. They come alone, watch everything from some corner, sometimes they take notes. This guy didn’t have a notebook, but he had the look.

I brought him his Classico and recited the specials.

“Would you say the ahi, or the osso buco?” He stroked his lips with long fingers. They had hair on them. I imagined shoulders like a gorilla. Hair everywhere but that dome. Too bad for him.

I knew if I said the ahi he’d order the osso. I wanted to tell him to stop wasting my time, it wasn’t intriguing and he was twenty years too old for me. “The osso’s our specialty.”

“Then bring that.” He folded his menu and handed it to me. “And the heirloom tomatoes to start.” He spoke better than you’d think, with a jacket like that and the edge of his turtleneck unraveling.

It got crazy busy then. People and wine and opinions, big steaming bowls of pasta, steaks, and veal between closely packed tables. I didn’t have a moment-and yet, I could feel his eyes, following me, from the corner table by the exposed brick wall. I’m an actress. When I have an audience, I act. Even if I don’t, the non-acting is also acting. He made me aware of each small movement, the way I carried an armload of plates, uncorked a bottle of wine, flourished the pepper mill over a bowl of penne regate. He lifted his glass, showing me he needed a refill. I brought it over.

“I’m Richard,” he said as I filled his glass.

“Enjoying your meal?” I said, distant, professional. In case he couldn’t see I had five tables waiting.

“You’ve got a spot, exactly… there.” His long finger, pointing to my left tit.

I glanced down and saw he was right, I’d somehow got a spatter of red on the white linen right over the nip.

“It’s very provocative,” he said, looking at me over the rim of his wine glass.

I purposely didn’t do anything about it. First of all, if I tried to clean it up, it would just make a bigger spot, right there on my boob; and two, I didn’t want him to think I cared what he thought. He was trying to throw me, but I wasn’t that kind of girl. Not even then. I did better with an audience.

When I brought him his check, he asked, “Do you ever go to the Firehouse?”

A trendy bar on Rowena. “Sometimes,” I said.

“I’m going over there later,” he said. “Why don’t you join me for a drink after you’re done?”

“I’m going home,” I said. Forcing myself to meet his eyes. “I have to wash my shirt.”

He shrugged, paid the bill. “I hear they make an elegant martini. If you change your mind, I’ll see you over there… Holly.” He put his long finger to his mouth, hooking it over the lower lip, a good gesture, maybe I’d use it someday.

I was startled he knew my name, until I remembered that I’d signed the check. Anyone could have seen it, but people were rarely that observant.

He rapped the check on the table, left it there. “See you later.” He was taller than I thought he’d be, slender, his posture relaxed and surprisingly graceful. He didn’t move like a writer, none that I knew.

When he left, the place went flat, like old soda pop.

After I cleaned my tables and tipped my busboy, I walked around the corner to my apartment, a two-story ’40s court on Los Feliz Boulevard. Twelve units facing an identical building across a little yard where a box hedge corralled a flock of white calla lilies. Most of the residents were old ladies living on dead husbands’ pensions. A genteel crowd, these broke old grannies. We all lived here for the same reason: the address. Los Feliz Boulevard called to mind the mansions in the hills north and south of the street, but this was Granny Los Feliz, who counted her pennies and voted Republican, who drank cream sherry out of cut glass.

Most actresses who came here went straight for Hollywood. Three roommates and cereal for dinner, green apple martinis, X-bras from Victoria’s Secret. Others chose Silverlake, a bass player boyfriend in a punk band, a new tat, and an STD for every six months you lived there. But Los Feliz meant you could take care of yourself, you’d been here long enough to know your way around. Sometimes I drove up into the hills, imagining how it would feel to have money like that, old money, houses from the teens, silent-screen stuff, before Beverly Hills was even a gleam in some developer’s eye.

I let myself in, turned on the lights. Nothing but the glorious emptiness of no roommate. It was a luxury I could ill afford, but the last one, a dancer named Audrey, just got a show in Vegas. I liked dancers the best, they were never home, they weren’t sociable, they didn’t cook. Someday I wouldn’t need a roommate at all. It was just a matter of time. I sat on the flowered couch and counted my tips. You’d think people who could spend fifty on dinner could cough up ten for a tip.

I changed out of my work clothes, soaked the shirt in some bleach. I looked at myself in the mirror. There was nothing wrong with me. I was just small. Small ass, small tits, short legs, a bit bowed, but I knew how to dress, you’d never notice it. Big blues and bright skin, though nobody had seen my skin in quite a while. Okay, I had a problem with men. I was easily bored.

I reached for my pajamas and thought of the guy Richard, waiting for me at the Firehouse. The quick brown eyes, the mocking quality of the mouth, those gestures, their ironic self-consciousness. The graceful looseness of his walk. He looked like a writer but he moved like a dancer. Slouchy but light on his feet. I wondered what his story was. I kept thinking of the way he looked at me, like he had a secret he was enjoying. People I knew didn’t have secrets. They told you every microscopic detail of their lives. A leaf blew across a sidewalk and you got fifteen minutes worth. The upstairs neighbor went to the bathroom twice, God, do you think he’s got prostate? I wasn’t like that, and I could tell this guy Richard wasn’t either.

That time of night, you could park on Rowena without having to hike a mile. The Firehouse still had the high tin ceilings from when it was a working fire station, the wooden bar long and narrow. Richard sat halfway down, drinking something brown on ice. It wasn’t crowded, a few older guys scattered along the bar who watched me walk down to the bald man in the beat-up jacket. Richard didn’t say hello as I took the stool next to him. He didn’t even look at me. “Did you get the spot out?” he asked, lifting his drink to his lips in that stylized, mannered way of his. Slower than necessary. With the elegant pause.

“Out out, damned spot.” I flagged the bartender, asked for the wine list. They had an interesting-looking Dry Creek Zin. That made me feel good, a girl from Kearney who could look at a wine list and know the Zin from the Cab, prefer the New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs to the French. Waiting tables had educational advantages.

The Zin came, plummy, I could even taste figs, and pepper too. Richard put the wine on his tab. Touching those long fingers to his lips, again, that slightly gay self-consciousness, as if placing every motion in ironic quotes. Suddenly I knew. Actor. Actor actor actor.

“How are you liking L.A.?” he asked.

I knew it was intended to startle me, like using my name, but it was such an easy bet. Everyone here was from somewhere else. I wanted to show him I could return a serve. “I like it,” I said. “I like every fucking thing about it. How about you? Where are you from?”

He shook the ice in his drink, looking down into it with a half-smile. He raised his glass to his lips slowly and spoke before it arrived. “Right here.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I went to Marshall. A mere five blocks away. I’m nostalgic already.” He pointed west. “King Junior. Franklin Avenue Elementary.”

“Hard to picture you as a child,” I said.

“I was a difficult child.” He posed, lifting his drink as if it was the skull in Hamlet. “I never lived up to my potential.”

“I did well,” I said, sipping my wine. “I was valedictorian. I played flute in the marching band.”

“And then you decided to act. At… Champaign-Urbana? Or was it Lawrence, Kansas?”

It was Lincoln, but I didn’t need to confirm a run of insight that was now getting eerie.

“And now you’re here to break into the big time. How’s the climb to fame going?”

“It seems they tore Schwab’s down awhile back, but nobody told me.”

“Naturally, you take class. Boyd Stocker?”

“Chris Valente.”

“Ballet at 3rd Street-”

“Tap.”

That made him smile. I smiled too. I knew it was stupid but I really liked tap, it reminded me of old Busby Berkeley movies.

“You’ve come close,” he said, “but so far, the star never broke her ankle.”

Asshole. “Actually, I had a feature.”

“Never released.”

How could he know these things? Well, of course, if the feature had been released, I wouldn’t be slinging pasta at Orzo. Not that I’d have any money, but I wouldn’t want people to see me working for a living.

“There was a problem with the funding.”

He drew his finger across the condensation on his glass. “These things happen. But you’ll catch on. You’ve got something, a certain sense of authority. People watch you. All you have to do is soften up a little. You’re all barbed wire.”

Chris Valente said the same thing. Show your vulnerability, Holly. It just made me want to slug him. I lost my vulnerability a long time ago. Along with my innocence. Or so I thought then. “Maybe I’ve got a corral to fence.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it. You just want to layer, hold it in reserve, until it’s time to show it.” He looked down the bar to where the bartender, a blond boy with shaggy hair in a tight black shirt, stood laughing with an older man. “Miles, I’ll have another Jack Daniel’s, if I may.”

The bartender came down and took Richard’s glass, giving him a sweep of blond eyelash.

“So why don’t you act anymore?” I asked. Seeing if I could play the clairvoyant too.

He turned toward me, propped his head on his hand. He looked at me very directly, and I felt the full force of his personality in those eyes, that mocking mouth. “What is the attraction of acting? Seeing where our personalities line up with those of fictional characters? Infusing them with the stuff of life? But the day comes when one’s own personality is more interesting than those one is paid to animate.”

Miles handed him his new drink. Richard made me wait while he took a sip. Controlling the silences. God, he was good. What a shame he’d stopped acting.

“So what do you do now?” I said. “Unemployment?”

“Write. Coach. A number of things. Mostly I study the human condition.” He paused a beat. “I saw something in you tonight, Holly. Something I’ve been looking for.”

I smiled inwardly. He was too old for me and bald to boot, but he fascinated me, with his slightly gay gestures that contrasted with the bright brown wolfishness of his eyes, the flat wide mouth playing with its private joke. I itched to know that joke.

“Do you like animals, Holly?”

Just when I thought I knew what he was talking about. “Animals? You’re kidding.”

“I have a little problem,” he said, steepling his long fingers with hair on their backs. “Can I be frank for a moment?”

I had the feeling that he couldn’t be frank on his own deathbed.

“I found a dog. And I need to return it,” he said.

“So why don’t you?”

He moved his wide mouth around, pursing the lips, pushing them from side to side. “It’s not that simple. The dog belongs to Mariah McKay. Do you know who that is?”

An actress from the ’70s, sexy, sort of a dark Kathleen Turner.

“I found it on Los Feliz Boulevard. One of those little greyhounds. I saw the name and address on the tags, and was about to return it, but then I wondered, what if they think I stole it?” He opened his eyes wide, to show how innocent he was. “A problem, don’t you think?”

“Only if you want a reward. Otherwise just be a good neighbor.” A shitty little scam. I had to laugh.

He smiled. He knew I knew he was full of it. I was liking him more and more. “But I’m not such a good neighbor, Holly. I really do want the money.” A fucking petty crook. I finally meet a guy in L.A. who is actually interested me, and he’s into some shitass doggie scam. “It’s probably good for a couple hundred. If you found a hundred dollars lying in the street, would you give it back?”

I looked at us in the bar mirror-Richard with his dark, sharp-peaked eyebrows, and me with my pale face and pointed chin, my dark curls caught up in a ribbon band. And I knew we were the same. That’s why he recognized me. I smiled. “I’ll let you know when I pawn my Girl Scout patches.”

The McKay place was off Commonwealth, up in the hills, a Spanish mansion that had seen happier days. In the morning light, you could see the paint peeling off the pink stucco. I parked down the hill and made like I was jogging. The little greyhound had a tag that said, Gilbert, with an address and phone number, but nowhere did it say he belonged to Mariah McKay. Richard’s story stunk, but so what. He fucked like an angel, and I could use a hundred bucks.

Wearing my track pants and U of Nebraska sweatshirt, holding onto the shred of rah rah Americana I could remember, the marching band at halftime on a November Saturday, I jogged up the steep hill in the cold December damp. The little dog easily kept pace with me. It was about 11:00, nobody around but a couple of mow and blow gardeners. When we got to the house, I pocketed the leash and held the dog in my arms. I rang, then knocked. Making sure my barbed wire was tucked out of sight.

A little window in the door opened. “Yes?”

I figured the maid. “Yes, excuse me. I was running down on Wayne and I found a dog…?”

The door opened. It wasn’t the maid. It was a darkhaired, older woman with the odd puffy lips of an actress who’d had work done, and she held her arms out to the little dog, who jumped into them. She kissed that narrow, hard head. “Where the hell have you been, mister? You’ve had me worried sick.” She smiled at me. “Please, come in.”

Though it was high noon, the living room was dark and smelled of mold. A row of red theater chairs sat against one wall instead of a couch. A TV, squatting on a wire cart, played a soap opera. If she’d made money in the ’70s, she hadn’t hung onto it. She put the dog down and he skittered out of the living room, probably toward the kitchen and his bowl. I gave up on a reward. She could probably cough up a twenty, but no way was Richard seeing any three C’s. Couldn’t he have stolen a richer woman’s dog?

“I can’t thank you enough.” Mariah extended her hand, large, the back grown ropy with age. Her famous voice was throaty as ever. “Damn dog got out of the yard. I can’t find the hole either.” She took a pack of cigarettes from a pocket in her goat-hair sweater, lit one, coughed. “What’s your name, baby?”

“Holly,” I said.

“Very Christmasy. I was just making some coffee, Holly, want some?”

Should I tell her I’d seen her movies? “Yeah, that’d be great.”

She shuffled in her mirrored Indian slippers back the way the dog had gone, and I followed her without an invitation. There was a dining room up some steps, the long dark Spanish table covered with mail and piles of junk, and then into the kitchen painted salmon with black trim, a Deco feel. The sink was full of dishes. She put a battered blue enamel kettle on the stove and ground some coffee in a small grinder. No maid, no help. The whole thing was pathetic beyond words.

“Have you lived here a long time?” that high school flute player asked.

She opened a cat food-sized can of dog food and scraped it into a dirty dish. “Thirty years, give or take. Shoulda sold it when the market picked up, but the mortgage’s paid off now, I couldn’t rent a one-bedroom dump for what this costs me. Except the roof’s gone.” Her dark hair was rough and unbrushed, the mustard-colored shapeless sweater did nothing for her legendary figure.

She had on some ugly fake emeralds in her ears, and a cluster of pink and green glass on her bony right hand. “I’ve seen your movies,” said Miss Teen Americana. Striking a perfect balance between girlish excitement and Midwestern abashed modesty. “You’re one of my heroes.”

“Acting,” she snorted. “I like animals. They never act. They’re entirely authentic.” The little greyhound was pushing his dish around the broken tile floor.

Easy for her to say, now that the work no longer came. “I love acting. It lets you live all kinds of lives. I’m studying with Chris Valente.”

“You got lucky. All kinds of creeps out there, preying on the hopeful.” She gave me a pitying look. “How long have you been in town, baby?”

“About a year.” I smiled a vulnerable Midwestern smile.

She didn’t say any more, as the kettle whistled and she got busy making the coffee, balancing a filter cone on top of a chipped porcelain pot, pouring the boiling water in.

“It’s harder than I thought,” I continued, feeling my way along. “I just lost my roommate.” I played it brave-grace under pressure. More sympathetic than whining. “I’m waiting tables down at Orzo. I thought I’d be further along by now.”

“Chapter and verse, baby,” she said, watching the water drip through the grounds. “Orzo. That’s not a bad place. I like their osso buco.”

So did Richard. “They had it last night.” I tried again to redirect. “I don’t mind working there, but the tips aren’t as good as you’d think.”

“That’s tough.” She took two dirty cups out of the sink, rinsed them without benefit of soap or hot water, and filled them with coffee. I prayed the boiling water would be hot enough to kill whatever had been growing on the chipped lip of the mug. “You know, I have a room,” she said. “Never thought of renting it out before, but you seem like a nice kid. Any interest in that?”

“So, did you get in?” Richard asked. He’d gotten dressed, was flopped on my couch like the Crown Prince.

“You had any doubts?” I said, straddling his prone body. “But she doesn’t have money. You should see that place. It’s falling down around her. You’d hardly recognize her, she’s shlepping around like a bag lady.”

“Is that what she told you? She didn’t have any money?”

“No, it’s just what I saw.”

“Don’t be misled. That woman’s got oodles.”

“You’re tripping.”

“Trust me. Just look at that jewelry. She still had it, right?”

“Dime-store crap, you can get it in a box of Cracker Jacks.”

Richard laughed, shifted me so my weight did more good. “You looked but you couldn’t see. Paul Rhodes gave her those rocks back in the days of wine and roses. You can see in the magazines. She’d never part with them. I mean, the sentimental value alone.” I loved the invisible ironic quotation marks around that “sentimental.” He put his sensitive fingers to his lips, dancing the fingertips. “Even if it’s as bad as you describe, she’s hung onto a few pesos, I can assure you.”

What if those emeralds were real? Ten grand? Fifty? I tried to ballpark it, but I had no idea what jewelry like that was worth; I didn’t exactly have a charge card at Tiffany. “She asked me to move in. Help with expenses.”

He pressed his mouth to my neck, something that drove me crazy. “A generous offer, Holly. You should consider it.”

“You think I should, do you?” I said, trying to keep some illusion of independence, but I was already slipping.

“Oh, the savings alone. And the link to a bygone Hollywood. The cachet, the entrée. Not to mention what she might have been lying about, forgotten under the couch or in a spare room. I think you owe it to yourself.”

I waited a few days to return to the house off Commonwealth. Her car was in the driveway, an old blue-gray Mercedes like a tank. I knocked, figuring it was late enough that she would have slept off even a heavy drunk, but early enough that she wouldn’t have gone out had she a mind to. No answer. I rang again and knocked. It was such a pretty house, it didn’t deserve to be as neglected like this, leaves lying moldy, cracks running through the concrete steps.

I had just given up when the little window in the door opened. She fumbled with several locks and a chain. Gilbert raced out, danced around my legs, jumping on me, he weighed about as much as a handful of chicken bones.

“I’ve been thinking about the room,” I said, hesitantly, vulnerable as all get-out.

Her ruined face smiled. Her hair still hadn’t been washed, either that or it always looked that way, long and dark and stringy. “It hasn’t been used in a while,” she said, leading me through the cloisterish living room with its heavy beams, and up through the dining room, around to the kitchen and a set of wooden stairs I hadn’t noticed before, narrow with an iron handrail and a sharp bend under a low overhang.

“Myrna Loy lived here in the ’30s,” Mariah said. “Gale Storm.”

We climbed the stairs into a little hall flanked with a couple of doors. She opened one. A dirty window illuminated an odd-shaped room full of boxes, obviously a former maid’s quarters.

“Of course, we’ll move this crap somewhere.” She stood in the doorway, scratching her dirty hair. “So what do you think?”

It was cold in the room, though I couldn’t tell if it was because it had been closed off or because the heat didn’t work. A stained mattress leaned against the wall. What a fucking dump. But it would probably save me close to $800 a month and there might be some fringe benefits. “How much would you want?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think? Couple hundred?”

Not bad, for in a mansion in Los Feliz. Wouldn’t that look good on my portfolio. Even if I would have to wash the dishes in bleach.

And so I joined the ranks of the oddly housed. Los Angeles is full of us-house sitters, subletters, permanent house guests.

It wasn’t much of a move-clothes, a few books, a TV and boom box, and my laptop. But it took two days to clear the boxes out of the room. Memorabilia, just as Richard predicted. A gold mine. Letters from Belmondo and Bertolucci and Bianca Jagger, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane shirt, a drawing by Larry Rivers on a restaurant placemat. A lamp she’d taken from the set of Riverside 88, the Paul Rhodes film that put her on the map. YSL gowns in the closet, still in their designer bags. Old scripts marked with her handwriting, photographs, scrapbooks of reviews, and fashion layouts she’d been in, Bazaar and W and Interview. We sat on the floor and looked at a spread of her in Vogue, wearing Oscar de la Renta and Halston. She showed me the gown in the photograph, a Russian velvet dress with mink on the sleeves.

But the pictures made me sad. How bright she had been, blindingly alive, lit up from inside like a circus midway. And now here she was, a single lightbulb that had almost burnt out. I could smell her sadness, sitting next to me, in a pilled mustard sweater, and those lips, and her square cut emeralds dull with dirt. The way people’s lives turned out when they just ran them into the ground, like a rental car.

As we moved the boxes into another room across the hall, I saw something I didn’t much care for-rat droppings in the corners. Mariah said not to worry, she used these little traps that didn’t hurt the poor rats, you could carry them out to the backyard and let them go. I didn’t say anything, but later went out and bought some traps big enough to kill a cat. When I heard them pop in the night, all I felt was satisfaction.

So I hung out with Mariah, and took class and visited Richard in his apartment, around the corner from the bookstore on Vermont, the second floor of an old Spanish quad. It was small but dramatically decorated with handpainted red walls and gilded beams. Not at all what you’d expect, but that was Richard. His bed took up most of the floor, covered in brownand-black-striped cotton. Made seductions simple-there was nowhere else to sit. I teased him, that he should just come to my place sometime.

“Oh, you don’t want a stream of men interfering with your new friendship,” he said, tracing spirals on my skin.

I tossed the Bertolucci letter onto the bed, lay back, and folded my arms under my head. “She knows you, doesn’t she?” I asked.

He didn’t say anything, opened the letter, read it.

I pinched him. “Tell me. Was she a good fuck? Good as me?”

“She was very beautiful.”

It hurt. I was surprised how much it hurt.

He laughed and caught my hand, put it on his cock, which moved again. When I fucked him, I didn’t care how beautiful Mariah McKay had been, she looked like a bag lady now, and she wasn’t fucking anyone, unless it was the delivery guy from Whole Foods.

“I want you to do me a favor, Holly,” he said. He sipped his wine, arm tucked behind his head, the pillows piled up there, the fan of his pit hair like a dark blossom. His smell drove me mad.

I pulled gently at that nest of hair. I knew I would be attracted to hairy men for the rest of my life. “It wouldn’t be anything illegal, would it?”

“Oh, Midwest,” he said, drawling with irony. “Oh, Pioneers.”

I sat with Mariah on her row of theater seats, watching Valley of the Dolls. Mariah knew all the dialogue. “So now you come crawling back to Broadway,” she said along with Susan Hayward. “But Broadway doesn’t go for booze and dope.” Then Patty Duke snatched her wig and flushed it down the can. “Meow,” she said as she drowned it, Hayward pounding on the stall door.

What I could do with a part like Neely O’Hara. Not fucking Laura Wingfield, whom Chris had given me. He wanted me to find my soft side. Talk about miscasting. “It’s your job to find her, Holly. Allow her to live in you.”

I watched Mariah in her weird crocheted sweater and tights, unconsciously splitting the ends of her ragged hair. Her and Richard. Really? I wondered whether he was just yanking my chain. And how long ago?

“Poor Sharon,” Mariah said, watching the screen, Sharon Tate doing her breast exercises. “Did you know the La Bianca house is right around the corner, across from the nuns?”

The first Manson killing. Right here in Los Feliz. Better look out for Charlie’s girls…

It was a cold afternoon and I shivered, thinking of that freaky guy with his flock of bizarre little girls, exactly the kind of thing people in Kearney worried about when they thought of L.A. I wrapped my fingers around the packet of white powder Richard had given me. I was supposed to put it into Mariah’s drink. Some ground-up barbs to knock her out for a few hours. So far I’d taken a few things-a letter here, a signed picture there-but it was time to get into her Deco bedroom for a little scout around.

Yes, Grandma, there was lots to worry about in L.A., and they didn’t always look like Charlie and his girls. There were people like Richard. People like me.

And yet, I couldn’t help wondering how he knew her. If they’d really been lovers. She might have known him when he had hair, and she was a movie star. I was jealous of her, having had him, this fuzzy-headed has-been in the goat-hair sweater. I could imagine them together, how it was. I thought of it all the time, knowing what it was to have Richard; I’d never known sex could be like that. He was a drug. He hardly even came, just got you off about twenty times. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“I met this guy at Orzo’s,” I said, sipping my Corona. “He said he knew you.” I was taking a chance, but couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know one fucking thing about Richard. Who his friends were, what he liked to do besides fuck. “His name was Richard something.”

She shrugged, sipped at her Scotch, watching Sharon Tate and Lee Grant on the flickering screen.

“Kind of intense, brown eyes?” I added.

The speed at which she turned to me, I knew. And it was either big or recent. But it hadn’t been good. She looked downright scared. “Was he tall, lanky? Attractive in a sort of reptilian way?”

I backpedaled fast. I didn’t want to tip her off. “No, this guy was stocky. Sort of like a wrestler. He said he interviewed you in the ’80s. You snorted coke together.”

She relaxed, went back to watching the TV. “Oh, a journalist. Yeah, I seem to remember someone like that. Richard somebody. Stevens. Sheehan.”

Onscreen, Sharon Tate was launching a porn career to care for her declining husband.

“So,” I said, natural as all get-out. “Who was this other guy?”

“Someone I had a thing with,” she said, not turning away from the TV. “Years ago. But what a psycho. I had to get a restraining order.”

I thought of Richard. Had he threatened her, had he hurt her? Was he capable of that? I had imagined him as dark, but was he dangerous? You’ve got to layer. Hold something in reserve. Easy. Casual. “What was his name?”

“Anthony. Karras. I had him fired off a set. People don’t take too kindly to that.”

“That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?” I searched for my inner Laura. “Makes you kind of feel sorry for him.”

She patted my leg. “You’re a nice kid. Don’t feel too sorry for him. He was one of those guys who’s exciting in a kind of bad boy way… and then you get involved, and they’re just freaks. I got wise and told him it was over, to move the fuck out, but he wouldn’t. Had to call some people to get rid of him. He said he’d kill me. Showed up at my house. Called my friends. I took him off the picture and got a restraining order. Told the casting agents to watch out for him, he was a definite freak.” She got the remote, turned up the sound. “Learned my lesson, baby. No more smart men. Only nice and dumb and hung.”

I thought of the white powder concealed in my hand. Gilbert shoved his nose under my arm to be petted. I could feed him this shit, but he was a nice dog. I excused myself and went back to the kitchen, found Mariah’s stupid catch-and-release rat trap in the pantry. I opened the odiferous refrigerator-I’d scrubbed it out once, but it had lain rank too long, the smell was now part of the enamel-cut a little chunk of her $20-a-pound Whole Foods cheese, and blended it with a pinkie-nail’s worth of white powder. “Bon appetit,” I whispered as I pushed it through the door of the rat trap with a pencil. “My name’s Holly and I’ll be your rat-waitress tonight, we’re serving Humboldt Fog with a reduction of Nembutal.” Stuck the trap back into the pantry.

By dinnertime, there was a nice big guy in there. Stone cold dead. Teeth bared and claws curled to a chest solid as a pit bull’s.

I thought of it all through dinner. Richard sitting in his red room above the market, pouring himself a glass of wine, thinking he’d gotten away with murder. With me to take the rap. How satisfied he was with himself. You’re such a special girl, Holly. You’re going to go far. Yeah, I was going to go far. Right to fucking prison. Was he jerking off, imagining her dying? He sure as hell wasn’t thinking of me, walking away in handcuffs, trying to explain that my boyfriend put me up to it. I didn’t know, I just thought I was going to knock her out and rob her.

To think I’d imagined he really was hot for me, wanted me. He hadn’t even seen me. He’d been fucking me and thinking of her. How he was going to screw her. Thinking of her not as she was now, but as she had been back then, beautiful and famous and spoiled, when she’d had him thrown out and the locks changed. Just because I’d gotten the best screwing of my life, I was assuming it meant something. Oh, Midwest. Oh, Pioneers.

Well, I’d always known he was a wrong guy, fake as tendollar Prada. That every word out of his mouth was a lie. But not about us. Not how beautiful he thought I was, how exciting. Such a special girl. You’re going to make it. You just have to hide the barbed wire.

I’d hide it all right. Now he’d see how special I was.

At about 11:00 the phone rang. I picked up. Mariah didn’t like to answer her phone if there was someone else to do it. Hard not to have help when you’re a former film goddess. “Hello?”

It was Richard. I imagined how shocked he must be, hearing my voice, that son of a bitch. I listened for the tell, the little gasp, the hesitation, but he was good, he was always so fucking good. He didn’t waver for a second. “Holly. I thought you were going to call me. Did you do it?” He was calling to see if Mariah was dead.

Quickly, I scraped my own part together. Naïve cockstruck dupe wasn’t much of a stretch. “Yeah, but it sort of didn’t work out,” I said. “I put it in her Scotch like you said, but the dog knocked it over.”

“That’s too bad,” he said, carefully. “Did you use it all?”

“Yeah.” I lowered my voice, conspiratorially. “I didn’t want her waking up as I’m taking an earring out of her ear, right? Hey, I miss you.”

“What are you doing right now?” he asked.

“Working on my scene. Laura. It’s coming pretty well,” I said. “You’ll be surprised.”

“Come over here and surprise me.”

It was late, but he never went to bed before 2 a.m. He answered the door, wearing his tattered red brocade smoking jacket and a pair of jeans. The jacket would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. On him it hit just the right decadent note.

I let him kiss me. It surprised me. It felt just the same. Goddamnit if I didn’t still want him like a house on fire. It was insane. I felt like I was losing my mind. He poured us some wine. I tried mine and frowned, said it tasted weird, but he drank his and said it tasted fine. We made out on his bed and I took off my shirt, concealing our glasses of wine from him. I handed him his glass. “To Laura,” I said.

We toasted, then drank. He frowned and worked his mouth, his tongue, tasting, grimacing. “That is off.”

And then we made it. We did everything: me on top, him on top, sideways, scissoring. I was getting the best lay of my life. I came up with ideas I didn’t even know I had. I was sad I wasn’t going to have this anymore. But nobody fucks around with me. Nobody takes me for a ride.

Finally, he lay on his back, rubbing his arms, his chest. His breathing had grown audibly labored, though his cock was still working fine.

“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned.

“What time…” He was having trouble breathing. He turned over and squinted at the clock, his vision must not have been working so well. It was only 12:45.

“Feeling cold?”

His back arching, jerking. I rubbed his back, his arms. I could feel the rigidity, the tremor, the poison spreading. I hadn’t seen the rat die, I didn’t know quite what to expect. It was very instructive.

After a while, he pushed me away. “That’s… not… helping.” He lay on his back, his jaws clenching, his eyes luminous and big with fear. “Holly…”

“Can I get you something? Water? Aspirin?”

He nodded.

I fucked around in the kitchen, killing time, running the water, filling the glass a couple of times. As I held his water with one hand, I stretched out the other before me. Perfectly steady. I raised a palm up, inspected. The hand of someone I hadn’t known until tonight. We really could have had something, Richard and I. We were perfect for each other, like Bonnie and Clyde. But he didn’t see it. He just threw me away like a gumball prize.

When I came back with the water, he was rigid, his hand up by his throat, he could barely breathe. I held the water for him, let him drink. He choked a little, I backed off. He croaked, “Hosp… 911.”

“Should I call 911?” I said.

His face was pale with a greenish cast. Reptilian, yes, definitely. His eyes pleaded. Oh yeah. Now you notice me.

I called 611 and waited. Let it ring. I braced the receiver to my breast. “It’s busy, they say to hold. Oh God, Richard, what should I do?”

“Christ-” he gasped.

“Wait…” I said, as if someone was coming onto the phone. His back arched like he was in some yoga pose. “Oh fuck, it’s still busy, oh shit, Richard, what should I do?!” Crying a little. Was I overplaying it? Maybe just a bit. “Are you going to die?? Richard, don’t die!”

He tried to sit up on one elbow. “Help-”

“And… end of scene.” I announced. I hung up the phone, dropped the panicked-girlfriend routine. Now his eyes were bugging out of his head.

“You know, Anthony,” I said, pulling on my underwear, “I never did use that shit on Mariah.”

I was sure he would have taken a deep breath if he could, but he wasn’t breathing much at all. And yet, even like that, from somewhere, he found the strength to lunge at me. But he was rigid and in pain and all that happened was that he fell off the bed with a thud onto the Cost Plus rug.

“You know, I was crazy about you. I would have done anything for you. But you didn’t care what happened to me. All you cared about was getting back at her. For dumping you. You stupid fuck. She called you a psycho, you know? And I could be in jail right now, making my one call. Now, should it be to a lawyer? Or my darling boyfriend.”

His eyes looking up at me from the carpet, upside down, his back was so contorted, the whites were red and the irises full of horror and surprise. White frothy shit coming out of his nose, his mouth. I didn’t know how it would go down, how I would feel watching the man I adored die. It was like watching a part of myself die. The part that was good and decent. Well, good riddance.

“You know, I might have even offed her for you, if you’d sold it right. Then you could have had it all. Revenge, the swag, the whole deal. But you got sloppy. I won’t make that mistake.”

As he wheezed and convulsed, I busied myself cleaning up, wiping down the bottle and the water glass. I washed my wineglass but left his.

“Nobody’s going to think twice about this, Richard. Only Mariah. I’ll show her the headline, would you like that? Actor Dies in Los Feliz Apartment. Despondent over stalled career, bit player Anthony Karras…” I looked to see how he was liking my performance, but he had stopped breathing altogether. His eyes stared glassily at the leg of the coffee table, his right shoe. He was dead as the rat in the catch-and-release cage. I kneeled by him on the floor. “Am I good enough now, Richard?” I said softly to the body, his inert, splayed mouth open on the rug. I finished cleaning up, locked the door on the inside, wiped the knob, and then closed it with my shirttail.

MOROCCO JUNCTION 90210BY PATT MORRISON

Beverly Hills

Drive west along the Sunset Strip, out of the twenty-dollar-boutique-martini zone they call West Hollywood, and you know it without even seeing the signs: You’re in Beverly Hills.

Suddenly, the road under your wheels isn’t asphalt anymore. It’s butter. Beverly Hills must have a law: Pavement shall at all times be as smooth and creamy as the faces of the makeup-counter girls at Saks. Not so much as a dimple allowed in the roadbed to shiver the undercarriage of a Bentley.

Even in a geriatric ride like mine, with tires as bald and thin-skinned as Jesse Ventura, you can feel the difference. Besides, for me, rolling onto Butter Boulevard means I’m home. I live here.

I don’t live in Beverly Hills the way the Sultan of Brunei lived here, or even the way the Beverly Hillbillies did. I sure don’t drive anything like whatever His Sultanity kept in his garage-though my grungy old AMC Gremlin would give the Clampetts’ jalopy a run for the ugly trophy.

But I’m still a local.

For as long as Beverly Hills has been here, the Quires have been here, which is more than I can say for a lot of the fast new crowd. During the glory days of the big studios, my father, Harold Quire, headed up security for one of the biggest. He never got anything like rich, but he made good money and he kept his mouth shut, which got him connections and friends money couldn’t buy.

My father also bought a little hunk of land in a wild, scrubby canyon and built a Craftsman house on it, long before the neighbors started putting up Mediterranean villas. Anywhere else it’d be a classic, but in Beverly Hills it makes me a one-woman slum.

That’s what my father left me, that and the legacy of his reputation. It has helped me carve out a nice little niche for myself tutoring actors. I choose my own clients, make my own hours, and am generally free to tool around town indulging my hobby, dabbling in what my father did best-intelligence gathering.

It turns out that the best intelligence network in town is the cleaning ladies. Most mornings, I pick them up from the bus stops on Sunset and give them a lift up the hill to the mansions where they work. That’s how I found out about the jewelry heists-from the cleaning ladies. Lots of small-m mafias operate in Beverly Hills (and a couple of big-M ones), and my favorite is the Cleaning Lady Mafia. It is very tight and usually right about everything.

On their long bus rides from Boyle Heights or Van Nuys, they have plenty of time to compare notes on their employers. What arcane plastic surgery Señora Tiffany treated herself to as a reward for hosting that godawful celebrity charity golf tournament. What little tattletale item Señor Roberto forgot to take out of the pocket of his Sea Island cotton shirt before dumping it in the hamper.

Why they haven’t written their own nanny diaries, I don’t know, except that their idea of celebrity runs to the blondined spitfires on the Mexican telenovela soap operas, not some knotty-calved, tennis-playing billionaire studio mogul whose face they’ve never even seen on Telemundo.

Their patrones live in the hills and canyons above Sunset. The roads there are too twisting to accommodate buses, and the chatelaines too busy to go get the help from the bottom of the hill. So the cleaning ladies have to make like mountain goats. That’s why, before I head to my office, I give them rides to work. They accept, even though they’re embarrassed to be seen in my car. In Beverly, snobbery goes all the way up and down the social ladder.

I don’t mind. Beverly Hills has two kinds of rich: bankaccount rich and information rich. I’m the latter. My father got buried with more ugly secrets than a prison priest. The word “karma” wasn’t in his vocabulary, but if someone got what they deserved-good or bad-my father was the first to know… and the last to tell.

Take the murder of a certain Golden Age producer that regularly shows up on late-night TV shows about unsolved Hollywood mysteries. What only a handful of people ever knew is that he was bludgeoned to death by a dildo from his own collection of ornate sex toys fashioned from semi-precious stones-agate, topaz, tiger’s eye. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy: He used his toys to sodomize starlets he’d slipped a Mickey, and one of them finally fought back. That young actress went on to luminous stardom. My dad knew all about it; he just got out of karma’s way.

Our family rule was, if it’s in the papers-or nowadays, the blogs-it’s just gossip. Before it gets there-or if it never gets there at all-it’s information. And information, good information, isn’t easy to come by. This isn’t a chat-over-theback-fence place. Not when the fence is ten feet high and topped by Slinky loops of razor-wire. Parts of BH don’t even have sidewalks. You want exercise? That’s what home gyms are for. There are more unlisted phone numbers in L.A. than anyplace but Vegas, and the Beverly Hills residential phone book is thinner than Nicole Kidman’s ankles. Restaurants have unlisted numbers, on the principle that if you don’t know, you shouldn’t go.

Anyway, the Cleaning Lady Mafia topped my “reliable sources.” And on a hot July morning, I found out that my home town was getting whacked by high-end thieves. It started when Sonia announced that her patrona’s best friend, the heiress to a cosmetics fortune, had been cleaned out by robbers. “There was nothing left,” Sonia said. Except the foundation, I joked. Yessica, the youngest and hippest and best English speaker, rolled her eyes to remind me what a dumb huera I could be.

Then Yessica remembered that her friend’s patrones in Bel-Air, not far from the Reagans’ house, were cleaned out while they were at dinner at Ortolan. And Sonia shot back, wasn’t there also un robo up off Hillcrest two days ago? Between them, the cleaning ladies assembled a regular police log of rich people getting cleaned out. These slick operators made the smash-and-grab looters at the museum in Baghdad look like morons who shoplift Corn Nuts at 7-Eleven.

Anywhere else, this would be big news. Not here. Here, the cops don’t talk, the victims don’t talk. It’s like Disneyland-no crime, no litter, no frowns. The Happiest Zip Code on Earth. I’ve sometimes wondered whether the murder rate isn’t really ten times higher than the BHPD admits, but the city long ago cut a deal with one of the big-M Mafias to smuggle its stiffs over the municipal line and dump them in Century City.

I dropped the ladies off and drove to my office-the coffee shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I do my best thinking on the second-to-last pink stool at the counter, cocooned in banana-leaf wallpaper.

Most days, that thinking is about how to help rich and famous clients whose thread count in their linens is higher than their SAT scores. After spending more years in grad school than Nixon spent in the White House, I’m a natural for the job.

Remember the actress starring in a World War II picture who marveled to reporters that, gee, she’d never known about all those people killed in concentration camps? Oh yeah, she said it. That’s when the idea came to me. It took one call to an old friend of Dad’s at the studio and I had my first assignment.

Pretty soon the word got out. Other studio execs remembered my father’s reputation for discretion and then recalled mine for college knowledge. It’s our local nepotism, but it’s really no different from inheriting a job on a Ford assembly line. In Beverly, once you’re in, you’re in.

Now I discreetly tutor, shall we say, “struggling” actors. I put together an entertaining, easily digestible CliffsNotes backstory about their project of the moment: an archaeological thriller set in Greece, a movie about Madame Curie. Language, politics, science, art-I don’t overstuff their brains, just pad them a little. I should have been spending this morning crafting one-syllable Civil War nuggets for an actor just cast as General Grant. But the news I’d heard was too rich to pass up.

With my fork in one hand and my cell phone in the other, I started calling: my book club, my clients, my ex-Pilates classmates. (As a lapsed Pilatesian, the choice between a German exercise regimen and the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Dutch apple pancakes was no contest.)

The Cleaning Lady Mafia was right again.

All over town, the story was the same. Plasma TVs, laptops, cameras, cash in several countries’ currencies-poof, gone. But any decent second-story man would take those. It was the rest of the hauls that made this gang special. These thieves were discerning. If they didn’t actually subscribe to the glossy living-and-spending magazines, they must steal them from doctors’ offices on Roxbury. Forbes, Vogue, Wine Spectator-they’d be regular crime primers to these guys.

They knew to take the Manolos and leave the Bandolinos. Take the real pearls, leave the fakes. Patek Philippes, but not Omegas. They carted off wine, but only top-rack stuff: Château d’Yquem, Petrus, DuMol pinots from the first Clinton Administration.

And the jewels. Drag queens don’t have the nerve to wear rhinestones as big as the sparklers that were vanishing. I calculated the take just from the cleaning ladies’ count: besides all the brand-X bling, the thieves had stolen baubles that little King Davey bought to adorn the scrawny Duchess of Windsor, Fabergé desk trinkets the Romanovs used as stocking stuffers, Persian turquoises brought here by genuine Persians-Beverly Hills is full of them, starting with the Shah’s relatives.

Inside those fabulous houses on cliffsides and canyons, people were freaked with fear. Terrified to go out. Terrified to come home. The places they’d built to get away from it all weren’t far enough away, after all.

I saved the last call for the Davises. They were old family friends, and I’d picked up a rumor that they had been hit too. My father and Mr. Davis had been a sometimes-team-a studio security chief and an attorney. Carlton Claridge Davis wasn’t one of those attorneys you see on Court TV. He was good because he kept himself and his clients out of court-and out of the papers. He and my father had come to trust each other, and over the years they’d exchanged information and favors and friendship. I learned to swim in their pool. Their actor son, Winston, became one of my clients.

When the Davises heard I needed a place to stay while my house got earthquake-proofed last year, they’d offered me their daughter’s old room. I had a swell time, like living in a Father Knows Best episode-if the Anderson family had had a private screening room and a couple of Cézannes hanging in the dining room.

The Davis house had been hit while they were away visiting their first grandchild. The usual high-end gadgets went missing, but so did some of Eloise Davis’s jewelry. Her fondness for wearing her jewelry instead of stashing it in the vault was notable even in Beverly Hills. My first memory of her is on the tennis court, the thwack of ball on racket in counterpoint to the tinkle of bangle on bangle. Just about every piece came with a lively story about the giver, or the occasion, or both. Many were engraved with memories. Her history, in carats and karats-not bad, she’d say, for a small-town girl.

Theirs was old Beverly Hills money. Old money here meant BCTV-before color TV. Old money had more class than new money, but fewer zeroes. New money BH didn’t much care whether you were Charles Lindbergh or Charles Manson, just so long as you were famous-ideally paired with rich. Old money BH, on the other hand, set great store by Bostonian virtues like discretion and civic dignity.

This was understandable. When actors first swarmed into Hollywood, they encountered signs in boardinghouse windows reading, No Dogs or Actors. They couldn’t even get top billing in a rejection.

Once they’d prospered and swarmed into this new town and made it theirs, little wonder they began to practice their own kind of snobbery and exclusion. My father had often recounted the cautionary tale of a man who complained to the papers about getting fleeced in a Beverly Hills gambling scandal in the 1930s. In retaliation, the victim was cut from every guest list, every club, snubbed and ignored, his children passed over for good schools, his wife unable to book a good stylist at a salon. Oh, the cheater himself was briefly punished as the Old BH crowd saw fit: lousy tee times, bad tables at restaurants, little slights that mattered so much. But that was nothing compared to their fury at the man who let the world in on a Beverly Hills secret.

Old BH hated the fact that the place’s original name was Morocco Junction; they thought it sounded like some cheesy hotel on the Vegas Strip, as indeed it did. In the early 1960s, a Barbary Coast stripper-one of the new silicone types whose body wasn’t so much a temple as a major topographical feature-began billing herself as Beverly Hills. Old BH passed the homburg at a Chamber of Commerce smoker and presented Ms. Hills-along with a few legal documents drawn up by Mr. Davis-a nice little retirement fund, and a one-way ticket to Zurich so she could deposit it in person. New Beverly Hills would have elected her mayor.

My sympathies lay firmly with Old Beverly Hills, I decided, as Meghan finally answered the phone after ten rings. She was Eloise’s assistant, a Renaissance Studies major in her first job out of college.

“Oh, Minerva, Mrs. Davis isn’t here? The police called and said they found her jewelry and could she come down and ID it?” I liked Meghan well enough-but she spoke in irritating, perpetual interrogatories.

So they had been hit.

“What about the Cézannes?” I asked. Marita, their housekeeper, had once told me that she didn’t see what was so special about the pair of still lifes. She called them, dismissively, “las frutas.”

“Oh, they didn’t touch them, thankfully?”

Now I knew these thieves were pros-smart enough to recognize a Cézanne, and smarter still to know how risky it is to fence a hot post-Impressionist.

The thieves had to know that both Davises would be away. Every July, Mr. Davis went to the Bohemian Grove-that private men’s club in the Redwoods where prime ministers and billionaires go to pee on trees and build bonfires. And Eloise went back to the Midwest for her annual get-together with her old college girlfriends. No women were allowed at the Grove gatherings, and no men at Eloise’s “girls’ weekend.”

“She hurried right home when she heard about the burglars. She was in an absolutely terrible state-I’d never seen her so bad?”

Well, I’d soon hear all about it from Eloise herself-maybe after she got back from the police station. One thing I knew: Nobody would ever break into my place. My dogs regarded any creature larger than a parakeet as a potential Osama bin Laden. And my tumbledown Craftsman house screamed out, If you find anything worth stealing, we’ll both be surprised! I was immune.

On my way to breakfast the next morning, I was surprised to find an extra passenger for my cleaning-lady shuttle: Marita, the Davises’ maid, whom Meghan usually picked up. Driving along Schuyler Road is like cruising down the Loire-castles on both sides. The biggest is Greystone Mansion, where Heidi Fleiss used to screw rich men. Greystone’s first owner, an oilman’s son, was murdered by his own assistant. An inside job.

Hello. Switch on the klieg lights: an inside job. Like all these heists.

Whoa. Lights off. Yessica was right-I am a dumb huera sometimes. What big crimes in Beverly Hills aren’t inside jobs? Back in 1929, the gang that made off with a twelvecarat diamond ring from a house in Benedict Canyon had dressed like electricians and been ushered right in the servants’ entrance.

Every one of these houses is watched over by more camera angles than a James Cameron film set. Nobody just strolls in and happens upon a stash of De Beers’ best. They had to know the angles, the layout, the comings and goings of everyone there.

This was bad news for the cleaning ladies. Their patronas would gather by their rock-bottomed pools and speculate, Who can we trust? Did some maitre d’ tip off the thieves to when the family would be out to dinner? Or the blow-dry guy at the salon? Or maybe-and their eyes would swivel to the stolid brown women swabbing their slate floors… or maybe… the help.

At the Davis house, Marita hadn’t set both feet out of the car when the front door opened and Meghan ran out sobbing. She yanked Marita to her feet and hugged her like she was giving her the Heimlich maneuver. They communicated in their own peculiar Italo-Spanglish hybrid, and with Meghan crying like the fountain at Spago’s, it was hard to get it straight.

Eloise Davis was dead.

“Como?” Marita had asked several times, incredulously. “Muerto?”

“Yes,” said Meghan. “Sí. Morto. Morta?” (Meghan wasn’t long out of Barnard.)

Oh no-Eloise. Had the thieves come back for the Cézannes, found Mrs. Davis at home, and upped the ante to murder?

Meghan said the paramedics were on their way. She didn’t know any more. If she did, I couldn’t understand through the sobbing.

Meghan put an arm around Marita and they walked inside, heads dipped together in misery, one dark and one Sheer Blond Spun Gold. The immense Spanish door swung shut. I was half-tempted to knock-to do what, I don’t know. Make coffee. Pass Kleenex. Just be there. Instead, I got back in the car.

The cleaning ladies, who had observed everything, crossed themselves and fell silent. They barely muttered “adiós” when I dropped them off.

My father’s Rule Number One was: Find out what everyone else knows. Rule Number Two: Don’t let on that you know anything. I’d already planned on going to the BHPD to suss out my pals about the burglaries; now I had another reason-Eloise’s murder.

They all knew me at the PD. A lot of the brass had learned the trade under my dad. And my grandmother had been BH’s first air cop. She had a pilot’s license and a badge and patrolled on wings back when a lot of towns still sent out cops on horseback. That made me practically a blue brat.

On the way, I speed-dialed Joel, my secret source in the coroner’s office. Joel loves Hollywood. He came here from one of those fly-over states the way pilgrims go to Canterbury-with reverence and awe.

I know it makes me sound like a cartoon private eye, “my mole at the morgue.” Truth is, Joel’s chief job is running the coroner’s gift shop, selling souvenir beach towels with chalked body outlines and personalized toe-tag key chains. When the shop isn’t open, he edits and files autopsy reports.

But his passion is Hollywood. To Joel, anyone who ever possessed a lot pass is touched by stardust. He knows more about the movies than folks who actually make them, every fragment of minutia from Edison’s Kinetoscope The Kiss to next year’s releases. We met because Joel sent me a very sweet sympathy note after my father died, and we became buddies.

“Skeletons in the closet, death becomes you,” sang out Joel, who changed his telephone answering voice almost every day. Today it was Bogie, or maybe Mae West with a head cold.

“Not me, Joel,” I said dryly. “Mrs. Eloise Davis, Beverly Hills. And it’s the other way around-Mrs. Davis has become death.”

He was already writing it down; I could hear the scribbly sound of the gift shop’s best-selling ballpoint pen shaped like a human femur. “Eloise Davis,” I repeated. “Be nice. She was. When, where, how? Call me when you know. Later, Marlowe.”

I waved my way into the BHPD, chirping to the desk sergeant that I wanted to see whether my stolen emerald tiara had been recovered. “Oh sure, Minerva,” he said cheerily. “In the property room, right next to the Hope Diamond.”

As soon as he turned away, I zigged down the opposite hall from the property room and poked my head in at the office of the lieutenant, another Quire protégé, who’d be handling the Davis investigation. Not there. Probably at the coroner’s this very minute. I’d pick his brain when he brought it back to his desk.

As long as I was there, I might as well check out what Eloise had seen yesterday-her recovered jewels. I zagged back to the property room. Somehow I’d thought the process of finding one’s burgled loot would be as discreet and private as identifying a loved one at the morgue.

The line down the hallway was like the Crown Jewels queue at the Tower of London. These people couldn’t all be victims. The cops had spread the table with midnight-blue cloth. It looked like Christmas at Cartier’s, though Cartier has scarier security.

From the way the looky-loos were handling the goods, they might have thought this was Cartier’s too. I was surprised to recognize some of Eloise’s jewelry scattered here and there-from what Meghan said, I thought she’d claimed it yesterday. There were the bracelets, a couple of necklaces, and her clip-on earrings, from the era when Tiffany’s believed real ladies didn’t pierce their ears.

Some woman picked up Eloise’s calibre-set sapphire ring. She slipped it onto her finger and was admiring it when she saw me watching and put it back down. Slags. Vulgar enough, pawing over other people’s jewels. With Eloise murdered, it was downright ghoulish. Once they heard she was dead, they’d be chewing this cud for a week.

With an insouciance I didn’t feel, I gave the desk sergeant my best Queen Mother wave, and walked down Little Santa Monica to Jamba Juice. I was ordering a Strawberry Nirvana Enlightened Smoothie (hey, I don’t make up the names) when my phone twittered at me.

It was Winston Davis, my client and Eloise’s son. He had landed his first small acting role a year or so before, as Porfirio Rubirosa in a TV bio-pic about Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress. While the Dominican playboy’s chief assets were unquestionably in his polo jodhpurs, I persuaded Winston that he should know more about the Latin lover-his times, his class, his culture-to portray him convincingly and sell the film to a wider Hispanic audience.

He got just one review, but it was good: “Winston Davis agreeably reminds us that there was something to Rubirosa from the waist up too.” Winston and his parents had thanked me as profusely as if I’d written it myself.

“Oh, Minerva,” Winston began. “Meghan said you came by. I wish you’d come inside. Mom… you make her laugh.” His tenses were as wobbly as his voice. “Made her laugh.”

I made the usual condoling noises about not wanting to intrude.

“No, please come over,” he said. “Katharine’s here.” I knew Winston’s sister from Beverly Hills High, our alma mater with a fifteen-story oil well on the football field. That the well is still pumping away tells you about our local priorities; that it’s been camouflaged in a trapezoidal floral condom tells you about our local pretenses. I’d earned advance placement credits in Political Science for my failed campaign to change our school team name to the Fighting Derricks.

“Please. Dad’ll be glad to see you too.”

For the second time that day, I drove up to the Davises’ house and took the parking spot an unmarked police car was just pulling away from.

The huge Spanish door was opened again, by Winston-tall, dark, and a little less than handsome for the fatigue circling his eyes like the rings of Saturn. I shuffled down a huggy receiving line of grief: Winston, Katharine and her husband, and my father’s old compatriot, the brand new widower Carlton Claridge Davis.

As I hugged Carlton back, I saw over his shoulder that the Cézannes were still in place. So there hadn’t been a second burglary, or at least not a successful one.

Winston steered me up the stairs. Heading toward Eloise’s suite, he must have felt me stiffen. “It’s okay-she’s… not here,” Winston said delicately. “Dad found her this morning. He thought she’d had some kind of stroke. He called 911. But she was already…” I waited. “You know.”

So maybe it wasn’t murder then? At least not violent, bloody murder.

Winston started to sit down on his mother’s bed, then swiveled his rear end onto the bench at the foot of it. I sat at the dressing table. He didn’t want a conversation. He just wanted to think out loud. I’d done the same thing after my father died.

“She wasn’t sick or anything. We asked the doctor about that right away-was she not telling something, so we wouldn’t worry? Nothing. The last time the doctor saw her was yesterday, after she left the police station. He gave her something to help her sleep. She was so incredibly upset by the robbery-even though we had insurance, she hated the idea of strangers rooting through the house.”

He ran his thumb along the welting on the bench cushion, a cloudlike pouf upholstered in Clarence House blue velvet. Eloise had once pointed it out to me with pride-not for the $400-a-yard fabric, but for the stiff patch where Katharine, age five, had smeared Elmer’s glue pasting illustrations into her first book report.

“We thought she’d be so happy when the police found most of her jewelry.” Winston sighed and looked up again. “It was in some pawnshop in Koreatown. The cops said we were lucky it hadn’t been broken up yet.”

The night before, Eloise had given the family a dinnertable account of going down to the police station, groups of women wandering among the tables, just as I’d seem them doing, picking up bangles and brooches like it was a pasha’s yard sale. A couple of acquaintances had spotted her and waved a bit guiltily-“Oh, Eloise, I think I saw your David Webb pin over there… Eloise, isn’t this your Cartier panther bracelet?”

But the cops hadn’t let her take her jewelry home. There were two more days of showings, in case there was some dispute, and anyway, it was evidence.

Mr. Davis’s voice rolled up the stairs, the words indistinct but the tone unmistakably summoning. Winston excused himself and hustled downstairs as my phone rang. It was Joel, my coroner mole.

“Two options, Minerva,” he said, cutting to the chase, this time in William Powell’s Nick Charles voice. “Neither of them murder. Toxicology results will take a few weeks, but the white coats favor accidental overdose or suicide. Paramedics found empty sleeping pill bottles. And your Homicide guys just left. Keep it mum, okay? Over and out.”

I felt myself go flushed and teary, and a shameful thought crossed my mind. Murder would almost have been preferable-horrible, but cleaner in its way.

Winston labored back up the stairs. If he noticed any difference in me, he didn’t say so.

“Dad wondered if you’d be willing to go get Mom’s jewelry from the station. The cops called and said that under the circumstances, it’s okay, they have plenty to make their case. Those guys know you, and Dad’s written a note authorizing it. Here. He’s in no shape to do it. And the, ah, funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”

I said sure.

Winston braced a hand against my shoulder. “Minerva, before you go, we all agreed that we want you to have something to remember her by.” From his pocket, he fished something out and dangled it from his fingertips. A delicate rose-gold bangle as finely braided as hair. Like a Victorian mourning bracelet, fashioned from the locks of the dear departed. I had never seen it off Eloise’s arm, until Winston slid it onto mine.

“You know, she always insisted she be buried with all her jewelry. She made such a big deal out of it. We always kidded her about trying to take it with her. But the lawyer told Dad it was in the will. So we wanted to make sure you got this now…” Winston’s voice trailed away. “See you later? Marita’s fixing some food, if you’re hungry.”

I couldn’t remember ever being less hungry. For the second time that day, I headed toward the BHPD, wondering why a rich woman, a healthy woman, a happy wife, a woman who’d just had the one-in-a-million luck of getting her stolen treasures back-why would she kill herself? It had to be an accident.

The same desk sergeant who’d joked about the Hope Diamond was as solemn as a pallbearer when I handed over the note and signed for Eloise’s jewelry. The white plastic property bag was unmarked, probably the only bag in Beverly Hills that didn’t brag about where it came from.

Small but heavy, containing the best moments of her entire life. A woman who was well over twenty-five when she moved to Beverly Hills from some nonentity Midwestern town, and nearly thirty-five when she married the handsome kind attorney in the law office where she worked. A life like that was, as Tolstoy observed in Anna Karenina, too happy to make much of a story.

Except, now, for the way it had ended.

By the time I got back to the Davises’, people were beginning to gather.

I slipped into the hall, past the family, and went on into the kitchen. I thought I’d get out of the earshot of the sobbing, lest I start in myself.

But Marita and Meghan were doing their own bawling, a subdued duet over a tray of de-crusted sandwiches. They mopped their eyes on Sferra Bros. linen napkins, twenty bucks each, a fact I knew because I’d priced them in a friend’s bridal registry. (I ended up giving her a gift certificate to PETCO.)

“Thanks, Minerva, thanks so much?” Meghan said. “Would you mind putting it on Mrs. D.’s dressing table? I’ve got to lay out her clothes for the… service?”

Some chatelaines change their décor with every Architectural Digest annual “Designers’ Own Homes” issue. For her rooms, Eloise had stuck to the blue, lilac, and silver palette she favored. When she began going gray, she had laughed that finally her hair went with the color scheme.

Leaving the jewels on the dressing table sounded like a lousy idea, considering the burglaries. I carried the bag into the bathroom. I’d tell Katharine I’d stuffed it in the back of a drawer full of makeup and skin goop until the funeral. My grandmother used to hide her dough in a box of Kotex. She figured even burglars and junkies would be too squeamish to look there.

I yanked too hard. The drawer came out completely and tipped in my hands, spilling mascara and lipstick and cotton balls all over the floor. I kneeled down to gather it up. Its owner would never touch any of it again, but it wasn’t my place to throw it away-though I did ditch the cotton balls, scooping them up as they scuttled like Nerf balls along the floor.

When I opened my fist above the wastebasket to let them cascade, I saw something at the bottom that hadn’t shaken loose when Marita emptied it. A newspaper clipping, torn raggedly into several pieces, each crumped smaller than a cotton ball itself.

I smoothed them out and assembled them on the marble floor. It was the kind of story big-city newspapers don’t bother to write anymore. A young man, a doctor, a figure of some standing in whatever town it was, had been killed by a drunk driver two weeks before.

The victim’s name meant nothing. But the face-it had the Davis family stamp to it: a little bit of Winston, a lot of Eloise.

And the town. I’d heard of the place. It wasn’t far from where Eloise had gone to college, where she and her friends met every year for their girls-only reunion.

I read on. Friends mourned the man who had been adopted into a poor but loving family, then become a high-school standout and a fine medical school student. His parents evidently scrimping to send him there. After his internship, he hadn’t run off to a fancy city practice, but returned to his hometown. He was on his way to the hospital, to take a friend’s shift, when he was killed.

As I stared at the dead face on the mangled scraps of newsprint, things began to make a sad kind of sense.

Eloise hadn’t been going to a girlfriends’ get-together every year-but she had needed everyone to think that. She had been checking on her illegitimate son. It’s not a word that Madonna’s generation uses, but it was a common one, and an unkind one, to Eloise’s generation. She’d given this boy up for adoption, as unwed mothers did then, and had gone to college nearby to be close to him.

Now her boy was dead, yes, but would she have killed herself over that? She still had two children and a loving husband, and her secret was safe in her poor son’s grave.

As I assembled the bits of newspaper, Eloise’s bracelet gleamed on my arm. The one she never took off. So much of Eloise’s jewelry were mementos or gifts, so many of them inscribed-I wondered, had she engraved this one with some secret reminder of her son, like his birthdate, meaningful only to her?

I slipped it off and tipped it into the light, turned it. Nothing.

Not even a hallmark? A karat marking? I switched on the lighted makeup mirror, that lab-quality magnifier found in the bathroom of every woman in Beverly Hills, the forensic facial tool in the ruthless hunt for any hint of imperfection.

In the merciless light I could see that the bracelet was missing something else. Something less definable than a hallmark, more elusive. Something a Beverly Hills brat would know from the time she was old enough to try shoplifting at Fred Segal: the unmistakable inner glow of deep, true gold. I looked closer. Here and there, under unforgiving magnification, the tiniest pinpoints of cool metal gleamed through.

Silver. Not gold.

A fake. No, a copy.

I spread a thick towel on the marble countertop and laid out what I’d brought back from the BHPD. One after another, in the unrelenting light, I began to notice almost microscopic clues-a jewel cut slightly too deeply, a patina a little too dull, another a little too bright. Line for line, the copies were exceptionally accomplished, but copies nonetheless.

Why? Why on earth would a rich woman have fake jewelry?

I tried to use my father’s practical brain instead of my academic one. Eloise Davis had killed herself. She had gone back to her “annual reunion” and learned that her boy was dead. He probably didn’t know about her, didn’t know that his upbringing, his education, med school-all had been paid for covertly by Eloise.

Eloise, who could have asked her husband for anything but this, had sold her jewelry piece by piece, and concealed her losses by commissioning superb copies that could pass muster almost anywhere. Except, maybe, in BH.

My mind hurried down the stairs to the Cézannes that still hung in the dining room-not because thieves didn’t want Cézannes, but because perhaps they too were copies and the thieves knew it.

For thirty years, the Davises, their friends, their guests, their help, had all been so used to seeing the paintings that they never noticed the switch. But the savvy thieves recognized them for what they were.

Once they’d had the leisure to scrutinize Eloise’s stolen jewelry, they would have twigged to the fact that it was all fake too, and dumped it fast on that Koreatown pawnbroker, where it turned up along with some of their lesser jewelry haul.

I imagined those looky-loos at the police department coming back, looking once, twice. Somebody would eventually figure it out. In this town? You bet they would. Two girls in my sixth-grade class did their science fair project on how to test for genuine gold.

Soon it’d be whispered from salon chair to salon chair, from restaurant booth to restaurant booth. Eloise Davis’s fabulous jewelry is fake.

Her suicide made a sad kind of sense: She’d rather be dead than humiliated-or humiliate her family. New BH would laugh at her pretensions; Old BH would expel the Davises for having embarrassed them in front of New BH.

Once, Eloise had owned the real things, the satin and velvet jewelers’ boxes from Harry Winston and Van Cleef’s, and the insurance appraisals to prove it. But once le tout BH knew the jewelry wasn’t real, Mr. Davis, good lawyer that he is, would set out to turn up the truth about why his wife wore fake jewels. And then he’d find out about the illegitimate son and the gold and diamonds gone to pay for his upbringing, his education, maybe even the very car he was driving the day he was killed.

And good lawyer’s wife that she was, Eloise had planned-so she thought-for every contingency. Her will specified that her jewelry be buried with her. Sentiment, everyone would agree. The jewels had disappeared, and the insurance company would have paid up. But instead they resurfaced, very publicly. That, on top of her boy’s death, knocked her plan awry, and she must have seen only one solution-in the pill bottles beside her bed.

Oh, Eloise, you desperate, foolish, loving woman. By the time the tox results came back from the lab, she and her jewelry would be long buried.

No one would connect a Beverly Hills matron’s death with a GP killed in a car crash in the rural Midwest.

I switched off the glaring makeup light and the room subsided into shadows. I pocketed the bit of newspaper and carried the jewelry out to the dressing table. Now it hardly mattered whether anyone stole it before the funeral. Maybe one of these days, another pack of thieves, less discriminating, would steal the fake Cézannes and tie up that loose end.

The family didn’t know. And they never would, not from me. As I said, in Beverly Hills, the police don’t talk. The victims don’t talk. And I am my father’s daughter. Why should I?

OVER THIRTYBY CHRISTOPHER RICE

West Hollywood

The bus bench at the intersection of Santa Monica and La Cienega was empty, which meant that Jawbone was probably holed up in a shelter somewhere, possibly drying out from the combo of malt liquor and meth that kept him shouting at passing traffic for days on end. It was Ben’s lover Ron who had given Jawbone his nickname, a nod to the fact that the guy’s face was so wasted from drug use that the only solid thing left in it was his mandible. The intersection had been Jawbone’s turf for years now, and the fact that he had chosen this night to go on hiatus made Ben feel all the more shameful as he walked home from a sleazy gay bar at a little after 2 in the morning.

For most of the night he had guzzled weak vodka tonics. Then he had made the mistake of buying a tab of ecstasy off a nineteen-year-old tranny that had turned out to be spit and aspirin. Because he was slightly numb and seriously nauseous, it took Ben a few seconds to realize that he recognized the giant face staring down at him from the billboard for some new cop show that had just gone up over the intersection that afternoon. Ben had slept with the handsome actor right after moving to L.A. They had shared the same agent and the same cosmetic dentist and, to Ben’s disappointment, the same taste for throwing their ankles skyward in the bedroom. Now that he was being prepped for prime-time glory, it was a safe bet that the star-to-be, who had apparently changed his name from Peter Lefkin to Peter Lowe, no longer sped around West Hollywood in his Porsche convertible with Leontyne Pryce blasting from the stereo and a vial of coke tucked inside the pocket of his white jeans.

For a while, Ben just stood there, staring up at his former lover. Peter Lefkin Lowe had been given all of the same opportunities as Ben, and had adopted a few vices that Ben had never been forced to reckon with, and there he was, towering over the intersection of Santa Monica and La Cienega, while Ben, thirty-five and a year from his last acting job, stumbled home from a night spent watching adolescent go-go boys dance on top of a dirty bar.

He was supposed to be in Palm Springs getting wined and dined by his agent. But earlier that evening, an hour before he was supposed to brave rush hour traffic, Ben had taken a good hard look at the evidence and realized that his agent’s idea for a weekend getaway was probably a separation hearing. He hadn’t worked in over a year, not since being booted from the cast of A Passing Wind. Never mind that his four-year stint as alcoholic, sexually compulsive corporate attorney Arthur Bowden had earned him four Daytime Emmy nominations. Never mind that he had spent years training to be the kind of actor who didn’t have to hit the gym three times in a single day to make up for his lack of talent. The minute Ben Campbell started to grow a belly, Arthur Bowden’s life ended in a fiery helicopter crash, and now Ben Campbell was considering commercial work for the first time in ten years.

The bungalow he shared with his lover was the kind of tiny, absurdly expensive property that real estate agents referred to as charming and upwardly mobile gay couples referred to as transitional. Still, Ben felt a surge of pride as he approached it; this was the only real accomplishment he had left. Six years ago, he had convinced his lover Ron to take on the mortgage at almost ten percent interest, a testament to the fact that Ben’s powers of persuasion were dependent upon the firmness of his ass.

Ron would be furious when he found out Ben had cancelled on his agent, so Ben decided to delay the inevitable as long as possible by entering through the side gate instead of the front door. Ben had spent the last 365 potential working days turning the backyard into a Zen meditation retreat, but he hadn’t done much of anything in it besides sneak the occasional cigarette. Squares of white gravel held rows of faux-bonsai trees and a stone Buddha sat cross-legged in the middle of the yard, a thin stream of water gurgling from a hole in the center of its bald head. Ron’s only contribution to the landscaping had been to repeatedly batter it with his gas-powered leaf blower, before one of the neighbors called to angrily remind him that gas-powered leaf blowers were illegal in the city of West Hollywood. That was Ron-ever successful in all of his business endeavors, he was convinced that this gave him license to remain ever defiant in the face of small rules designed to make other people comfortable.

Maybe I’ll sleep on the sofa, Ben thought. What on earth would he tell Ron if he woke up? Sorry, honey. I jeopardized my relationship with my agent so I could spend the night at Rudy’s. You remember Rudy’s, don’t you, honey? That trashy dance club you and I went to last Friday when we ran out of the things to say to each other at dinner? The one where you got a hard-on for that twinky little porn star they had dancing on the bar? I even pretended to be the progressive gay wife while you slid a five-dollar bill into his sweaty jock strap, remember?

When he closed his hand around the knob, Ben realized that the back door was slightly open. Like most of their friends, they had come to a specific agreement about sex outside of the relationship. Unlike most of their friends, however, they had both agreed not to have any. Suddenly, Ben realized that he had executed the kind of detective work a suspicious wife usually took weeks to plan-he had convinced his lover he would be out of town and had not given any indication that he was returning home early.

A fluid-filled groan came from the direction of the master bedroom, too low to be heard by anyone besides a startled lover hovering on the back steps. Ben was confident that Ron had made the sound, and in his mind’s eye, he saw the nubile young porn star from Rudy’s straddling Ron’s hairy chest, the kid’s hands gripping the headboard in front of him as he jammed his erection down Ron’s throat. Force-feeding was Ron’s favorite position and Ben had assumed it countless times, fearing the day when he would be too heavy for Ron to accommodate him without cursing. From what Ben could remember, the kid had almond-shaped blue eyes, enormous bleached teeth, and a compact body that was still one-quarter teenager. The night Ron tipped the kid so handsomely, Ben had gone online and found out that the kid’s professional name was Mike Ellis and his most recent credits included The Boners and Farewell My Daddy. In terms of output, the kid’s career was outpacing Ben’s two to nothing.

The bedroom door was open. His fingers going numb as he gripped the edge of the doorframe, Ben peered in and saw the lower half of his lover’s body, his back resting against the bed’s footboard, his legs splayed on the carpet in front of him. The white soles of his sneakers stared back at Ben like eyes without irises. Ron’s head and torso were blocked by the towering figure standing in front of him. The exertion of the guy’s thrusts drove his baseball cap back over his mop of shoulder-length hair. Ben couldn’t see the stranger’s hands but he figured they were gripping the back of Ron’s head.

Ben had left the back door open behind him. He stepped out of it, just as silently as he had entered, when Ron let out a sharper, more high-pitched sound that suggested the activities being carried out in the bedroom had grown more penetrating. Ben made it to the box hedges that concealed the back fence, then he fell to his knees and threw up. After he caught his breath, he realized what a tragic irony it was that he had rid himself of all the chemicals that could have kept him numb during this.

TV movies had taught him that there would be certain pivotal moments in his life, so like a good little actor, he had rehearsed for them. The emotional press conference he would have to give after his adopted daughter was abducted off their front lawn. The moment when Ron finally sank down on one knee and officially proposed. And, of course, the black day when he would walk in on Ron in bed with someone else.

Where was the tearful rage he had practiced? What had become of the venomous one-liners he had meant to hurl at the offending home-wrecker as he made a mad dash from the bedroom? Indeed, it was Ben who had headed straight for the back door, not the tall baseball cap-wearing stranger. Now, down on his knees in a dark corner of his own backyard, he tried to read some meaning into his own strange instincts.

Why had he run? Why was he still hiding? Because it wasn’t a confrontation he wanted. He had to get a good look at the man who had led Ron to stray. He had to observe him. Pinpoint just what qualities the man had that Ben had squandered. Maybe Ben could get some of those things back, even if he had already lost Ron.

He drew his knees to his chest and wedged himself between the back fence and the box hedge, readjusting until he was in a position that allowed him to see the back door. After only a few minutes of this, his back started to tense up, and his stomach clenched at the thought that Ron might ask this stranger to spend the night with him in their bed. Their friends Phil and Tom had been in an open relationship together for years, but both of them were always eager to recite their number one ground rule: Never in our bed. If the wait became unbearable, Ben would use his cell phone to call the house, claim that he and his agent had had it out and he had pulled over to collect himself on the drive home. Would be there within minutes. Surely that would send the tall dark stranger racing out the back door.

The stranger had been too tall to be Mike Ellis, prince of the sweaty jock strap. That left the blond Yale Law graduate he and Ron had met at a fundraiser cocktail party for the Equal Liberties Defense Fund two weeks earlier. Yalie had made a beeline for Ron after spotting him across the buffet table. The arrogant little prick didn’t even bother to extend his hand to Ben when Ron finally introduced them after several agonizing minutes of small talk. Like every other twentysomething queen fresh off an American Airlines flight from JFK, Yalie heaped generous amounts of disdain on a city that had already granted him a flawless tan and the most spacious apartment he had ever lived in, all while undressing Ron with sparkling chestnut eyes.

Overboard. That was the expression Ron had used when Ben had vented his annoyance about the little son of a bitch on the ride home. When he saw the look on Ben’s face, Ron had tried a sheepish grin and said, “Relax. I said overboard. Not over thirty.”

The touch of cold steel brought Ben back into his body, and he realized he was standing in front of the garden shed, fingering the padlock on its doors. The lock had been left open and the gas-powered leaf blower abandoned on the dirt floor inside. Another image struck him. Ron hearing the phone ring over the leaf blower’s dull roar, tossing it inside the shed before he ran back inside the house, steps quickened by arousal and anticipation. A set of manual hedge clippers hung from a nail inside the shed. Ben could just make out their silhouette, knew that if he opened the doors a few more inches the security light over the back gate would throw them into sharp relief, transform them into an invitation he might not be able to turn down. When Lorena Bobbit cut off her husband’s dick, it didn’t actually kill him, Ben thought. Ergo, while cutting a man’s dick off is a very dangerous thing, it doesn’t always end in death. Castration and attempted murder are two different things.

He was growing impressed with this quick logic when the back door to the house slammed shut. Ben spun around just in time to see a shadow streak through the security light’s halo and out the side gate. The hedge clippers forgotten, Ben took off after the guy.

By the time Ben reached the sidewalk, the stranger was a block away, moving at a steady clip with his shoulders hunched forward and a backpack jostling against a puffy waffle-print coat that was too heavy for the spring evening.

The stranger somehow sensed that he was being pursued and whirled around. Ben threw himself behind a sycamore tree before he could be seen. He listened to the man’s frenzied whispers, tried to make out his words but couldn’t. After surveying the lay of shadows all around him, he decided to venture a peek. Half a block away, the stranger rocked back and forth, his head pivoting as if he had been scanning the sidewalk behind him and some internal gearshift had gotten stuck. A nearby porch light illuminated his matted shoulderlength hair but not his face.

The stranger backed up until he was at the mouth of an alleyway that ran behind the businesses on Santa Monica Boulevard, a once-important West Hollywood thoroughfare that had born the nickname Vaseline Alley before the sheriff’s department had planted traffic barriers at either end to keep the predators from cruising it after dark. When the stranger saw this new path of escape, he turned on his heel and entered it.

As soon as he reached the mouth of the alleyway, Ben called out to the stranger, who backed away from a dumpster he was trying to open with one hand.

“Jawbone,” Ben whispered.

The resident lunatic stared back at Ben with cue-ball eyes, chapped lips parted over yellowing teeth. Not a porn star. Not an Ivy League graduate. A deranged drug addict. He held a bulging black backpack in his right fist. The front flaps of his waffle-print coat were smeared with blood and it looked as if the bag was as well, even though the color partially masked the stains. Jawbone’s lips were moving rapidly, forming words Ben could barely hear.

“’Cause he wasn’t listening none, that’s why. ’Cause that thing was a-blowin’ and he wasn’t listenin’ none to what I say, so I had to… had to… had to…”

Displaying both of his palms at waist level, Ben started moving toward the man, trying to put nothing but supplication on his face even as he strained to hear the content of Jawbone’s frenzied speech, made even less intelligible by his heavy Southern accent.

“See I was tryin’ to get him to come out and see that there wasn’t somethin’ in his trash. Somethin’ movin’, alright? But he couldn’t hear me none over that blower…”

The leaf blower. Ron had been using that damn leaf blower and for some reason Jawbone, blitzed out of his head, had come into the yard, wanting his attention.

A few steps away from Jawbone, Ben lifted a hand and opened his mouth to speak. But before Ben made a sound, Jawbone spun, pulled the dumpster’s lid open with one hand, and tossed the black backpack inside. Then he took off running.

Everything inside of Ben seemed to rear up, trying to force him to chase Jawbone down the alley. But by the time this physical intention resolved itself into a coherent thought, Jawbone was gone. Go back to the house, Ben told himself, even as he pried open the dumpster’s lid with both hands. They weren’t fucking. Go back to the house now. But a more reasonable-sounding voice in his head told him that Jawbone had simply robbed them, that the blood stains all over him had been old, probably the result of some accident, and who knew what stereo equipment or old watches were stuffed inside the bag he had been so eager to get rid of.

Ben pulled a trash can over to the side of the dumpster, lifted the lid with one arm, and reached down for the bag with the other. When his fingers finally grazed a strap, his center of gravity shifted and suddenly he was eating plastic, having landed face-first on the mess of trash bags inside. The lid slammed shut and he jumped to his feet, pushing it back open, and set the bag down on the trash can’s lid.

Once his feet were on the pavement again, he heard a rustling sound behind him. He turned. The bag was rolling toward the middle of the alley, each revolution slightly lopsided, leaving a trail of blood smears across the pavement.

As soon as it came to a stop, Ben crouched down over it and tugged the zipper open.

He was still kneading the matted hair inside, wondering if all hair felt the same once a person’s head had been removed from his body, when a harsh spotlight pierced the alleyway and fixed on him. For a few dazed seconds, he thought the sheriff’s cruiser would continue on, leaving him alone with his lover’s severed head. Then he heard the clipped, hollow-sounding voice of the deputy speaking into his radio, followed by the squeak of rubber boots heading toward him.

When the deputy was a few feet away, Ben peered up at the squat shadow standing in the spotlight’s unrelenting glare, his right hand resting gently against the holster he had just unsnapped. Ben heard himself say, “I need to go home now.”

ONCE MORE, LAZARUSBY HÉCTOR TOBAR

East Hollywood

Before they found the gun, they were running through the trenches at a construction site, throwing dirt clods at each other. But for their overgrown adolescent bodies, an adult standing nearby might have mistaken them for grade-school boys playing cowboys and Indians. They’d stand up in a trench, “fire” at the boy in the next trench over, and laugh and duck when the clod exploded on the other’s shirt, leaving a faint brown circle of clinging dirt crumbs. Throwing dirt clods was more fun than vandalizing the tractor and the backhoe, both of which were immune to much vandalism anyway, sitting there stoic and yellow-metalled at one corner of the construction site, impervious to dirt clods and rocks and globs of tar and even a splash of urine. It was Elliot who peed on the tractor treads, to little or no effect other than the stinking mist he sent into the air, and it was Elliot who found the gun a few minutes later, lying on the bottom of the trench.

Actually, Elliot stepped on the gun. Or, to be more accurate, he tripped over it. This is what he told Detective Sanabria. Elliot was an especially bright fourteen-year-old, and he sensed that telling the story to Detective Sanabria with all its details was going a long way toward exculpating him of any guilt, and that each little twist and turn he could remember was keeping him out of the squad car now parked at the edge of the construction site. The gun itself needed no describing, having been photographed by Detective Sanabria, and then catalogued and tagged and carried away in a plastic bag. Elliot said he thought it was a toy at first, and this was true, until he picked it up, at which point its mass gave away its identity instantly, as did its intricate assemblage-the tiny screws above the trigger, the patterned indentations in the handle, the mysterious metal latches and slides, and the letters stamped into the black metal: CAUTION: capable of firing with magazine removed.

Detective Sanabria had grown up in this very East Hollywood neighborhood, gone to the very school across from the construction site, and could imagine the scene as if he had lived it himself. Danny, the victim, was the first bystander to run over, drawn by Elliot’s sudden stillness and silence before the object he was holding. Soon that same wordlessness had overtaken all the other boys, their shouts and laughter replaced by the identical frozen Os of their stunned adolescent mouths. Across the street, sinewy thirdand fourth-grade girls were running and playing tag and kickball on the school playground, without a clue about what these older kids were up to. Elliot slipped out of the momentary trance, smiled wickedly at the other boys, and raised the weapon and pointed it at the ponytailed girls. The girls didn’t notice, they just bounced a red ball rhythmically against a narrow wall that jutted like a sail from the playground’s asphalt blacktop, singing a song, while Elliot closed one eye and pretended to aim, looking down the stubby barrel.

Elliot laughed, and then passed the gun on to the victim, this boy they called Danny but who Detective Sanabria would soon identify as Daniel José Cruz Jr., age fourteen and a half, born in San Vicente, El Salvador, a resident of 5252 Harold Way, Hollywood, California, and just as American as fried chicken and potato salad. The victim had taken the gun, and like the little boy and the knucklehead he really was, he had turned the barrel toward himself to look inside.

Knucklehead: It was not a word Detective Sanabria used growing up in this neighborhood, where Spanish and Armenian were starting to crowd out English, causing it to retreat from whole chunks of the day. Knucklehead was an appellation used at the station for bank robbers who got caught in the parking lot fiddling with the ignition in their getaway cars, shoplifters wearing pilfered sweaters with the price tags still attached, murderers who shot off their own fingers and their girlfriends with the same bullet.

If Danny had not been shipped away to intensive care at the Children’s Hospital (Detective Sanabria’s least favorite place to visit on earth), Detective Sanabria would have given him a good knucklehead slap at precisely the spot where the bullet entered his brain.

“¿Tienes miedo? No te agüites.”

Danny turned his wrist to look at the inside of the barrel, which was his way of answering Elliot’s taunt: No, he wasn’t afraid; he could stare into the most dangerous part of the gun, the part that could kill you. He wanted to show all the other boys his lack of fear. The circular cavity was coming into view when a light flashed and he heard a roar that somehow penetrated into the darkness that followed, the sustained thunder of a river tumbling over a cliff or a zoo of animals letting out a simultaneous roar, followed by the absolute silence of a dreamless sleep.

He opened his eyes to the soft glow of fluorescent lamps, and caught the sharp glint of light reflecting off stainless steel. He was on his back, suddenly, in a bed. His first fully formed thought was that it was not right that he could close his eyes and be transported from one place to the next, from the ditches and the dirt of the construction site to this strange room of glowing light with-what was this?-tubes taped to his arms. He fell asleep again, drifting in and out of wakefulness many times, and had the sensation that he was floating above the bed in a slow tumble. Finally, his eyes became fixed and steady and he could tell exactly where he was: a hospital. In a corner of the room, he saw a stocky and familiar figure, a woman in a blouse that fit too tight against her round belly, asleep in her chair, her open mouth facing the ceiling like the top of a snoring chimney.

“Mamá,” he said.

His mother startled awake. She looked at him with a perplexed, confused gaze, and he quickly understood that being awake was not something expected of him, that sleeping was now his natural condition.

“¡Hijo!” she shouted, so loud that the sound waves reverberated in his skull, which, he now realized, was covered with a helmet of gauze bandages. His mother brought her hands together and fell into prayer, closing her eyes, looking much as she had just a moment ago when she was snoring, words he could not hear drifting skyward from her lips like steam.

Danny soon forgot about her, raising his arms to inspect the tubes that fed a silky liquid into his wrists, lifting his fingers to touch the bandages, probing very gingerly for the place the bullet had entered. Inside his skull there was now an opening, a round path through his head, a cylinder as long and wide as the barrel of a gun.

“So you shot yourself,” Detective Sanabria said. “Good job, knucklehead. Do me a favor. Make that the last shot you ever fire from a gun.”

Children and guns were Detective Sanabria’s obsession, his off-hours hobby. The other detectives in Hollywood Division left copies of their reports on Sanabria’s desk whenever they handled cases in which children were shot, or in which children shot at other children. A ten-year-old shooting his sister in the shoulder with a.22; a two-year-old shot through the heart while in his playpen, the bullet crossing through three walls thanks to the penetrating power of an AK-47. Detective Sanabria could not explain why or when this obsession began, though his old partner Detective Nazarian knew perfectly well: He had been Sanabria’s friend since way back in the academy, and had been at the scene of Sanabria’s first homicide (it was also Nazarian’s first), which just happened to be four blocks from the elementary school they had both attended, an old brick edifice built in the early glory days of Hollywood, with the dusty pictures of silent film star alumni growing moldy behind a glass case in the office. Nazarian had seen the stunned look on then-probationary Officer Sanabria’s face when he looked down at that bleeding, dying eight-year-old whose walnut-shaped eyes and copper skin bore a striking resemblance to Detective Sanabria’s own.

In the case of Daniel “Danny” Cruz, Detective Sanabria’s investigation and the trace of the nine-millimeter gun that had placed Danny in this bed had been as fruitless as it usually was. Manufactured by the American Patriot Gun Co. of Waukegan, Illinois, the weapon had been sold to the Guns R Us Mart of Phoenix, Arizona, and then to a certain Andrew Palazzo, who, when contacted by Detective Sanabria by phone, said that he had sold the gun at a swap meet in Mesa, Arizona some six years ago.

“Untraceable,” Detective Nazarian had remarked when Sanabria told him the results of his two-hour investigation. “Unknowable.”

Detective Nazarian had seen enough cases of children and guns that he wanted to get out of police work, which was why he was going to graduate school and starting to toss around words like “unknowable,” which everyone in the Hollywood LAPD station found annoying, especially Detective Sanabria. But it was probably true: How and why some idiot had left a loaded gun in the construction site across the street from an elementary school was probably unknowable. So that left the victim Danny to talk to.

Detective Sanabria could not pretend he was here for any investigation. He was here for something else-to do something he did not know how to do, that he felt queasily uncomfortable doing, which was to make the speech and twist his face into the angry I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass-youngman stare that would keep Daniel “Danny” Cruz away from guns the rest of his life.

He stood staring at Danny with a lingering, pathetic, hopeless absence of words. “Now you know what a bullet can do to you,” was the best he could do. “Or maybe you don’t really know yet. Because you’re still alive, aren’t you? And you shouldn’t be.”

Only much later, days after Danny had taken his first, lightheaded steps away from the hospital bed, after the nurses had helped him walk through the ward, after listening to the doctor give his mother a much-too-long list of instructions for his care, when he was back in the familiar and messy nest of his room, did he realize exactly what had happened to him.

He had shot himself in the skull and survived.

He had been in a coma for two weeks, at one point nearly left for dead.

“You cheated death,” his mother said. “We even had a priest here.”

Danny remembered the first time he had understood what death was, in bed under his covers when he was still in elementary school. In the darkness of his room, hours after watching a movie filled with medieval battle scenes in which one of the protagonists had exited the world of the living with an especially poignant soliloquy, the abstraction of death had become real for the first time. It was perfect blackness, a sleep from which he would never awaken, forever tucked under the football helmets on his comforter, the bedroom lights permanently off.

Danny the hospital patient had a new appreciation for what death meant and, at the same time, could now see the possibility that he might “cheat” it. He could run away from death like those quick-footed boys in that game they used to play in gym, “War,” where you stood with your friends in a cluster of bodies and dodged the rubber balls your classmates threw at you, until only one boy was left-the winner. Danny had done something like that: A brass bullet spinning through the air, on fire, had taken aim at his brain and he had twisted away just enough to avoid being killed.

The more he thought about it, the more he saw his survival was an act of will, rather than a stroke of luck. Danny was not yet fifteen and unprepared to accept the idea that his life could end so stupidly. He noticed adults shook their heads when they looked at the scar under his eye socket, a pushed-in nub of darker, stringy flesh. He saw in this a gesture of admiration for his strength and courage. Elliot looked a little afraid of him, which made Danny feel happy and triumphant. “Jesus, man, you lived,” Elliot said. “I don’t know anybody who’s taken a bullet in the head and lived.”

Before he had been shot, the most daring thing Danny had ever done was back in his days at LeConte Junior High School when he broke into the campus after hours-with Elliot-walking through the empty hallways trying to crack open the odd locker or two. He had never been a good vandal because he always heard his mother’s voice when he tried to do those things. In the years since his father had left for El Salvador, never to return, Danny’s numerous Los Angeles relatives had reminded him that a boy should respect his mother, that he shouldn’t dishonor her: They were all alone, a working woman and her young son, and any bad thing he did would be a reflection on her. His mother, in turn, doted on him. She bought the blankets and curtains printed with the logos of football teams that decorated his bedroom, with their one-eyed pirates and stylized birds of prey. She had bought him the dragon poster that loomed over the bed on which he was now sitting. These things belonged to a boy, and he wasn’t a boy, not anymore. He was suddenly angry at his mother, for no other reason than he felt her protective presence everywhere in his room.

Danny stood up and walked out of his room, then through the living room and the smell of soup and cooked meat that always lived there, and out the front door. Reaching the sidewalk, he stopped for a long time to examine the other stucco bungalows on the block, the palm trees that all leaned toward the south, the cars and vans parked in the driveways, their dented bodies covered with white patches. It all looked familiar, and at the same time, completely different. The pinks and yellows and blues of the houses were faded and sun-bleached, the palm trees were sad and weary. For his entire life he had lived on this block, he had pushed toy trucks and ridden tricycles and bicycles up and down the sidewalks. Everyone on the block knew his name.

Beyond this quiet little neighborhood was the real Hollywood, the thoroughfares of liquor stores and hotels, motels and sex shops, which had always existed on the fringes of his boy consciousness as a forbidden, dangerous hinterland of gaudy marquees. Danny the boy used to ride the bus home from school and stay away from the freaks on Vermont and Western. Danny the wounded warrior decided it was time to take a walk, toward the thick metallic sound of traffic on the avenues and the rising cry of firetrucks and police patrols. In a few minutes he found himself facing the din and the carbontinged air of Hollywood Boulevard, its long parallel rows of street lamps just beginning to glow white in the twilight. He was standing near the bottom of a gentle slope several miles long, the boulevard a buckling line of asphalt rising into the distant hills toward a gleaming array of billboards and hotel towers that clung to the mountainside, far away but reachable.

Danny had walked just half a block when he stopped, frozen in place by an image glowing from the side of a bus shelter. It was an illuminated movie poster depicting a man in a charcoal suit who held a gun at his side, a thin woman in a short skirt leaning against him, holding a gun too, but with two hands instead of just one. That’s the way you’re supposed to hold a weapon. Away from your body, pointed downward. The steel glint of their guns seemed to match the sheen of their clothes, the breathlessness of their pose. They stood, magically, on a platform of letters that spelled out the movie’s title: NO TIME TO LOSE. Behind them rose a city of shadows, the silhouettes of tall buildings standing before a black mountain, the same city that stood before Danny in real life, a warren of alleyways where adversaries lurked in ambush, a place where a man might do battle with other men, each holding his weapon smartly between his palms, ready to guide bullets on the paths bullets were meant to take.

When he drifted back home and turned on the tiny television in his room, he saw the gun-holding couple from the poster in a commercial. “In the dark corridors of a violent city,” the voice-over intoned, “there is no time to lose.” Weapons, he noticed, were being drawn on about half of the channels on his cable system. There were soldiers carrying rifles, villains swinging machine guns from their hips, housewives cowering in closets with silver-plated.22s, ready to fend off intruders and rapists. Some of the scenes were filmed in squat palmlined residential neighborhoods that looked much like his own. People fired guns while crouched behind cement walls; they fired guns in kitchens; they fired guns while falling from airplanes; they fired guns and then jumped into lakes and rivers; they fired guns in warehouses, pinging bullets deflecting off iron beams.

Danny had become a member of the fraternity of gunslingers, and, like the people on the television screen, he began to feel looked-at. When he finally returned to school at Hollywood High, he drew stares everywhere he went. One of the football players said hello and gave him a hearty, friendly punch on the shoulder. Girls touched his scar with soft fingers that brushed against his cheek. Sandra, the one with the flowing black curls, the girl he had stared at for months without saying a word, cornered him by surprise in a hallway. For the first time, he was close enough to take in the scent of her perfume, a basket of overripe peaches that had dissolved into the air around her. Like everyone else, she had heard about his accident.

“Are you okay? I mean, that must have been awful, to be in a coma,” she said. “Are you totally, you know, like healed?”

No other schoolmate had asked about his health. Only Sandra had been thoughtful enough, which to Danny immediately confirmed what he had always imagined: that she was as saintly as she was beautiful. Now he was speaking to her, his nerves steady because he was a wounded warrior, not a boy. They talked about his accident, about life and death, about the school and how stupid everyone was. Sandra wanted to know what it felt like to be dead: She was convinced that he had “passed over to the other side and come back.” He made up a story about seeing clouds and angels that brought tears to her eyes.

Part of it was true; the old Danny had gone to sleep and died and this new Danny had taken his place, a Danny who wasn’t afraid to touch Sandra’s hand the third time they talked, a Danny who knew when to reach over and kiss her, how to wrap his arm around the arch of her back when they necked. A few days after they first spoke, they were under the bleachers at dusk, tugging awkwardly at each other’s clothes, scattered cups and hot dog wrappers at their feet. A week after that half-consummated encounter, they were in his room, fully naked on the bed with the football curtains and his baseball glove as witnesses.

When they said their goodbyes and he watched her walk away down the sidewalk from the perch of his bedroom window, he knew for certain that the old Danny had died forever. He felt possessive of her in a hard, brittle way: Her blue jeans belonged to him, her lips, and the small scar on her chin. It was an unexpected thing to feel; tenderness and vulnerability at one moment, and then a kind of anger the next. The third time they were alone in his room, he pushed her arms forcefully against the floor. He was about to pull his hands away and apologize, but when he looked at her eyes he saw that roughness was what she expected from him all along. The boy who had been shot had to have a core of steel.

Danny took to greeting everyone, all the time, with an angry gaze and found himself losing his patience for the routine and rhythms of the school day. By late morning, he was already squirming in his seat, daydreaming about fistfights, doodling pictures of fanciful weapons. On the bus home, he looked at the other passengers and wondered which one would challenge him, and how he would strike back with balled-up fists and kicks. He always won these imaginary fisticuffs, standing triumphantly over his bleeding adversaries. Finally, and without any good reason, he found his real-life self decking a tenth-grader named Pedro Carrillo in the cafeteria. The guy ran off, sobbing, and for the first time in his life Danny felt like a stupid bully.

In the days that followed, Pedro walked around the school with one eye swimming in a purple cloud of cracked veins. The word on campus was that there would be a settling of accounts with Pedro’s older brothers, a portly senior and even more portly dropout who held court several hours each day in front of a tattoo parlor on Vine Street, next to the star on the Walk of Fame honoring Rin Tin Tin. It was said that one of the Carrillo brothers would jump Danny on the football field during PE, or ambush him in the cafeteria, or that the other would shoot him on Wilton Place after he stepped off the bus. Danny was one young man against three brothers. Asking Elliot for a gun to even the odds seemed like the logical thing to do. Elliot produced one two days later, a snub revolver that bore no resemblance to the sleek weapon Danny had shot himself with. “I got it from a guy on Western, a guy my brothers told me about.”

Danny was headed home one Friday, walking past the elementary school, walking almost at a trot because he was going to pick up Sandra and take her to his room, when something cut past his ear. A half second later he heard the unmistakable report of a gun. Instinctively, he fell to the ground, looking up to see the largest of the Carrillo brothers walking toward him from across the street, a gun at his side, trying his best to assume the fierce and demented look of an actor shooting his way through an R-rated thriller. Danny stood up, quickly grabbed his own weapon from his backpack, and pointed it at Pedro’s brother, stopping him in his tracks. For a moment, the two gunslingers looked at each other with childlike befuddlement. Then Danny began firing, squinting his eyes against the explosions of his gun. Pedro’s brother started running, across the street and into the construction site, where he jumped into a ditch lined with metal rebar. From just a few paces away, Danny fired again, not squinting so much now and sure he would hit his target, but instead he felt a burning pain in his back. He fell, as stiff and heavy as a downed tree, and plopped down into a pile of earth, face first. A woman screamed from across the street. Pedro’s brother moaned from the ditch, calling out, “You shot me, you shot me,” in a pleading voice that seemed to belong to a five-year-old. Danny moved his head, an act of will against the currents of pain that ran up and down his spine, and looked into a deep hole carved into the soil. He saw chunks of mud floating about a pool of black water, and wanted to cry because he knew he would be buried soon, dressed forever in wet earth.

The daylight around him dissolved quickly. He entered a self-conscious dream, lifting himself from the ground and beginning to run through a dark corridor, stumbling toward home and his room, to the bed his mother always made for him. If he could lose himself under the blankets, his mother would kiss him goodnight. The dream ended and he was vaguely aware of being on a bed that was not his own, of lights shining beyond the black universe inside his skull, of his limbs being lifted and prodded, of formless voices chattering about him. He wanted desperately to open his eyes; he tried lifting his arms and kicking his feet, but he had turned into something heavy and immovable After the longest of efforts, he succeeded in opening his eyes, seeing what had to be an apparition: a dark man standing at the center of an aura of yellow light, a glint of metal on his chest, his lips moving but the words unintelligible. Danny slipped back into his nothingness.

“Danny. Danny. Danny.” It was a familiar voice, his mother speaking calmly, evenly. “Danny. Danny. Aquí estoy.”

He opened his eyes easily, naturally, without much effort at all. “Mamá,” he said.

She was standing over him, as was Sandra, the two women on opposite sides of the bed, each clutching one of his hands in theirs, rubbing his fingers and his palm with identical strokes. No one spoke. For the moment he merely looked at them-the familiar, round figure of his mother, and Sandra, who had changed in some way he could not put words to. Sandra stared at him with brown eyes swimming in a pool of tears, fixed on him with a strange and desperate intensity.

“You look older,” he said. Danny sensed that many days, weeks, maybe even months had passed while he was asleep. The skin of his arms and hands had turned soggy and the sunlight outside the hospital window belonged to a different, colder season than the one he remembered. The world had aged in his absence.

“She’s having your baby,” his mother said.

He lowered his chin to look at Sandra’s belly, which did, in fact, rise slightly with an unfamiliar roundness. She brought her hands to the roundness and cradled it.

“Our baby,” she said.

Danny felt the blood rushing to his skull, and let his head fall back on the pillow. Being awake was too complicated, so he closed his eyes and waited, in vain, to slip back into sleep.

“Hijo, hijo, are you okay?”

“I knew we shouldn’t have told him,” Sandra said.

“What do you mean? You think he’s not going to notice you with your belly?”

“We should have waited…”

The two women argued, the words bouncing back and forth over his prone body, until he spoke again.

“How long have I been asleep?” he asked with his eyes still closed.

“Three months,” his mother said.

“Almost four,” Sandra added. “The detective was here yesterday and he said he saw you open your eyes. So we came here to sit with you.”

“And to pray,” his mother said.

He fell asleep to the sound of the two women whispering Hail Marys in different languages, his mother’s “… y en la hora de nuestra muerte…” tangled up with Sandra’s “… pray for us sinners…”

Detective Sanabria sat at the foot of the bed, the round and vaguely Olmec features of his face molded into a tense mask of irritation and befuddlement. “Paralyzed. Both you and the other knucklehead, Beto Carrillo. Poetic justice. That’s what my partner called it. You guys shot your legs out from under each other. Good work, pendejo. Me and the D.A. figure you’ve both been punished enough already so there will be no ADW charges. Your friend Elliot’s in juvie-he’s going to do time for you… Yeah, I found out he gave you the gun. Won’t tell me where he got it, the little brat.”

Danny thought that he, too, would like to know where the gun came from. He thought of what the grip felt like in his hands, remembered wincing when he fired it, and wondered who else had touched it, what other damage it had done, which other children had played with it. On his back in this hospital bed, with his mother standing over him, Danny was starting to think of himself as a boy again. Somewhere there was a factory that churned out toy trucks and bullets for children, passing them on to toy stores, and to gun traffickers who operated in the alleyways of East Hollywood, selling them to boys like Elliot. The bullets in the gun Danny bought had cut the wires to another young man’s legs, just as the wires to his own legs had been cut, forever.

Forever is a long time when you’re fourteen years old. None of the doctors who came to see him used that word, though it was clearly the word they meant to use every time they talked about his condition. The doctors were specialists in fields whose names were too complicated to remember. There were coma doctors, spinal cord doctors, doctors interested in his moods, and doctors who talked about rehabilitation. They shined lights in his eyes and wrote notes about what they saw; they poked and prodded his legs, attached sensors to his skull and watched his brain waves on a monitor. As a whole, the doctors were optimistic about his “recovery,” but fatalists when it came to his chances for walking again. After a few days, a burly hospital worker lifted him off the bed and onto a wheelchair with a cheerful, “Your new wheels, dude!”

From now on, Danny would see things from four feet off the ground. Melancholia robbed him of speech, he could barely grunt a yes or a no when Sandra came to see him again, her belly rounder still. Every few days she seemed to get bigger. He was helpless before her stomach, the child growing underneath the hard shell of a belly she forced him to touch. “You’re going to walk again,” she said emphatically. “You are. I know it.”

When he went back to school, he became, briefly, an object of curiosity. The girls took turns wheeling him around and putting their arms on his shoulders. One girl rubbed her fingers through his hair affectionately, but this only depressed him more because it reminded him of those parts of his body where he could no longer feel anything. For a week or so, the guys on the football team took turns pushing him around school, and for one game he sat in his chair next to the team bench, the helmeted players patting him on the cheek near the scar of his first bullet “for good luck.” Danny sat and sulked all game long. They didn’t invite him back.

People began to avoid him, ducking into side passages when he wheeled down the hallways. No one asked to see the scar left by the second bullet, the angry red welt below his ribs, and the meandering scar in his back where the doctors had removed the metal. No one asked to hear stories about what it was like to be dead-a second time-and to come to life again. He became a ghostly, solitary figure, haunting the campus, pushing himself across the quad, inching forward with a stop-and-go roll. Sandra sometimes followed alongside him, until she became too big and round to go to class. Eventually he stopped going to school too, despite the pleas of his mother, who grew frustrated and irritable with him. “No seas mujer,” she snapped at him. Don’t be a woman. But even that insult couldn’t shake him from his leaden mood.

Mostly, he watched television. In the movies, he noticed, people who got shot were never paralyzed. They bore their wounds with a grimace and rose to their feet, chasing after their enemies; or they died dignified deaths, giving long speeches before they closed their eyes forever. No gunslinger ever suffered the humiliation of sitting all day in a vinyl chair, trapped with the vinegar smell of his inert legs, forced to endure the protracted lamentations of his mother and his pregnant girlfriend, who both wondered how they would feed the baby, once it was born.

After a week rooted like an angry weed to the floors of the bungalow, Danny finally got fed up and decided to wander the neighborhood in his wheelchair, joining the parallel universe of mumbling bottle collectors and lunatics who made their home on the sidewalks. He inched along slowly, deliberately, pushing hard to roll the wheelchair over the concrete squares where tree roots had raised the sidewalk, and up the steep ramps that were cut into the curb at each corner. It was during one of these excursions that, one afternoon, three blocks on from his house, he coasted down a slight slope, half hoping he would gain speed, lose control, and bounce into traffic. Instead, he came to a stop at the construction site across the street from his old elementary school. The dirt trenches were gone and the ground was covered with a vast table of concrete. Twice he had been shot here and left for dead. His manhood had arrived and slipped away from one moment to the next. A sense of injustice rose through his body, a muffled crimson scream. He stared directly into the yellow, fiery light of the sun, then turned away and cried, burying his hot face in his hands, weeping until his chest felt as weak and drained as his legs. Finally, he sat up, opening his eyes to the sight of girls running up and down the playground across the street, skipping with strong, healthy legs.

Danny was headed back home, very slowly, because his arms were tired of pushing, when he found his path blocked by a pair of standing denim pants on the sidewalk. They belonged to a rather large and roundish teenage girl.

“You prick,” she said.

Danny looked up and gave her a quizzical, annoyed look. “Get out of my way,” he mumbled, without much conviction.

“Who’s going to take care of Beto, you prick?” The girl reached into the backpack that dangled from her shoulder, a pink affair decorated with a pouting Betty Boop, and produced a small chrome gun, barely bigger than the palm of her hand. “Who’s going to take care of him, you prick?”

Danny grabbed the rubber tires of his wheelchair and pushed backward, first calmly and then with panic, as the girl raised her toy-sized gun and pointed it at him. He looked at the tiny opening of the gun’s barrel and pushed harder, but couldn’t get any distance between him and the girl, who kept marching toward him, mascara rivers racing down her cheeks. He tried to turn around, bouncing the chair and its wheels the way a therapist at the hospital had taught him, but he succeeded only in tipping the chair over, falling to the ground with a thud and a crash, his cheek crushed against the cement sidewalk.

Without hearing the gunshots, he felt the impact of the bullets on his body, the first striking him near the waist, the second at the base of the neck, sending a starburst of blue light across his eyelids. His skull became a bell made of bone. All at once, everything turned mercifully quiet.

He slipped into a dream in which he saw himself sprawled on the sidewalk, being lifted by men in black suits, the girl with the Betty Boop backpack standing against a nearby tree, sucking her thumb. Small chunks of silver and brass dripped from his back. He saw Pedro’s brother standing waist-high in a ditch, his arms raised in a plea: Help me. Elliot came to place a finger inside Danny’s first wound, the one in his cheek, wiggling the finger about like a worm. Danny shook his head and tried to push him away, and startled awake to see he was inside an ambulance, a paramedic’s latex gloves pulling back his eyelids. “Hey, Louie, we got him back!” the paramedic shouted. Danny passed out, tumbling into a warm dreamlessness, and then woke up again, alone, months later, in a room with green walls. For a few minutes he listened to the beep of a machine that echoed his own heartbeat until the steady, soft sound made him drowsy and he closed his eyes again.

When Detective Sanabria came to the Children’s Hospital some time later, he spent a good two hours at the foot of Danny’s bed. He felt especially useless before the sight of this boy’s prone body. Sanabria was beginning to question his place in the world, the assumptions about goodness, strength, and perseverance that had informed his life up to now; the hours of study in community college, his struggles at Cal State L.A. in classes like Applied Psychology and Urban Criminology, his monklike devotion to the reading of prolix police manuals that had ended with his consecration as detective. Here on the bed before him was a boy who had managed to get himself shot not once, but three times, twice with Sanabria looking after him, as it were. The girl with the gun in her Betty Boop backpack was in juvie, learning to draw pictures of weeping girl-clowns from her fellow inmates, and as unwilling as the rest of the knuckleheads to give up the name of the person who had sold her the gun. The gun traffickers operated a machinery of violence that churned up the fertile ground in Detective Sanabria’s corner of East Hollywood. He saw them as blood merchants filling a charnel house with the bones of children, stacking femurs and punctured skulls harvested from the streets, lining their foul clothing with the quarters, the nickels, and the rolled-up dollar bills of children.

The doctors’ prognosis was that Danny would never again awaken, that the forever of his wheelchair had become the forever of his sleep. Detective Sanabria stood up from his chair, walked over to the bed, and stood over the boy. He kissed Daniel “Danny” Cruz Jr. on the forehead, and then painted an invisible cross there with his thumb, a gesture the detective’s own Mexican mother annoyingly repeated each time they parted.

“God, I hate this fucking hospital,” he said, and left.

Two weeks later, Danny was awakened by a distant, highpitched wail, and saw a fuzzy object at the foot of his bed, a human-like figure that persisted in its unfocused, blurry state, until he blinked several times and it began to take form: First he saw Sandra, her face bloated and paler than he remembered, and then the infant she cradled in her arms, a baby girl with an even chunkier face and a broad, flat nose. “What’s going on?” he said abruptly, causing Sandra to startle and look up at him, and the baby to stop crying and look at him too.

“You’re awake!” Sandra called out, as the baby began to gnaw at her own wrist with toothless gums, sucking with a cracking sound that was like bubble gum popping. For a moment, Danny was hypnotized by the sight of the baby, by the two pink barrettes attached to her thin black hair, the way her jaws moved as she chewed, and by the flower-bud mouth that was revealed when her wrist fell away.

Suddenly, he felt the urge to sit up, to lift his back off the bed. He grabbed hold of the aluminum bars at his side, rose up, and felt the blood rush to his head, his eyes beginning a slow roll backwards, until he shook out the dizziness. Without saying a word, Sandra passed the child to him and he held her, feeling her tiny chest rise and fall against his shoulder. He listened to the fast, desperate pant of her breathing, and felt the warm flow of baby drool as it soaked through his hospital smock and dripped down his chest, past the wounds near his ribs.

Danny raised a finger and gently tapped her nose. For a moment, he worried he might hurt her, that the needles in his wrists might stick her, but the fear passed. Time ticked forward with no other sound than the occasional trumpetblaring of Sandra blowing her nose, and he noticed that the frame of the hospital room window was being filled, quickly, with the tangerine hue of a disappearing California afternoon. Danny saw his daughter’s future unfolding, the yellow march of many suns across the heavens, and the slow, slow progress of the months and years they would live together in the waking world, an epoch of quiet never broken by the sound of gunfire.

Sandra wiped her nose and got up from the chair, then looked at the baby and broke into a bright, childlike smile of wonder. “She fell asleep in your arms!”

Danny listened to his daughter’s breathing grow steady, and felt rhythmic puffs of wind beating softly against his chest. He kept very still.