Whispers

Then Tony said, "Whatever weakness and faults you might have, you're a pretty damned good cop."

Frank glanced at him, startled.

"I mean it," Tony said. "There's been friction between us. A lot of the time, we rub each other the wrong way. Maybe we won't be able to work together. Maybe we'll have to put in requests for new partners. But that'll just be a personality difference. In spite of the fact that you're about three times as rough with people as you ever need to be, you're good at what you do."

Frank cleared his throat. "Well ... you, too."

"Thank you."

"Except sometimes you're just too ... sweet."

"And you can be a sour son of a bitch sometimes."

"Want to ask for a new partner?"

"I don't know yet."

"Me either."

"But if we don't start getting along better, it's too dangerous to go on together much longer. Partners who make each other tense can get each other killed."

"I know," Frank said. "I know that. The world's full of assholes and junkies and fanatics with guns. You have to work with your partner as if he was just another part of you, like a third arm. If you don't, you're a lot more likely to get blown away."

"So I guess we should think seriously about whether we're right for each other."

"Yeah," Frank said.

Tony started looking for street numbers on the buildings they passed. "We should be just about there."

"That looks like the place," Frank said, pointing.

The address on Juan Mazquezza's Vee Vee Gee pay record was a sixteen-unit garden apartment complex in a block largely taken over by commercial interests: service stations, a small motel, a tire store, an all-night grocery. From a distance the apartments looked new and somewhat expensive, but on closer inspection Tony saw signs of decay and neglect. The exterior walls needed a new coat of stucco; they were badly chipped and cracked. The wooden stairs and railings and doors all needed new paint. A signpost near the entrance said the place was Las Palmeras Apartments. The sign had been hit by a car and badly damaged, but it hadn't been replaced. Las Palmeras looked good from a distance because it was cloaked in greenery that masked some of its defects and softened the splintery edges. But even the landscaping, when scrutinized closely, betrayed the seediness of Las Palmeras; the shrubs had not been trimmed in a long time, and the trees were raggedy, and the jade shrubs were in need of care.

The pattern at Las Palmeras could be summed up in one word: transition. The few cars in the parking area reinforced that evaluation. There were two middle-priced new cars that were lovingly cared for, gleaming with fresh wax. No doubt they belonged to young men and women of optimism and were signs of accomplishment to them. A battered and corroded old Ford leaned on one flat tire, unused and unuseable. An eight-year-old Mercedes stood beyond the Ford, washed and waxed, but a bit worse for wear; there was a rusty dent in one rear fender. In better days, the owner was able to purchase a twenty-five-thousand-dollar automobile, but now he apparently couldn't come up with the two-hundred-dollar deductible part of the repair bill. Las Palmeras was a place for people in transition. For some of them, it was a way station on the upward climb to bright and beckoning careers. For others, it was a precarious spot on the cliff, the last respectable toehold on a sad and inevitable fall into total ruin.

As Frank parked by the manager's apartment, Tony realized that Las Palmeras was a metaphor for Los Angeles. This City of Angels was perhaps the greatest land of opportunity the world had ever known. Incredible quantities of money moved through here, and there were a thousand ways to earn a sizable bankroll. L.A. produced enough success stories to fill a daily newspaper. But the truly astounding affluence also created a variety of tools for self-destruction and made them widely available. Any drug you wanted could be found and bought easier and quicker in Los Angeles than in Boston or New York or Chicago or Detroit. Grass, hashish, heroin, cocaine, uppers, downers, LSD, PCP.... The city was a junkie's supermarket. Sex was freer, too. Victorian principles and sensibilities had collapsed in Los Angeles faster than they had in the rest of the country, partly because the rock music business was centered there, and sex was an integral part of that world. But there were other vastly more important factors that had contributed to the unchaining of the average Californian's libido. The climate had something to do with it; the warm dry days and the subtropical light and the competing winds--desert and sea winds--had a powerful erotic influence. The Latin temperament of the Mexican immigrants made its mark on the population at large. But perhaps most of all, in California you felt that you were on the edge of the Western world, on the brink of the unknown, facing an abyss of mystery. It was seldom a conscious awareness of being on the cultural edge, but the subconscious mind was bathed in that knowledge at all times, an exhilarating and sometimes scary feeling. Somehow, all of those things combined to break down inhibitions and stir the gonads. A guilt-free view of sex was healthy, of course. But in the special atmosphere of L.A., where even the most bizarre carnal tastes could be indulged with little difficulty, some men (and women) could become as addicted to sex as to heroin. Tony had seen it happen. There were some people, certain personality types, who chose to throw everything away--money, self-respect, reputation--in an endless party of fleshy embraces and brief wet thrills. If you couldn't find your personal humiliation and ruin in sex and drugs, L.A. provided a smorgasbord of crackpot religions and violence-prone radical political movements for your consideration. And of course, Las Vegas was only one hour away by cheap regularly scheduled airlines, free if you could qualify as a high-rolling junketeer. All of those tools for self-destruction were made possible by the truly incomprehensible affluence. With its wealth and its joyous celebration of freedom, Los Angeles offered both the golden apple and the poisoned pear: positive transition and negative transition. Some people stopped at places like Las Palmeras Apartments on their way up, grabbed the apple, moved to Bel Air or Beverly Hills or Malibu or somewhere else on the Westside, and lived happily ever after. Some people tasted the contaminated fruit, and on the way down they made a stop at Las Palmeras, not always certain how or why they'd wound up there.

In fact, the manager of the apartment complex did not appear to understand how the patterns of transition had brought her to her current circumstances. Her name was Lana Haverby. She was in her forties, a well-tanned blonde in shorts and halter. She had a good opinion of her sexual attractiveness. She walked and stood and sat as if she were posing. Her legs were okay, but the rest of her was far from prime. She was thicker in the middle than she seemed to realize, too big in hips and butt for her skimpy costume. Her breasts were so huge that they were not attractive but freakish. The thin halter top exposed canyonesque cleavage and accentuated the large turgid nipples, but it could not give her breasts the shape and uplift they so desperately needed. When she wasn't changing her pose or adjusting it, when she wasn't trying to gauge what effect her body had on Frank and Tony, she seemed confused, distracted. Her eyes didn't always appear to be focused. She tended to leave sentences unfinished. And several times she looked around in wonder at her small dark living room and at the threadbare furniture, as if she had absolutely no idea how she had come to this place or how long she'd been here. She cocked her head as if she heard whispering voices, just out of range, that were trying to explain it all to her.

Lana Haverby sat in a chair, and they sat on the sofa, and she looked at the mug shots of Bobby Valdez.

"Yeah," she said. "He was a sweetie."

"Does he live here?" Frank asked.

"He lived ... yeah. Apartment nine ... was it? But not any more."

"He moved out?"

"Yeah."

"When was that?"

"This summer sometime. I think it was...."

"Was what?" Tony asked.

"First of August," she said.

She recrossed her bare legs, put her shoulders back a bit farther to elevate her breasts as much as possible.

"How long did he live here?" Frank asked.

"I guess it was three months," she said.

"He live alone?"

"You mean was there a chick?"

"A girl, a guy, anybody," Frank said.

"Just him," Lana said. "He was a sweetie, you know."

"Did he leave a forwarding address?"

"No. But I wish he would have."

"Why? Did he skip out on the rent?"

"No. Nothing like that. I'd just like to know where I could...."

She cocked her head, listening to the whispers again.

"Where you could what?" Tony asked.

She blinked. "Oh ... I'd sure like to know where I could visit him. I was kind of working on him. He turned me on, you know. Got my juices running. I was trying to get him into bed, but he was, you know, sort of shy."

She had not asked why they wanted Bobby Valdez, alias Juan Mazquezza. Tony wondered what she would say if she knew her shy little sweetie was an aggressive, violent rapist.

"Did he have any regular visitors?"

"Juan? Not that I noticed."

She uncrossed her legs, sat with her thighs spread, and watched Tony for his reaction.

"Did he say where he worked?" Frank asked.

"When he first moved in, he worked at some laundry. Later, he got something else."

"Did he say what it was?"

"No. But he was, you know, making good money."

"He have a car?" Frank asked.

"Not at first," she said. "But later. A Jaguar two-plus-two. That was beautiful, man."

"And expensive," Frank said.

"Yeah," she said. "He paid a bundle for it and all in cold hard cash."

"Where would he get that kind of money?"

"I told you. He was making good bread at his new job."

"Are you sure you don't know where he was working?"

"Positive. He wouldn't talk about it. But, you know, as soon as I saw that Jaguar, I knew ... he wasn't long for this place," she said wistfully. "He was moving up fast."

They spent another five minutes asking questions, but Lana Haverby had nothing more of consequence to tell them. She was not a very observant person, and her recollection of Juan Mazquezza seemed to have tiny holes in it, as if moths had been nibbling at her store of memories.

When Tony and Frank got up to leave, she hurried to the door ahead of them. Her gelatinous breasts jiggled and swayed alarmingly, in what she evidently thought was a wildly provocative display. She affected that ass-swinging, tippy-toe-walk that didn't look good on any coquette over twenty-one; she was forty, a grown woman, unable to discover and explore the dignity and special beauty of her own age, trying to pass for a teenager, and she was pathetic. She stood in the doorway, leaning back slightly against the open door, one long leg bent at the knee, copying a pose she'd seen in a men's magazine or on a cheesecake calendar, virtually begging for a compliment.

Frank turned sideways as he went through the door, barely able to avoid brushing against her breasts. He strode quickly down the walk toward the car, not looking back.

Tony smiled and said, "Thanks for your cooperation, Miss Haverby."

She looked up at him, and her eyes focused on his eyes more clearly than they had focused on anything during the past fifteen minutes. She held his gaze, and a spark of something vital glimmered in her eyes--intelligence, genuine pride, maybe a shred of self-respect--something better and cleaner than had been there before. "I'm going to move up and out of here, too, you know, like Juan did. I wasn't always just a manager at Las Palmeras. I moved in some, you know, pretty rich circles."

Tony didn't want to hear what she had to tell him, but he felt trapped and then mesmerized, like the man who was stopped in the street by the Ancient Mariner.

"Like when I was twenty-three," she said. "I was working as a waitress, but I got up and out of that. That was when the Beatles, you know, were just getting started, like seventeen years ago, and the whole rock thing was really exploding then. You know? A good-looking girl back then, she could connect with the stars, make those important connections, you know, and go just about everywhere with the big groups, travel all over the country with them. Oh, wow, man, those were some fantastic times! Like there wasn't anything you couldn't have or do. They had it all, those groups, and they spread it around, you know. And I was with them. I sure was. I slept with some very famous people, you know. Household names. I was very popular, too. They liked me."

She began to list bestselling rock groups from the sixties. Tony didn't know how many of them she'd actually been with and how many she only imagined she'd been with, but he noticed that she never mentioned individuals; she had been to bed with groups, not people.

He had never wondered what became of groupies, those bouncy child-women who wasted some of their best years as hangers-on in the rock music world. But now he knew at least one way they could end up. They trailed after the current idols, offering inarticulate praise, sharing drugs, providing convenient receptacles for the sperm of the rich and famous, giving no thought to time and the changes it would bring. Then one day, after a girl like that had been burnt out by too much booze and too much pot and too much cocaine and maybe a little heroin, when the first hard wrinkles came at the corners of the eyes, when the laugh lines grew a shade too deep, when the pneumatic breasts began to show the first signs of sagging, she was eased out of one group's bed--and discovered that, this time, there was no other group willing to take her in. If she wasn't averse to turning tricks, she could still make a living that way, for a few years. But to some of them that was a turn-off; they didn't think of themselves as hookers but as "girlfriends." For a lot of them, marriage was out, for they'd seen too much and done too much to willingly settle for a tame domestic life. One of them, Lana Haverby, had taken a job at Las Palmeras, a position she thought of as temporary, just a way to swing free rent until she could reconnect with the beautiful people.

"So I won't be here much longer," she said. "I'll be moving on soon. Any time now, you know. I feel lots of good things coming. Like really good vibrations, you know?"

Her situation was ineffably sad, and Tony could think of nothing to say that would make a difference to her. "Uh ... well ... I sure wish you all the luck in the world," he said stupidly. He edged past her, through the door.

The gleam of vitality vanished from her eyes, and she was suddenly desperately posing again, shoulders back, chest out. But her face was still weary and drawn. Her belly was still straining at the waistband of her shorts. And her hips were still too big for girlish games. "Hey," she said, "if you're ever in the mood for some wine and, you know, a little conversation...."

"Thank you," he said.

"I mean, feel free to stop by when you're not, you know, on duty."

"I might do that," he lied. Then, because he felt he had sounded insincere and didn't want to leave her without anything, he said, "You've got pretty legs."

That was true, but she didn't know how to accept a compliment, gracefully. She grinned and put her hands on her breasts and said, "It's usually my boobs that get all the attention."

"Well... I'll be seeing you," he said, turning away from her and heading toward the car.

After a few steps, he glanced back and saw that she was standing in the open door, head cocked to one side, far away from him and Las Palmeras Apartments, listening to those faint whispering voices that were trying to explain the meaning of her life.

As Tony got into the car, Frank said, "I thought she got her claws into you. I was about ready to call up a SWAT team to rescue you."

Tony didn't laugh. "It's sad."

"What?"

"Lana Haverby."

"You kidding me?"

"The whole situation."

"She's just a dumb broad," Frank said. "But what did you think about Bobby buying the Jag?"

"If he hasn't been robbing banks, there's only one way he could get hold of that kind of cash."

"Dope," Frank said.

"Cocaine, grass, maybe PCP."

"It gives us a whole new place to start looking for the little bastard," Frank said. "We can go out on the street and start putting some muscle on the known dealers, guys who've taken falls for selling junk. Make it hot for them, and if they've got a lot to lose and they know where Bobby is, they'll give him to us on a silver platter."

"Meanwhile," Tony said, "I'd better call in."

He wanted a DMV check on a black Jaguar registered to Juan Masquezza. If they could get a license number for the hot sheet, then looking for Bobby's wheels would be part of every uniformed officer's daily duties.

That didn't mean they would find him right away. In any other city, if a man was wanted as badly as Bobby was wanted, he would not be able to live in the open for a long time. He would be spotted or tracked down in a few weeks at most. But Los Angeles was not like other cities; at least in terms of land area, it was bigger than any other urban center in the nation. L.A. was spread over nearly five hundred square miles. It covered half again as much land as all the boroughs of New York City, ten times more than all of Boston, and almost half as much as the state of Rhode Island. Counting the illegal aliens, which the Census Bureau did not do, the population of the entire metropolitan area was approaching nine million. In this vast maze of streets, alleyways, freeways, hills, and canyons, a clever fugitive could live in the open for many months, going about his business as boldly and unconcernedly as any ordinary citizen.

Tony switched on the radio, which they had left off all morning, called Communications, and asked for the DMV check on Juan Mazquezza and his Jaguar.

The woman handling their frequency had a soft appealing voice. After she took Tony's requests, she informed him that a call had been out for him and Frank the past two hours. It was now 11:45. The Hilary Thomas case was open again, and they were needed at her Westwood house, where other officers had answered a call at 9:30.

Racking the microphone, Tony looked at Frank and said, "I knew it! Dammit, I knew she wasn't lying about the whole thing."

"Don't preen your feathers yet," Frank said disagreeably. "Whatever this new development is, she's probably making it up like she made up all the rest of it."

"You never give up, do you?"

"Not when I know I'm right."

A few minutes later, they pulled up in front of the Thomas house. The circular driveway was filled with two press cars, a station wagon for the police laboratory, and a black-and-white.

As they got out of their car and started across the lawn, a uniformed officer came out of the house and walked toward them. Tony knew him; his name was Warren Prewitt. They met him halfway to the front door.

"You guys answered this call last night?" Prewitt asked.

"That's right," Frank said.

"What is it, do you work twenty-four hours a day?"

"Twenty-six," Frank said.

Tony said, "How's the woman?"

"Shaken up," Prewitt said.

"Not hurt?"

"Some bruises on her throat."

"Serious?"

"No."

"What happened?" Frank said.

Prewitt capsulized the story that Hilary Thomas had told him earlier.

"Any proof that she's telling the truth?" Frank asked.

"I heard how you feel about this case," Prewitt said. "But there is proof."

"Like what?" Frank asked.

"He got into the house last night through a study window. A very smart job it was, too. He taped up the glass so she wouldn't hear it breaking."

"She could have done that herself," Frank said.

"Broken her own window'?" Prewitt asked.

"Yeah. Why not?" Frank said.

"Well," Prewitt said, "she wasn't the one who bled all the hell over the place."

"How much blood?" Tony asked.

"Not a whole lot, but not a whole little," Prewitt said. "There's some on the hall floor, a big bloody handprint on the wall up there, drops of blood on the stairs, another smeared print on the downstairs foyer wall, and traces of blood on the doorknob."

"Human blood?" Frank asked.

Prewitt blinked at him. "Huh?"

"I'm wondering if it's a fake, a hoax."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Tony said.

"The boys from the lab didn't get here till about forty-five minutes ago," Prewitt said. "They haven't said anything yet. But I'm sure it's human blood. Besides, three of the neighbors saw the man running away."

"Ahhh," Tony said softly.

Frank scowled at the lawn at his feet, as if he were trying to wither the grass.

"He left the house all doubled up," Prewitt said. "He was holding his stomach and shuffling kind of hunched over, which fits in with Miss Thomas's statement that she stabbed him twice in the midsection."

"Where'd he go?" Tony asked.

"We have a witness who saw him climb into a gray Dodge van two blocks south of here. He drove away."

"Got a license number?"

"No," Prewitt said. "But the word's out. There's a want on the van."

Frank Howard looked up. "You know, maybe this attack isn't related to the story she fed us last night. Maybe she cried wolf last night--and then this morning she really was attacked."

"Doesn't that strike you as just a bit too coincidental?" Tony asked exasperatedly.

"Besides, it must be related," Prewitt said. "She swears it was the same man."

Frank met Tony's stare and said, "But it can't be Bruno Frye. You know what Sheriff Laurenski said."

"I never insisted it was Frye." Tony said. "Last night, I figured she was attacked by someone who resembled Frye."

"She insisted--"

"Yeah, but she was scared and hysterical," Tony said. "She wasn't thinking clearly, and she mistook the look-alike for the real thing. It's understandable."

"And you tell me I'm building a case on coincidences," Frank said disgustedly.

At that moment Officer Gurney, Prewitt's partner, came out of the house and called to him! "Hey, they found him. The man she stabbed!"

Tony, Frank, and Prewitt hurried to the front door.

"HQ just phoned," Gurney said. "A couple of kids on skateboards found him about twenty-five minutes ago."

"Where?"

"Way the hell down on Sepulveda. In some supermarket parking lot. He was lying on the ground beside his van."

"Dead?"

"As a doornail."

"Did he have any ID?" Tony asked.

"Yeah," Gurney said. "It's just like the lady told us. He's Bruno Frye."

***

Cold.

Air conditioning thrummed in the walls. Rivers of icy air gushed from two vents near the ceiling.

Hilary was wearing a sea-green autumn dress, not of a light summery fabric, but not heavy enough to ward off a chill. She hugged herself and shivered.

Lieutenant Howard stood at her left side, still looking somewhat embarrassed. Lieutenant Clemenza was on her right. The room didn't feel like part of a morgue. It was more like a cabin in a spaceship. She could easily imagine that the bone-freezing cold of deep space lay just beyond the gray walls. The steady humming of the air conditioning could be the distant roar of rocket engines. They were standing in front of a window that looked into another room, but she would have preferred to see endless blackness and far-away stars beyond the thick glass. She almost wished she were on a long inter-galactic voyage instead of in a morgue, waiting to identify a man she had killed.

I killed him, she thought.

Those words, ringing in her mind, seemed to make her even colder than she had been a second ago.

She glanced at her watch.

3:18.

"It'll be over in a minute," Lieutenant Clemenza said reassuringly.

Even as Clemenza spoke, a morgue attendant brought a wheeled litter into the room on the other side of the window. He positioned it squarely in front of the glass. A body lay on the cart, hidden by a sheet. The attendant pulled the shroud off the dead man's face, halfway down his chest, then stepped out of the way.

Hilary looked at the corpse and felt dizzy.

Her mouth went dry.

Frye's face was white and still, but she had the insane feeling that at any moment he would turn his head toward her and open his eyes.

"Is it him?" Lieutenant Clemenza asked.

"It's Bruno Frye," she said weakly.

"But is it the man who broke into your house and attacked you?" Lieutenant Howard asked.

"Not this stupid routine again," she said. "Please."

"No, no," Clemenza said, "Lieutenant Howard doesn't doubt your story any more, Miss Thomas. You see, we already know that man is Bruno Frye. We've established that much from the ID he was carrying. What we need to hear from you is that he was the man who attacked you, the man you stabbed."

The dead mouth was unexpressive now, neither frowning nor smiling, but she could remember the evil grin into which it had curved.

"That's him," she said. "I'm positive. I've been positive all along. I'll have nightmares for a long time."

Lieutenant Howard nodded to the morgue attendant beyond the window, and the man covered the corpse.

Another absurd but chilling thought struck her: What if it sits up on the cart and throws the sheet off?

"We'll take you home now," Clemenza said.

She walked out of the room ahead of them, miserable because she had killed a man--but thoroughly relieved and even delighted that he was dead.

***

They took her home in the unmarked police sedan. Frank drove, and Tony sat up front. Hilary Thomas sat in the back, shoulders drawn up a bit, arms crossed, as if she was cold on such a warm late-September day.

Tony kept finding excuses to turn around and speak to her. He didn't want to take his eyes off her. She was so lovely that he made him feel as he sometimes did in a great museum, when he stood before a particularly exquisite painting done by one of the old masters.

She responded to him, even gave him a couple of smiles, but she wasn't in the mood for light conversation. She was wrapped up in her own thoughts, mostly staring out the side window, mostly silent.

When they pulled into the circular driveway at her place and stopped in front of the door, Frank Howard turned to her and said, "Miss Thomas ... I ... well ... I owe you an apology."

Tony was not startled by the admission, but he was somewhat surprised by the sincere note of contrition in Frank's voice and the supplicatory expression on his face; meekness and humility were not exactly Frank's strongest suits.

Hilary Thomas also seemed surprised. "Oh ... well ... I suppose you were only doing your job."

"No," Frank said. "That's the problem. I wasn't doing my job. At least I wasn't doing it well."

"It's over now," she said.

"But will you accept my apologies?"

"Well ... of course," she said uncomfortably.

"I feel very bad about the way I treated you."

"Frye won't be bothering me any more," she said. "So I guess that's all that really matters."

Tony got out of the car and opened her door. She could not get out by herself because the rear doors of the sedan had no inside handles, a deterrent to escape-minded prisoners. Besides, he wanted to accompany her to the house.

"You may have to testify at a coroner's inquest," he said as they approached the house.

"Why? When I stabbed him, Frye was in my place, against my wishes. He was threatening my life."

"Oh, there's no doubt it's a simple case of self-defense," Tony said quickly. "If you have to appear at an inquest, it'll just be a formality. There's no chance in the world that any sort of charges will be brought or anything like that."

She unlocked the front door, opened it, turned to him, smiled radiantly. "Thank you for believing in me last night, even after what the Napa County Sheriff said."

"We'll be checking into him," Tony said. "He's got some explaining to do. If you're interested, I'll let you know what his excuse is."

"I am curious," she said.

"Okay. I'll let you know."

"Thank you."

"It's no bother."

She stepped into the house.

He didn't move.

She looked back at him.

He smiled stupidly.

"Is there anything eise?" she asked.

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"What?"

"One more question."

"Yes?"

He had never felt so awkward with a woman before.

"Would you have dinner with me Saturday?"

"Oh," she said. "Well ... I don't think I can."

"I see."

"I mean, I'd like to."

"You would?"

"But I really don't have much time for a social life these days," she said.

"I see."

"I've just gotten this deal with Warner Brothers, and it's going to keep me busy day and night."

"I understand," he said.

He felt like a high school boy who had just been turned down by the popular cheerleader.

"It was very nice of you to ask," she said.

"Sure. Well ... good luck with Warner Brothers."

"Thank you."

"I'll let you know about Sheriff Laurenski."

"Thank you."

He smiled, and she smiled.

He turned away, started toward the car, and heard the door of the house close behind him. He stopped and looked back at it.

A small toad hopped out of the shrubbery, onto the stone footpath in front of Tony. It sat in the middle of the walk and peered up at him, its eyes rolled way back to achieve the necessary angle, its tiny green-brown chest rapidly expanding and contracting.

Tony looked at the toad and said, "Did I give up too easily?"

The little toad made a peeping-croaking sound.

"What have I got to lose?" Tony asked.

The toad peeped-croaked again.

"That's the way I look at it. I've got nothing to lose."

He stepped around the amphibian cupid and rang the bell. He could sense Hilary Thomas looking at him through the one-way peephole lens, and when she opened the door a second later, he spoke before she could. "Am I terribly ugly?"

"What?"

"Do I look like Quasimodo or something?"

"Really, I--"

"I don't pick my teeth in public," he said.

"Lieutenant Clemenza--"

"Is it because I'm a cop?"

"What?"

"You know what some people think?"

"What do some people think?"

"They think cops are socially unacceptable."

"Well, I'm not one of those people."

"You're not a snob?"

"No. I just--"

"Maybe you turned me down because I don't have a lot of money and don't live in Westwood."

"Lieutenant, I've spent most of my life without money, and I haven't always lived in Westwood."

"Then I wonder what's wrong with me," he said, looking down at himself in mock bewilderment.

She smiled and shook her head. "Nothing's wrong with you, Lieutenant."

"Thank God!"

"Really, I said no for just one reason. I don't have time for--"

"Miss Thomas, even the President of the United States manages to take a night off now and then. Even the head of General Motors has leisure time. Even the Pope. Even God rested the seventh day. No one can be busy all the time."

"Lieutenant--"

"Call me Tony."

"Tony, after what I've been through the last two days, I'm afraid I wouldn't be a barrel of laughs."

"If I wanted to go to dinner with a barrel of laughs, I'd take a bunch of monkeys."

She smiled again, and he wanted to take her beautiful face in his hands and kiss it all over.

She said, "I'm sorry. But I need to be alone for a few days."

"That's exactly what you don't need after the sort of experience you've had. You need to get out, be among people, get your spirits up. And I'm not the only one who thinks so." He turned and pointed to the stone footpath behind him. The toad was still there. It had turned around to look at them.

"Ask Mr. Toad," Tony said.

"Mr. Toad?"

"An acquaintance of mine. A very wise person." Tony stooped down and stared at the toad. "Doesn't she need to get out and enjoy herself, Mr. Toad?"

It blinked slow heavy lids and made its funny little sound right on cue.

"You're absolutely correct," Tony told it. "And don't you think I'm the one she should go out with?"

"Scree-ooak," it said.

"And what will you do to her if she turns me down again?"

"Scree-ooak, scree-ooak."

"Ahhh," Tony said, nodding his head in satisfaction as he stood up.

"Well, what did he say?" Hilary asked, grinning. "What will he do to me if I won't go out with you--give me warts?"

Tony looked serious. "Worse than that. He tells me he'll get into the walls of your house, work his way up to your bedroom, and croak so loudly every night that you won't be able to sleep until you give in."

She smiled. "Okay. I give up."

"Saturday night?"

"All right."

"I'll pick you up at seven."

"What should I wear?"

"Be casual," he said.

"See you Saturday at seven."

He turned to the toad and said, "Thank you, my friend."

It hopped off the walk, into the grass, then into the shrubbery.

Tony looked at Hilary. "Gratitude embarrasses him."

She laughed and closed the door.

Tony walked back to the car and got in, whistling happily.

As Frank drove away from the house, he said, "What was that all about?"

"I got a date," Tony said.

"With her?"

"Well, not with her sister."

"Lucky stiff."

"Lucky toad."

"Huh?"

"Private joke."

When they had gone a couple of blocks, Frank said, "It's after four o'clock. By the time we get this heap back to the depot and check out for the day, it'll be five o'clock."

"You want to quit on time for once?" Tony asked.

"Not much we can do about Bobby Valdez until tomorrow anyway."

"Yeah," Tony said. "Let's be reckless."

A few blocks farther on, Frank said, "Want to have a drink after we check out?"

Tony looked at him in amazement. That was the first time in their association that Frank had suggested hanging out together after hours.

"Just a drink or two," Frank said. "Unless you have something planned--"

"No. I'm free."

"You know a bar?"

"The perfect place. It's called The Bolt Hole."

"It's not around HQ, is it? Not a place where a lot of cops go?"

"So far as I know, I'm the only officer of the law who patronizes it. It's on Santa Monica Boulevard, out near Century City. Just a couple of blocks from my apartment."

"Sounds good," Frank said. "I'll meet you there."

They rode the rest of the way to the police garage in silence--somewhat more companionable silence than that in which they had worked before, but silence nonetheless.

What does he want? Tony wondered. Why has that famous Frank Howard reserve finally broken down?

***

At 4:30, the Los Angeles medical examiner ordered a limited autopsy on the body of Bruno Gunther Frye. If at all possible, the corpse was to be opened only in the area of the abdominal wounds, sufficient to determine if those two punctures had been the sole cause of death.

The medical examiner would not perform the autopsy himself, for he had to catch a 5:30 flight to San Francisco in order to keep a speaking engagement. The chore was assigned to a pathologist on his staff.

The dead man waited in a cold room with other dead men, on a cold cart, motionless beneath a white shroud.

***

Hilary Thomas was exhausted. Every bone ached dully; every joint seemed enflamed. Every muscle felt as if it had been put through a blender at high speed and then reconstituted. Emotional strain could have precisely the same physiological effect as strenuous physical labor.

She was also jumpy, much too tense to be able to refresh with a nap. Each time the big house made a normal settling noise, she wondered if the sound was actually the squeak of a floorboard under the weight of an intruder. When the softly sighing wind brushed a palm frond or a pine branch against a window, she imagined someone was stealthily cutting the glass or prying at a window lock. But when there was a long period of perfect quiet, she sensed something sinister in the silence. Her nerves were worn thinner than the knees of a compulsive penitent's trousers.

The best cure she had ever found for nervous tension was a good book. She looked through the shelves in the study and chose James Clavell's most recent novel, a massive story set in the Orient. She poured a glass of Dry Sack on the rocks, settled down in the deep brown armchair, and began to read.

Twenty minutes later, when she was just beginning to lose herself thoroughly in Clavell's story, the telephone rang. She got up and answered it. "Hello."

There was no response.

"Hello?"

The caller listened for a few seconds, then hung up.

Hilary put down the receiver and stared at it thoughtfully for a moment.

Wrong number?

Must have been.

But why didn't he say so?

Some people just don't know any better, she told herself. They're rude.

But what if it wasn't a wrong number. What if it was ... something else.

Stop looking for goblins in every shadow! she told herself angrily. Frye's dead. It was a bad thing, but it's over and done with. You deserve a rest, a couple of days to collect your nerves and wits. But then you've got to stop looking over your shoulder and get on with your life. Otherwise, you'll end up in a padded room.

She curled up in the armchair again, but she caught a chill that brought goosebumps to her arms. She went to the closet and got a blue and green knitted afghan, returned to the chair, and draped the blanket over her legs.

She sipped the Dry Sack.

She started reading Clavell again.

In a while, she forgot about the telephone call.

***

After signing out for the day, Tony went home and washed his face, changed from his suit into jeans and a checkered blue shirt. He put on a thin tan jacket and walked two blocks to The Bolt Hole.

Frank was already there, sitting in a back booth, still in his suit and tie, sipping Scotch.

The Bolt Hole--or simply The Hole, as regular customers referred to it--was that rare and vanishing thing: an ordinary neighborhood bar. During the past two decades, in response to a continuously fracturing and subdividing culture, the American tavern industry, at least that part of it in cities and suburbs, had indulged in a frenzy of specialization. But The Hole had successfully bucked the trend. It wasn't a gay bar. It wasn't a singles' bar or a swingers' bar. It wasn't a bar patronized primarily by bikers or truckers or show business types or off-duty policemen or account executives; its clientele was a mixture, representative of the community. It wasn't a topless go-go bar. It wasn't a rock and roll bar or a country and western bar. And, thank God, it wasn't a sports bar with one of those six-foot television screens and Howard Cosell's voice in quadraphonic sound. The Hole had nothing more to offer than pleasantly low lighting, cleanliness, courtesy, comfortable stools and booths, a jukebox that wasn't turned too loud, hot dogs and hamburgers served from the minuscule kitchen, and good drinks at reasonable prices.

Tony slid into the booth, facing Frank.

Penny, a sandy-haired waitress with pinchable cheeks and a dimpled chin, stopped by the table. She ruffled Tony's hair and said, "What do you want, Renoir?"

"A million in cash, a Rolls-Royce, eternal life, and the acclaim of the masses," Tony said.

"What'll you settle for?"

"A bottle of Coors."

"That we can provide," she said.

"Bring me another Scotch," Frank said. When she went to the bar to get their drinks, Frank said, "Why'd she call you Renoir?"

"He was a famous French painter."

"So?"

"Well, I'm a painter, too. Neither French nor famous. It's just Penny's way of teasing me."

"You paint pictures?" Frank asked.

"Certainly not houses."

"How come you never mentioned it?"

"I made a few observations about fine art a time or two," Tony said. "But you greeted the subject with a marked lack of interest. In fact, you couldn't have shown less enthusiasm if I'd wanted to debate the fine points of Swahili grammar or discuss the process of decomposition in dead babies."

"Oil paintings?" Frank asked.

"Oils. Pen and ink. Watercolors. A little bit of everything, but mostly oils."

"How long you been at it?"

"Since I was a kid."

"Have you sold any?"

"I don't paint to sell."

"What do you do it for?"

"My own satisfaction."

"I'd like to see some of your work."

"My museum has odd hours, but I'm sure a visit can be arranged."

"Museum?"

"My apartment. There's not much furniture in it, but it's chockfull of paintings."

Penny brought their drinks.

They were silent for a while, and then they talked for a few minutes about Bobby Valdez, and then they were silent again. There were about sixteen or eighteen people in the bar. Several of them had ordered sandwiches. The air was filled with the mouth-watering aroma of sizzling ground sirloin and chopped onions.

Finally, Frank said, "I suppose you're wondering why we're here like this."

"To have a couple of drinks."

"Besides that." Frank stirred his drink with a swizzle stick. Ice cubes rattled softly. "There are a few things I have to say to you."

"I thought you said them all this morning, in the car, after we left Vee Vee Gee."

"Forget what I said then."

"You had a right to say it."

"I was full of shit," Frank said.

"No, maybe you had a point."

"I tell you, I was full of shit."

"Okay," Tony said. "You were full of shit."

Frank smiled. "You could have argued with me a bit more."

"When you're right, you're right," Tony said.

"I was wrong about the Thomas woman."

"You already apologized to her, Frank."

"I feel like I should apologize to you."

"Not necessary."

"But you saw something there, saw she was telling the truth. I didn't even get a whiff of that. I was off on the wrong scent altogether. Hell, you even pushed my nose in it, and I couldn't pick up the right smell."

"Well, sticking strictly to nasal imagery, you might say you couldn't get the scent because your nose was so far out of joint."

Frank nodded glumly. His broad face seemed to sag into the melancholy mask of a bloodhound. "Because of Wilma. My nose is out of joint because of Wilma."

"Your ex-wife?"

"Yeah. You hit it right on the head this morning when you said I've been a woman-hater."

"Must have been bad, what she did to you."

"No matter what she did," Frank said, "that's no excuse for what I've let happen to me."

"You're right."

"I mean, you can't hide from women, Tony."

"They're everywhere," Tony agreed.

"Christ, you know how long it's been since I slept with a woman?"

"No."

"Ten months. Since she left me, since four months before the divorce came through."

Tony couldn't think of anything to say. He didn't feel he knew Frank well enough to engage in an intimate discussion of his sex life, yet it was obvious that the man badly needed someone to listen and care.

"If I don't get back in the swim pretty soon," Frank said, "I might as well go away and be a priest."

Tony nodded. "Ten months sure is a long time," he said awkwardly.

Frank didn't respond. He stared into his Scotch as he might have stared into a crystal ball, trying to see his future. Clearly, he wanted to talk about Wilma and the divorce and where he should go from here, but he didn't want to feel that he was forcing Tony to listen to his trouble. He had a lot of pride. He wanted to be coaxed, cajoled, drawn out with questions and murmured sympathy.

"Did Wilma find another man or what?" Tony asked, and knew immediately that he had gone to the heart of the matter much too quickly.

Frank was not ready to talk about that part of it, and he pretended not to hear the question. "What bothers me is the way I'm screwing up in my work. I've always been damned good at what I do. Just about perfect, if I say so myself. Until the divorce. Then I turned sour on women, and pretty soon I went sour on the job, too." He took a long pull on his Scotch. "And what the hell's going on with that damned crazy Napa County Sheriff? Why would he lie to protect Bruno Frye?"

"We'll find out sooner or later," Tony said.

"You want another drink?"

"Okay."

Tony could see that they were going to be sitting in The Bolt Hole for a long while. Frank wanted to talk about Wilma, wanted to get rid of all the poison that had been building up in him and eating at his heart for nearly a year, but he was only able to let it out a drop at a time.

***

It was a busy day for Death in Los Angeles. Many died of natural causes, of course, and therefore were not required by law to come under a coroner's probing scalpel. But the medical examiner's office had nine others with which to deal. There were two traffic fatalities in an accident certain to involve charges of criminal negligence. Two men were dead of gunshot wounds. One child had apparently been beaten to death by a mean-tempered drunken father. A woman had drowned in her own swimming pool, and two young men had died of what appeared to be drug overdoses. And there was Bruno Frye.

At 7:10 Thursday evening, hoping to catch up on the backlog of work, a pathologist at the city morgue completed a limited autopsy on the body of Bruno Gunther Frye, male, Caucasian, age forty. The doctor did not find it necessary to dissect the corpse beyond the general area of the two abdominal traumata, for he was swiftly able to determine that the deceased definitely had perished from those injuries and no other. The upper wound was not critical; the knife tore muscle tissue and grazed a lung. But the lower wound was a mess; the blade ripped open the stomach, pierced the pyloric vein, and damaged the pancreas, among other things. The victim had died of massive internal bleeding.

The pathologist sewed up the incisions he had made as well as the two crusted wounds. He sponged blood and bile and specks of tissue from the repaired stomach and the huge chest.

The dead man was transferred from the autopsy table (which still bore traces of red-brown gore in the stainless-steel blood gutters) to a cart. An attendant pushed the cart to a refrigerated room where other bodies, already cut open and explored and sewn up again, now waited patiently for their ceremonies and their graves.

After the attendant left, Bruno Frye lay silent and motionless, content in the company of the dead as he had never been in the company of the living.

***

Frank Howard was getting drunk. He had taken off his suit jacket and his tie, had opened the first two buttons of his shirt. His hair was in disarray because he kept running his fingers through it. His eyes were bloodshot, and his broad face was doughy. He slurred some of his words, and every once in a while he repeated himself, stressing a point so often that Tony had to gently nudge him on, as if bumping a phonograph needle out of a bad groove. He was downing two glasses of Scotch to one of Tony's beers.

The more he drank, the more he talked about the women in his life. The closer he got to being completely smashed, the closer he got to the central agony of his life: the loss of two wives.

During his second year as a uniformed officer with the LAPD, Frank Howard had met his first wife, Barbara Ann. She was a salesgirl working the jewelry counter in a downtown department store, and she helped him choose a gift for his mother. She was so charming, so petite, so pretty and dark-eyed, that he couldn't resist asking for a date, even though he was certain she would turn him down. She accepted. They were married seven months later. Barbara Ann was a planner; long before the wedding, she worked out a detailed agenda for their first four years together. She would continue to work at the department store, but they would not spend one penny of her earnings. All of her money would go into a savings account that would later be used to make a down payment on a house. They would try to save as much as they could from his salary by living in a safe, clean, but inexpensive studio apartment. They would sell his Pontiac because it was a gas hog, and because they would be living close enough to the store for Barbara Ann to walk to work; her Volkswagen would be sufficient to get him to and from divisional HQ, and his equity in his car would start the house fund. She had even planned a day-by-day menu for the first six months, nourishing meals prepared within a tight budget. Frank loved this stern accountant streak in her, partly because it seemed so out of character. She was a light-hearted, cheerful woman, quick to laugh, sometimes even giddy, impulsive in matters not financial, and a wonderful bedmate, always eager to make love and damned good at it. She was not an accountant in matters of the flesh; she never planned their love-making; it was usually sudden and surprising and passionate. But she planned that they would buy a house only after they'd acquired at least forty percent of the purchase price. And she knew exactly how many rooms it should have and what size each room should be; she drew up a floor plan of the ideal place, and she kept it in a dresser drawer, taking it out now and then to stare at it and dream. She wanted children a great deal, but she planned not to have them until she was secure in her own house. Barbara Ann planned for just about every eventuality--except cancer. She contracted a virulent form of lymph cancer, which was diagnosed two years and two days after she married Frank, and three months after that, she was dead.

Tony sat in the booth at The Bolt Hole, with a beer getting warm in front of him, and he listened to Frank Howard with the growing realization that this was the first time the man had shared his grief with anyone. Barbara Ann had died in 1958, twenty-two years ago, and in all the time since, Frank had not expressed to anyone the pain he had felt while watching her waste away and die. It was a pain that had never dwindled; it burned within him now as fiercely as it had then. He drank more Scotch and searched for words to describe his agony; and Tony was amazed at the sensitivity and depth of feeling that had been so well-concealed behind the hard Teutonic face and those usually expressionless blue eyes.

Losing Barbara Ann had left Frank weak, disconnected, miserable, but he had sternly repressed the tears and the anguish because he had been afraid that if he gave in to them he would not be able to regain control. He had sensed self-destructive impulses in himself: a terrible thirst for booze that he had never experienced prior to his wife's death; a tendency to drive much too fast and recklessly, though he had previously been a cautious driver. To improve his state of mind, to save himself from himself, he had submerged his pain in the demands of his job, had given his life to the LAPD, trying to forget Barbara Ann in long hours of police work and study. The loss of her left an aching hole in him that would never be filled, but in time he managed to plate over that hole with an obsessive interest in his work and with total dedication to the Department.

For nineteen years he survived, even thrived, on the monotonous regimen of a workaholic. As a uniformed officer, he could not extend his working hours, so he went to school five nights a week and Saturdays, until he earned a Bachelor of Science in Criminology. He used his degree and his superb service record to climb into the ranks of the plainclothes detectives, where he could labor well beyond his scheduled tour of duty each day without screwing up a dispatcher's roster. During his ten- and twelve- and fourteen-hour workdays, he thought of nothing else but the cases to which he had been assigned. Even when he wasn't on the job, he thought about current investigations to the exclusion of just about everything else, pondered them while standing in the shower and while trying to fall asleep at night, mulled over new evidence while eating his early breakfasts and his solitary late-night dinners. He read almost nothing but criminology textbooks and case studies of criminal types. For nineteen years he was a cop's cop, a detective's detective.

In all that time, he never got serious about a woman. He didn't have time for dating, and somehow it didn't seem right to him. It wasn't fair to Barbara Ann. He led a celibate's life for weeks, then indulged in a few nights of torrid release with a series of paid partners. In a way he could not fully understand, having sex with a hooker was not a betrayal of Barbara Ann's memory, for the exchange of cash for services made it strictly a business transaction and not a matter of the heart in even the slightest regard.

And then he met Wilma Compton.

Leaning back against the booth in The Bolt Hole, Frank seemed to choke on the woman's name. He wiped one hand across his clammy face, pushed spread fingers through his hair, and said, "I need another double Scotch." He made a great effort to articulate each syllable, but that only made him sound more thoroughly drunk than if he had slurred and mangled his words.

"Sure," Tony said. "Another Scotch. But we ought to get a bite of something, too."

"Not hungry," Frank said.

"They make excellent cheeseburgers," Tony said. "Let's get a couple of those and some French fries."

"No. Just Scotch for me."

Tony insisted, and finally Frank agreed to the burger but not the fries.

Penny took the food order, but when she heard Frank wanted another Scotch, she wasn't sure that was a good idea.

"I didn't drive here," Frank assured her, again stressing each sound in each word. "I came in a taxi 'cause I intended to get stupid drunk. I'll go home in a taxi, too. So please, you dimpled little darling, bring me another of those delicious double Scotches."

Tony nodded at her. "If he can't get a cab later, I'll take him home."

She brought new drinks for both of them. A half-finished beer stood in front of Tony, but it was warm and flat, and Penny took it away.

Wilma Compton.

Wilma was twelve years younger than Frank, thirty-one when he first met her. She was charming, petite, pretty, and dark-eyed. Slender legs. Supple body. Exciting swell of hips. A tight little ass. A pinched waist and breasts a shade too full for her size. She wasn't quite as lovely or quite as charming or quite as petite as Barbara Ann had been. She didn't have Barbara Ann's quick wit or Barbara Ann's industrious nature or Barbara Ann's compassion. But on the surface, at least, she bore enough resemblance to the long-dead woman to stir Frank's dormant interest in romance.

Wilma was a waitress at a coffee shop where policemen often ate lunch. The sixth time she waited on Frank, he asked for a date, and she said yes. On their fourth date, they went to bed. Wilma had the same hunger and energy and willingness to experiment that had made Barbara Ann a wonderful lover. If at times she seemed totally concerned with her own gratification and not at all interested in his, Frank was able to convince himself that her selfishness would pass, that it was merely the result of her not having had a satisfying relationship in a long time. Besides, he was proud that he could arouse her so easily, so completely. For the first time since he'd slept with Barbara Ann, love was a part of his love-making, and he'd thought he perceived the same emotion in Wilma's response to him. After they had been sleeping together for two months, he asked her to marry him. She said no, and thereafter she no longer wanted to date him; the only time he could see her and talk to her was when he stopped at the coffee shop.

Wilma was admirably forthright about her reasons for refusing him. She wanted to get married; she was actively looking for the right man, but the right man had to have a substantial bankroll and a damned good job. A cop, she said, would never make enough money to provide her with the lifestyle and the security she wanted. Her first marriage had failed largely because she and her husband had always been arguing about bills and budgets. She had discovered that worries about finances could burn the love out of a relationship, leaving only an ashy shell of bitterness and anger. That had been a terrible experience, and she had made up her mind never to go through it again. She didn't rule out marrying for love, but there had to be financial security as well. She was afraid she sounded hard, but she could not endure the kind of pain she had endured before. She got all shaky-voiced and teary-eyed when she spoke of it. She would not, she said, risk the unbearably sad and depressing dissolution of another love affair because of a lack of money.

Strangely, her determination to marry for money did not decrease Frank's respect for her or dampen his ardor. Because he had been lonely for so long, he was eager to continue their relationship, even if he had to wear the biggest pair of rose-colored glasses ever made in order to maintain the illusion of romance. He revealed his financial situation to her, virtually begged her to look at his savings account passbook and short-term certificates of deposit which totaled nearly thirty-two thousand dollars. He told her what his salary was and carefully explained that he would be able to retire fairly young with a fine pension, young enough to use some of their savings to start a small business and earn even more money. If security was what she wanted, he was her man.

Thirty-two thousand dollars and a police pension were not sufficient for Wilma Compton. "I mean," she said, "it's a good little piece of change, but then you don't own a house or anything, Frank." She fingered the savings account passbooks for a long moment, as if receiving sexual pleasure from them, but then she handed them back and said, "Sorry, Frank. But I want to shoot for something better than this. I'm still young, and I look five years younger than I really am. I have some time yet, a little more time to look around. And I'm afraid that even thirty-two thousand isn't a big bankroll these days. I'm afraid it might not be enough to get us through some crisis. And I won't go into something with you if there's a chance it could ... get hateful ... and mean ... like it did the last time I was married."

He was crushed.

"Christ, I was acting like such a fool!" Frank wailed, pounding one fist into the table to emphasize his foolishness. "I had made up my mind that she was exactly like Barbara Ann, something special, someone rare and precious. No matter what she did, not matter how crude she was or how coarse or how unfeeling, I made excuses for her. Lovely excuses. Dandy, elaborate, creative excuses. Stupid. I was stupid, stupid, dumb as a jackass. Jesus!"

"What you did was understandable," Tony said.

"It was stupid."

"You were alone a long, long time," Tony said. "You had such a wonderful two years with Barbara Ann that you thought you'd never have anything half as good again, and you didn't want to settle for less. So you shut out the world. You convinced yourself that you didn't need anyone. But we all need someone, Frank. We all need people to care about. A hunger for love and comradeship is as natural to our species as the requirement for food and water. So the need built up inside of you all those years, and when you saw someone who resembled Barbara Ann, when you saw Wilma, you couldn't keep that need bottled up any longer. Nineteen years of wanting and needing came bubbling out of you all at once. You were bound to act kind of crazy. It would have been nice if Wilma had turned out to be a good woman who deserved what you had to offer. But you know, actually, it's surprising someone like Wilma didn't get her claws into you years ago."

"I was a sap."

"No."

"An idiot."

"No, Frank. You were human," Tony said. "That's all. Just human like the rest of us."

Penny brought the cheeseburgers.

Frank ordered another double Scotch.

"You want to know what made Wilma change her mind?" Frank asked. "You want to know why she finally agreed to marry me?"

"Sure," Tony said. "But why don't you eat your burger first."

Frank ignored the sandwich. "My father died and left me everything. At first it looked like maybe thirty thousand bucks, but then I discovered the old man had collected a bunch of five- and ten-thousand dollar life insurance policies over the past thirty years. After taxes, the estate amounted to ninety thousand dollars."

"I'll be damned."

"With what I had already," Frank said, "that windfall was enough for Wilma."

"Maybe you'd have been better off if your father had died poor," Tony said.

Frank's red-rimmed eyes grew watery, and for a moment he looked as if he was about to weep. But he blinked rapidly and held back the tears. In a voice laden with despair, he said, "I'm ashamed to admit it, but when I found out how much money was in the estate, I stopped caring about my old man dying. The insurance policies turned up just one week after I buried him, and the moment I found them I thought, Wilma. All of a sudden I was so damned happy I couldn't stand still. As far as I was concerned, my dad might as well have been dead twenty years. It makes me sick to my stomach to think how I behaved. I mean, my dad and I weren't really close, but I owed him a lot more grieving than I gave. Jesus, I was one selfish son of a bitch, Tony."

"It's over, Frank. It's done," Tony said. "And like I said, you were a bit crazy. You weren't exactly responsible for your actions."

Frank put both hands over his face and sat that way for a minute, shaking but not crying. Finally, he looked up and said, "So when she saw I had almost a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, Wilma wanted to marry me. In eight months, she cleaned me out."

"This is a community property state," Tony said. "How could she get more than half of what you had?"

"Oh, she didn't take anything in the divorce."

"What?"

"Not one penny."

"Why?"

"It was all gone by then."

"Gone?"

"Poof!"

"She spent it?"

"Stole it," Frank said numbly.

Tony put down his cheeseburger, wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Stole it? How?"

Frank was still quite drunk, but suddenly he spoke with an eerie clarity and precision. It seemed important to him that this indictment of her, more than anything else in his story, should be clearly understood. She had left him nothing but his indignation, and now he wanted to share that with Tony. "As soon as we got back from our honeymoon, she announced she was taking over the bookkeeping. She was going to attend to all our banking business, watch over our investments, balance our checkbook. She signed up for a course in investment planning at a business school, and she worked out a detailed budget for us. She was very adamant about it, very businesslike, and I was really pleased because she seemed so much like Barbara Ann."

"You'd told her that Barbara Ann had done those things?"

"Yeah. Oh, Jesus, yeah. I set myself up to be picked clean. I sure did."

Suddenly, Tony wasn't hungry any more.

Frank pushed one shaky hand through his hair. "See, there wasn't any way I could have suspected her. I mean, she was so good to me. She learned to cook my favorite things. She always wanted to hear about my day when I got home, and she listened with such interest. She didn't want a lot of clothes or jewelry or anything. We went out to dinner and to the movies now and then, but she always said it was a waste of money; she said she was just as happy staying home with me and watching TV together or just talking. She wasn't in any hurry to buy a house. She was so ... easy-going. She gave me massages when I came home stiff and sore. And in bed ... she was fabulous. She was perfect. Except ... except ... all the time she was cooking and listening and massaging and fucking my brains out, she was...."

"Bleeding your joint bank accounts."

"Of every last dollar. All except ten thousand that was in a long-term certificate of deposit."

"And then just walked out?"

Frank shuddered. "I came home one day, and there was a note from her. It said, 'If you want to know where I am, call this number and ask for Mr. Freyborn.' Freyborn was a lawyer. She'd hired him to handle the divorce. I was stunned. I mean, there was never any indication.... Anyway, Freyborn refused to tell me where she was. He said it would be a simple case, easily settled because she didn't want alimony or anything else from me. She didn't want a penny, Freyborn said. She just wanted out. I was hit hard. Real hard. Jesus, I couldn't figure out what I'd done. For a while, I nearly went crazy trying to figure out where I went wrong. I thought maybe I could change, learn to be a better person, and win her back. And then ... two days later, when I needed to write a check, I saw the account was down to three dollars. I went to the bank and then to the savings and loan company, and after that I knew why she didn't want a penny. She'd taken all the pennies already."

"You didn't let her get away with it," Tony said.

Frank slugged down some Scotch. He was sweating. His face was pasty and sheet-white. "At first, I was just kind of dumb and ... I don't know ... suicidal, I guess. I mean, I didn't try to kill myself, but I didn't care if I lived either. I was in a daze, a kind of trance."

"But eventually you snapped out of that."

"Part way. I'm still a little numb. But I came part of the way out of it," Frank said. "Then I was ashamed of myself. I was ashamed of what I'd let her do to me. I was such a sap, such a dumb son of a bitch. I didn't want anyone to know, not even my attorney."

"That's the first purely stupid thing you did," Tony said. "I can understand the rest of it, but that--"

"Somehow, it seemed to me that if I let everyone know how Wilma conned me, then everyone would think that every word I'd ever said about Barbara Ann was wrong, too. I was afraid people would get the idea that Barbara Ann had been conning me just like Wilma, and it was important to me, more important than anything else in the world, that Barbara Ann's memory be kept clean. I know it sounds a little crazy now, but that's how I looked at it then."

Tony didn't know what to say.

"So the divorce went through smooth as glass," Frank said. "There weren't any long discussions about the details of the settlement. In fact, I never got to see Wilma again except for a few minutes in court, and I haven't talked to her since the morning of the day she walked out."

"Where is she now? Do you know?"

Frank finished his Scotch. When he spoke his voice was different, soft, almost a whisper, not as if he was trying to keep the rest of the story secret from other customers in The Hole, but as if he no longer had sufficient strength to speak in a normal tone of voice. "After the divorce went through, I got curious about her. I took out a small loan against that certificate of deposit she'd left behind, and I hired a private investigator to find out where she was and what she was doing. He turned up a lot of stuff. Very interesting stuff. She got married again just nine days after our divorce was final. Some guy named Chuck Pozley down in Orange County. He owns one of those electronic game parlors in a shopping center in Costa Mesa. He's worth maybe seventy or eighty thousand bucks. The way it looks, Wilma was seriously thinking about marrying him just when I inherited all the money from my dad. So what she did, she married me, milked me dry, and then went to this Chuck Pozley with my money. They used some of her capital to open two more of those game parlors, and it looks like they'll do real well."

"Oh, Jeez," Tony said.

This morning he had known almost nothing at all about Frank Howard, and now he knew almost everything. More than he really wanted to know. He was a good listener; that was both his blessing and his curse. His previous partner, Michael Savatino, often told him that he was a superior detective largely because people liked and trusted him and were willing to talk to him about almost anything. And the reason they were willing to talk to him, Michael said, was because he was a good listener. And a good listener, Michael said, was a rare and wonderful thing in a world of self-interest, self-promotion, and self-love. Tony listened willingly and attentively to all sorts of people because, as a painter fascinated by hidden patterns, he was seeking the overall pattern of human existence and meaning. Even now, as he listened to Frank, he thought of a quote from Emerson that he had read a long time ago: The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. All men and women and children were fascinating puzzles, great mysteries, and Tony was seldom bored by their stories.

Still speaking so softly that Tony had to lean forward to hear him, Frank said, "Pozley knew what Wilma had in mind for me. It looks like they were probably seeing each other a couple of days a week while I was at work. All the time she was playing the perfect wife, she was stealing me blind and fucking this Pozley. The more I thought about it, the madder I got, until finally I decided to tell my attorney what I should have told him in the first place."

"But it was too late?"

"That's about what it comes down to. Oh, I could have initiated some sort of court action against her. But the fact that I hadn't accused her of theft earlier, during the divorce proceedings, would have weighed pretty heavily against me. I'd have spent most of the money I had left on lawyers' fees, and I'd probably have lost the suit anyway. So I decided to put it behind me. I figured I'd lose myself in my work, like I'd done after Barbara Ann died. But I was torn up a whole lot worse than I realized. I couldn't do my job right any more. Every woman I had to deal with ... I don't know. I guess I just.. . just saw Wilma in all women. If I had the slightest excuse, I got downright vicious with women I had to question, and then before long I was getting too rough with every witness, both men and women. I started losing perspective, overlooking clues a child would spot.... I had a hell of a falling out with my partner, and so here I am." His voice sank lower by the second, and he gave up the struggle for clarity; his words began to get mushy. "After Barbara Ann died, at least I had my work. At least I had somethin'. But Wilma took everythin'. She took my money and my self-respec', and she even took my ambition. I juss can't seem to care 'bout nothin' any more." He slid out of the booth and stood up, swaying like a toy clown that had springs for ankles. "S'cuse me. Gotta go pee." He staggered across the tavern to the men's room door, giving an exaggerated wide berth to everyone he encountered on the way.

Tony sighed and closed his eyes. He was weary, both in body and soul.

Penny stopped by the table and said, "You'd be doing him a favor if you took him home now. He's going to feel like a half-dead goat in the morning."

"What's a half-dead goat feel like?"

"A lot worse than a healthy goat, and a whole lot worse than a dead one," she said.

Tony paid the tab and waited for his partner. After five minutes, he picked up Frank's coat and tie and went looking for him.

The men's room was small: one stall, one urinal, one sink. It smelled strongly of pine-scented disinfectant and vaguely of urine.

Frank was standing at a graffiti-covered wall, his back to the door when Tony entered. He was pounding his open palms against the wall above his head, both hands at once, making loud slapping sounds that reverberated in the narrow high-ceilinged room. BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM! The noise wasn't audible in the barroom because of the dull roar of conversation and the music, but in here it hurt Tony's ears.

"Frank?"

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

Tony went to him, put a hand on his shoulder, pulled him gently away from the wall, and turned him around.

Frank was weeping. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears. Big tears streamed down his face. His lips were puffy and loose; his mouth quivered with grief. But he was crying soundlessly, neither sobbing nor whimpering, his voice stuck far back in his throat.

"It's okay," Tony said. "Everything will be all right. You don't need Wilma. You're better off without her. You've got friends. We'll help you get over this, Frank, if you'll just let us. I'll help. I care. I really do care, Frank."

Frank closed his eyes. His mouth sagged down, and he sobbed, but still in eerie silence, making noise only when he sucked in a wheezy breath. He reached out, seeking support, and Tony put an arm around him.

"Wanna go home," Frank said mushily. "I juss wanna go home."

"All right. I'll take you home. Just hold on."

With arms around each other, like old buddies from the war, they left The Bolt Hole. They walked two and a half blocks to the apartment complex where Tony lived and climbed into Tony's Jeep station wagon.

They were halfway to Frank's apartment when Frank took a deep breath and said, "Tony ... I'm afraid."

Tony glanced at him.

Frank was hunched down in his seat. He seemed small and weak; his clothes looked too big for him. Tears shone on his face.

"What are you afraid of?" Tony asked.

"I don't wanna be alone," Frank said, weeping thinly, shaking from the effects of too much liquor, but shaking from something else as well, some dark fear.

"You aren't alone," Tony said.

"I'm afraid of... dyin' alone."

"You aren't alone, and you aren't dying, Frank."

"We all get old ... so fast. And then.... I want someone to be there."

"You'll find someone."

"I want someone to remember and care."

"Don't worry," Tony said lamely.

"It scares me."

"You'll find someone."

"Never."

"Yes. You will."

"Never. Never," Frank said, closing his eyes and leaning his head against the side window.

By the time they got to Frank's apartment house, he was sleeping like a child. Tony tried to wake him. But Frank would not come fully to his senses. Stumbling, mumbling, sighing heavily, he allowed himself to be half-walked, half-carried to the door of the apartment. Tony propped him against the wall beside the front door, held him up with one hand, felt through his pockets, found the key. When they finally reached the bedroom, Frank collapsed on the mattress in a loose-limbed heap and began to snore.

Tony undressed him down to his shorts. He pulled back the covers, rolled Frank onto the bottom sheet, pulled the top sheet and the blanket over him. Frank just snuffled and snored.

In the kitchen, in a junk drawer beside the sink, Tony found a pencil, a pad of writing paper, and a roll of Scotch tape. He wrote a note to Frank and taped it to the refrigerator door.

Dear Frank,

When you wake up in the morning, you're going to remember everything you told me, and you're probably going to be a little embarrassed. Don't worry. What you told me will stay strictly between us. And tomorrow I'll tell you some outrageously embarrassing secrets of my own, so then we'll be even. After all, cleaning the soul is one thing friends are for.

Tony.

He locked the door on his way out.

Driving home, he thought about poor Frank being all alone, and then he realized that his own situation was not markedly better. His father was still alive, but Carlo was sick a lot these days and probably would not live more than five years, ten at the most. Tony's brothers and sisters were spread all over the country, and none of them was really close in spirit either. He had a great many friends, but it was not just friends that you wanted by you when you were old and dying. He knew what Frank had meant. When you were on your deathbed, there were only certain hands that you could hold and from which you could draw courage: the hands of your spouse, your children, or your parents. He realized that he was building the kind of life that, when complete, might well be a hollow temple of loneliness. He was thirty-five, still young, but he had never truly given much serious thought to marriage. Suddenly, he had the feeling that time was slipping through his fingers. The years went by so very fast. It seemed only last year that he had been twenty-five, but a decade was gone.

Maybe Hilary Thomas is the one, he thought as he pulled into the parking slot in front of his apartment. She's special. I can see that. Very special. Maybe she'll think I'm someone special, too. It could work out for us. Couldn't it?

For a while he sat in the Jeep, staring at the night sky, thinking about Hilary Thomas and about getting old and dying alone.

***

At 10:30, when Hilary was deeply involved in the James Clavell novel, just as she was finishing a snack of apples and cheese, the telephone rang.

"Hello?"

There was only silence on the other end of the line.

"Who's there?"

Nothing.

She slammed the receiver down. That's what they told you to do when you got a threatening or obscene phone call. Just hang up. Don't encourage the caller. Just hang up quickly and sharply. She had given him a real pain in the ear, but that didn't make her feel a lot better.

She was sure it wasn't a wrong number. Not twice in one night with no apology either time. Besides, there had been a menacing quality in that silence, an unspoken threat.

Even after she had been nominated for the Academy Award, she had never felt the need for an unlisted number. Writers were not celebrities in the same sense that actors and even directors were. The general public never remembered or cared who earned the screenplay credit on a hit picture. Most writers who got unlisted numbers did it because it seemed prestigious; unlisted meant the harried scribbler was so busy with so many important projects that he had no time for even the rare unwanted call. But she didn't have an ego problem like that, and leaving her name in the book was just as anonymous as taking it out.

Of course, maybe that was no longer true. Perhaps the media reports about her two encounters with Bruno Frye had made her an object of general interest where her two successful screenplays had not. The story of a woman fighting off a would-be rapist and killing him the second time--that might very well fascinate a certain kind of sick mind. It might make some animal out there eager to prove he could succeed where Bruno Frye had failed.

She decided to call the telephone company business office first thing in the morning and ask for a new, unlisted number.

***

At midnight, the city morgue was, as the medical examiner himself had once described it, quiet as a tomb. The dimly lighted hallway was silent. The laboratory was dark. The room full of corpses was cold and lightless and still except for the insect hum of the blowers that pumped chill air through the wall vents.

As Thursday night changed to Friday morning, only one man was on duty in the morgue. He was in a small chamber adjacent to the M.E.'s private office. He was sitting in a spring-backed chair at an ugly metal and walnut-veneer desk. His name was Albert Wolwicz. He was twenty-nine years old, divorced, and the father of one child, a daughter named Rebecca. His wife had won custody of Becky. They both lived in San Diego now. Albert didn't mind working the (you should forgive the expression) graveyard shift. He did a little filing, then just sat and listened to the radio for a while, then did a bit more filing, then read a few chapters of a really good Stephen King novel about vampires on the loose in New England; and if the city remained cool all night, if the uniformed bulls and the meat wagon boys didn't start running in stretchers from gang fights or freeway accidents, it would be sweet duty all the way through to quitting time.

At ten minutes past midnight, the phone rang. Albert picked it up. "Morgue."

Silence.

"Hello," Albert said.

The man on the other end of the line groaned in agony and began to cry.

"Who is this?"

Weeping, the caller could not respond.

The tortured sounds were almost a parody of grief, an exaggerated and hysterical sobbing that was the strangest thing Albert had ever heard. "If you'll tell me what's wrong, maybe I can help."

The caller hung up.

Albert stared at the receiver for a moment, finally shrugged and put it down.

He tried to pick up where he'd left off in the Stephen King novel, but he kept thinking he heard something shuffling through the doorway behind him. He turned around half a dozen times, but there was never anyone (or anything) there.

Four

FRIDAY MORNING.

Nine o'clock.

Two men from Angels' Hill Mortuary of West Los Angeles arrived at the city morgue to claim the body of Bruno Gunther Frye. They were working in association with the Forever View Funeral Home in the town of St. Helena, where the deceased had lived. One man from Angels' Hill signed the necessary release, and both men transferred the corpse from cold storage to the back of a Cadillac hearse.

***

Frank Howard did not appear to have a hangover. His complexion did not have that after-the-binge sallowness; he was ruddy and healthy-looking. His blue eyes were clear. Confession apparently was every bit as good for the soul as the proverb promised.

At first in the office, then in the car. Tony sensed the awkwardness he had anticipated, and he did his best to make Frank feel comfortable. In time, Frank seemed to realize that nothing had changed for the worse between them; indeed, the partnership was working far better than it had during the past three months. By mid-morning, they had established a degree of rapport that would make it possible for them to learn to function together almost as a single organism. They still did not interact with the perfect harmony that Tony had experienced with Michael Savatino, but now there did not seem to be any obstacles to the development of precisely that sort of deep relationship. They needed some time to adjust to each other, a few more months, but eventually they would share a psychic bond that would make their job immeasurably easier than it had been in the past.

Friday morning, they worked on leads in the Bobby Valdez case. There were not many trails to follow, and the first two led nowhere.

The Department of Motor Vehicles report on Juan Mazquezza was the first disappointment. Apparently, Bobby Valdez had used a phony birth certificate and other false ID to obtain a valid driver's license under the name Juan Mazquezza. But the last address the DMV could provide was the one from which Bobby had moved last July, the Las Palmeras Apartments on La Brea Avenue. There were two other Juan Mazquezzas in the DMV files. One was a nineteen-year-old boy who lived in Fresno. The other Juan was a sixty-seven-year-old man in Tustin. They both owned automobiles with California registrations, but neither of them had a Jaguar. The Juan Mazquezza who had lived on La Brea Avenue had never registered a car, which meant that Bobby had bought the Jaguar using yet another phony name. Evidently, he had a source for forged documents of extremely high quality.

Dead end.

Tony and Frank returned to the Vee Vee Gee Laundry and questioned the employees who had worked with Bobby when he'd been using the Mazquezza name. They hoped that someone would have kept in touch with him after he quit his job and would know where he was living now. But everyone said Juan had been a loner; no one knew where he'd gone.

Dead end.

After they left Vee Vee Gee, they went to lunch at an omelet house that Tony liked. In addition to the main dining room, the restaurant had an open-air brick terrace where a dozen tables stood under blue- and white-striped umbrellas. Tony and Frank ate salads and cheese omelets in the warm autumn breeze.

"You doing anything tomorrow night?" Tony asked.

"Me?"

"You."

"No. Nothing."

"Good. I've arranged something."

"What?"

"A blind date."

"For me?"

"You're half of it."

"Are you serious?"

"I called her this morning."

"Forget it," Frank said.

"She's perfect for you."

"I hate match-making."

"She's a gorgeous woman."

"Not interested."

"And sweet."

"I'm not a kid."

"Who said you were?"

"I don't need you to fix me up with someone."

"Sometimes a guy does that for a friend. Doesn't he?"

"I can find my own dates."

"Only a fool would turn down this lady."

"Then I'm a fool."

Tony sighed. "Suit yourself."

"Look, what I said last night at The Bolt Hole...."

"Yeah?"

"I wasn't looking for sympathy."

"Everybody needs some sympathy now and then."

"I just wanted you to understand why I've been in such a foul mood."

"And I do understand."

"I didn't mean to give you the impression that I'm a jerk, that I'm a sucker for the wrong kind of woman."

"You didn't give me that impression at all."

"I've never broken down like that before."

"I believe it."

"I've never ... cried like that."

"I know."

"I guess I was just tired."

"Sure."

"Maybe it was all that liquor."

"Maybe."

"I drank a lot last night."

"Quite a lot."

"The liquor made me sentimental."

"Maybe."

"But now I'm all right."

"Who said you weren't?"

"I can get my own dates, Tony."

"Whatever you say."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

They concentrated on their cheese omelets.

There were several large office buildings nearby, and dozens of secretaries in bright dresses paraded past on the sidewalk, going to lunch.

Flowers ringed the restaurant terrace and perfumed the sun-coppered air.

The noise on the street was typically that of L.A. It wasn't the incessant barking of brakes and screaming of horns that you heard in New York or Chicago or most other cities. Just the hypnotic grumble of engines. And the air-cutting whoosh of passing cars. A lulling noise. Soothing. Like the tide on the beach. Made by machines but somehow natural, primal. Also subtly and inexpressibly erotic. Even the sounds of the traffic conformed to the city's subconscious subtropical personality.

After a couple of minutes of silence, Frank said, "What's her name?"

"Who?"

"Don't be a smartass."

"Janet Yamada."

"Japanese?"

"Does she sound Italian?"

"What's she like?"

"Intelligent, witty, good-looking."

"What's she do?"

"Works at city hall."

"How old is she?"

"Thirty-six, thirty-seven."

"Too young for me?"

"You're only forty-five, for God's sake."

"How'd you come to know her?"

"We dated for a while," Tony said.

"What went wrong?"

"Nothing. We just discovered we make better friends than lovers."

"You think I'll like her?"

"Positive."

"And she'll like me?"

"If you don't pick your nose or eat with your hands."

"Okay," Frank said. "I'll go out with her."

"If it's going to be an ordeal for you, maybe we should just forget it."

"No. I'll go. It'll be okay."

"You don't have to do it just to please me."

"Give me her phone number."

"I don't feel right about this," Tony said. "I feel like I've forced you into something."

"You haven't forced me."

"I think I should call her and cancel the arrangements," Tony said.

"No, listen, I--"

"I shouldn't try to be a matchmaker. I'm lousy at it."

"Dammit, I want to go out with her!" Frank said.

Tony smiled broadly. "I know."

"Have I just been manipulated?"

"You manipulated yourself."

Frank tried to scowl, but couldn't. He grinned instead. "Want to double-date Saturday night?"

"No way. You've got to stand on your own, my friend."

"And besides," Frank said knowingly. "you don't want to share Hilary Thomas with anyone else."

"Exactly."

"You really think it can work with you two?"

"You make it sound like we're planning to get married. It's just a date."

"But even for a date, won't it be ... awkward?"

"Why should it be?" Tony asked.

"Well, she's got all that money."

"That's a male chauvinist remark if I ever heard one."

"You don't think that'll make it difficult?"

"When a man has some money, does he have to limit his dating to women who have an equal amount of money?"

"That's different."

"When a king decides to marry a shopgirl, we think it's too romantic for words. But when a queen wants to marry a shopboy, we think she's letting herself be played for a fool. Classic double standard."

"Well ... good luck."

"And to you as well."

"Ready to go back to work?"

"Yeah," Tony said. "Let's find Bobby Valdez."

"Judge Crater might be easier."

"Or Amelia Earhart."

"Or Jimmy Hoffa."

***

Friday afternoon.

One o'clock.

The body lay on an embalming table at Angels' Hill Mortuary in West Los Angeles. A tag wired to the big toe on the right foot identified the deceased as Bruno Gunther Frye.

A death technician prepared the body for shipment to Napa County. He swabbed it down with a long-lasting disinfectant. The intestines and other soft abdominal organs were pulled out of the dead man through the only available natural body opening and discarded. Because of the stab wounds and the autopsy that had taken place the previous night, there was not much unclotted blood or other fluids remaining in the corpse, but those last few dollops were forced out nonetheless; embalming fluid took their place.

The technician whistled a Donny and Marie Osmond hit while he labored over the dead man.

The Angels' Hill Mortuary was not responsible for any cosmetic work on the corpse. That would be handled by the mortician in St. Helena. The Angels' Hill technician merely tucked the sightless eyes shut forever and sewed up the lips with a series of tight interior stitches which froze the wide mouth in a vague eternal smile. It was a neat job: none of the sutures would be visible to the mourners--if there were any mourners.

Next, the deceased was wrapped in a opaque white shroud and put into a cheap aluminum coffin that met minimum construction and seal standards set by the state for the conveyance of a dead body by any and all means of public transportation. In St. Helena, it would be transferred to a more impressive casket, one that would be chosen by the family or friends of the loved one.

At 4:00 Friday afternoon, the body was taken to the Los Angeles International Airport and put into the cargo hold of a California Airways propjet destined for Monterey, Santa Rosa, and Sacramento. It would be taken off the plane at the second stop.

At 6:30 Friday evening, in Santa Rosa, there was no one from Bruno Frye's family at the small airport. He had no relatives. He was the last of his line. His grandfather had brought only one child into the world, a lovely daughter named Katherine, and she had produced no children at all. Bruno was adopted. He never had married.

Three people waited on the Tarmac behind the small terminal, and two of them were from the Forever View Funeral Home. Mr. Avril Thomas Tannerton was the owner of Forever View, which served St. Helena and the surrounding communities in that part of the Napa Valley. He was forty-three, good-looking, slightly pudgy but not fat, with lots of reddish-blond hair, a scattering of freckles, lively eyes, and an easy warm smile that he had difficulty suppressing. He had come to Santa Rosa with his twenty-four-year-old assistant, Gary Olmstead, a slightly-built man who seldom talked more than the dead with whom he worked. Tannerton made you think of a choirboy, a veneer of genuine piety over a core of good-natured mischievousness; but Olmstead had a long, mournful, ascetic face perfectly suited to his profession.

The third man was Joshua Rhinehart, Bruno Frye's local attorney and executor of the Frye estate. He was sixty-one years old, and he had the looks that would have contributed to a successful career as a diplomat or politician. His hair was thick and white, swept back from brow and temples, not chalk-white, not yellow-white, but a lustrous silver-white. A broad forehead. A long proud nose. A strong jaw and chin. His coffee-brown eyes were quick and clear.

The body of Bruno Frye was transferred from the aircraft to the hearse, then driven back to St. Helena. Joshua Rhinehart followed in his own car.

Neither business nor personal obligations had required Joshua to make this trip to Santa Rosa with Avril Tannerton. Over the years, he had done quite a lot of work for Shade Tree Vineyards, the company that had been wholly owned by the Frye family for three generations, but he had long ago ceased to need the income from that account, and in fact it had become considerably more trouble than it was worth. He continued to handle the Frye family's affairs largely because he still remembered the time, thirty-five years ago, when he had been struggling to build a practice in rural Napa County and had been helped immeasurably by Katherine Frye's decision to give him all the family's legal business. Yesterday, when he heard that Bruno was dead, he hadn't grieved at all. Neither Katherine nor her adopted son had ever inspired affection, and they most certainly had not encouraged the special emotional ties of friendship. Joshua accompanied Avril Tannerton to the Santa Rosa airport only because he wanted to be in a position to manage the arrival of the corpse in case any reporters showed up and tried to turn the event into a circus. Although Bruno had been an unstable man, a very sick man, perhaps even a profoundly evil man, Joshua was determined that the funeral would be carried out with dignity. He felt he owed the dead man that much. Besides, for most of his life, Joshua was a stalwart supporter and promoter of the Napa Valley, championing both its quality of life and its magnificent wine, and he did not want to see the fabric of the entire community stained by the criminal acts of one man.

Fortunately, there had not been a single reporter at the airport.

They drove back to St. Helena through creeping shadows and dying light, east from Santa Rosa, across the southern end of the Sonoma Valley, into the five-mile-wide Napa Valley, then north in the purple-yellow gloaming. As he followed the hearse, Joshua admired the countryside, something he had done with ever-increasing pleasure for the last thirty-five years. The looming mountain ridges were thick with pine and fir and birch, lighted only along their crests by the westering sun, already out of sight; those ridges were ramparts, Joshua thought, great walls keeping out the corrupting influences of a less civilized world than that which lay within. Below the mountains the rolling hills were studded with black-trunked oaks and covered with long dry grass that, in the daylight, looked as blond and soft as cornsilk; but now in the gathering dusk which leeched away its color, the grass shimmered in dark waves, awash in the ebb and glow of a gentle breeze. Beyond the boundaries of the small quaint towns, endless vineyards sprang up on some of the hills and on nearly all of the rich flatland. In 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson had written of the Napa Valley: "One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure; that is better; a third is best. So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite ... and the wine is bottled poetry." When Stevenson had been honeymooning in the valley and writing Silverado Squatters, there had been fewer than four thousand acres in vines. By the coming of the Great Plague--Prohibition--in 1920, there had heen ten thousand acres producing viniferous grapes. Today, there were thirty thousand acres bringing forth grapes that were far sweeter and less acidic than those grown anywhere else in the world, as much productive land as in all of the Sonoma Valley, which was twice as large as the Napa. Tucked in among the vineyards were the great wineries and houses, some of them converted from abbeys and monasteries and Spanish-style missions, others built along clean modern lines. Thank God, Joshua thought, only a couple of the newer wineries had opted for the sterile factory look that was an insult to the eye and a blight upon the valley. Most of man's handiwork either complemented or at least did not intrude upon the truly dazzling natural beauty of his unique and idyllic place. As he followed the hearse toward Forever View, Joshua saw lights come on in the windows of the houses, soft yellow lights that brought a sense of warmth and civilization to the encroaching night. The wine is bottled poetry, Joshua thought, and the land from which it comes is God's greatest work of art: my land; my home; how lucky I am to be here when there are so many less charming, less pleasant places in which I might have wound up.

Like in an aluminum coffin, dead.

Forever View stood a hundred yards back from the two-lane highway, just south of St. Helena. It was a big white colonial-style house, with a circular driveway, marked by a tasteful white and green hand-painted sign. As darkness fell, a single white spotlight came on automatically, softly illuminating the sign; and a low row of electric carriage lamps marked the circular driveway with a curve of amber light.

There were no reporters waiting at Forever View either. Joshua was pleased to see that the Napa County press evidently shared his strong aversion to unnecessary bad publicity.

Tannerton drove the hearse around to the rear of the huge white house. He and Olmstead slid the coffin onto a cart and wheeled it inside.

Joshua joined them in the mortician's workroom.

An effort had been made to give the chamber an airy cheerful ambience. The ceiling was covered with prettily textured acoustical tile. The walls were painted pale blue, the blue of a robin's egg, the blue of a baby's blanket, the blue of new life. Tannerton touched a wall switch, and lilting music carne from stereo speakers, bright soaring music, nothing somber, nothing heavy.

To Joshua, at least, the place reeked of death in spite of everything that Avril Tannerton had done to make it cosy. The air bore traces of the pungent fumes from embalming fluid, and there was a sweet cover-up aerosol scent of carnations that only reminded him of funeral bouquets. The floor was glossy white ceramic tile, freshly scrubbed, a bit slippery for anyone not wearing rubber-soled shoes; Tannerton and Gary Olmstead were wearing them, but Joshua was not. At first, the tile gave an impression of openness and cleanliness, but then Joshua realized the floor was grimly utilitarian; it had to have a stainproof surface that would resist the corroding effects of spilled blood and bile and other even more noxious substances.

Tannerton's clients, the relatives of the deceased, would never be brought into this room, for the bitter truth of death was too obvious here. In the front of the house, where the viewing chambers were decorated with heavy wine-red velvet drapes and plush carpets and dark wood paneling and brass lamps, where the lighting was low and artfully arranged, the phrases "passed away" and "called home by God" could be taken seriously; in the front rooms, the atmosphere encouraged a belief in heaven and the ascendance of the spirit. But in the tile-floored workroom with the lingering stink of embalming fluid and the shiny array of mortician's instruments lined up on enamel trays, death seemed depressingly clinical and unquestionably final.

Olmstead opened the aluminum coffin.

Avril Tannerton folded back the plastic shroud, revealing the body from the hips up.

Joshua looked down at the waxy yellow-gray corpse and shivered. "Ghastly."

"I know this is a trying time for you," Tannerton said in practiced mournful tones.

"Not at all," Joshua said. "I won't be a hypocrite and pretend grief. I knew very little about the man, and I didn't particularly like what I did know. Ours was strictly a business relationship."

Tannerton blinked. "Oh. Well ... then perhaps you would prefer us to handle the funeral arrangements through one of the deceased's friends."

"I don't think he had any," Joshua said.

They stared down at the body for a moment, silent.

"Ghastly," Joshua said again.

"Of course," Tannerton said, "no cosmetic work has been done. Absolutely none. If I could have gotten to him soon after death, he'd look much better."

"Can you ... do anything with him?"

"Oh, certainly. But it won't be easy. He's been dead a day and a half, and though he's been kept refrigerated--"

"Those wounds," Joshua said thickly, staring at the hideously scarred abdomen with morbid fascination. "Dear God, she really cut him."

"Most of that was done by the coroner," Tannerton said. "This small slit is a stab wound. And this one."

"The pathologist did a good job with his mouth," Olmstead said appreciatively.

"Yes, didn't he?" Tannerton said, touching the sealed lips of the corpse. "It's unusual to find a coroner with an aesthetic sense."

"Rare." Olmstead said.

Joshua shook his head. "I still find it hard to believe."

"Five years ago," Tannerton said, "I buried his mother. That's when I met him. He seemed a little ... strange. But I figured it was the stress and the grief. He was such an important man, such a leading figure in the community."

"Cold," Joshua said. "He was an extremely cold and self-contained man. Vicious in business. Winning a battle with a competitor wasn't always enough for him; if at all possible, he preferred to utterly destroy the other fellow. I've always thought he was capable of cruelty and physical violence. But attempted rape? Attempted murder?"

Tannerton looked at Joshua and said, "Mr. Rhinehart, I've often heard it said that you don't mince words. You've got a reputation, a much admired reputation, for saying exactly what you think and to hell with the cost. But...."

"But what?"

"But when you're speaking of the dead, don't you think you ought to--"

Joshua smiled. "Son, I'm a cantankerous old bastard and not entirely admirable. Far from it! As long as truth is my weapon, I don't mind hurting the feelings of the living. Why, I've made children cry, and I've made kindly gray-haired grandmothers weep. I have little compassion for fools and sons of bitches when they're alive. So why should I show more respect than that for the dead?"

"I'm just not accustomed to--"

"Of course, you're not. Your profession requires you to speak well of the deceased, regardless of who he might have been and what heinous things he might have done. I don't hold that against you. It's your job."

Tannerton couldn't think of anything to say. He closed the lid of the coffin.

"Let's settle on the arrangements," Joshua said. "I'd like to get home and have my dinner--if I have any appetite left when I leave here." He sat down on a high stool beside a glass-fronted cabinet that contained more tools of the mortician's trade.

Tannerton paced in front of him, a freckled, mop-haired bundle of energy. "How important is it to you to have the usual viewing?"

"Usual viewing?"

"An open casket. Would you find it offensive if we avoided that?"

"I hadn't really given it a thought," Joshua said.

"To be honest with you, I don't know how ... presentable the deceased can be made to look," Tannerton said. "The people at Angels' Hill didn't give him quite a full enough look when they embalmed him. His face appears to be somewhat drawn and shrunken. I am not pleased. I am definitely not pleased. I could attempt to pump him up a bit, but patchwork like that seldom looks good. As for cosmetology ... well ... again, I wonder if too much time has passed. I mean, he apparently was in the hot sun for a couple of hours after he died, before he was found. And then it was eighteen hours in cold storage before the embalming was done. I can certainly make him look a great deal better than he does now. But as for bringing the glow of life back to his face.... You see, after all that he's been through, after the extremes of temperature, and after this much time, the skin texture has changed substantially; it won't take makeup and powder at all well. I think perhaps--"

Beginning to get queasy, Joshua interrupted. "Make it a closed casket."

"No viewing?"

"No viewing."

"You're sure?"

"Positive."

"Good. Let me see.... Will you want him buried in one of his suits?"

"Is it necessary, considering the casket won't be open?"

"It would be easier for me if I just tucked him into one of our burial gowns."

"That'll be fine."

"White or a nice dark blue?"

"Do you have something in polka dots?"

"Polka dots?"

"Or orange and yellow stripes?"

Tannerton's ever-ready grin slipped from beneath his dour funeral director expression, and he struggled to force it out of sight again. Joshua suspected that, privately, Avril was a fun-loving man, the kind of hail-fellow-well-met who would make a good drinking buddy; but he seemed to feel that his public image required him to be somber and humorless at all times. He was visibly upset when he slipped up and allowed the private Avril to appear when only the public man ought to be seen. He was, Joshua thought, a likely candidate for an eventual schizophrenic breakdown.

"Make it the white gown," Joshua said.

"What about the casket? What style would--"

"I'll leave that to you."

"Very well. Price range?"

"Might as well have the best. The estate can afford it."

"The rumor is he must have been worth two or three million."

"Probably twice that," Joshua said.

"But he really didn't live like it."

"Or die like it," Joshua said.

Tannerton thought about that for a moment, then said, "Any religious services?"

"He didn't attend church."

"Then shall I assume the minister's role?"

"If you wish."

"We'll have a short graveside service," Tannerton said. "I'll read something from the Bible, or perhaps just a simple inspirational piece, something nondenominational."

They agreed on a time for burial: Sunday at two o'clock in the afternoon. Bruno would be laid to rest beside Katherine, his adoptive mother, in the Napa County Memorial Park.

As Joshua got up to leave, Tannerton said, "I certainly hope you've found my services valuable thus far, and I assure you I'll do everything in my power to make the rest of this go smoothly."

"Well," Joshua said, "you've convinced me of one thing. I'm going to draw up a new will tomorrow. When my times comes, I sure as hell intend to be cremated."

Tannerton nodded. "We can handle that for you."

"Don't rush me, son. Don't rush me."

Tannerton blushed. "Oh, I didn't mean to--"

"I know, I know. Relax."

Tannerton cleared his throat uncomfortably. "I'll... uh ... show you to the door."

"No need. I can find it myself."

Outside, behind the funeral home, the night was very dark and deep. There was only one light, a hundred-watt bulb above the rear door. The glow reached only a few feet into the velveteen blackness.

In the late afternoon, a breeze had sprung up, and with the coming of the night, it had grown into a gusty wind. The air was turbulent and chilly; it hissed and moaned.

Joshua walked to his car, which lay beyond the meager semicircle of frosty light, and as he opened the door he had the peculiar feeling he was being watched. He glanced back at the house, but there were no faces at the windows.

Something moved in the gloom. Thirty feet away. Near the three-car garage. Joshua sensed rather than saw it. He squinted, but his vision was not what it had once been; he couldn't discern anything unnatural in the night.

Just the wind, he thought. Just the wind stirring through the trees and bushes or pushing along a discarded newspaper, a piece of dry brush.

But then it moved again. He saw it this time. It was crouched in front of a row of shrubs leading out from the garage. He could not see any detail. It was just a shadow, a lighter purple-black smudge on the blue-black cloth of the night, as soft and lumpy and undefined as all the other shadows--except that this one moved.

Just a dog, Joshua thought. A stray dog. Or maybe a kid up to some mischief.

"Is someone there?"

No reply.

He took a few steps away from his car.

The shadow-thing scurried back ten or twelve feet, along the line of shrubbery. It stopped in an especially deep pool of darkness, still crouching, still watchful.

Not a dog, Joshua thought. Too damned big for a dog. Some kid. Probably up to no good. Some kid with vandalism on his mind.

"Who's there?"

Silence.

"Come on now."

No answer. Just the whispering wind.

Joshua started toward the shadow among shadows, but he was suddenly arrested by the instinctive knowledge that the thing was dangerous. Horrendously dangerous. Deadly. He experienced all of the involuntary animal reactions to such a threat: a shiver up his spine; his scalp seemed to crawl and then tighten; his heart began to pound; his mouth went dry; his hands curled into claws; and his hearing seemed more acute than it had been a minute ago. Joshua hunched over and drew up his bulky shoulders, unconsciously seeking a defensive posture.

"Who's there?" he repeated.

The shadow-thing turned and crashed through the shrubs. It ran off across the vineyards that bordered Avril Tannerton's property. For a few seconds, Joshua could hear the steadily diminishing clamor of its flight, the receding thud-thud-thud of heavy running footsteps and the fading wheeze as it gasped for breath. Then the wind was the only sound in the night.

Looking over his shoulder a couple of times, he returned to his car. He got in, closed the door, locked it.

Already, the encounter began to seem unreal, increasingly dreamlike. Was there actually someone in the darkness, waiting, watching? Had there been something dangerous out there, or had it been his imagination? After spending half an hour in Avril Tannerton's ghoulish workshop, a man could be expected to jump at strange noises and start looking for monstrous creatures in the shadows. As Joshua's muscles relaxed, as his heart slowed, he began to think he had been a fool. The threat he had sensed so strongly seemed, in retrospect, to be a phantom, a vagary of the night and wind.

At worst, it had been a kid. A vandal.

He started the car and drove home, surprised and amused by the effect Tannerton's workroom had had upon him.

***

Saturday evening, promptly at seven o'clock, Anthony Clemenza arrived at Hilary's Westwood house in a blue Jeep station wagon.

Hilary went out to meet him. She was wearing a sleek emerald-green silk dress with long tight sleeves and a neckline cut low enough to be enticing but not cheap. She hadn't been on a date in more than fourteen months, and she nearly had forgotten how to dress for the ritual of courtship; she had spent two hours choosing her outfit, as indecisive as a schoolgirl. She accepted Tony's invitation because he was the most interesting man she'd met in a couple of years--and also because she was trying her best to overcome her tendency to hide from the rest of the world. She had been stung by Wally Topelis's assessment of her; he had warned her that she was using the virtue of self-reliance as an excuse to hide from people, and she had recognized the truth in what he'd said.

She avoided making friends and finding lovers, for she was afraid of the pain that only friends and lovers could inflict with their rejections and betrayals. But at the same time that she was protecting herself from the pain, she was denying herself the pleasure of good relationships with good people who would not betray her. Growing up with her drunken violent parents, she had learned that displays of affection were usually followed by sudden outbursts of rage and anger and unexpected punishment.

She was never afraid to take chances in her work and in business matters; now it was time to bring the same spirit of adventure to her personal life. As she walked briskly toward the blue Jeep, swinging her hips a little, she felt tense about taking the emotional risks that the mating dance entailed, but she also felt fresh and feminine and considerably happier than she had in a long time.

Tony hurried around to the passenger's side and opened the door. Bending low, he said, "The royal carriage awaits."

"Oh, there must be some mistake. I'm not the queen."

"You look like a queen to me."

"I'm just a lowly serving girl."

"You're a great deal prettier than the queen."

"Better not let her hear you say that. She'll have your head for sure."

"Too late."

"Oh?"

"I've already lost my head over you."

Hilary groaned.

"Too saccharine?" he asked.

"I need a bite of lemon after that one."

"But you liked it."

"Yes, I admit I did. I guess I'm a sucker for flattery," she said, getting into the Jeep in a swirl of green silk.

As they drove down toward Westwood Boulevard, Tony said, "You're not offended?"

"By what?"

"By this buggy?"

"How could I be offended by a Jeep? Does it talk? Is it liable to insult me?"

"It's not a Mercedes."

"A Mercedes isn't a Rolls. And a Rolls isn't a Toyota."

"There's something very Zen about that."

"If you think I'm a snob, why'd you ask me out?"

"I don't think you're a snob," he said. "But Frank says we'll be awkward with each other because you've got more money than I have."

"Well, based on my experience with him, I'd say Frank's judgments of other people are not to be trusted."

"He has his problems," Tony agreed as he turned left onto Wilshire Boulevard. "But he's working them out."

"I will admit this isn't a car you see many of in L.A."

"Usually, women ask me if it's my second car."

"I don't really care if it is or isn't."

"They say that in L.A. you are what you drive."

"Is that what they say? Then you're a Jeep. And I'm a Mercedes. We're cars, not people. We should be going to the garage for an oil change, not to a restaurant for dinner. Does that make sense?"

"No sense at all," Tony said. "Actually, I got a Jeep because I like to go skiing three or four weekends every winter. With this jalopy, I know I'll always be able to get through the mountain passes, no matter how bad the weather gets."

"I've always wanted to learn to ski."

"I'll teach you. You'll have to wait a few weeks. But it won't be long until there's snow at Mammoth."

"You seem pretty sure we'll still be friends a few weeks from now."

"Why wouldn't we be?" he asked.

"Maybe we'll get into a fight tonight, first thing, at the restaurant."

"Over what?"

"Politics."

"I think all politicians are power-hungry bastards too incompetent to tie their own shoelaces."

"So do I"

"I'm a Libertarian."

"So am I--sort of."

"Short argument."

"Maybe we'll fight over religion."

"I was raised a Catholic. But I'm not much of anything any more."

"Me either."

"We don't seem to be good at arguing."

"Well," she said, "maybe we're the kind of people who fight over little things, inconsequential matters."

"Such as?"

"Well, since we're going to an Italian restaurant, maybe you'll love the garlic bread, and I'll hate it."

"And we'll fight over that?"

"That or the fettucini or the manicotti."

"No. Where we're going, you'll love everything," he said. "Wait and see."

He took her to Savatino's Ristorante on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was an intimate place, seating no more than sixty and somehow appearing to seat only half that number; it was cozy, comfortable, the kind of restaurant in which you could lose track of time and spend six hours over dinner if the waiters didn't nudge you along. The lighting was soft and warm. The recorded opera--leaning heavily to the voices of Gigli and Caruso and Pavarotti--was played loud enough to be heard and appreciated, but not so loud that it intruded on conversation. There was a bit too much decor, but one part of it, a spectacular mural, was, Hilary thought, absolutely wonderful. The painting covered an entire wall and was a depiction of the most commonly perceived joys of the Italian lifestyle: grapes, wine, pasta, dark-eyed women, darkly handsome men, a loving and rotund nonna, a group of people dancing to the music of an accordionist, a picnic under olive trees, and much more. Hilary had never seen anything remotely like it, for it was neither entirely realistic nor stylized nor abstract nor impressionistic, but an odd stepchild of surrealism, as if it were a wildly inventive collaboration between Andrew Wyeth and Salvador Dali.

Michael Savatino, the owner, who turned out to be an ex-policeman, was irrepressibly jolly, hugging Tony, taking Hilary's hand and kissing it, punching Tony lightly in the belly and recommending pasta to fatten him up, insisting they come into the kitchen to see the new cappuccino machine. As they came out of the kitchen, Michael's wife, a striking blonde named Paula, arrived, and there was more hugging and kissing and complimenting. At last, Michael linked arms with Hilary and escorted her and Tony to a corner booth. He told the captain to bring two bottles of Biondi-Santi's Brunello di Montelcino, waited for the wine, and uncorked it himself. After glasses had been filled and toasts made, he left them, winking at Tony to show his approval, seeing Hilary notice the wink, laughing at himself, winking at her.

"He seems like such a nice man," she said when Michael had gone.

"He's some guy," Tony said.

"You like him a great deal."

"I love him. He was a perfect partner when we worked homicide together."

They fell smoothly into a discussion of policework and then screenwriting. He was so easy to talk to that Hilary felt she had known him for years. There was absolutely none of the awkwardness that usually marred a first date.

At one point, he noticed her looking at the wall mural. "Do you like the painting?" he asked.

"It's superb."

"Is it?"

"Don't you agree?"

"It's pretty good," he said.

"Better than pretty good. Who did it? Do you know?"

"Some artist down on his luck," Tony said. "He painted it in exchange for fifty free dinners."

"Only fifty? Michael got a bargain."

They talked about films and books and music and theater. The food was nearly as good as the conversation. The appetizer was light; it consisted of two stubby crèpes, one filled with unadulterated ricotta cheese, the other with a spicy concoction of shaved beef, onions, peppers, mushrooms, and garlic. Their salads were huge and crisp, smothered in sliced raw mushrooms. Tony selected the entrée, Veal Savatino, a specialita of the house, incredibly tender white-white veal with a thin brown sauce, pearl onions, and grilled strips of zucchini. The cappuccino was excellent.

When she finished dinner and looked at her watch, Hilary was amazed to see that it was ten minutes past eleven.

Michael Savatino stopped by the table to bask in their praise, and then he said to Tony, "That's number twenty-one."

"Oh, no. Twenty-three."

"Not by my records."

"Your records are wrong."

"Twenty-one," Michael insisted.

"Twenty-three," Tony said. "And it ought to be numbers twenty-three and twenty-four. It was two meals, after all."

"No, no," Michael said. "We count by the visit, not by the number of meals."

Perplexed, Hilary said, "Am I losing my mind, or does this conversation make no sense at all?"

Michael shook his head, exasperated with Tony. To Hilary he said, "When he painted the mural, I wanted to pay him in cash, but he wouldn't accept it. He said he'd trade the painting for a few free dinners. I insisted on a hundred free visits. He said twenty-five. We finally settled on fifty. He undervalues his work, and that makes me angry as hell."

"Tony painted that mural?" she asked.

"He didn't tell you?"

"No."

She looked at Tony, and he grinned sheepishly.

"That's why he drives that Jeep," Michael said. "When he wants to go up in the hills to work on a nature study, the Jeep will take him anywhere."

"He said he had it because he likes to go skiing."

"That too. But mostly, it's to get him into the hills to paint. He should be proud of his work. But it's easier to pull teeth from an alligator than it is to get him to talk about his painting."

"I'm an amateur," Tony said. "Nothing's more boring than an amateur dabbler running off at the mouth about his 'art.'"

"That mural is not the work of an amateur," Michael said.

"Definitely not," Hilary agreed.

"You're my friends," Tony said, "so naturally you're too generous with your praise. And neither of you has the qualifications to be an art critic."

"He's won two prizes," Michael told Hilary.

"Prizes?" she asked Tony.

"Nothing important."

"Both times he won best of the show," Michael said.

"What shows were these?" Hilary asked.

"No big ones," Tony said.

"He dreams about making a living as a painter," Michael said, "but he never does anything about it."

"Because it's only a dream," Tony said. "I'd be a fool if I seriously thought I could make it as a painter."

"He never really tried," Michael told Hilary.

"A painter doesn't get a weekly paycheck," Tony said. "Or health benefits. Or retirement checks."

"But if you only sold two pieces a month for only half what they're worth, you'd make more than you get as a cop," Michael said.

"And if I sold nothing for a month or two months or six," Tony said, "then who would pay the rent?"

To Hilary, Michael said, "His apartment's crammed full of paintings, one stacked on the other. He's sitting on a fortune, but he won't do anything about it."

"He exaggerates," Tony told her.

"Ah, I give up!" Michael said. "Maybe you can talk some sense into him, Hilary." As he walked away from their table, he said, "Twenty-one."

"Twenty-three." Tony said.

Later, in the Jeep, as he was driving her home, Hilary said, "Why don't you at least take your work around to some galleries and see if they'll handle it?"

"They won't."

"You could at least ask."

"Hilary. I'm not really good enough."

"That mural was excellent."

"There's a big difference between restaurant murals and fine art."

"That mural was fine art."

"Again, I've got to point out that you aren't an expert."

"I buy paintings for both pleasure and investment."

"With the aid of a gallery director for the investment part?" he asked.

"That's right. Wyant Stevens in Beverly Hills."

"Then he's the expert, not you."

"Why don't you show some of your work to him?"

"I can't take rejection."

"I'll bet he won't reject you."

"Can we not talk about my painting?"

"Why?"

"I'm bored."

"You're difficult."

"And bored," he said.

"What shall we talk about?"

"Well, why don't we talk about whether or not you're going to invite me in for brandy."

"Would you like to come in for brandy?"

"Cognac?"

"That's what I have."

"What label?"

"Remy Martin."

"The best." He grinned. "But, gee, I don't know. It's getting awfully late."

"If you don't come in," she said, "I'll just have to drink alone." She was enjoying the silly game.

"Can't let you drink alone," he said.

"That's one sign of alcoholism."

"It certainly is."

"If you don't come in for a brandy with me, you'll be starting me on the road to problem drinking and complete destruction."

"I'd never forgive myself."

Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting side by side on the couch, in front of the fireplace, watching the flames and sipping Remy Martin.

Hilary felt slightly light-headed, not from the cognac but from being next to him--and from wondering if they were going to go to bed together. She had never slept with a man on the first date. She was usually wary, reluctant to commit herself to an affair until she had spent a couple of weeks--sometimes a couple of months--evaluating the man. More than once she had taken so long to make up her mind that she had lost men who might have made wonderful lovers and lasting friends. But in just one evening with Tony Clemenza, she felt at ease and perfectly safe with him. He was a damned attractive man. Tall. Dark. Rugged good looks. The inner authority and self-confidence of a cop. Yet gentle. Really surprisingly gentle. And sensitive. So much time had passed since she'd allowed herself to be touched and possessed, since she'd used and been used and shared. How could she have let so much time pass? She could easily imagine herself in his arms, naked beneath him, then atop him, and as those lovely images filled her mind, she realized that he was probably having the same sweet thoughts.

Then the telephone rang.

"Damn!" she said.

"Someone you don't want to hear from?"

She turned and looked at the phone, which was a walnut box model that stood on a corner desk. It rang, rang.

"Hilary?"

"I'll bet it's him," she said.

"Him who?"

"I've been getting these calls...."

The strident ringing continued.

"What calls?" Tony asked.

"The last couple of days, someone's been calling and then refusing to speak when I answer. It's happened six or eight times."

"He doesn't say anything at all?"

"He just listens," she said. "I think it's some nut who was turned on by the newspaper stories about Frye."

The insistent bell made her grit her teeth.

She stood up and hesitantly approached the phone. Tony went with her. "You have a listed number?"

"I'm getting a new one next week. It'll be unlisted."

They reached the desk and stood looking at the phone. It rang again and again and again.

"It's him," she said. "Who else would let it ring that long?"

Tony snatched up the receiver. "Hello?"

The caller didn't respond.

"Thomas residence," Tony said. "Detective Clemenza speaking."

Click.

Tony put the phone down and said, "He hung up. Maybe I scared him off for good."

"I hope so."

"It's still a good idea to get an unlisted number."

"Oh, I'm not going to change my mind about that."

"I'll call the telephone company service department first thing Monday morning and tell them the LAPD would appreciate a speedy job."

"Can you do that?"

"Sure."

"Thank you, Tony." She hugged herself. She felt cold.

"Try not to worry about it," he said. "Studies show that the kind of creep who makes threatening phone calls usually gets all his kicks that way. The call itself usually satisfies him. He usually isn't the violent type."

"Usually?"

"Almost never."

She smiled thinly. "That's still not good enough."

The call had spoiled any chance that the night might end in a shared bed. She was no longer in the mood for seduction, and Tony sensed the change.

"Would you like me to stay a while longer, just to see if he calls again?"

"That's sweet of you," she said, "But I guess you're right. He's not dangerous. If he was, he'd come around instead of just calling. Anyway, you scared him off. He probably thinks the police are here just waiting for him."

"Did you get your pistol back?"

She nodded. "I went downtown yesterday and filled out the registration form like I should have done when I moved into the city. If the guy on the phone does come around, I can plink him legally now."

"I really don't think he'll bother you again tonight."

"I'm sure you're right."

For the first time all evening, they were awkward with each other.

"Well, I guess I'd better be going."

"It is late," she agreed.

"Thank you for the cognac."

"Thank you for a wonderful dinner."

At the door he said, "Doing anything tomorrow night?"

She was about to turn him down when she remembered how good she had felt sitting beside him on the sofa. And she thought of Wally Topelis's warning about becoming a hermit. She smiled and said, "I'm free."

"Great. What would you like to do?"

"Whatever you want."

He thought about it for a moment, "Shall we make a whole day of it?"

"Well ... why not?"

"We'll start with lunch. I'll pick you up at noon."

"I'll be ready and waiting."

He kissed her lightly and affectionately on the lips, "Tomorrow," he said,

"Tomorrow."

She watched him leave, then closed and locked the door.

***

All day Saturday, morning and afternoon and evening, the body of Bruno Frye lay alone in the Forever View Funeral Home, unobserved and unattended.

Friday night, after Joshua Rhinehart had left, Avril Tannerton and Gary Olmstead had transferred the corpse to another coffin, an ornate brass-plated model with a plush velvet and silk interior. They tucked the dead man into a white burial gown, put his arms straight out at his sides, and pulled a white velvet coverlet up to the middle of his chest. Because the condition of the flesh was not good, Tannerton did not want to expend any energy trying to make the corpse presentable. Gary Olmstead thought there was something cheap and disrespectful about consigning a body to the grave without benefit of makeup and powder. But Tannerton persuaded him that cosmetology offered little hope for Bruno Frye's shrunken yellow-gray countenance.

"And anyway," Tannerton had said, "you and I will be the last people in this world to lay eyes on him. When we shut this box tonight, it'll never be opened again."

At 9:45 Friday night, they had closed and latched the lid of the casket. That done, Olmstead went home to his wan little wife and his quiet and intense young son. Avril went upstairs; he lived above the rooms of the dead.

Early Saturday morning, Tannerton left for Santa Rosa in his silver-gray Lincoln. He took an overnight bag with him, for he didn't intend to return until ten o'clock Sunday morning. Bruno Frye's funeral was the only one that he was handling at the moment. Since there was to be no viewing, he hadn't any reason to stay at Forever View; he wouldn't be needed until the service on Sunday,

He had a woman in Santa Rosa. She was the latest of a long line of women; Avril thrived on variety. Her name was Helen Virtillion. She was a good-looking woman in her early thirties, very lean, taut, with big firm breasts which he found endlessly fascinating.

A lot of women were attracted to Avril Tannerton, not in spite of what he did for a living but because of it. Of course, some were turned off when they discovered he was a mortician. But a surprising number were intrigued and even excited by his unusual profession.

He understood what made him desirable to them. When a man worked with the dead, some of the mystery of death rubbed off on him. In spite of his freckles and his boyish good looks, in spite of his charming smile and his great sense of fun and his open-hearted manner, some women felt he was nonetheless mysterious, enigmatic. Unconsciously, they thought they could not die so long as they were in his arms, as if his services to the dead earned him (and those close to him) special dispensation. That atavistic fantasy was similar to the secret hope shared by many women who married doctors because they were subconsciously convinced that their spouses could protect them from all of the microbial dangers of this world.

Therefore, all day Saturday, while Avril Tannerton was in Santa Rosa making love to Helen Virtillion, the body of Bruno Frye lay alone in an empty house.

Sunday morning, two hours before sunrise, there was a sudden rush of movement in the funeral home, but Tannerton was not there to notice.

The overhead lights in the windowless workroom were switched on abruptly, but Tannerton was not there to see.

The lid of the sealed casket was unlatched and thrown back. The workroom was filled with screams of rage and pain, but Tannerton was not there to hear.

***

At ten o'clock Sunday morning, as Tony stood in his kitchen drinking a glass of grapefruit juice, the telephone rang. It was Janet Yamada, the woman who had been Frank Howard's blind date last night.

"How'd it go?" he asked.

"It was wonderful, a wonderful night."

"Really?"

"Sure. He's a doll."

"Frank is a doll."

"You said he might be kind of cold, difficult to get to know, but he wasn't."

"He wasn't?"

"And he's so romantic."

"Frank?"

"Who else?"

"Frank Howard is romantic?"

"These days you don't find many men who have a sense of romance," Janet said. "Sometimes it seems like romance and chivalry were thrown out the window when the sexual revolution and the women's rights movement came in. But Frank still helps you on with your coat and opens doors for you and pulls your chair out and everything. He even brought me a bouquet of roses. They're beautiful."

"I thought you might have trouble talking to him."

"Oh, no. We have a lot of the same interests."

"Like what?"

"Baseball, for one thing."

"That's right! I forgot you like baseball."

"I'm an addict."

"So you talked baseball all night."

"Oh, no," she said. "We talked about a lot of other things. Movies--"

"Movies? Are you trying to tell me Frank is a film buff?"

"He knows the old Bogart pictures almost line by line. We traded favorite bits of dialogue."

"I've been talking about film for three months, and he hasn't opened his mouth," Tony said.

"He hasn't seen a lot of recent pictures, but we're going to a show tonight."

"You're seeing him again?"

"Yeah. I wanted to call and thank you for fixing me up with him," she said.

"Am I one hell of a matchmaker, or am I one hell of a matchmaker?"

"I also wanted to let you know that even if it doesn't work out, I'll be gentle with him. He told me about Wilma. What a rotten thing! I wanted you to know that I'm aware she put a couple of cracks in him, and I won't ever hit him too hard."

Tony was amazed. "He told you about Wilma the first night he met you?"

"He said he used to be unable to talk about it, but then you showed him how to handle his hostility."

"Me?"

"He said after you helped him accept what had happened, he could talk about it without pain."

"All I did was sit and listen when he wanted to get it off his chest."

"He thinks you're a hell of a great guy."

"Frank's a damned good judge of people, isn't he?"

Later, feeling good about the excellent impression that Frank had made on Janet Yamada, optimistic about his own chances for a little romance, Tony drove to Westwood to keep his date with Hilary. She was waiting for him; she came out of the house as he pulled into the driveway. She looked crisp and lovely in black slacks, a cool ice-blue blouse, and a lightweight blue corduroy blazer. As he opened the door for her, she gave him a quick, almost shy kiss on the cheek, and he got a whiff of fresh lemony perfume.

It was going to be a good day.

***

Exhausted from a nearly sleepless night in Helen Virtillion's bedroom, Avril Tannerton got back from Santa Rosa shortly before ten o'clock Sunday morning.

He did not look inside the coffin.

With Gary Olmstead, Tannerton went to the cemetery and prepared the gravesite for the two o'clock ceremony. They erected the equipment that would lower the casket into the ground. Using flowers and a lot of cut greenery, they made the site as attractive as possible.

At 12:30 back at the funeral home, Tannerton used a chamois cloth to wipe the dust and smudged fingerprints from Bruno Frye's brass-plated casket. As he ran his hand over the rounded edges of the box, he thought of the magnificent contours of Helen Virtillion's breasts.

He did not look inside the coffin.

At one o'clock, Tannerton and Olmstead loaded the deceased into the hearse.

Neither of them looked inside the coffin.

At one-thirty they drove to the Napa County Memorial Park. Joshua Rhinehart and a few local people followed in their own cars. Considering that it was for a wealthy and influential man, the funeral procession was embarrassingly small.

The day was clear and cool. Tall trees cast stark shadows across the road, and the hearse passed through alternating hands of sunlight and shade.

At the cemetery, the casket was placed on a sling above the grave, and fifteen people gathered around for the brief service. Gary Olmstead took up a position beside the flower-concealed control box that operated the sling and would cause it to lower the deceased into the ground. Avril stood at the front of the grave and read from a thin book of nondenominational inspirational verses. Joshua Rhinehart was at the mortician's side. The other twelve people flanked the open grave. Some of them were grape growers and their wives. They had come because they had sold their harvests to Bruno Frye's winery, and they considered their attendance at his funeral to be a business obligation. The others were Shade Tree Vineyards executives and their wives, and their reasons for being present were no more personal than those of the growers. Nobody wept.

And nobody had the opportunity or the desire to look into the coffin.

Tannerton finished reading from his small black book. He glanced at Gary Olmstead and nodded.

Olmstead pushed a button on the control box. The powerful little electric motor hummed. The casket was lowered slowly and smoothly into the gaping earth.

***

Hilary could not remember another day that was as much fun as that first full day with Tony Clemenza.

For lunch, they went to the Yamashiro Skyroom, high in the Hollywood Hills. The food at Yamashiro was uninspiring, even ordinary, but the ambience and the stunning view made it a fine place for an occasional light lunch or dinner. The restaurant, an authentic Japanese palace, had once been a private estate. It was surrounded by ten acres of lovely ornamental gardens. From its mountaintop perch, Yamashiro offered a breathtaking view of the entire Los Angeles basin. The day was so clear that Hilary could see all the way to Long Beach and Palos Verdes.

After lunch, they went to Griffith Park. For an hour, they walked through part of the Los Angeles Zoo, where they fed the bears, and where Tony did hilarious imitations of the animals. From the zoo they went to a special afternoon performance of the dazzling Laserium hologram show in the Griffith Park Observatory.

Later, they passed an hour on Melrose Avenue, between Doheny Drive and La Cienega Boulevard, prowling through one fascinating antique shop after another, not buying, just browsing, chatting with the proprietors.

When the cocktail hour arrived, they drove to Malibu for Mai Tais at Tonga Lei. They watched the sun set into the ocean and relaxed to the rhythmic roar of breaking waves.

Although Hilary had been an Angeleno for quite some time, her world had been composed only of her work, her house, her rose garden, her work, the film studios, her work, and the few fancy restaurants in which the motion picture and television crowd gathered to do business. She had never been to the Yamashiro Skyroom, the zoo, the laser show, the Melrose antique shops, or Tonga Lei. It was all new to her. She felt like a wide-eyed tourist--or, more accurately, like a prisoner who had just finished serving a long, long sentence, most of it in solitary confinement.

But it was not just where they went that made the day special. None of it would have been half as interesting or as much fun if she'd been with someone other than Tony. He was so charming, so quick-witted, so full of fun and energy, that he made the bright day brighter.

After slowly sipping two Mai Tais each, they were starving. They drove back to Sepulveda and went north into the San Fernando Valley to have dinner at Mel's landing, another place with which she was not familiar. Mel's was unpretentious and moderately priced, and it offered some of the freshest and tastiest seafood she had ever eaten.

As she and Tony ate Mel's steamed clams and discussed other favorite places to eat, Hilary found that he knew ten times as many as she did. Her knowledge did not extend much beyond that handful of expensive dining spots that served the movers and shakers of the entertainment industry. The out-of-the-way eateries, the hole-in-the-wall cafés with surprising house specialties, the small mom-and-pop restaurants with plainly served but delicious food--all of that was one more aspect of the city about which she had never taken time to learn. She saw that she had become rich without ever discovering how to use and fully enjoy the freedom that her money could provide.

They ate too many of Mel's clams and then too much red snapper with too many Malaysian shrimp. They also drank too much white wine.

Considering how much they consumed, it was amazing, Hilary thought, that they had so much time between mouthfuls for conversation. But they never stopped talking. She was usually reticent on the first few dates with a new man, but not with Tony. She wanted to hear what he thought about everything, from Mork and Mindy to Shakespearean drama, from politics to art. People, dogs, religion, architecture, sports, Bach, fashions, food, women's liberation, Saturday morning cartoons--it seemed urgent and vital that she know what he thought about those and a million other subjects. She also wanted to tell him what she thought about all those things, and she wanted to know what he thought of what she thought, and pretty soon she was telling him what she thought of what he thought of what she thought. They chattered as if they had just learned that God was going to strike everyone in the world deaf and dumb at sunrise. Hilary was drunk, not on wine, but on the fluidity and intimacy of their conversation; she was intoxicated by communication, a potent brew for which she had built up little tolerance over the years.

By the time he took her home and agreed to come in for a nightcap, she was certain they would go to bed together. She wanted him very much; the thought of it made her warm and tingly. She knew he wanted her. She could see the desire in his eyes. They needed to let dinner settle a bit, and with that in mind, she poured white crème de menthe on the rocks for both of them.

They were just sitting down when the telephone rang.

"Oh, no," she said.

"Did he bother you after I left last night?"

"No."

"This morning?"

"No."

"Maybe that's not him."

They both went to the phone.

She hesitated, then picked it up. "Hello?"

Silence.

"Damn you!" she said, and she slammed the receiver down so hard that she wondered if she'd cracked it.

"Don't let him rattle you."

"I can't help it," she said.

"He's just a slimy little creep who doesn't know how to deal with women. I've seen others like him. If he ever got a chance to make it with a woman, if a woman offered herself to him on a silver platter, he'd run away screaming in terror."

"He still scares me."

"He's no threat. Come back to the couch. Sit down. Try to forget about him."

They returned to the sofa and sipped their crème de menthe in silence for a minute or two.

At last, she softly said, "Damn."

"You'll have an unlisted number by tomorrow afternoon. Then he won't be able to bother you any more."

"But he sure spoiled this evening. I was so mellow."

"I'm still enjoying myself."

"It's just that ... I'd figured on more than just drinks in front of the fireplace."

He stared at her. "Had you?"

"Hadn't you?"

His smile was special because it was not merely a configuration of the mouth; it involved his whole face and his expressive dark eyes; it was the most genuine and by far the most appealing smile that she had ever seen. He said, "I've got to admit I had hopes of tasting more than the crème de menthe."

"Damn the phone."

He leaned over and kissed her. She opened her mouth to him, and for a brief sweet moment their tongues met. He pulled back and looked at her, put his hand against her face as if he was touching delicate porcelain. "I think we're still in the mood."

"If the phone rings again--"

"It won't."

He kissed her on the eyes, then on the lips, and he put one hand gently on her breast.

She leaned back, and he leaned into her. She put her hand on his arm and felt the muscles bunched beneath his shirt.

Still kissing her, he stroked her soft throat with his fingertips, then began to unbutton her blouse.

Hilary put her hand on his thigh, where the muscles were also tense beneath his slacks. Such a lean hard man. She slid her hand up to his groin and felt the huge steeliness and fierce heat of his erection. She thought of him entering her and moving hotly within her, and a thrill of anticipation made her shiver.

He sensed her excitement and paused in the unbuttoning of her blouse to lightly trace the swell of her breasts where they rose above the cups of her bra. His fingers seemed to leave cool trails on her warm skin; she could feel the lingering ghost of his touch as clearly as she could feel the touch itself.

The telephone rang.

"Ignore it," he said.

She tried to do as he said. She put her arms around him and slid down on the couch and pulled him on top of her. She kissed him hard, crushing her lips against his, licking, sucking.

The phone rang and rang.

"Damn!"

They sat up.

It rang, rang, rang.

Hilary stood.

"Don't," Tony said. "Talking to him hasn't helped. Let me handle it another way and see what happens."

He got up from the couch and went to the corner desk. He lifted the receiver, but he didn't say anything. He just listened.

Hilary could tell from his expression that the caller had not spoken.

Tony was determined to wait him out. He looked at his watch.

Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Two minutes.

The battle of nerves between the two men was strangely like a childish staring contest, yet there was nothing childish about it. It was eerie. Goosebumps popped up on her arms.

Two and a half minutes.

It seemed like an hour.

Finally, Tony put down the phone. "He hung up."

"Without saying anything?"

"Not a word. But he hung up first, and I think that's important. I figured if I gave him a dose of his own medicine he wouldn't like it. He thinks he's going to frighten you. But you're expecting the call, and you just listen like he does. At first, he thinks you're only being cute, and he's sure he can outwait you. But the longer you're silent, the more he starts to wonder if you aren't up to some trick. Is there a tap on your phone? Are you stalling so the police can trace the call? Is it even you who picked up the phone? He thinks about that, starts to get scared, and hangs up."

"He's scared? Well, that's a nice thought," she said.

"I doubt that he'll get up the nerve to call back. At least not until you've changed numbers tomorrow. And then he'll be too late."

"Nevertheless, I'll be on edge until the man from the phone company's done his job."

Tony held out his arms, and she moved into his embrace. They kissed again. It was still extraordinarily sweet and good and right, but the sharp edge of unrestrained passion could no longer be felt. Both of them were unhappily aware of the difference.

They returned to the couch, but only to drink their crème de menthe and talk. By twelve-thirty in the morning, when he had to go home, they had decided to spend the following weekend on a museum binge. Saturday, they'd go to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to look at the German expressionist paintings and the Renaissance tapestry. Then they would spend most of Sunday at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which boasted a collection of art richer than any other in the world. Of course, in between the museums, they would eat a lot of good food, share a lot of good talk, and (they ardently hoped) pick up where they had left off on the couch.

At the front door, as he was leaving, Hilary suddenly couldn't bear to wait five days to see him again. She said, "What about Wednesday?"

"What about it?"

"Doing anything for dinner?"

"Oh. I'll probably fry up a batch of eggs that are just getting stale in the refrigerator."

"All that cholesterol's bad for you."

"And maybe I'll cut the mold off the bread, make some toast. And I should finish the fruit juice I bought two weeks ago."

"You poor dear."

"The bachelor's life."

"I can't let you eat stale eggs and moldy toast. Not when I make such a terrific tossed salad and filet of sole."

"A nice light supper," he said.

"We don't want to get bloated and sleepy."

"Never know when you might have to move fast."

She grinned. "Precisely."

"See you Wednesday."

"Seven?"

"Seven sharp."

They kissed, and he walked away from the door, and a cold night wind rushed in where he had been, and then he was gone. Half an hour later, upstairs, in bed, Hilary's body ached with frustration. Her breasts were full and taut; she longed to feel his hands on them, his fingers gently stroking and massaging. She could close her eyes and feel his lips on her stiffening nipples. Her belly fluttered as she pictured him braced above her on his powerful arms, and then she above him, moving in slow sensuous circles. Her sex was moist and warm, ready, waiting. She tossed and turned for almost an hour before she finally got up and took a sedative.

As sleep crept over her, she held a drowsy dialogue with herself.

Am I falling in love?

--No. Of course not.

Maybe. Maybe I am.

--No. Love's dangerous.

Maybe it'll work with him.

--Remember Earl and Emma.

Tony's different.

--You're horny. That's all it is. You're just horny.

That, too.

She slept, and she dreamed. Some of the dreams were golden and fuzzy about the edges. In one of them she was naked with Tony, lying in a meadow where the grass felt like feathers, high above the world, a meadow atop a towering pillar of rock, and the warm wind was cleaner than sunshine, cleaner than the electric current of a lightning bolt, cleaner than anything in the world.

But she had nightmares, too. In one of them, she was in the old Chicago apartment, and the walls were closing in, and when she looked up she saw there was no ceiling, and Earl and Emma were staring down at her, their faces as big as God's face, grinning down at her as the walls closed in, and when she opened the door to run out of the apartment, she collided with an enormous cockroach, a monstrous insect bigger than she was, and it obviously intended to eat her alive.

***

At three o'clock in the morning, Joshua Rhinehart woke, grunting and tussling briefly with the tangled sheets. He'd drunk a bit too much wine with dinner, which was most unusual for him. The buzz was gone, but his bladder was killing him; however, it was not merely the call of nature that had disturbed his sleep. He'd had a horrible dream about Tannerton's workroom. In that nightmare, several dead men--all of them duplicates of Bruno Frye--had risen up from their caskets and from the porcelain and stainless steel embalming tables; he had run into the night behind Forever View, but they had come after him, had searched the shadows for him, moving jerkily, calling his name in their flat dead voices.

He lay on his back in the darkness, staring at the ceiling which he could not see. The only sound was the nearly inaudible purr of the electronic digital clock on the nightstand.

Before his wife's death three years ago, Joshua had seldom dreamed. And he'd never had a nightmare. Not once in fifty-eight years. But after Cora passed away, all of that changed. He dreamed at least once or twice a week now, and more often than not the dream was a bad one. Many of them had to do with losing something terribly important but indescribable, and there always ensued a frantic but hopeless search for that which he had lost. He didn't need a fifty-dollar-an-hour psychiatrist to tell him that those dreams were about Cora and her untimely death. He still had not adjusted to life without her. Perhaps he never would. The other nightmares were filled with walking dead men who often looked like him, symbols of his own mortality; but tonight they all bore a striking resemblance to Bruno Frye.

He got out of bed, stretched, yawned. He shuffled to the bathroom without turning on a lamp.

A couple of minutes later, on his way back to bed, he stopped at the window. The panes were cold to the touch. A stiff wind pressed against the glass and made mewling sounds like an animal that wanted to be let inside. The valley was still and dark except for the lights of the wineries. He could see the Shade Tree Vineyards to the north, farther up in the hills.

Suddenly, his eye was caught by a fuzzy white dot just south of the winery, a single smudge of light in the middle of a vineyard, approximately where the Frye house stood. Lights in the Frye house? There wasn't supposed to be anyone there. Bruno had lived alone. Joshua squinted, but without his glasses, everything at a distance tended to grow hazier the harder he tried to focus on it. He couldn't tell if the light was at the Frye place or at one of the administration buildings between the house and the main winery complex. In fact, the longer he stared the less he was sure that it was a light he was watching; it was faint, lambent; it might only be a reflection of moonlight.

He went to the nightstand and, not wanting to turn on a lamp and spoil his night vision, he felt for his glasses in the dark. Before he found them, he knocked over an empty water glass.

When he got back to the window and looked up into the hills again, the mysterious light was gone. Nevertheless, he stood there for a long while, a vigilant guardian. He was executor of the Frye estate, and it was his duty to preserve it for final distribution in accordance with the will. If burglars and vandals were stripping the house, he wanted to know about it. For fifteen minutes, he waited and watched, but the light never returned.

At last, convinced that his weak eyes had deceived him, he went back to bed.

***

Monday morning, as Tony and Frank pursued a series of possible leads on Bobby Valdez, Frank talked animatedly about Janet Yamada. Janet was so pretty. Janet was so intelligent. Janet was so understanding. Janet was this, and Janet was that. He was a bore on the subject of Janet Yamada, but Tony allowed him to gush and ramble. It was good to see Frank talking and acting like a normal human being.

Before checking out their unmarked police sedan and getting on the road, Tony and Frank had spoken to two men on the narcotics squad, Detectives Eddie Quevedo and Carl Hammerstein. The word from those two specialists was that Bobby Valdez was most likely selling either cocaine or PCP to support himself while he pursued his unpaid vocation as a rapist. The biggest money in the L.A. drug market was currently in those two illegal but extremely popular substances. A dealer could still make a fortune in heroin or grass, but those were no longer the most lucrative commodities in the underground pharmacy. According to the narcs, if Bobby was involved in drug traffic, he had to be a pusher, selling directly to users, a man at the lower end of the production and marketing structure. He was virtually penniless when he got out of prison last April, and he needed substantial capital to become either a manufacturer or an importer of narcotics. "What you're looking for is a common street hustler," Quevedo had told Tony and Frank. "Talk to other hustlers." Hammerstein had said, "We'll give you a list of names and addresses. They're all guys who've taken falls for dealing drugs. Most of them are probably dealing again; we just haven't caught them at it yet. Put on a little pressure. Sooner or later, you'll find one of them who's run into Bobby on the street and knows where he's holed up." There were twenty-four names on the list that Quevedo and Hammerstein had given them.

Three of the first six men were not at home. The other three swore they didn't know Bobby Valdez or Juan Mazquezza or anyone else with the face in the mug shots.

The seventh name on the list was Eugene Tucker, and he was able to help them. They didn't even have to lean on him. Most black men were actually one shade of brown or another, but Tucker was truly black. His face was broad and smooth and as black as tar. His dark brown eyes were far lighter than his skin. He had a bushy black beard that was salted with curly white hairs, and that touch of frosting was the only thing about him, other than the whites of his eyes, that was not very, very dark. He even wore black slacks and a black shirt. He was stocky, with a big chest and bigger arms, and his neck was as thick as a wharf post. He looked as if he snapped railroad ties in two for exercise--or maybe just for fun.

Tucker lived in a high-rent townhouse in the Hollywood Hills, a roomy place that was sparsely but tastefully furnished. The living room had only four pieces in it: a couch, two chairs, a coffee table. No end tables or fancy storage units. No stereo. No television set. There weren't even any lamps; at night, the only light would come from the ceiling fixture. But the four pieces that he did have were of remarkably high quality, and each item perfectly accented the others. Tucker had a taste for fine Chinese antiques. The couch and chairs, which recently had been reupholstered in jade-green velvet, were all made of hand-carved rosewood, a hundred years old, maybe twice that, immensely heavy and well-preserved, matchless examples of their period and style. The low table was also rosewood with a narrow inlaid ivory border. Tony and Frank sat on the couch, and Eugene Tucker perched on the edge of a chair opposite them.

Tony ran one hand along the rosewood arm of the couch and said, "Mr. Tucker, this is marvelous."

Tucker raised his eyebrows. "You know what it is?"

"I don't know the precise period," Tony said. "But I'm familiar enough with Chinese art to know this is definitely not a reproduction that you picked up on sale at Sears."

Tucker laughed, pleased that Tony knew the value of the furniture. "I know what you're thinking," he said good-naturedly. "You're wondering how an ex-con, just two years out of the stir, can afford all this. A twelve-hundred-dollar-a-month townhouse. Chinese antiques. You're wondering if maybe I've gotten back into the heroin trade or some allied field of endeavor."

"In fact," Tony said, "that's not what I'm asking myself at all. I am wondering how the devil you've done it. But I know it's not from selling junk."

Tucker smiled. "How can you be so sure?"

"If you were a drug dealer with a passion for Chinese antiques," Tony said, "you'd simply furnish the entire house at a single crack, instead of a piece or two at a time. You are clearly into something that earns a lot of bread, but not nearly as much as you'd make distributing dope like you used to do."

Tucker laughed again and applauded approvingly. He turned to Frank and said, "Your partner is perceptive."

Frank smiled. "A regular Sherlock Holmes."

To Tucker, Tony said, "Satisfy my curiosity. What do you do?"

Tucker leaned forward, suddenly frowning, raising one granite fist and shaking it, looking huge and mean and very dangerous. When he spoke he snarled: "I design dresses."

Tony blinked.

Collapsing back in his chair, Tucker laughed again. He was one of the happiest people Tony had ever seen. "I design women's clothes," he said. "I really do. My name's already beginning to be known in the California design community, and some day it'll be a household word. I promise you."

Intrigued, Frank said, "According to our information, you did four years of an eight-year sentence for wholesaling heroin and cocaine. How'd you go from that to making women's clothes?"

"I used to be one mean son of a bitch," Tucker said. "And those first few months in prison, I was even meaner than usual. I blamed society for everything that happened to me. I blamed the white power structure. I blamed the whole world, but I just wouldn't put any blame on myself. I thought I was a tough dude, but I hadn't really grown up yet. You aren't a man until you accept responsibility for your life. A lot of people never do."

"So what turned you around?" Frank asked.

"A little thing," Tucker said. "Man, sometimes it amazes me how such a little thing can change a person's life. With me, it was a TV show. On the six o'clock news, one of the L.A. stations did a five-part series about black success stories in the city."

"I saw it," Tony said. "More than five years ago, but I still remember it."

"It was fascinating stuff," Tucker said. "It was an image of the black man you never get to see. But at first, before the series began, everybody in the slammer figured it would be one big laugh. We figured the reporter would spend all his time asking the same idiot question: 'Why can't all these poor black folks work hard and become rich Las Vegas headliners like Sammy Davis, Jr.?' But they didn't talk to any entertainers or sports stars."

Tony remembered that it had been a striking piece of journalism, especially for television, where news--and especially the human interest stories on the news--had as much depth as a teacup. The reporters had interviewed black businessmen and businesswomen who had made it to the top, people who had started out with nothing and eventually had become millionaires. Some in real estate. One in the restaurant business. One with a chain of beauty shops. About a dozen people. They all agreed that it was harder to get rich if you were black, but they also agreed that it was not as hard as they thought when they started out, and that it was easier in Los Angeles than in Alabama or Mississippi or even Boston or New York. There were more black millionaires in L.A. than in the rest of California and the other forty-nine states combined. In Los Angeles, almost everyone was living in the fast lane; the typical southern Californian did not merely accommodate himself to change but actively sought it and reveled in it. This atmosphere of flux and constant experimentation drew a lot of marginally sane and even insane people into the area, but it also attracted some of the brightest and most innovative minds in the country, which was why so many new cultural and scientific and industrial developments originated in the region. Very few Southern Californians had the time or patience for outmoded attitudes, one of which was racial prejudice. Of course, there was bigotry in L.A. But whereas a landed white family in Georgia might require six or eight generations to overcome its prejudice toward blacks, that same metamorphosis of attitudes often transpired in one generation of a Southern California family. As one of the black businessmen on the TV news report had said, "The Chicanos have been the niggers of L.A. for quite some time now." But already that was changing, too. The Hispanic culture was regarded with ever-increasing respect, and the browns were creating their own success stories. Several people interviewed on that news special had offered the same explanation for the unusual fluidity of Southern California's social structures and for the eagerness with which people there accepted change; it was, they said, partly because of geology. When you were living on some of the worst fault lines in the world, when the earth could quake and move and change under your feet without warning, did that awareness of impermanence have a subconscious influence on a person's attitudes toward less cataclysmic kinds of change? Some of those black millionaires thought it did, and Tony tended to agree with them.

"There were about a dozen rich black people on that program," Eugene Tucker said. "A lot of guys in the slammer with me just hooted at the TV and called them all Uncle Toms. But I started thinking. If some people on that show could make it in a white world, why couldn't I? I was just as clever and smart as any of them, maybe even smarter than some. It was a completely new image of a black man to me, a whole new idea, like a light bulb going on in my head. Los Angeles was my home. If it really offered a better chance, why hadn't I taken advantage of it? Sure, maybe some of those people had to act like Uncle Toms on their way to the top. But when you've made it, when you've got that million in the bank, you're nobody's man but your own." He grinned. "So I decided to get rich."

"Just like that," Frank said, impressed.

"Just like that."

"The power of positive thinking."

"Realistic thinking," Tucker corrected.

"Why dress designing?" Tucker asked.

"I took aptitude tests that said I'd do well in design work or any aspect of the art business. So I tried to decide what I'd most enjoy designing. Now, I've always liked to choose the clothes my girlfriends wear. I like to go shopping with them. And when they wear an outfit I've picked, they get more compliments than when they wear something they chose themselves. So I hooked up with a university program for inmates, and I studied design. Took a lot of business courses, too. When I was finally paroled, I worked for a while at a fast food restaurant. I lived in a cheap rooming house and kept my expenses down. I drew some designs, paid seamstresses to sew up samples, and started hawking my wares. It wasn't easy at first. Hell, it was damned hard! Every time I got an order from a shop, I walked it to the bank and borrowed money against it to complete the dresses. Man, I was clawing to hold on. But it got better and better. It's pretty good now. In a year, I'll open my own shop in a good area. And eventually you'll see a sign in Beverly Hills that says 'Eugene Tucker.' I promise you."

Tony shook his head. "You're a remarkable man."

"Not particularly," Tucker said. "I'm just living in a remarkable place and a remarkable time."

Frank was holding the manila envelope that contained the mug shots of Bobby "Angel" Valdez. He tapped it against his knee and looked at Tony and said, "I think maybe we've come to the wrong place this time."

"It sure looks that way," Tony said.

Tucker slid forward on his chair. "What was it you wanted?"

Tony told him about Bobby Valdez.

"Well," Tucker said, "I don't move in the circles I once did, but I'm not completely out of touch either. I donate fifteen or twenty hours of my time every week to Self-Pride. That's a city-wide anti-drug campaign. I feel sort of like I've got debts to pay, you know? A Self-Pride Volunteer spends about half his time talking to kids, the other half working on an information-gathering program, sort of like TIP. You know about TIP?"

"Turn in Pushers," Tony said.

"Right. They have a number you can call and give anonymous tips about neighborhood drug dealers. Well, we don't wait for people to call us at Self-Pride. We canvas those neighborhoods where we know pushers work. We go door to door, talk to parents and kids, pump them for anything they know. We build up dossiers on dealers until we feel we've really got the goods, then we turn the dossiers over to the LAPD. So if this Valdez is dealing, there's a chance I'll know at least a little something about him."

Frank said, "I have to agree with Tony. You are rather remarkable."

"Hey, look, I don't deserve any pats on the back for my work at Self-Pride. I wasn't asking for congratulations. In my day I created a lot of junkies out of kids who might have done right if I hadn't been there to steer them wrong. It's going to take me a long, long time to help enough kids to balance the equation."

Frank took the photographs out of the envelope and gave them to Tucker.

The black man looked at each of the three shots. "I know the little bastard. He's one of about thirty guys we're building files on right now."

Tony's heartbeat accelerated a bit in anticipation of the chase to come.

"Only he doesn't use the name Valdez," Tucker said.

"Juan Mazquezza?"

"Not that either. I think he calls himself Ortiz."

"Do you know where we can find him?"

Tucker stood up. "Let me call the information center at Self-Pride. They might have an address on him."

"Terrific," Frank said.

Tucker started toward the kitchen to use the phone in there, stopped, looked back at them. "This might take a few minutes. If you'd like to pass the time looking at my designs, you can go into the study." He pointed to a set of double doors that opened off the living room.

"Sure," Tony said. "I'd like to see them."

He and Frank went into the study and found that it was even more sparsely furnished than the living room. There was a large expensive drawing table with its own lamp. A high stool with a padded seat and a spring back stood in front of the table, and beside the stool there was an artist's supply cabinet on wheels. Near one of the windows, a department store mannequin posed with head tilted coyly and shiny-smooth arms spread wide; bolts of bright cloth lay at its plastic feet. There were no shelves or storage cabinets; stacks of sketches and drawing tablets and draftsman's tools were lined up on the floor along one wall. Obviously, Eugene Tucker was confident that eventually he would be able to furnish the entire townhouse with pieces as exquisite as those in the living room, and in the meantime, regardless of the inconvenience, he did not intend to waste money on cheap temporary furniture.

Quintessential California optimism, Tony thought.

Pencil sketches and a few full-color renditions of Tucker's work were thumbtacked to one wall. His dresses and two-piece suits and blouses were tailored yet flowing, feminine yet not frilly. He had an excellent sense of color and a flair for the kind of detail that made a piece of clothing special. Every one of the designs was clearly the work of a superior talent.

Tony still found it somewhat difficult to believe that the big hard-bitten black man designed women's clothes for a living. But then he realized that his own dichotomous nature was not so different from Tucker's. During the day, he was a homicide detective, desensitized and hardened by all of the violence he saw, but at night, he was an artist, hunched over a canvas in his apartment-studio, painting, painting, painting. In a curious way, he and Eugene were brothers under the skin.

Just as Tony and Frank were looking at the last of the sketches, Tucker returned from the kitchen. "Well, what do you think?"

"Wonderful," Tony said. "You've got a terrific feeling for color and line."

"You're really good," Frank said.

"I know," Tucker said, and he laughed.

"Does Self-Pride have a file on Valdez?" Tony asked.

"Yes. But he calls himself Ortiz, like I thought. Jimmy Ortiz. From what we've been able to gather, he deals strictly in PCP. I know I'm not on solid ground when I start pointing the finger at other people ... but so far as I'm concerned, a PCP dealer is the lowest kind of bastard in the drug trade. I mean, PCP is poison. It rots the brain cells faster than anything else. We don't have enough information in our file to turn it over to the police, but we're working on it."

"Address?" Tony asked.

Tucker handed him a slip of paper on which the address had been noted in neat handwriting. "It's a fancy apartment complex one block south of Sunset, just a couple of blocks from La Cienega."

"We'll find it," Tony said.

"Judging from what you've told me about him," Tucker said, "and from what we've learned about him at Self-Pride, I'd say this guy isn't the kind who's ever going to knuckle down and rehabilitate himself. You'd better put this one away for a long, long time."

"We're sure going to try," Frank said.

Tucker accompanied them to the front door, then outside, where the patio deck in front of the townhouse offered a wide view of Los Angeles in the basin below. "Isn't it gorgeous?" Tucker asked. "Isn't it something?"

"Quite a view," Tony said.

"Such a big, big, beautiful city," Tucker said with pride and affection, as if he had created the megalopolis himself. "You know, I just heard that the bureaucrats back in Washington made a study of mass transit possibilities for L.A. They were determined to ram some system or other down our throats, but they were stunned to find out it would cost at least one hundred billion dollars to build a rapid transit railway network that would handle only ten or twelve percent of the daily commuter crush. They still don't understand how vast the West is." He was rhapsodizing now, his broad face alight with pleasure, his strong hands tossing off one gesture after another. "They don't realize that the meaning of L. A. is space--space and mobility and freedom. This is a city with elbow room. Physical and emotional elbow room. Psychological elbow room. In L.A., you have a chance to be almost anything you want to be. Here, you can take your future out of the hands of other people and shape it yourself. It's fantastic. I love it. God, I love it!"

Tony was so impressed with the depth of Tucker's feeling for the city that he revealed his own secret dream. "I've always wanted to be an artist, to make a living with my art. I paint."

"Then why are you a cop?" Tucker asked.

"It's a steady paycheck."

"Screw steady paychecks."

"I'm a good cop. I like the work well enough."

"Are you a good artist?"

"Pretty good, I think."

"Then take the leap," Tucker said. "Man, you are living on the edge of the Western world, on the edge of possibility. Jump. Jump off. It's one hell of a thrill, and it's so damned far to the bottom that you'll never crash into anything hard or sharp. In fact, you'll probably find exactly the same thing I found. It's not like falling down at all. You'll feel like you're falling up!"

Tony and Frank followed the brick wall to the driveway, past a jade-plant hedge that had thick juicy leaves. The unmarked sedan was parked in the shade of a large date palm.

As Tony opened the door on the passenger's side, Tucker called to him from the patio deck, "Jump! Just jump off and fly!"

"He's some character," Frank said as he drove away from the townhouse.

"Yeah," Tony said, wondering what it felt like to fly.

As they headed for the address that Tucker had given them, Frank talked a little about the black man and then a lot about Janet Yamada. Still mulling over Eugene Tucker's advice, Tony gave his partner only half his attention. Frank didn't notice that Tony was distracted. When he was talking about Janet Yamada, he really didn't attempt to carry on a conversation; he delivered a soliloquy.

Fifteen minutes later, they found the apartment complex where Jimmy Ortiz lived. The parking garage was underground, guarded by an iron gate that opened only to an electronic signal, so they couldn't see if there was a black Jaguar on the premises.

The apartments were on two levels, in randomly set wings, with open staircases and walkways. The complex was structured around an enormous swimming pool and a lot of lush greenery. There was also a whirlpool spa. Two girls in bikinis and a hairy young man were sitting in the swirling water, drinking a martini lunch and laughing at one another's banter as tendrils of steam writhed up from the turbulent pool around them.

Frank stopped at the edge of the Jacuzzi and asked them where Jimmy Ortiz lived.

One of the girls said, "Is he that cute little guy with the mustache?"

"Baby face," Tony said.

"That's him," she said.

"Does he have a mustache now?"

"If it's the same guy," she said. "This one drives a terrific Jag."

"That's him," Frank said.

"I think he lives over there." she said, "in Building Four, on the second floor, all the way at the end."

"Is he home?" Frank asked.

No one knew.

At Building Four, Tony and Frank climbed the stairs to the second floor. An open-air balcony ran the length of the building and served the four apartments that faced onto the courtyard. Along the railing, opposite the first three doors, pots of ivy and other climbing plants had been set out to give the second level a pleasant green look like that enjoyed by ground-floor residents; but there were no plants in front of the end apartment. The door was ajar.

Tony's eyes met Frank's. A worried look passed between them.

Why was the door ajar?

Did Bobby know they were coming?

They flanked the entrance. Waited. Listened.

The only sound came from the happy trio in the courtyard whirlpool.

Frank raised his eyebrows questioningly.

Tony pointed to the doorbell.

After a brief hesitation, Frank pressed it.

Inside, the chimes rang softly. Bong-bing-bong.

They waited for a response, eyes on the door.

Suddenly the air seemed perfectly still and oppressively heavy. Humid. Thick. Syrupy. Tony had trouble breathing it; he felt as if he were drawing a fluid into his lungs.

No one answered the bell.

Frank rang it again.

When there was still no response, Tony reached under his jacket and slipped his revolver from its shoulder holster. He felt weak. His stomach was bubbling acidly.

Frank took out his revolver, listened closely for sounds of movement inside, then finally pushed the door all the way open.

The foyer was deserted.

Tony leaned sideways to get a better look inside. The living room, of which he could see only a small part, was shadowy and still. The drapes were shut, and there were no lights burning.

Tony shouted, "Police!"

His voice echoed under the balcony roof.

A bird chirruped in an olive tree.

"Come out with your hands raised, Bobby!"

On the street, a car horn sounded.

In another apartment a phone rang, muffled but audible.

"Bobby!" Frank shouted. "You hear what he said? We're the police. It's all over now. So just come out of there. Come on! Right now!"

Down in the courtyard, the whirlpool bathers had grown very quiet.

Tony had the crazy notion that he could hear people in a dozen apartments as they crept stealthily to their windows.

Frank raised his voice even further: "We don't want to hurt you, Bobby!"

"Listen to him!" Tony shouted into the apartment. "Don't force us to hurt you. Come on out peacefully."

Bobby didn't respond.

"If he was in there," Frank said, "he'd at least tell us to go fuck ourselves."

"So what now?" Tony asked.

"I guess we go in."

"Jesus, I hate shit like this. Maybe we should call a backup team."

"He's probably not armed," Frank said.

"You're kidding."

"He doesn't have any prior arrests for carrying a gun. Except when he's after a woman, he's a sniveling little creep."

"He's a killer."

"Women. He's only dangerous to women."

Tony shouted again: "Bobby, this is your last chance! Now, dammit, come out of there nice and slow!"

Silence.

Tony's heart was hammering furiously.

"Okay," Frank said. "Let's get this over with."

"If memory serves me right, you went in first the last time we had to do something like this."

"Yeah. The Wilkie-Pomeroy case."

"Then I guess it's my turn," Tony said.

"I know you've been looking forward to this."

"Oh, yes."

"With all your heart."

"Which is now in my throat."

"Go get him, tiger."

"Cover me."

"The foyer's too narrow for me to give you good cover. I won't be able to see past you once you go in."

"I'll stay as low as possible," Tony said.

"Make like a duck. I'll try to look over you."

"Just do the best you can."

Tony's stomach was cramping up on him. He took a couple of deep breaths and tried to calm down. That trick had no effect other than to make his heart pound harder and faster than it had been doing. At last, he crouched and launched himself through the open door, the revolver held out in front of him. He scuttled across the slippery tile floor of the foyer and stopped at the brink of the living room, searching the shadows for movement, expecting to take a bullet right between the eyes.

The living room was dimly illuminated by thin strips of sunlight that found their way around the edges of the heavy drapes. As far as Tony could tell, all of the lumpy shapes were couches and chairs and tables. The place appeared to be full of big, expensive, and utterly tasteless Americanized Mediterranean furniture. A narrow shaft of sunlight fell across a red velvet sofa that had a large and thoroughly grotesque wrought-iron fleur-de-lis bolted to its imitation oak side.

"Bobby?"

No response.

A clock ticking somewhere.

"We don't want to hurt you, Bobby."

Only silence.

Tony held his breath.

He could hear Frank breathing.

Nothing else.

Slowly, cautiously, he stood.

No one shot at him.

He felt along the wall until he located a light switch. A lump with a garish bullfight scene on its shade came on in one corner, and he could see that both the living room and the open dining area beyond it were deserted.

Frank came in behind him and motioned toward the door of the foyer closet.

Tony stepped back, out of the way.

Holding his revolver at gut-level, Frank gingerly opened the sliding door. The closet contained only a couple of lightweight jackets and several shoe boxes.

Staying away from each other in order to avoid making a single easy target of themselves, they crossed the living room. There was a liquor cabinet with ridiculously large black iron hinges: the glass in the cabinet doors was tinted yellow. A round coffee table was in the center of the room. a mammoth eight-sided thing with a useless copper-lined brazier in the middle of it. The sofa and high-backed chairs were upholstered in flame-red velvet with lots of gold fringe and black tassels. The drapes were flashy yellow and orange brocade. The carpet was a thick green shag. It was a singularly ugly place to live.

And, Tony thought, it's also an absurd place in which to die.

They walked through the dining area and looked into the small kitchen. It was a mess. The refrigerator door and a few of the cupboards were standing open. Cans and jars and boxes of food had been pulled off the shelves and dumped onto the floor. Some items appeared to have been thrown down in a rage. Several jars were broken; sharp fragments of glass sparkled in the garbage. A puddle of maraschino cherry juice lay like a pink-red amoeba on the yellow tiles; the bright red cherries gleamed in every corner. Chocolate dessert topping was splashed all over the electric stove. Cornflakes were scattered everywhere. And dill pickles. Olives. Dry spaghetti. Someone had used mustard and grape jelly to scrawl one word four times on the only blank wall in the kitchen:

Cocodrilos

Cocodrilos

Cocodrilos

Cocodrilos

They whispered:

"What is it?"

"Spanish."

"What's it mean?"

"Crocodiles."

"Why crocodiles?"

"I don't know."

"Creepy," Frank said.

Tony agreed. They had walked into a bizarre situation. Even though he could not understand what was happening, Tony knew there was great danger ahead. He wished he knew which door it would pop out of.

They looked in the den, which was as overfurnished as the other two rooms. Bobby wasn't hiding in there or in the den closet.

They moved warily back down the hall toward the two bedrooms and two baths. They didn't make a sound.

They didn't find anything out of the ordinary in the first bedroom and bathroom.

In the master bedroom, there was another mess. All of the clothes had been taken out of the closet and strewn about. They were piled on the floor, wadded into balls on the bed, draped over the dresser where they had fallen when thrown, and most if not all of them were badly damaged. Sleeves and collars had been stripped off shirts. Lapels had been torn from sports jackets and suit coats. The inseams of trousers had been ripped open. The person who had done all of that had been functioning in a blind rage, yet he had been surprisingly methodical and thorough in spite of his fury.

But who had done it?

Someone with a grudge against Bobby?

Bobby himself? Why would he mess up his own kitchen and destroy his own clothes?

What did crocodiles have to do with it?

Tony had the disturbing feeling that they were moving too fast through the apartment, that they were overlooking something important. An explanation for the strange things they'd discovered seemed to be hovering at the edge of his mind, but he could not reach out and grab it.

The door to the adjoining bath was closed. It was the only place they hadn't looked.

Frank trained his revolver on the door and watched it while he spoke to Tony. "If he didn't leave before we got here, he has to be in the bathroom."

"Who?"

Frank gave him a quick perplexed glance. "Bobby, of course. Who else?"

"You think he tore up his own place?"

"Well ... what do you think?"

"We're missing something."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"I don't know."

Frank moved toward the bathroom door.

Tony hesitated, listening to the apartment.

The place was about as noisy as a tomb.

"Somebody must be in that bathroom," Frank said.

They took up positions flanking the door.

"Bobby! You hear me?" Frank shouted. "You can't stay in there forever. Come out with your hands raised!"

Nobody came out.

Tony said, "Even if you're not Bobby Valdez, no matter who you are, you've got to come out of there."

Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.

Frank took hold of the knob and twisted it slowly until the bolt slipped out of its slot with a soft snick. He pushed the door open and convulsively threw himself back against the wall to get out of the way of any bullets or knives or other indications that he was unwelcome.

No gunfire. No movement.

The only thing that came out of the bathroom was a really terrible stench. Urine. Excrement.

Tony gagged. "Jesus!"

Frank put one hand over his mouth and nose.

The bathroom was deserted. The floor was puddled with bright yellow urine, and feces was smeared over the commode and sink and clear glass shower door.

"What in the name of God is going on here?" Frank asked through his fingers.

One Spanish word was printed twice in feces on the bathroom wall.

Cocodrilos

Cocodrilos

Tony and Frank swiftly retreated to the center of the bedroom, stepping on torn shirts and ruined suits. But now that the bathroom door had been opened, they could not escape the odor without leaving the room altogether, so they went into the hallway.

"Whoever did this really hates Bobby," Frank said.

"So you no longer think Bobby did it to himself?"

"Why would he? It doesn't make sense. Christ, this is about as weird as they come. The hairs are up on the back of my neck."

"Spooky," Tony agreed.

His stomach muscles were still painfully cramped with tension, and his heart was thumping only slightly slower than it had been when they'd first crept into the apartment.

They were both silent for a moment, listening for the footsteps of ghosts.

Tony watched a small brown spider as it climbed the corridor wall.

Finally Frank put his gun away and took out his handkerchief and wiped his sweat-streaked face.

Tony holstered his own revolver and said, "We can't just leave it like this and put a stakeout on the place. I mean, we've gone too far for that. We've found too much that needs explaining."

"Agreed," Frank said. "We'll have to call for assistance, get a warrant, and run a thorough search."

"Drawer by drawer."

"What do you think we'll find?"

"God knows."

"I saw a phone in the kitchen," Frank said.

Frank led the way down the hall to the living room, then around the corner, into the kitchen. Before Tony could follow him across the threshold from the dining area, Frank said, "Oh, Jesus," and tried to back out of the kitchen.

"What's the matter?"

Even as Tony spoke, something cracked loudly.

Frank cried out and fell sideways and clutched at the edge of a counter, trying to stay on his feet.

Another sharp crack slammed through the apartment, echoing from wall to wall, and Tony realized it was gunfire.

But the kitchen had been deserted!

Tony reached for his revolver, and he had the peculiar feeling he was moving in slow-motion while the rest of the world rushed past in frantic double time.

The second shot took Frank in the shoulder and spun him around. He crashed down into the mess of maraschino cherry juice and dry spaghetti and cornflakes and glass.

As Frank dropped out of the way, Tony was able to see beyond him for the first time, and he spotted Bobby Valdez. He was wriggling out of the cupboard space under the sink, a spot they hadn't thought to investigate because it looked too small to conceal a man. Bobby was squirming and slithering out of there like a snake from a tight hole. Only his legs were still under the sink; he was on his side, pulling himself out with one arm, holding a .32 pistol in his other hand. He was naked. He looked sick. His eyes were huge, wild, dilated, sunken in rings of puffy dark flesh. His face was shockingly pale, his lips bloodless. Tony took in all of those details in a fraction of a second, with senses sharpened by a flood of adrenaline.

Frank was just hitting the floor, and Tony was still reaching for his revolver when Bobby fired a third time. The bullet whacked into the edge of the archway. An explosion of plaster chips stung Tony's face.

He threw himself backward and down, twisting as he went, struck the floor too hard with his shoulder, gasped in pain, and rolled out of the dining area, out of the line of fire. He scrambled behind a chair in the living room and finally got his gun out of its holster.

Perhaps six or seven seconds had passed since Bobby had fired the first shot.

Someone was saying, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," in a quivering, high-pitched voice.

Suddenly, Tony realized he was listening to himself. He bit his lip and fought off an attack of hysteria.

He now knew what had been bothering him; he knew what they had overlooked. Bobby Valdez was selling PCP, and that should have told them something when they saw the state of the apartment. They should have remembered that pushers were sometimes stupid enough to use what they sold. PCP, also called angel dust, was an animal tranquilizer that had a fairly predictable effect upon horses and bulls. But when people took the stuff, their reactions ranged from placid trances to weird hallucinations to unexpected fits of rage and violence. As Eugene Tucker said, PCP was poison: it literally ate away at brain cells, rotted the mind. Supercharged on PCP, bursting with perverse energy, Bobby had smashed up his kitchen and had done all the other damage in the apartment. Pursued by fierce but imaginary crocodiles, desperately seeking refuge from their snapping jaws, he had squirmed into the cupboard under the sink and had pulled the doors shut. Tony hadn't thought to look in the cupboard because he hadn't realized they were stalking a raving lunatic. They had searched the apartment with caution, prepared for the moves that might be expected of a mentally-disturbed rapist and incidental killer, but unprepared for the bizarre actions of a gibbering madman. The mindless destruction evident in the kitchen and master bedroom, the apparently senseless writing on the walls, the disgusting mess in the bathroom--all of those were familiar indications of PCP-induced hysteria. Tony never served on the narcotics squad, but, nevertheless, he felt he should have recognized those signs. If he had interpreted them properly, he most likely would have checked under the sink, as well as anywhere else conceivably big enough for a man to hide, even if the quarters would be brutally uncomfortable; for it was not uncommon for a person on an extremely ugly PCP trip to surrender totally to his paranoia and try to hide from a hostile world, especially in cramped, dark, womblike places. But he and Frank misinterpreted the clues, and now they were up to their necks in trouble.