Look at this boy, thirteen years old, sitting on the edge of a bed. His feet do not touch the floor. He wears only white socks and underpants, his narrow frame otherwise bare. The socks droop loose from his feet like empty sacks. His bangs, kitchen-scissor trimmed by his mother, hang unevenly over his eyebrows. There’s a scab on his lower lip, the result of an altercation with a bully at school, and his upper lip is chapped from constant nervous licking. His narrow shoulders are slumped, spine zippered up the middle of his pale, freckled back. He looks down at his lap. His hands rest there. In them, held in his cupped palms like some holy object, a small makeshift pistol.

His stepfather keeps his gun locked away somewhere, but the bullets he stores in his sock drawer. The boy, Sandy, found them by accident. He was poking around his mom and stepfather’s bedroom looking for a few dimes. He wanted to see a movie and eat a bag of popcorn. Instead of loose change he found the bullets. They were in a small cardboard box. He took three. He thought he could get away with three, and so far he has.

It’s been two weeks.

During the first several days Sandy carried the bullets with him everywhere, in the pocket of his wool school pants, and whenever he had a moment alone he took them out and examined them. He went to the bathroom at school several times and locked himself in one of the green-painted toilet stalls just so he could hold them and look at them. They felt heavier in his hand than they did in his pocket. They felt more substantial.

He imagined being able to shoot his stepfather. That would put an end to things. Then he wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore, not in his own house. Then this man who pretended he could replace his dad would be gone. Then this man he hated, who clearly hated him, would be gone.

He had no intention of acting out his fantasy. Not at first. He’d had dozens of others and nothing had come of any of them. Not until last summer, anyway, when he’d imagined stabbing his stepfather to death, while taking his rage out on a cat. Later he felt bad about killing the little thing, but at the time he was simply thinking of this man he despised. He wasn’t thinking at all. But even then he never came close to actually stabbing his stepfather. Even with a knife he felt weak and small. He still does. He feels like little more than a walking cringe.

Every time he comes home from school, every time he steps through the front door, his stomach is a terrible knot of dread. He walks straight to his bedroom, hoping his stepfather won’t see him or hear him, hoping he can pass like a ghost. He hides there till dinnertime, doing homework and reading comics. At dinner he sits stiff, eats without speaking but for please and thank you, eats despite a sick stomach, and tries not to make noise when he chews. He certainly doesn’t put his elbows on the table. Last time he did that his stepfather stuck a fork into the back of his hand. He heard Neil later tell his mother that he hadn’t meant for it to break the skin. I was just trying to make a point, he said, and laughed at his accidental pun. But whatever his stepfather’s intentions, Sandy was unable to use his hand for several days. The holes turned black and the skin surrounding them turned red, and his hand swelled up, and it ached so bad he couldn’t even hold a pencil.

Soon he found himself wondering how he might get his hands on a gun. He looked for his stepfather’s, but found nothing, not even a safe inside which it might be locked. He broke into two different houses down the street while he was supposed to be at school, but came up empty-handed yet again. He didn’t know what to do. The fantasy, which had only begun to take form in reality, was about to blow apart again, like smoke on the wind.

Then it occurred to him that he could make a gun.

Last year his friend Nathan had found a shotgun shell, and they went into Nathan’s garage and put it into his father’s vise and hit it with the rounded end of a ball-peen hammer. It exploded, punched a dozen holes in the garage door, tore out chunks of wood. Great splinters hung off the front of the door, the circle of damage bigger than a dinner plate. It was great and terrifying. Nathan was grounded for a month and told he could no longer play with Sandy. His parents said Sandy was a bad influence. They said Sandy got him into trouble. It had been Nathan’s idea, but that’s the way it’s always been with him.

He gets picked on by other kids at school. Teachers slap the back of his head when it was the boy next to him who was whispering. If he walks into a store he almost always gets yelled at by the proprietor. Sometimes for flipping through the comic books without buying, sometimes for no reason at all. Simply because he’s there and looks like a good receptacle for rage. People don’t like the look of him. Random people on the street will find excuses to yell at him — if he accidentally steps on their shoe, for instance, or bumps into them while running to school.

His stepfather is, of course, the worst of all.

Sandy’s mother told him once that he was a lightning rod. Some people, she said, simply have faces other people want to kick the teeth out of. You’re one of those people, Sandy, for whatever reason, so you’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to be careful and you’ve got to be tough.

But he’s tired of being tough. And he isn’t a lightning rod. He’s a cup. Violence doesn’t flow through him and safely into the ground; he’s been filled up and is now overflowing with it. He feels it pouring out of him like a boiling liquid.

He knows he’ll go to Hell. When he was eleven a preacher named Billy Graham came to town and did revival meetings in a big tent on Washington Boulevard. His mom took him to one of those meetings after dinner and he heard a lot of talk about Hell, talk that stuck with him, so he knows that’s where he’ll go, but he doesn’t care. He can’t live with his stepfather even one more day.

To make the gun, Sandy folded a roadmap until it could be used comfortably as a handle. It was already folded, it came that way, and it took only two more folds to get it to the right size. First he folded it lengthwise to get it the correct width. Then the other way. It was surprisingly sturdy as a handle. He put the antenna into the crease of the last fold and taped it into place. When he was done he couldn’t pull the antenna away from the handle even if he wanted to.

After that he let it sit for a couple days. It was shaped something like a gun, and the bullets he took from his stepfather fit snugly into the barrel, but he couldn’t think of a way to make it fire.

His problem was that his imagination was more dexterous than his fingers. Everything he thought of was far too complicated.

Then, while he was on the back side of Bunker Hill, shooting rocks at tin cans with a slingshot, he thought of the solution. He cut a rubber band and put it through a metal washer and taped each end of the rubber band to the gun’s handle so that he could simply pull back on the metal washer and let go and it would snap against the back of the shell and the bullet would fire.

Bang.

He hit his knuckle the first two times he tried it, snapped the washer against bone, drawing blood on the second attempt, but on the third try it worked. The sound it made was not nearly as loud as he’d expected, not a bang but a small pop. The bullet put a hole in his bedroom floor and the spent shell shot out the back of the gun and thwacked against his right arm. His mother came in and asked him what was that noise I just heard, and he said I don’t know, mom, and she said strange, could have sworn I heard something, and paused a moment in the doorway looking suspicious. He thought she must know, maybe she even smelled it on the air, but she said nothing. And after a moment she simply told him he needed to wash up for dinner, it would be ready in fifteen minutes. He said okay, and she turned and left.

His arm is still bruised, like someone poked him with a finger, but Sandy doesn’t care. He managed to make a working gun, it didn’t explode in his hand, and he has two bullets left. He plans to use one of them tonight — as soon as his stepfather comes home from the bar. He looks at the clock on his night table.

It looks back at him.

It says tick. . tick. . tick.

It’s just past twelve o’clock in the morning. His mom works nights and won’t be home for hours, so he has time. As long as Neil comes home from the bar early, as he often does, and drunk, as he always does, and as long as Sandy doesn’t lose his nerve, he can do this. He knows he can.

He just waits till his stepfather is sleeping, walks up to him, points, and. .

Yes.

Teddy Stuart looks across the felt-topped game table to the pimple-faced son of a bitch dealing cards. Dead black eyes and hollow cheeks. Face colorless but for the pink acne on his chin and forehead. Hair slicked into place with a week’s worth of unwashed grease. Like all the dealers here he wears a white shirt with an arm garter, a waistcoat, and a black bowtie. Unlike most of the dealers this one’s a mechanic. Teddy’s sure of it. The little shit has busted him five times in a row on hands under fourteen, and that just wouldn’t happen if the kid wasn’t a mechanic.

There’s nothing Teddy hates more than playing smart and losing anyway. He knows that’s why they’re called games of chance, but goddamn it, chance won’t kick you in the balls five times in a row. Only people will do that: only people have hearts that black. Chance is merely indifferent.

He came out to Los Angeles to make a delivery for the Man, and instead of being allowed to blow off a little steam after a cross-country journey, Atlantic to Pacific, and the stressful handing over of a briefcase with more money in it than he’s personally earned in the last ten years — though he’s well paid — he’s expected to sit across from this pimple-faced kid not much older than the turd he squeezed between his cheeks this morning while the little motherfucker deals crooked hands with a straight face.

There are two other players at the table besides, one on either side of him.

Teddy exhales with a sigh and looks at his cards. A six of hearts and a seven of clubs. Red and black. Thirteen.

The lady to his right hit on seventeen and collected an eight of hearts, his eight of hearts. Stupid bitch keeps collecting cards meant for him.

‘If you bust me again. .’

He clenches his jaw and wipes at his mouth with the palm of his left hand. He closes his eyes, trying to keep himself calm. He opens his eyes and taps the table with a dirty, chewed-on fingernail.

The dealer puts down a nine of clubs.

‘You son of a bitch,’ Teddy says, reaching forward to grab the kid, wanting to pull him down by the collar, slam his smug face against the table. But the kid’s fast — faster than Teddy, anyway. He pulls back, dodging the swipe, and next thing Teddy knows he has both barrels of a sawed-off shotgun pressed against his forehead, hello, looks like your brains might be leaving by the back door, and the two other players are on their feet, taking several steps back.

‘I think it’s time for you to leave, friend.’

‘You cheating bastard, do you know who I am?’

‘I don’t care if your name is Jesus Humphrey Christ, you gotta leave.’

‘You have no idea who you’re fucking with.’

‘Theodore Stuart, a numbers cruncher for James “the Man” Manning who thinks just because he works for someone with some pull, that means he has some pull hisself. Well, your boss don’t have as much pull on this coast as you seem to think he does, and even if he did he don’t have no pull with me, and even if he did have pull with me you ain’t him. Far as I can tell, you’re just a fat drunk who can count money okay, but can’t seem to hold onto any hisself.’ He licks his lips. ‘Now, all this conversation is stimulating, I admit, but I got a job to do, which means you gotta leave. Get to it, friend.’

‘Take the gun off me.’

Teddy knows the night is over, knows he must subtract himself from this situation, but something in him refuses to budge while the dealer has the gun on him. He will have this one small victory. He will walk out of here with a little dignity. He will not walk out of here with his shoulders slumped, with his gaze on the floor, watching his feet drag him into the night. He will not walk out of here hating himself. The kid will take the gun off him or Teddy will not move. Not an inch.

Not a goddamned inch.

‘No.’

‘Take the gun off me and I’ll go.’

‘You’ll go anyway, friend. I’m the one at the trigger end of this weapon.’

Herb Boykin, this place’s owner, wearing a well-tailored suit and a hand-painted tie, is staring at them from across the room. Teddy can see him over the kid’s shoulder. Can see him rock back on his heels with his hands in his pockets. Can see him suck on an eyetooth. Can see him rock forward. Can see him walk toward them.

‘What’s going on here, Francis?’ he says as he arrives. ‘Mr Stuart’s out past his bedtime.’

‘You’re making the other patrons nervous.’ ‘Tell em to relax. I only hit what I’m aiming at.’ He says this without taking his eyes off Teddy. Then he says: ‘Are you gonna leave, friend?’

‘Take the gun off me.’

‘Back away and it’ll be off you.’

‘Shotguns are less than — uh — discriminatory, Francis.’

‘It’s pushed against his forehead, sir. I ain’t gonna miss.’ Teddy can feel tears welling in his eyes. Fifty years old and tears welling in his eyes over an altercation with a kid barely out of high school. But he refuses to lose this battle completely. He refuses to leave here humiliated. He blinks. His eyes sting. He knows they’re reddening and knowing this makes him angry. How dare the kid do this to him. How dare he. He pushes his head against the barrel of the gun, making it hurt, wanting it to hurt, wanting to feel more anger and less humiliation.

‘You gonna pull the trigger or put the gun away?’ he says. ‘Your choice.’

‘Take the gun off him, Francis. Mr Stuart’s leaving.’

The kid hesitates but finally does as he was told.

‘That’s right, boy,’ Teddy says. ‘Do what the boss man says.’

The kid twitches at being called boy and mumbles something about not being no spade. This is good. He’s at least gotten under the kid’s skin. It doesn’t release the spring-pressure in his belly, the tension that wants to explode from within him, but it’s good nonetheless. It’s something.

He stands up and straightens his tie. He glances around the large room. Most everyone is looking at him, silent. He recognizes several of them, their white faces like signs showing him their amused shock. He feels tears wanting once more to well in his eyes, but refuses them, blinks them away.

‘I’m sure it was a misunderstanding, Mr Stuart,’ Herb Boykin says. ‘I do think it’s best if you leave for the night, but you’re welcome back. You’ll have fifty dollars in chips waiting for you at the counter.’

‘I’m not coming back here, you stupid son of a bitch. What happened here wasn’t a misunderstanding. Your dealer’s a mechanic. A cheat. That’s a reflection on you. You and your place. So fuck you. Fuck you.’

He hawks up a mouthful and spits it into Boykin’s face. It runs down the man’s cheek like frothed egg white.

Boykin removes a handkerchief and wipes it away. Then he looks past Teddy and nods. Teddy turns around in time to see a large Negro take two steps toward him while swinging a hefty enameled sap. A moment later everything goes bright, like looking into the sun. Then black.

There is no transition, just click, like a light being turned off.

1

Headlights flash briefly against Sandy’s bedroom window as a vehicle turns onto the street. It rolls up the hill from the corner and pulls to a stop outside. The brakes squeal. The engine dies, turning over a last couple times slowly, winding down like a clockwork toy, then going silent. A car door squeaks open, slams shut. Footsteps approach the front door and the front door, after a jangling of keys, swings open. A moment later it closes. Then the sound of a dead-bolt sliding into place. Keys being set down on the scratched surface of the table by the front door. Shoes being kicked off and dropping to the floor one after the other with a thud and a thud. Footsteps padding away. Water running in the kitchen. The pipes moaning. A glass being filled. Silence. A glass being set down on the counter. Creaking floorboards. The couch straining.

Then five minutes of silence. It rings loudly in Sandy’s ears, like tinnitus.

Finally the snoring begins. His stepfather’s asleep. Soon he’ll be asleep forever.

Sandy pushes off the bed.

The carpet feels strange beneath his feet, coarse and unnatural and unpleasant. He sets down the gun to put clothes on. His stepfather’s asleep; he’s not going to look in on him and wonder what the hell he’s doing dressed in the middle of the night. You up to no good again? What you been up to? You answer me, you little shit, don’t just shrug with that blank-stupid look on your face. What you been up to? Why you dressed? His stepfather’s asleep and Sandy wants to be clothed for what he’s about to do.

Being unclothed makes him feel vulnerable.

After putting on a pair of pants and a T-shirt Sandy collects the bullets from a shoebox under his bed and puts one into his pocket. The other he puts into the back of his homemade gun. He walks to his bedroom door. He stands there for a long time — heart pounding, hands sweaty. He licks his lips.

His mind is chaos, thoughts coming at him from every direction. Don’t do it, you have to do it. What if mom comes home? What if he wakes up? What if mom comes home? Don’t do it. If he wakes up and sees you with the gun he’ll take it from you and kill you with it. You have to do it, don’t do it, just get undressed and get back into bed and go to sleep. Just get into bed and sleep. It’s safer. What if he wakes up? Sometimes you have good dreams. If you go to sleep now maybe you’ll have good dreams. Don’t do it, don’t do it, you have to do it, you’ve got to, you must, don’t-

He steps into the hallway. He walks down its narrow length. The walls feel like they’re pushing toward him. Then he’s through the hallway and into the living room with the gun gripped in his fist. Gripped tight.

He’s afraid.

But as he walks, a strange thing happens:

Picture a single-storey house with blue-painted wood siding covering the exterior walls and gray asphalt shingles lining the roof. Picture it standing in the dark of night, the windows bright yellow rectangles revealing every room to anyone who might wander by. A record player blares scratchy in the dining room, sounding as if the record’s spinning the wrong way. On a radio in the front bedroom someone talks excitedly but incoherently, the consonants and vowels somehow failing to form words. In the kitchen a dog wails like an infant while in the hallway a baby barks madly.

This is Sandy’s mind when he begins walking.

But with each step one room in the house of his mind goes dark. With each step one room goes silent. Each step is like a switch shutting off part of his brain until when he arrives before his stepfather his mind’s quiet and dark and calm as the space between two heartbeats. Everything outside this moment is a dream. Everything outside this moment has ceased to exist.

There’s only one window still lighted and Sandy, standing on the sidewalk, can see himself through it, lifting a makeshift pistol and aiming it at his sleeping stepfather’s left temple.

His stepfather: sprawled out on the couch, the old sagging couch with its itchy upholstery, one arm flopped over his fat belly, the other hanging down, knuckles on the carpet, palm open like he’s expecting silver. Shallow nasal snores as he inhales through his nostrils are followed by quiet exhalations through his open mouth like wind through a canyon but distant.

Except for these sounds, silence.

All other noises have been erased. In their place, a strange calm.

But something’s coming. Like a train you sense even before you can hear it, the vibrations on your skin, something approaches.

It’s happening. He doesn’t even feel like he’s doing it. It feels as though he’s a mere puppet and someone else is controlling him. Someone else is pulling the strings, but it’s happening, and soon it’ll be finished.

Sandy watches himself raise the gun. Watches himself pull back on the washer. Watches the rubber band stretch. Watches the color change slightly, turning a lighter shade of beige as the rubber thins and grows taut.

He watches himself let it go.

There’s nothing to it. The fingers separate by mere millimeters and the metal washer jumps from between them.

The gun makes a muted popping sound. The empty shell shoots out the back of the gun and thwacks Sandy in the neck. His stepfather’s head snaps to the right. Then he sits up, his stepfather sits up, wobbling drunkenly, reminding Sandy of a buoy on the water, bobbing. . bobbing. . bobbing.

With the sound of the shot Sandy seems to have been slammed back into himself, and now here he is again — hi, old friend, it’s been too long — standing only feet from his stepfather, and his first thought is that it didn’t work. The gun didn’t work correctly. If it had worked correctly his stepfather would be dead. But he’s not dead. He’s sitting on the couch, he’s lifting his head, he’s looking at Sandy. He’s saying, ‘What — what happened?’

Blood trickles down the side of his face.

Sandy opens his mouth to respond, but there are no words.

1

Teddy wakes up face-down in a parking lot. He rolls over, sits up, touches his face. There are bits of gravel imbedded there. He brushes them from his cheek and they fall to the ground.

At first he’s possessed by confusion and a strange uncomprehending sadness, as if he’d awakened from a nightmare he could not quite remember — just vague unpleasant images and a sound like a gate swinging on a rusty hinge — but that soon gives way to anger as he remembers what happened, how he was humiliated.

He looks to his right and sees a black coupe looming over him. Reaches up and grabs the jutting door handle. Pulls himself to his feet, swaying there a moment unbalanced. Looks down at his clothes. His suit is ruined. It’s covered in grime and dirt, one of his waistcoat’s buttons is missing, and a pocket has torn loose.

His head throbs.

He touches his temple and feels the sharp sting of pain and a crust of dried blood.

That little pimple-faced son of a bitch.

Teddy’s gonna make him sorry. The hell he won’t. He’ll not be made to feel this way by anyone. He’s been through too much in the last ten years to take what he took tonight without giving some back.

He’s been through far too much.

1

Candice stands in the parking lot behind the nightclub at which she works on the corner of Venice and Hauser, just northwest of Sugar Hill, where the moneyed Negroes live. They started moving into the neighborhood, taking over the mortgages of dried-up oil barons and derailed railroad magnates, during the Great Depression, and the neighborhood’s northern border, Washington Boulevard, still stands as a sort of racial equator, with colored folk living primarily to the south. The nightclub is closed and silent, the voices and laughter which earlier enlivened it now only drunken memories, the neon-tube sign out front — which can normally be read from six blocks in either direction, pinning a name on the place, the Sugar Cube — is dark as the night itself, and but for two cars, the lot in which Candice now stands is empty. She leans against one of them, a blonde woman with her lips smeared red, her hair pin-curled, her dress inappropriate for a woman in almost any other profession.

She works as a B-girl, flirting with men, dancing with them, getting them to buy her watered-down drinks at premium prices. A hand on the knee. A kiss on the corner of the mouth. A suggestive look. It can be a difficult job. You must laugh at stupid jokes. You can’t allow yourself to cringe at the stink of garlic on breath. Your feet get bruised as the clumsier ones are always tenderizing your meat out on the dance floor.

And the men get grabby. Sometimes they get violent.

She’s been accosted on more than one occasion in this very parking lot by drunken men who wanted to take what she was unwilling to give them — or sell them.

Men are animals. You have to be careful with them. You have to tempt them, let them hope they might get to see what’s hidden under your skirt without ever letting them believe it’s a promise. If you let it get too far you’ll find yourself in a dangerous situation.

It’s made worse by the fact that some of the girls have a price. There’s a dressing room upstairs, and it’s a rare night that Candice doesn’t see men get dragged up there by their ties like obedient puppies on leashes.

Only once was she unable to fight off an attacker. He left her torn and bleeding in this very parking lot, a mere twenty feet from where she now stands, took the money she’d earned that night, spit on her, called her a cunt and a whore.

For two weeks afterwards she looked like she went several rounds with Rocky Marciano, and though she couldn’t afford the time off, she stayed home until the bruises healed. Once she returned to work the mere thought of walking out here in the dark was traumatizing. She couldn’t do it alone. She tried to be strong on her first day back, to put on a brave face, but halfway to her car she found herself shaking and crying, unable to force her feet further into the darkness. She stood paralyzed until one of the other girls saw her and walked her to her car.

It took months before she could walk out here by herself.

She’s more cautious now, more careful. Men are animals. And she has a boy to raise, a boy whose father is already absent. She doesn’t want him to lose his mother as well. She wants him to retain some innocence for as long as possible.

She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, looks toward the Sugar Cube’s back door. Vivian said she’d only be a minute, said she just had to use the ladies’ room, but it has to have been a quarter hour now, and Candice isn’t dressed for this chill night air.

She looks up at the moon, bright behind a thin film of disintegrating clouds, and feels a small surge of anger. Directed neither at the moon nor at Vivian, but at her husband Neil, who’s probably asleep on the couch in their little falling-down house on Bunker Hill. Once again he left her stranded. When he gets off work — he’s head mail clerk at a downtown office building — he often hops on a streetcar and takes it here to the nightclub, says hey, just wanted to see your pretty face, I’ll only stay a few minutes, but minutes turn into hours, and by the time he’s pushing out the door, the streetcars have stopped running. So what does he do? Sometimes he gets a cab, but too often he stumbles to the car, drives it home, collapses onto the couch, and falls into a drunken sleep without even realizing he’s once again left her without a way home. It happens at least once a week, usually after a busy Saturday night when she’s at her most tired, when her feet are killing her, when she’s been grabbed one time too many by one chump too many, and wants nothing so much as the comfort of her own bed.

She cares for Neil, despite his flaws, despite the way he treats her son, but sometimes she feels like strangling him till he’s dead. He can be so thoughtless, and all tomorrow’s apologies mean nothing to her now. They’ll mean very little then.

Vivian finally pushes through the back door and sways across the parking lot toward her, saying sorry about that, had to get some money out of Heath.

‘Money for what?’

‘Leland did some work for him couple weeks ago, asked me to collect it.’

Candice nods, takes another drag from her cigarette, offers it to Vivian, who pinches it between two fingers, sucks the last drag from it, and flicks it out to the asphalt. It hits the ground and a small scattering of orange embers flash on the air, briefly looking like a miniature fireworks show — one for the ants and beetles — before going dark.

‘Where’s he been lately, anyway?’

‘Leland?’

She nods.

‘Had a movie last week, five full days of work.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Twelve hours a day every day.’

‘Was it a speaking part?’

‘Not this time. But maybe soon. It’s about building relationships with producers. You know, it’s less to do with talent than knowing the right people.’

‘Come on,’ Candice says, pulling on a locked door, ‘my lady parts are freezing off.’

They get into the car and Vivian starts the engine.

‘You need to do something about Neil. The way he leaves you stranded is rotten.’

‘He doesn’t mean it.’

‘If it only happened once I’d believe that.’

Candice shrugs, and as Vivian pulls the car out of the parking lot and into the street she turns to the passenger’s-side window and looks through it, out at the city, her breath fogging the glass in front of her.

She likes this part of the night. The bars have closed and the night owls have gone home, everyone from the zoot-suited Mexicans to the Negro-speaking hipsters, but it’s too early yet for even the earliest risers to be pushing through their front doors. The city is still and silent and possesses the feeling of possibility, like an unhatched egg. You can almost forget it was long ago parceled out and sold. You can almost forget that crooks live in its mansions while honest people live in tarpaper shacks. You can almost forget that racial violence rages everywhere, from Hollywood Stars games at Wrigley Field to burning crosses in the yards of Negroes who dared to buy homes in white neighborhoods. You can almost forget that gangsters dine with famous actors and grin from newspaper photographs while honest, hardworking men die unknown.

You can almost forget, but not quite.

She knows the chief of police, William H. Parker, has promised to clean the place up, but she knows too that the Bloody Christmas beatings were only three months ago now, and if the man can’t control his own cops, how is he supposed to control a city?

The answer’s simple. He can’t. And in truth she doesn’t blame him for that. Los Angeles is a monster, a beast whose primary nutrients are Hollywood glitter and dumb violence. No one could control such an animal.

They drive north till they hit Sunset Boulevard, then head east, past the point where it hooks right and becomes Macy Street. A few minutes after that Vivian turns the car left onto Bunker Hill Avenue, and Candice finds herself surrounded by the comforting familiarity of her neighborhood, crumbling though it is.

The car rolls north on a street punctuated by potholes. Up ahead, on the right, in front of their small house, their small crumbling house with its asphalt-shingle roof, sits their car, a 1948 Chevrolet Fleetmaster. The driver’s-side door hangs open. Key’s probably still jutting from the ignition as well. It wouldn’t be the first time. Lucky the car wasn’t stolen by some leather-jacketed hoodlum looking to joyride.

Sometimes she could just-

Her thought is cut off by the sight of something on the asphalt beside the car, something about the size of a man. Not only the size of a man but the shape. A man on his back with his head tilted to the right, toward the parked car.

Whatever it is, the sound of the approaching vehicle doesn’t cause it to stir. It simply lies there, still as a mountain.

‘Oh my God,’ she says.

‘Maybe he’s just passed out.’

Candice doesn’t respond. As the car slows down she pushes open the door and steps out into the chill April air. She walks toward the sedan, moonlight reflecting off the chrome grille. Looks down at the man lying on the asphalt beside it. Looks at his left hand. The fingers are curled and dirt is crusted under the nails, black crescents lining the tip of each one. She looks at his face, looks into his eyes. He doesn’t look back. He’s incapable of looking back. He’s incapable of anything. The left side of his face is covered in blood. There’s a black dot like a wormhole in his temple. A five-pointed star carved into his forehead. The gashes deep and red, white bone visible beneath them.

She steps back. She puts her hands over her mouth. Her face feels numb. Her legs feel numb. She can’t feel her legs at all, and no wonder, they must have disappeared, they must have simply vanished out from under her, because now she’s sitting on the cold asphalt in the middle of the street, and the only way that could have happened is if her legs vanished. A second ago they were holding her up.

Why is Neil outside? Why is Neil lying in the street? That’s such a silly, stupid thing for him to be doing.

‘Neil,’ she says, ‘we have to go inside. It’s late.’

1

Look at this man wearing nothing but a pair of tattered underpants and one argyle sock. Look at him with his pale white belly gone soft. Look at him with his stick legs lined with blue veins and his once-muscular arms now wasted. Look at the gray hair on his head thinning at the temples and the dry riverbed wrinkles in his face. Look at the purple smears like bruises under his eyes.

Look at the pale band of skin on the ring finger on his left hand.

He snores quietly, lying on top of the green wool blanket stretched over his narrow, sagging mattress. If he’s dreaming it doesn’t show. His face is still and without expression, and, being expressionless, free of the scowl he puts on daily, like a hat, before stepping into the morning sunlight. In sleep he looks innocent. It would be a shame to wake him, to bring reality back to that face, to the brown eyes now lidded, to the weary mind behind them.

A knock at the door.

The man shifts in his sleep but the shutters of his eyes remain fixed.

Another knock. A woman’s voice speaking his name.

Carl Bachman opens his eyes and sits up with a curse. He stares at the blank wall. He clears his throat, crawls out of bed, pads to the door. He says what. He’s told there’s a phone call for him. He says okay and pulls open the door, squinting at his heavy-set landlady, Mrs Hoffman. She looks away from him, clearly embarrassed by his lack of clothing. He scratches himself and yawns. She says you shouldn’t be getting calls at this hour. House rules say no phone calls after nine o’clock. You should respect the rules, being a policeman. He says he didn’t exactly call himself and won’t be held responsible for other people’s actions. Besides, he says, this is probably police business. He pushes past her, walks down the hallway in his stained underwear to the telephone stand, picks up the telephone and says ugh. Captain Ellis, Homicide Division, sounding like he was just awakened himself, speaks into his ear, telling him there’s been a murder. You and Friedman are next in the rotation so you probably want to catch the scene. He says okay, writes down the address on a pad of paper which rests on the telephone stand, hangs up.

He feels sweaty and sick in his stomach. His legs feel cramped. He rubs his face, walks back to his room, grabs a clean pair of underwear. He looks at the brown paper bag in the top drawer of his dresser, tucked in beside his underclothes, but tells himself no, don’t, not right before a job. You have to keep this in check. You can’t let yourself lose control. He pushes the drawer closed, tries to massage the cramp out of his left thigh.

Ignore it.

He grabs a towel from the back of a chair where he set it out to dry and walks down the hallway to the second-floor bathroom. His landlady walks behind him telling him no showers after nine o’clock, it wakes the other tenants. He tells her your running mouth is more likely to wake them than running water, so why don’t you clap your trap. Then he walks into the bathroom and closes the door in her face. He turns on the shower and waits for the water to get hot. While he waits he pulls off his underpants and kicks them into the corner. He steps into the shower with one sock still on his foot, curses, pulls it off his foot, throws it over the curtain rod. It hangs there, dripping water onto the floor.

He washes himself quickly — armpits, asshole, face, and feet — steps out of the shower, dries off. He wipes the mirror and looks at himself, deciding he doesn’t need to shave. He puts on his clean underwear and pads back to his room. He slips into blue slacks, a white shirt, a holster, a red tie, a coat. He runs his fingers through his wet hair and puts a fedora onto his head. He clips his badge onto his belt.

The telephone in the hallway rings again.

He walks out and picks it up himself.

‘Captain?’

‘Friedman.’

‘Shit.’

‘Nice to hear your voice, too, Carl. You mind picking me up on the way?’

‘It’s not on the way.’

‘You mind picking me up not on the way?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Will you do it anyhow?’

‘You need to get yourself a more reliable car.’

‘This week. Will you pick me up?’

‘Yeah.’

He drops the phone.

Locks his room door.

Heads down the stairs to the front of the house.

Two steps from the exit door, his stomach goes sour. He turns around, walks to the first-floor bathroom (which none of the tenants are supposed to use, but he isn’t walking back upstairs), unsnaps his belt, hooks his thumbs in, and pulls down his pants and underwear in one motion. He sits on the toilet just in time. He’s been constipated for two days and now diarrhea. While he’s there he checks his pockets for cigarettes, finds a crumpled packet of Chesterfields, slips one between his lips, lights it. He takes a deep drag. When he’s finished with his shit he wipes twice, pulls up his pants, buckles his belt. He checks his stool for blood, but finds none. He always expects blood in his stool, but there never is any. Sometimes he’s disappointed, sometimes relieved. Depends on his mood. He flushes, takes another drag from his cigarette, heads once more toward the front door.

This time he makes it through, pulls it shut behind him, trudges across the lawn to a black Ford parked at the curb.

It takes three attempts to get it started, but finally the engine rumbles to life.

He rolls down the window and inhales the chill night air. He takes another drag from his cigarette and steels himself for what’s coming.

He likes the puzzle aspect of being murder police, likes fitting together the pieces till he has a picture of what happened, but the blood and loss he hates. The dull shocked expressions on the faces of those left behind. The swollen eyes. The question there’s no answer to: why. You try to wall yourself off from that part of it, crack jokes (as long as survivors aren’t around), pretend you don’t care, but you can’t block it all out. It simply can’t be done.

Still, you try.

He’s become, in the last several months, better at it than many.

He puts the car into gear and gets it rolling.

Despite what he will have to deal with at the scene he’s glad to have a case. It might distract him from everything else that’s going on in his life right now. Something outside himself and his own bullshit. Even someone else’s pain would be better than his own, and he’ll do his best to avoid even that. He’ll focus instead on how the pieces fit together. If you think of human troubles, you’re thinking human thoughts, and those just get in the way. Human emotions get in the way. The trick is to feel nothing. The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

He drives in silence through the night, stopping only once between the boarding house and the murder scene. His partner Zach Friedman is already in front of his house when Carl pulls to the curb. He’s standing on the porch sipping coffee from a red cup.

He pulls open the car door and gets inside.

‘Thanks for picking me up.’

‘You’re buying breakfast when we get done with this.’

‘Deal.’

Fourteen minutes after pulling away from one curb they pull up to another. Carl brings the car to a stop behind a row of police vehicles. Wooden sawhorses stand in the street, cordoning off a large area, and uniformed police officers stand with them, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from thermoses. Other cops are already knocking on doors, asking questions. And the crime lab boys are going about their business flashing bulbs and taking swabs.

Carl and Friedman push out of the car and walk toward Captain Ellis, who stands smoking a cigarette and watching the madness.

To no one in particular Carl says, ‘What do we got?’

Sam Avery from the crime lab says, ‘White male between thirty-five and fourty years old. About five foot ten, one ninety-five. Supine on the street beside a motor vehicle. Gunshot wound to the left temple, another to the crown of the head. Five-pointed star carved into the forehead. Doesn’t look like he put up a fight. Gunman must’ve took him by surprise.’

‘Interesting,’ Carl says.

The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

1

Here we are, New Hampshire Avenue, a narrow strip of asphalt lined with dark-windowed stucco apartment buildings, trees, and parked cars. For the moment silence covers the street like a blanket. Even the neighborhood cats seem to be sleeping. Then the rattle of a doorknob, a man stepping into the early morning. A bespectacled man with black hair and green eyes. He wears white pants, a heavily starched white shirt with short sleeves, and a black bowtie. Perched atop his head, a white captain’s hat.

The air is still and cool and the sky dark, though it’s already begun its morning fade to the milky blue-gray of daytime.

A block north Wilshire Boulevard stretches out empty across the land.

This man, just shy of six feet tall, taps an Old Gold cigarette from its crushed packet, lights it, and walks to his Divco milk truck, all white but for the fenders painted light blue, and, on the side of the truck, also in blue, the words,

H.H. WHITE CREAMERY CO.

In Business Since 1912.

In business since the year this man, this milkman, Eugene Dahl, was born. In business for fourty years. In business since milk was delivered by horse and carriage.

He steps into the truck and gets it started. He pumps the gas pedal to keep it running while the four-cylinder engine warms up. It takes a few minutes.

While he waits for the engine to start running smoothly he smokes his cigarette and looks out the windshield at his quiet street.

He spits a bit of tobacco off the end of his tongue.

It’s hard to believe this is where life has brought him: to a finicky milk truck in front of his one-bedroom apartment just west of downtown Los Angeles. Once he thought he was going to be something.

Once he almost was.

1

Carl pulls his car to the curb in front of a diner on Broadway. He hasn’t had a meal since dinner, day before yesterday, and needs to eat. He isn’t hungry, nobody would be after dealing with what he just dealt with, but that hardly matters. His body needs sustenance, so he’ll put food into his mouth, chew, and swallow.

As soon as the boy confessed to the murder, Captain Ellis made a call to the Juvenile Division, and their detectives came in, took the boy in for processing, and took over the case. Except for Carl’s report and testimony come the trial, his part in it is finished. Yet somehow he was the one left explaining to the boy’s mother what was happening. The look on her face was heartbreaking.

But that’s over. No point thinking about it.

The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

‘What do you want?’

‘Cheeseburger, I guess.’

Friedman nods, then steps out of the vehicle and walks across the pavement before disappearing through the diner’s smudged glass doors.

Carl looks through the windshield to the street ahead. He frowns at nothing. Against his own will he thinks of his wife. He misses her.

1

Seymour Markley, in blue-and-white-striped pajamas, pads barefoot across his hardwood floor, down the wide book-lined hallway, through the tastefully decorated living room, to the thick, hand-carved maple front door. He grabs the glass doorknob and pulls, wondering who could be knocking at this hour on a Sunday morning.

At first he doesn’t recognize her. There’s a part of his brain that knows he should — the short brunette hair; the vacant blue eyes; the full, soft-looking lips — but the context is wrong, and at first he has no idea who she is. He blinks at her through his wire-framed spectacles, lips parted but soundless. He’s about to say something, yes, can I help you, I think perhaps you’re at the wrong house, when recognition comes. It comes all at once, like a fist to the gut.

He glances over his shoulder to make sure Margaret is still in bed, to make sure she isn’t standing in the hallway watching this, then looks back to the woman standing on the other side of the threshold. He believes her name is Vivian. That’s what she calls herself at work, anyway. She works as a B-girl, and sometimes more, at a place called the Sugar Cube. Out on the street behind her, in a green Chevrolet coupe, sits another woman. He recognizes her as well, but has never heard her name spoken aloud. Or if he has he’s forgotten. The woman in the car appears to have been crying very recently. She looks at them, at Seymour and Vivian, through the passenger’s-side window. She has blonde hair. Her face is pale. She looks like a ghost.

Or maybe Seymour’s simply been unnerved by seeing these women out of context. He feels slightly dizzy.

‘What are you doing here? How did you find my house?’

‘I’m sorry to bother you at home,’ Vivian says, touching his arm briefly, ‘but we need help.’

‘You can’t be here,’ he says, glancing over his shoulder a second time, ‘you simply cannot be here.’

‘But I am here, and I’m not leaving until you agree to help.’

‘With what?’

‘Candice’s boy is in some trouble.’

‘Who’s Candice?’

‘The woman in the car. She works with me.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Legal trouble. Why else would I bother you on a Sunday morning?’

‘What did he do?’

Vivian pauses, looks hesitant.

‘What did he do? You didn’t come here to not tell me.’

‘He killed a man.’

‘What?’

‘I know. But you’re gonna help us.’

‘Or what,’ Seymour says, feeling anger start to swell within him, ‘you’ll tell my wife? Do you really think she’ll believe you? You’re just a whore. I can claim it’s nothing but an attempt at blackmail. Why don’t you get the hell out of here?’

‘Nobody has to believe me, Seymour,’ Vivian says. ‘I have pictures.’

‘You have. .’ He blinks at her. His eyes feel dry, itchy.

She mimes the taking of a photograph, says, ‘Click.’

Seymour cannot think. There’s a hitch in his mind. All the gears have locked up. Then, after a moment, after that strange mental hang-up has resolved itself, his brain starts working again and thought returns to him.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But we can’t talk here. I’ll meet you and your friend-’

‘Candice.’

‘I’ll meet you and Candice at nine o’clock. There’s a diner called Fred’s not far from here. We’ll talk there.’

‘Nine o’clock?’

Seymour nods.

‘You better show up.’

‘I will,’ Seymour says, and pushes the door closed.

He turns around and puts his back to it. He looks down the length of the hallway, toward the room where his wife still lies in bed. He knew better than to do what he did. He always knows better, every time. But something in him, some base part of him, thrives on that knowledge, and rather than stopping him it pushes him forward. Into places where a man can buy anything so long as he has enough money folded into his wallet. He lets the women lead him upstairs, or to the back room. He watches them undress. He lets them come to him, not at all assertive himself, lets himself pretend he didn’t know what would happen, what it would lead to. That’s part of the game. Most of the time he has to be so much in control that he likes giving it up on these occasions. But it also makes him feel disgusting to do what he does. After it’s over he feels sick. He fears syphilis. He fears gonorrhea. He comes home and scrubs his body in scalding water and tells himself he will never do that again. It’s filthy and he’s filthy for doing it. He avoids his wife for a week, sometimes two, to make sure he hasn’t contracted anything that he might give her, though it’s less out of concern for her wellbeing than out of fear that he’ll have to explain to her why she must get penicillin shots. But despite the way it makes him feel, despite the guilt, a couple months later he’s in his car again, driving, telling himself he’s not going where he knows damn well he is.

Sometimes he manages to restrain the urge for as long as six months, but never more. He hates himself for it. Immediately afterwards he hates himself, but the mind is a strange thing, and when the venereal diseases do not arrive, when it’s clear that God hasn’t punished him for his transgressions, the guilt and shame fade away.

But it looks like God’s punished him after all, doesn’t it? He’s certain he never told Vivian his last name, nor would he ever have told her his job. So how did she find him? How does she know who he is, what he does?

Don’t be a fool, Seymour. Your name and photograph are in the newspaper on a regular basis. You were elected to office. You’re a public figure who failed to keep his private vices private.

God didn’t do this; you’ve brought it upon yourself.

He walks down the hallway and pushes into his bedroom. Margaret, in bed, opens her eyes and smiles at him sleepily.

‘Who was it?’

‘Barry. Looks like I’ll have to go into work for a few hours.’

‘But it’s Sunday.’

‘I know. You’ll have to go to church without me.’

1

Eugene Dahl pulls his milk truck to a stop in front of the Galt Hotel on Wilshire and kills the engine with the turn of a key. He steps from the truck and walks into the hotel’s bar, which opens onto the street. All daylight is cut off as the door swings shut behind him. A few dim bulbs overhead and a couple neon tubes on the walls provide what little illumination remains. Every direction you turn the dim room feels like looking through a window screen.

Outside it was a Thursday evening. Outside it was the tenth of April. But none of that matters in here. In here it is forever midnight at the end of the world.

He looks around the room for Trish but doesn’t see her, and when he doesn’t see her he feels relief at her absence. He took her to dinner a few times last summer, took her on a few motorcycle rides along the Pacific Coast Highway, took her to a Negro bar for dancing and drinks, but after a few dates she became possessive and angry when he so much as glanced at another woman. Yet when he wasn’t around she was spreading her legs for anybody willing to buy her a few martinis. First they had fights, then they stopped talking. But neither of them was willing to give up this spot. When you find a good bar, you tend to be loyal. Instead, and without discussing it, they developed shifts. Sometimes there’s overlap, but not today.

He walks across the room to a barstool and sits down on cushioned red leather.

The barkeep, Jerry, a balding fellow with a gut that hangs over his belt, white shirt stretched over it like a tarp, dries his hands on a liquor-and mixer-stained towel, grabs a tumbler, and pours a double shot of bourbon into it. He pushes the drink across the counter to Eugene, who lifts it, puts it to his nose, and inhales its fine harsh scent.

He takes a mouthful, closes his eyes, and lets it sit on his tongue. He likes the tingling sensation it brings. He swallows. It goes down warm, feeling acidic, like heartburn in reverse.

He grew up during prohibition, so most of what he drank back home was bathtub moonshine. Occasionally, though, someone’s dad would get a prescription and bring home a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, which everyone would nip from for the next day or two. The bottle claimed the whiskey was

UNEXCELLED FOR MEDICINAL PURPOSES

and while Eugene still isn’t sure what medicinal purposes the whiskey might serve — sometimes it was prescribed for gout, sometimes for the very headaches it caused — he believed then and believes still that Old Grand-Dad is unexcelled for drinking purposes. There’s nothing finer than a good bourbon. He thinks he’ll have another three of these at least before he even considers letting his stool cool off.

He finishes work midday, eats lunch, and still has hours to kill. He loves the way they stretch out before him. He doesn’t understand boredom. Sitting on a barstool, sipping a drink, thinking about the book you will soon start writing — soon, but not today — is more than enough to fill the hours.

One need not actually do anything.

Thinking is enough. Dreaming is enough. Dreaming is the best. As soon as you do, the dream is dead, usurped by reality. It’s best to hold onto that bittersweet hope and the knowledge that there’s still time, even if it is slowly bleeding down the drain of the world. For now there’s time. There’s the future.

He again sips his drink.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘How are the twins?’

‘Short and stupid.’

‘I’m not sure those were the wisest names for your children, Jerry.’

‘You ain’t met em.’

‘How old are they now?’

‘Ten months. I don’t know why they can’t be born twelve years old. What good are kids when they’re too goddamn small to take out the garbage?’

Eugene shrugs, thinks of his own childhood.

He grew up in poverty, but hardly knew it. He could spend entire days alone, playing, building fantasy worlds around himself as he went on great adventures, hunting nonexistent beasts and discovering imaginary treasures. There was an innocent magic to it that even now makes his chest ache with nostalgia when he thinks about it, though he knows there was ugliness there he’s since forgotten, or pushed from his mind. He could remember, but chooses not to. He’s simply glad he still has some small magic within him. He’s protective of it, never wants to lose it. Maybe this is why he doesn’t spend it, why he only dreams. He’s afraid if he uses it, the magic will be gone. He’s afraid he will use it up completely. Then what will he have left?

The door behind him lets out a high-pitched squeak as someone pushes through. He looks over his shoulder to see a slender woman with wavy red hair slither into the dim bar. She’s pale, with fine features, and manages somehow to be both beautiful and ugly simultaneously. There’s something oddly, disquietingly, reptilian about her. She sways silently toward the counter, in a brief dress, and sits down, leaving an empty stool between herself and Eugene.

She reaches into a clutch, finds an etched gold cigarette-ase, unlatches it with the push of a button, and flips it open. She removes a filtered Kent cigarette with slender fingers, puts it between her lipsticked lips. She glances toward Eugene, her eyes pale blue.

‘Have a light?’

Eugene flips open his lighter, a pre-war Zippo, gets a flame going with some effort — he needs to replace the flint — and holds it to the end of her cigarette. She inhales deeply, removes the cigarette from her mouth, the end of the filter now smeared red, and exhales a thin stream of smoke through sensually puckered lips. A smile touches them.

‘Thanks.’

‘You bet.’

‘How’d you like to buy me a drink?’

‘That depends.’

‘Oh, yeah? On what does it depend?’

‘What are you drinking?’

‘Is this a test?’

‘I guess you could call it that.’

‘A man who’s particular, I like it. But I’m afraid I’m about to disappoint you. Old Grand-Dad, neat.’

‘Old Grand-Dad.’ He smiles.

‘Did I pass after all?’

‘Pass? What say we skip to the end and get married?’

‘Ouch, that is the end. Let’s just start with the drink.’

‘Bourbon for the lady, Jerry. And I’ll have another myself.’

Jerry nods.

The woman holds out her hand. ‘Evelyn.’

He takes her hand lightly in his own. ‘Eugene.’

‘You don’t look like a Eugene.’

‘No?’

She shakes her head.

‘What do I look like?’

‘A Kurt. That chin belongs on somebody with a hard-edged consonant in his name. I’d even settle for Frank. Eugene, though, I’m not sure it works for you.’

‘I’ve managed to live with it so far.’

‘Then I suppose I can too.’

‘That’s awful generous of you, I appreciate it.’

‘I thought you would.’

‘You from out of town?’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Your accent.’

‘I have an accent?’

He nods.

‘I’m in from New York.’

‘I’d hate to call you a liar.’

A blush touches her cheeks.

‘I grew up in New Jersey.’

‘What brings you to town?’

‘Business.’

‘Business?’

Evelyn nods.

‘What kind of business?’

‘You a private dick?’

‘Just making conversation.’

‘I work for my dad.’

‘Well, what kind of business is your dad in?’ Evelyn downs her whiskey.

‘Stop asking questions and buy me another drink,’ she says. ‘Quick, before you ruin your chances.’

‘Another drink for the lady, Jerry.’

1

A dark hardwood desk sits near the back of Seymour Markley’s large office, and Seymour himself sits behind it in a brown leather chair, his back straight, his hands clasped before him. He faces three chairs, one of them occupied.

He pulls a white rag from his pocket and gives it a quick snap to remove all lint, then takes off his glasses and cleans them methodically. He thinks about this situation, this bleeding of his personal life into his professional; he doesn’t like it one bit. He sets the glasses back on his nose, folds the rag into quarters, and slips it out of sight. He looks across his desk to Barry Carlyle, his chief investigator.

Barry is cue-ball bald, with a black mustache on his lip about the width of his nose, which is itself blade-thin, granny glasses resting on it precariously. His narrow shoulders give way to a large belly and backside before he dwindles down once more to skinny legs. He’s shaped a bit like an egg, and like an egg looks as though he may topple at any moment when standing upright. His legs are currently crossed, calf on knee, a pale bit of one ankle visible between his garter-clipped argyle sock and the hem of his gray slacks. He wears a poorly knotted red bowtie.

It’s nearly six o’clock in the evening on the seventh of April, the day after his meeting with those two whores in that San Fernando Valley diner, the sun’s hovering over the sea, threatening to sink into it hot and sizzle out, and Barry has just arrived. Seymour’s been nervously awaiting this meeting all day. He made phone calls, talked to Chief Parker about a few cases, spoke with his chief deputy about a troublesome witness, and more, but he did it all with the absent confidence and knowledge of a professional who can do his day-to-day work without full attention. Eighty-five per cent of his mind was on this bit of blackmail which has threatened his career and marriage. He awaits what Barry has to say with the same palm-sweaty dread with which he awaits a verdict in a case he’s unsure of.

‘Well?’

‘I’ve looked over the boy’s file, talked with the detectives covering the case, and done some other digging besides,’ Barry says in his nasal but toneless voice. ‘I think there’s a smart way to handle this, a way that might, with a little luck, even help to advance your career. Let me give you the facts and we’ll go from there, but they seem to me to suggest a fairly straightforward approach.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Okay.’ Barry opens a folder in his lap and studies it a moment. ‘Okay. Here are the facts. One,’ he says, counting off with a finger, ‘the boy killed his stepfather and was inspired by a comic-book story to carve a star into the man’s forehead. Two, psychologists such as Frederic Wertham have done research into comics and believe they damage young minds and turn normal boys to violence. Three, the comic book that inspired the boy was published by E.M. Comics, which utilizes the Manning Printing Company of Newark, New Jersey, to do all of its comic books and magazines. And four, said printing company is owned by none other than James Douglas Manning.

‘Now, I did some asking around, lined a few palms with silver, and while I don’t have any solid evidence of it at this point it looks like Manning controls and funds the publishing company as well, uses both it and his printing company to clean dirty money. To twice-filter it, so to speak.’ He pauses, glances down at his file, flips through the pages, looks up again. ‘Okay. Those are the facts.’

Seymour nods but says nothing. He licks his lips, shuffling and reshuffling the information in his mind to see what kind of hand he might deal himself. He taps his fingers on his desk. The clock ticks. After half a minute of silence he leans back in his chair and puts his hand over his open mouth, covering an unbelieving smile. Then, in a hushed tone, as if he might frighten the fact of it away if he speaks too loudly, he says, ‘This could make my career.’

Barry nods.

‘I mean, Kefauver’s all but guaranteed the Democratic nomination come July, and all he did was bring a bunch of gangsters down to various courthouses to plead the fifth on television. J. Edgar Hoover’s been trying to get to Manning since the days when his business was confined to breaking kneecaps in New Jersey, and I actually have a chance to nail the son of a bitch. Forget taking on Fletcher Bowron. If this goes right I could have the governorship.’

‘Oh,’ Barry says. ‘I forgot the most crucial part of all this.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The Sheriff’s Department arrested James Manning’s accountant last night. Picked him up in front of one of those gambling joints out there on Sunset Boulevard west of LAPD jurisdiction.’

‘What’d they get him on?’

‘Murder.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘I wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

Seymour shakes his head, barely able to believe it. Up until only a minute ago he’d thought his career might be finished.

‘I’ll talk to the accountant tomorrow morning. I want you to head over to the juvenile-detention facility and talk to the boy, see how malleable his recollection of the evening might be. Take the mother along if you think it will help.’

‘Right,’ Barry says, and gets to his feet. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

1

On Monday morning, the seventh of April, while Seymour Markley is asking his chief investigator Barry Carlyle to look into a rather important matter and get back to him before the end of the day, and three days before Eugene Dahl will come home to find an envelope nailed to his front door, Sandy Duncan is sitting on a white-painted school bus, looking out the window at the world as it passes by; he sees a blur of color as the road moves under him, as it sweeps beneath the bus like a great gray ribbon, bringing the juvenile-detention facility closer to him, and closer still.

1

Next morning, nine o’clock, Candice sits on a chair in the corner of the living room, her back straight, her hands resting flat on her thighs. She wears a gray wool skirt and a white blouse with ruffles running down the front, conservative when compared to her work attire, and her blonde hair is pulled back and twisted into a tight bun, making her look severe. She wears no makeup. Someone used to seeing her at the Sugar Cube with lips smeared red, eyes shaded blue, and blush on her cheeks wouldn’t recognize her. Compared to that woman this one is thin-lipped and terribly sad.

She stares at the couch, at the bloodstains on the floor in front of it. It’s a strange thing, a thing she doesn’t understand at all, but despite the fact she misses Neil very much, there’s a part of her that is angry with him. Angry with him for dying, yes, and angry with him, too, for being the reason her innocent boy is no longer innocent. The reason he’s no longer here. Neil’s the one who filled him with so much violence he could no longer contain it. Neil’s the one who taught him what violence was through demonstration. The lessons we remember are the ones that hurt us. She knows Neil thought he was doing right. She knows he wanted Sandy to be strong and good and was trying to make him that way. But he was wrong, and now he’s dead.

And Sandy’s locked away.

There’s no logical reason for it to be so, but she believes she can feel the distance between her and her son, a great sucking hollow. Some antediluvian instinct, some primordial soul-nerve, feels her son’s absence, and there is within her a great urge to get him back, whatever the cost, to get him back to fill that empty space.

She thinks she’s going to take the couch out to the curb later today or tomorrow morning. She can’t stand to sit on it. She knows that’s where Neil was killed and can’t stand even to be near it.

Then there’s the pity and hatred in her neighbors’ eyes. They pity her for her loss, of course, poor thing, but there’s something in people that makes them also hate someone who’s been the victim of a tragedy. Part of them believes she must have had it coming. She must have had it coming because nothing like that could ever happen to them.

They’re safe. They’re secure. They need worry neither about God’s indifference nor the unlocked door.

The bell rings and Candice jumps, her heart pounding wildly in her chest.

‘I’ll be right there,’ she says once she is again calm.

She gets to her feet, pulls open the door, and is greeted by an egg-shaped bald man in a blue suit and a red bowtie. He says hello and she says hello.

She walks with him to his car and gets into it.

1

And here we are again: Thursday, the tenth of April: the day Eugene Dahl meets Evelyn Manning; the day he drives home and discovers a white envelope nailed to his apartment’s front door. We are, in fact, smack-dab between those two events, standing outside the bar on the first floor of the Galt Hotel.

Step inside.

Eugene, showered and dressed but not yet fully awake, stumbles from his bathroom and walks down his narrow hallway. He has the day off, but finds it impossible to sleep past four o’clock even when he has nowhere to be, even when he’s a bit hung over, as he is today. His time as a milkman has ruined him for sleeping in.

As he walks toward the kitchen his shower-fogged glasses clear in the cool morning air. Coffee should be done percolating and he needs a cup. He grabs a mug from the cupboard and pours thin brown liquid into it. He checks the fridge, but is out of fresh milk. An empty bottle sits in the door beside a jar of mustard. His mind’s working just well enough that he finds the empty milk bottle amusing. He shuts the fridge and starts looking through his cupboards for an alternative. After shoving several cans of peas and green beans and Spam aside he finds a can of condensed milk. He can’t find his can opener, so he punches a couple holes into the lid with a screwdriver and pours the thick syrup into his coffee.

Then, with mug in hand, he walks to the dining table and sits. He intends to drink his coffee in silence and stare blank-eyed at the wall thinking nothing at all, but instead his eyes fall upon the envelope he found nailed to his front door last night.

He’d forgotten about it until now. Drunken memories seem to remain drunk long after you yourself have sobered up. Pulling the note from the door, walking inside, trying to write: it’s all a blur.

He picks up the envelope and looks at it. It’s blank, white. He holds it up to the sunlight but can’t see what’s inside. He tears open the top and finds within the envelope a newspaper clipping. At first he’s staring at an advertisement. Think of it! A new cylinder-type vacuum cleaner! Only $13.95 complete with attachments! He flips over the thin sheet of paper and reads this headline:

D.A. SEYMOUR MARKLEY SAYS COMICS CAUSE MURDER!

1

Seymour Markley sits alone in a booth. He looks out the grease-spotted window to the street but doesn’t see them. He looks around the diner for the second time, scanning the faces of the other patrons, but none of them are familiar. They didn’t inadvertently cross paths. They aren’t waiting for him at some other table. They simply haven’t yet arrived.

He takes a sip of orange juice, straightens his tie. Though he doesn’t plan to eat, couldn’t eat if he tried, he wipes the water-spotted flatware off with a napkin and sets each piece down parallel to the others, fork, knife, spoon.

He can’t stand that these people have turned this around on him. Despite the fact that he might be able to advance his career because of it, it bothers him. He’s an important man. He’s an important man and he’s being made to wait by unimportant people: by scum: by a whore and her cuckold husband. It’s almost too much to take.

The door swings open and he looks toward it.

A fellow in a cowboy hat walks into the diner wearing dark pants, a checkered shirt with pearl buttons, and a bolo tie. On the pinky finger of his right hand he wears a blue topaz ring. His mustache is thick and long, hiding his mouth, and the ends are waxed to ice-pick points. Seymour feels like he knows him from somewhere, but can’t imagine where, unless he’s put him in prison before.

But he doesn’t think that’s it.

Behind the cowboy walks Vivian in heels and a brief dress.

The cowboy scans the room. Then, tipping two fingers toward Seymour, he says in an oddly cheery voice, ‘That him, darlin?’

‘That’s him.’

The cowboy walks over and drops his hand like an axe in front of Seymour’s face. Seymour blinks at it.

‘Leland Jones. Wasn’t sure I recognized you with your clothes on.’ He smiles.

Seymour lets the hand hang for a long time, then says, ‘You can put that away. I’m not going to shake.’

‘Well, shit, that’s all right, sugar. I wasn’t dying to wring out your sweaty dishrag paw anyways.’

He slides into the booth. Vivian sits down beside him.

‘Hi, Seymour.’

‘We’re not friends, whore. Do you two have the pictures?’

Leland Jones leans in, smile gone. ‘You best watch the way you talk to my wife.’

‘Is your wife not a whore?’

‘My wife is a beautiful woman, and you’ll respect her. What she does for work don’t have nothin to do with who she is.’

Seymour knows suddenly where he’s seen this man before. He remembers him from Fort Apache, and is almost certain he’s seen him in other Western movies as well. He didn’t have any lines that Seymour can recall, he was just human background, but yes, that’s why he seemed familiar.

‘Do you have them?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The pictures.’

Leland Jones reaches into his back pocket and removes an envelope that’s been folded in half. He tosses it onto the table. It lands between the salt shaker and a bottle of hot sauce. Seymour blinks. Then reaches out and picks up the envelope, pulls it open, looks inside. Three Polaroid pictures. He flips through them twice, frowns.

Looks up at Vivian and says, ‘The first picture you showed me isn’t here.’

Vivian looks confused. ‘It’s. . what?’

‘Yeah,’ Leland Jones says, looking at him with blue eyes, his relaxed way of speaking stretching the word like verbal taffy, ‘I wanted to talk to you about that.’

‘Leland, what are you doing?’

‘Yes, Leland,’ Seymour says, ‘what are you doing? We had an agreement.’

‘You and the ladies had an agreement. But these pitchers don’t really belong to the ladies. They belong to me.’

‘We talked about this, Leland.’

‘All right, darlin, I get you’re mad, but let Leland take care of business.’

‘I held up my end of this agreement,’ Seymour says.

‘I appreciate that. Candice is a hell of a woman and she don’t deserve to have no pain in her life. That’s why I’m willing to give you that last pitcher for a mere hundred dollars. A bargain when you think about it.’

Vivian stares at her husband, clearly furious, her face white but for hot pink blotches on her cheeks, but she says nothing.

‘How do I know,’ Seymour says, ‘that once I pay for this last photo, another one won’t turn up? And another after that?’

‘I don’t mean to insult you, Mr Markley, but I don’t think Vivian had your pants down more’n five minutes before you was putting em back on. There just wasn’t no time to take a lotta pitchers.’

‘That’s not good enough.’

‘Then you’ll have to trust me.’

‘Trust a man who makes an agreement and then changes his mind when the other party has fulfilled his end of said agreement? I don’t think so.’

‘“Fulfilled his end of said agreement.”’ Leland laughs. ‘You are a lawyer, aren’t you? But last I heard Candice’s boy was still locked up.’

‘These things take time. The point is this: that last photograph has been paid for and I’m not willing to pay for it twice.’

‘I don’t see that you got a choice. I ain’t givin it back till you do.’

Seymour simply stares at him.

‘Tell you what, think it over. I’ll call your office at five o’clock and we’ll have us a little chat. Till then, I’ll bid you adieu.’

Seymour watches them stand up from the booth and walk toward the exit.

He doesn’t move for a long time.

1

Candice has the evening off and wishes she didn’t, but the funeral’s tomorrow and she couldn’t imagine trying to sit through it on four hours’ sleep, so here she is, sitting in the corner of the room, looking at the place where her couch used to be, wishing she was somewhere else. The couch is now curbside and will be until someone who doesn’t know its history makes off with it. She hopes it happens soon. She’d like to look out the window and see the damned thing has vanished.

Tomorrow she’ll go to Sears amp; Roebuck to look for a new one, because right now it’s the mental equivalent of a missing tooth. Her eye keeps going to the spot where it should be, looking, looking, looking, while her mind plays over the reason it’s gone.

She doesn’t want to be here.

She gets to her feet and walks to the telephone on the wall. On the counter below it, a telephone book. Stacked on top of the telephone book, business cards and scraps of paper. She picks up the paper with Detective Bachman’s phone number on it. She knows she shouldn’t call. She hit him and screamed at him and told him she would never forgive him for taking her son away. She called him a bastard and a motherfucker. But he told her he understood what she was going through, understood her loss, and there was something in his eyes that made her believe him. And she can think of no one else who might know what she’s thinking and feeling.

Vivian’s her friend, has done more than anyone to help her, but she’s probably at work, and wouldn’t understand anyway. And even if she did understand, there’s something about talking to a stranger that appeals to her, that feels safer. A stranger can’t judge you, and if he does judge you it doesn’t matter. You can simply walk away.

She picks up the telephone and makes the call.

A woman picks up.

‘Hoffman Boarding.’

‘Is Detective Bachman in?’

‘Hold on.’

The telephone is set down. This is followed by a knocking sound, the woman saying call for you, Bachman, are you there? Open the door. And then silence.

After a while the woman’s voice in her ear: ‘He isn’t in.’

‘Can I leave a message?’

‘Okay.’

‘Can you tell him Candice Richardson called?’

‘Candice Richardson?’

‘Sandy’s mother.’

‘Does he have your phone number?’

‘Trinity nine five one fifty.’

‘Would you like to say what it’s regarding?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you.’ She sets the phone down.

She wonders if he’ll call back. Part of her hopes he doesn’t.

1

Eugene, wearing only a pair of wrinkled slacks, walks Evelyn to the front door. She looks at him with her large eyes, purse clutched in her hands. Once more she is wearing the dress she wore last night, though it seems strange in the early morning, out of place, and it’s wrinkled from having spent the night on the floor. Most of her makeup has been rubbed away and her pin-curled hair is a frizzy mess. Her chin is pink and raw from kissing him, from rubbing against his sandpaper-rough five o’clock shadow.

She looks beautiful.

He touches her arm as he pulls open the door.

‘Sorry about this,’ he says.

She smiles. ‘It’s probably better this way. I can sneak into my room without anybody seeing at this hour.’

‘I’m glad you’re not upset.’

‘Will you call me?’

‘When I get this resolved.’

‘What are you gonna do?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Call me.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want a cab?’

‘It’s only a few blocks.’

She turns and walks down the stairs. He watches her go. When she’s out of the building he closes the apartment door and sets the deadbolt. He puts his forehead against the wood and stays there a moment before turning to face the room. He walks to the dining table and picks up the note, unfolds it and looks at the gray lettering on the white page. It was typed on a typewriter in need of ribbon replacement. The ‘t’ is cocked to the right, making it look a bit like a malformed ‘x’. The ‘h’ sits higher than the other letters. The note says:

1

Vivian pulls a black dress from her closet and holds it up at arm’s length to give it a once-over. She picks a few pieces of lint from it. It’s a nice dress and aside from being perhaps too brief quite funereal in its simplicity. She believes it’ll do. She will, after all, only be sitting in a pew beside Can-dice while a man of the cloth speaks of death and the departed and how the soul may move on but our memories remain, God bless us all, amen. She wonders how Candice is feeling. She seems to be holding up fairly well, as well as could be expected under these circumstances, but people put up facades. It’s hard to tell what’s going on inside another person’s mind.

Sometimes it is. But she’s fairly certain Leland knew exactly what she was thinking when he walked out the front door fifteen minutes ago, when he left to meet with Seymour Markley. He stood in the entry sulking, saying don’t be like that, darlin, like he thought he could just do whatever he wanted, ignoring her protests, and she had to be okay with it. She isn’t okay with it. She might be a whore, as Markley said, and she might be a blackmailer, but she’s not a liar. She wasn’t until Leland made her one.

And aside from any ethical qualms she has with what Leland is doing — and despite who and what she is, she does have those: how she makes her money might not be legal, but it’s honest — there’s another reason she’s upset with him. She lives by a rule that Leland’s breaking. You do not put your hand twice into the same till. Not unless you want your fingers cut off when the drawer slams shut. Leland knows this, they’ve been through this before, but once more he’s being stupid about it.

It infuriates her.

It doesn’t even matter if it works out. It has before. That isn’t the point. Every time it works out, it only encourages Leland to try something like this again, and next time it won’t work out. Or the time after that. You have to do things the right way. You have to be honest. You’re dealing with important people who aren’t used to being made vulnerable. You’re embarrassing them. You’re making demands. You have to be straight with them if you expect to come out of that unscathed.

It’s simple self-preservation.

She walks to the bathroom and hangs the dress from the door. She turns on the water in the tub, plugs the drain, watches the tub slowly fill up.

After a few minutes she slips out of her nightgown and steps into the water. She has about thirty minutes to soak before she needs to get ready for the funeral.

1

Lou steps off an elevator and walks down a corridor that stinks of the cigarettes smoked behind the doors lining the walls on either side of him. He can see a cop standing in front of the door he wants to walk through. The cop is about twenty-three years old and wears a heavily starched uniform. His red hair is cut short and freckles dot his cheeks. His hands are clasped behind his back and he stares straight ahead at the wall, mouth a soggy teeter-totter drooping over his chin. Lou’s guessing this young cop used to be a marine. It’s in his posture. His older brother saw combat, has stories about storming the beach at Normandy, battling on vast fields of blood, bayoneting teenage warriors and feeling no remorse, for it was us or them, and we had God on our side. He’s unhappy that he was too young to join before the end of World War II and was unlucky enough to be discharged before the Korean War began. Probably he left to join the police force after two years at Camp Gordon, Georgia, or some other place equally as boring, hoping for action in the city if not on the battlefield. He wants to taste blood. That’s what Lou sees as he walks toward this young cop. That’s what he sees, but he hopes he’s wrong, because if he’s right it might mean trouble.

He approaches the cop, walking casually, hands in pockets. The hand in his right hip pocket grips the cool handle of a switchblade knife. If things had gone to plan, there’d be an identical knife in the milkman’s apartment. Evelyn bungled it, but he still wants to use the knife here; a gunshot will give Teddy Stuart too much warning. The cop looks toward him without moving his head. His eyes shift left, that’s all. Lou smiles at him and gives him a small nod. The cop does not return Lou’s smile.

Instead he says, ‘I think you’re on the wrong floor, sir.’

‘No, it’s all right, I’m just going-’

And then Lou’s upon him. He moves quickly, pulling both hands from his pockets simultaneously. With the left he reaches out and grabs an ear and pulls down, bending the cop forward. With the right, before the man can recover, before the hat which has fallen from the cop’s head has even hit the floor, he flicks open the switchblade and plants it in the back of the cop’s neck, slamming it straight down, aiming for the spinal cord. The cop crumples to the ground, unsheathing the blade now dripping with blood, nothing remaining of him but a pile of blue laundry, no sound escaping him but the single grunt he made when Lou grabbed him by the ear.

His blue hat lies on the floor a few feet away.

A strange chuckle escapes Lou’s throat. He’d thought the cop might be trouble but he wasn’t any trouble at all. If the police were going to use such an incompetent to protect Teddy Stuart they should have just left him unattended. It would have saved a life, and while Lou doesn’t get emotional about murder, not at this point, he sees no reason to commit the act unless it’s necessary. It is, after all, a messy and dangerous affair. Especially when the victim’s a cop.

He wipes the blade off on the cop’s uniform and puts it away. Later he’ll throw it into the ocean and have an ice cream at Santa Monica pier. But for now he must get on with business. He reaches into his coat pocket and grabs a pair of leather gloves. He slips his hands into them, removes the milkman’s revolver from his waistband, thumbs back the hammer.

He pulls back with his right foot and kicks. The door-jamb cracks but doesn’t give completely; he kicks again, it splinters, and the door swings open. He grabs the cop by the back of his collar and drags him into the room, which appears to be empty. No sign of Teddy Stuart. He dumps the cop just inside the door. Then he grabs the hat from the hallway floor and throws it on top of the corpse. It flips off the body and onto the carpet, where it lies upside down. He closes the door. It won’t latch, but at least it’ll provide a temporary barrier if Teddy Stuart makes a run.

‘Now,’ he says, taking a step deeper into the room, ‘if I were a rat, where would I hide? Under the bed, maybe.’

He leans down and looks. There’s nothing there but floor.

‘Maybe the armoire,’ he says. ‘Rats like the dark, don’t they?’

1

Seymour watches Leland Jones push in through the fingerprinted glass door. He stands in the doorway and scans the room, squinting and turning his head slowly like a lighthouse lamp. Then catches sight of Seymour and smiles. He holds up a hand like an Indian in a Western picture. Big Mustache say How. Seymour nods a cool greeting without, he’s certain, so much as a hint of smile. There’s no humor in him, nor kindness toward this blackmailing hillbilly peckerwood (as the southern Negroes Seymour’s put in prison would rightly call him). He looks past Leland, expecting Vivian to walk through the door behind him. But he appears to be alone.

He walks to the table and slides into the booth saying, ‘You need to relax, sugar. You look more nervous that a pussycat in a roomful of rockin chairs.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Seymour says. ‘Where’s Vivian?’

‘You miss her purty face, eh?’

‘I just want this finished.’

‘Fair enough. You got the money?’

‘I have it. Where is she?’

‘She’s at home. What’s it to you?’

‘At home?’

‘Yup.’

A hot lead ball drops into Seymour’s gut with a heavy plunk, like a fishing weight, splashing bile up into his throat and the back of his mouth. He tries to swallow but cannot. He removes a white cloth from his coat’s inside pocket. He snaps it to remove any lint and cleans his glasses. He rubs at the sore spots on his nose where his glasses usually rest. He puts his glasses back on. He folds the cloth into quarters and slides it back into his pocket. He swallows. He wonders if Vivian called the police when Barry broke into the place. He wonders if Barry might talk to get himself out of trouble. He wonders what kind of investigation that might lead to.

The precarious nature of his situation makes him feel sick. He hopes none of what he’s feeling is visible on his face, but believes it must be. His face feels numb and for a moment he can’t seem to move it.

‘Well,’ he says once he again has some control of himself, once he thinks he can speak with a voice that isn’t shaking, ‘let’s get this over with, then.’

‘Let’s,’ Leland says.

Seymour puts five twenty-dollar bills on the table.

Leland smiles and scoops the money up and counts it before shoving it into the breast pocket of his pearl-button cowboy shirt.

‘Thanks, sugar,’ he says. ‘Vivian said you might be a problem, but I think you handled the situation real good. You didn’t act scared. Business had to be done and you done it. I appreciate that.’ He slides out of the booth and gets to his feet. ‘Oh. Here’s your pitcher. It really is the last one, you know. I don’t believe in prolongin unpleasant business.’ He reaches into the back pocket of his pants, pulls out a Polaroid, tosses it onto the table top. He touches the brim of his Stetson cowboy hat, makes a clicking noise with the corner of his mouth, the way a man will sometimes do to call a horse, and turns away.

Seymour picks up the photo, gets to his feet, walks across the checkered vinyl floor to a payphone in the corner.

He slips a dime into the coin-slot and dials a phone number.

After three rings a woman picks up. ‘Carlyle residence.’

‘Hello,’ he says, ‘this is Seymour Markley. May I speak with Barry, please?’

‘Barry isn’t in.’

‘He’s not back yet?’

‘No.’

‘Okay,’ Seymour says, ‘thank you.’

‘You’re-’

He drops the phone into its cradle.

1

Eugene steps into the hotel room, feeling a strange vibration within him, a sort of dissonant internal buzz. He can hear it as well as feel it, this discord within, echoing in his skull. He looks to his right. A cop on the floor, dead. He lies on his side, head tilted down, arms limp in front of him, one hand turned up, the other turned down, a pool of black blood beneath him. His uniform shirt is bunched up under his armpits, untucked, revealing a bleached undershirt and beneath that bare white stomach. His eyes are open. They’re blue. The bare stomach is somehow the worst part. You never see a man naked in that way, with his clothes pulled away and rumpled, unless he’s been assaulted, and it’s usually drunk fellows who’ve been rolled by hoodlums. It reveals a vulnerability that, somehow, is both terrifying and embarrassing. You see your own vulnerability in it and must look away.

Two instincts war within him. The first and most basic is the instinct to flee. Blood, death: they make him slightly dizzy. The shock makes him feel as though he’s stuck within a nightmare. His heart is pounding in his chest despite his stillness; it’s telling him to get ready to move, and fast. But something else pulls him further into the room, a deeper survival instinct perhaps, hiding behind simple curiosity. What’s going on here and what does it have to do with him? It must have something to do with him, he was brought here, and if he leaves now he won’t get any answers.

A man can warm himself even beneath the blanket of certain doom.

He walks further into the room, looks to his left, and sees a gun on the carpet. A revolver. Then beyond it, and beyond an open door, another corpse lying on the white-tiled bathroom floor. Blood and brains are splattered on the back wall, running down it, sliding down it, thick and gelatinous as cold chicken fat. More blood running along the grout lines on the floor as if the areas between the tiles were a maze and the blood possessed some sort of primitive intelligence.

No one in the room is living but for Eugene.

Everything about this is wrong. There’s nothing to discover here but death. But running is not the thing to do. He needs to call the police. He needs to call the police and tell them what happened, every last detail, even if it means the district attorney becomes aware of him. This is obviously bigger than anything he can handle on his own.

He turns around, looking for a telephone.

But a piece of paper on the floor catches his eye. A crumpled piece of paper mostly hidden beneath an armoire. He walks to it, not sure what he’s doing, why he’s walking to it — you need to call the police, Eugene; stop fucking around and call them already — and leans down to pick it up. He flattens it out and looks at it, an H.H. White Creamery Company stock-request form. His name is written on it, in his handwriting. He turns back around to look at the gun on the floor, a.38 Smith amp; Wesson revolver with a six-and-a-half-inch barrel. He’s not a gun person, doesn’t give a tin shit about guns, but he recognizes it all the same. Recognizes it because he has one just like it. He set it on his dining table next to his typewriter case early this morning before the sun had even touched the horizon. He set it down and tore open an envelope. Within the envelope was a typed note, the typed note that told him to be here, to be here now. Is it possible Evelyn took it, picked it up from where he left it and stowed it away in her purse? He knows that it is. From the moment he got the note his mind was on only that and what it meant. She could have grabbed a freight dolly and wheeled out his refrigerator without his noticing.

He thinks of meeting Evelyn. He thinks of her evasive responses when he asked why she was in town, what kind of business her father was in.

He doesn’t want to believe what he’s beginning to believe. He likes Evelyn, or once did. Her liked her a lot. He thought they shared something. He knows they shared something. You can’t fake moments like the moments they had, moments where electricity seemed to spark between them. He hopes such moments can’t be faked, anyway, and knows he never experienced anything like that before. Part of him believed such experiences were mythological, simply the stuff of bad poetry. But since he met her his idle fantasies of the future have had her in them. And yet he knows he’s been framed and believes he knows by whom.

He needs to collect the evidence against him and get out of here.

He needs to do it now.

Outside: sirens wail.

He walks to the window and looks out, looks down to the street to see two LAPD radio cars screeching to a stop in front of the hotel, doors swinging open, uniformed officers stepping from their vehicles.

He shoves the paper into his pocket. Then grabs the gun and stuffs it down the front of his pants, untucking his shirt to hide it, hoping no one notices the shape of the gun under its fabric. If he stays calm, calm and collected, he might be able to walk out of here. Walk out of here and get rid of this evidence. Then he can find out why this was done to him. He knows Evelyn was part of it, he’s sure of it, and the more he thinks about it the more certain he becomes, but he’s also sure she didn’t do this on her own. There were others involved. He needs to find out who, who and why, and he needs to find out how to fix it.

But now isn’t the time to be thinking about such things.

Now is the time to be getting the fuck out of here.

He steps into the corridor, his foot sinking into the bloody puddle. He looks left. The cops will be coming up in the elevator. He needs to find the stairs. He turns right and walks, hoping he isn’t actively working to pin himself in. He feels sweaty and nervous and though he’s innocent he’s certain guilt is written across his face.

Innocent or not, he feels guilty.

At the end of the corridor he finds a white door. He thumbs a paddle and pulls, revealing a stairwell. He steps into it and starts down, gravity making it easy. And the worry pressing upon him.

The stairwell has a damp, dusty smell to it, like the smell of impending rain.

He trudges down, wondering what he’s going to find when he reaches the bottom and pushes through the last door, but he doesn’t have to wonder long, because soon enough he’s pushing through it.

He’s at the end of a corridor very much like the one on the sixth floor. At the other end, the hotel lobby. It looks calm. The uniformed police are probably upstairs now, about to discover the bodies he just left behind. He might be able to get out of here with no trouble, get out of here and get to his milk truck and drive away. He can worry about what happens after that once he gets there, because if he doesn’t get there, there won’t be any after that to worry about.

He walks down the corridor, hoping there are no cops at the front.

Nervousness and fear begin to take him over. He was not made for this sort of thing. There are born soldiers, and their home is the battlefield. There are born spies, and their home is Moscow. He’s a born dreamer, and his home is nowhere in this world. He doesn’t know how to tolerate this sort of stress, and though he tries very hard to maintain a placid expression he can feel small muscle twitches on his face and throughout his body. He imagines he must look like a man being electrocuted while simultaneously trying to walk.

He steps into the lobby, barely maintaining control, and looks left to the front door. He can see sunshine. A bellhop standing just inside the door, hand on a rolling cart. A doorman outside. But no cops.

He heads toward sunlight telling himself to just act normal despite the fact he feels jerky and stupid and unnatural. Just stay calm and wear a blank expression. Blank faces are forgettable as unmarked paper.

He’s halfway there. Then he cuts the distance in half again.

He thinks of something he heard once, about a philosopher who supposedly proved it was actually impossible to reach a destination because to do so you must cut the distance there in half, and in half again, and in half again, infinitely, and since there’s no limit to how small the distances can be cut, you arrive nowhere. You end up forever cutting distances in half. He’s always before thought it a bit of ridiculousness, but now he wonders if there isn’t some truth to it. He certainly feels now that he will never reach the door. He must have been walking for several minutes now, for hours, days. It must have been days. The sun must have set and risen again many times by now. His mouth is incredibly dry. How long has it been since he’s had a glass of water? It was only fifty feet from the start, how is he not out yet? How is he not escaped?

How is the door still ten feet away?

Now it’s five.

He’s nearly upon it when the doorman opens the door and a man in a gray suit and a fedora walks in. He’s in his fifties and sweaty but walks with purpose, his glassy eyes on something in the distance, the elevator perhaps. He bumps Eugene’s shoulder, sending Eugene spinning around.

The man stops and catches Eugene by the arm. The gun falls from Eugene’s waistband. He watches it flip end over end on its way down and swipes for it with a sweaty hand but misses.

The man says, ‘Sorry about that, buddy, I-’

The gun hits the floor with a thud and a rattle.

Eugene looks down at it, can’t I catch a single fucking break, and then looks up at the face of the man in the fedora.

His grip tightens on Eugene’s arm.

‘What’s with the weapon, son?’

Eugene pulls away from the man in the fedora, pulls hard, gets his arm out of the grip, though it feels bruised and sore, and rushes the front door. He bangs through it, tripping over the doorman. He falls forward, peeling skin off the palms of his hands as he catches himself on asphalt. Doesn’t even feel it. Doesn’t feel anything. Simply struggles to his feet, glancing over his shoulder to see the man in the fedora pull a revolver of his own from a holster. Sees a police badge clipped to the man’s belt. Then he’s looking forward again, stumbling along, looking for escape, a way to get away.

That’s all he wants in this moment: away.

1

Seymour Markley sits at his desk in his home office, the door shut and locked. He doesn’t want Margaret to walk in on him, as she sometimes does, offering a snack or something to drink. He doesn’t want her to see what he’s looking at, dozens of potential blackmail photographs. He’s amazed by how many there are. But it makes sense. None of the men in these pictures would dare speak up about being blackmailed. If they did they’d have to reveal why they were blackmailed, and if they were willing to do that they couldn’t have been blackmailed in the first place. The numbers added up because no one would reveal himself as a whoremonger.

Seymour faces the same shameful problem. He’d like to use these pictures to some political advantage, but doesn’t want anyone to know he too was photographed.

Of course that evidence is bubbled black film in a trash bin now, and while some of these men might suspect something, he learned many years ago that suspicion isn’t evidence. It isn’t even close.

So how does he best use these pictures to his advantage? He doesn’t want to blackmail anyone. He wants these men on his side. He wants these men in his corner come a political fight.

Perhaps the best move is to simply hand the pictures over to their subjects and suggest they remember the favor. But some of them might not even know the pictures exist. In fact, it’s certain. The pictures Vivian and her cuckold husband had of him were from over a year ago. They held onto them until they were useful. They were patient. Some of these men with whom he has old rivalries might even assume he hired someone to get the pictures himself, and that would only serve to make them mistrust him further. It could convince them that he should be buried, and there are those among them who could bury him.

So he’ll be careful. He’ll only give the pictures to those already on his side. He’ll put them in envelopes and hand them over and say, thought you might want these back. If the fellow responsible for them has been bothering you, that’s finished now. If not, I saved you some serious trouble. The rest of the pictures, he’ll hold on to.

In most cases he’ll ask for nothing in return, not until he needs help.

But there are a few people he needs favors from immediately. He believes he’ll start with Woodrow Selby at Monocle Pictures. He’ll hand the photographs to Selby and mention that he’s seen this background actor Leland Jones in several of his Western pictures. He’ll say he doesn’t like to recognize background actors, it pulls him right out of the action. He’ll ask Selby if he doesn’t find it distracting as well.

The telephone on his desk rings. He jumps, feeling guilty, grabs a handful of photographs and throws them into the box, then realizes how absurd that is and lets the others remain where they lie, spread out across his desk.

He picks up the telephone.

‘Hello.’

‘Seymour. It’s Bill.’

There are only a few reasons Bill Parker would be calling Seymour on a Saturday evening, none of them good. He and the chief of police have a fine professional relationship, but that’s the only relationship they have. They’ve not spoken a dozen words to one another outside the context of work.

Seymour clears his throat. ‘I’m almost afraid to ask.’

‘It’s your witness.’

‘Theodore Stuart?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s dead.’

Seymour finds it difficult at first to process the sentence, a mere two words though it is. He remains silent for a long time. He stares down at the photographs on his desk. He blinks.

Finally he says, ‘I thought he was under police protection.’

‘His police protection is dead too.’

‘James Manning?’

‘Too early to say. We have homicide detectives on the scene and boys from the crime lab are on their way. We’ll see what we get.’

‘I want to talk with the detectives on the case.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

1

Next morning, the thirteenth of April, Carl finds himself in a chair in the corner of his room at the boarding house in nothing but tattered gray underpants. His soft white belly bulges out over the elastic waistband as he slouches before a small table on which rest the accouterments of what is quickly becoming the point around which his life orbits: a glass of water, a small paper bindle, a shining spoon he took from the kitchen downstairs, a syringe, a pocket knife, cigarettes, a lighter. His forehead is covered in sweat, his legs are cramping. His stomach and liver hurt. His eyes itch.

He stares at the syringe. He told himself he’d never do this. He told himself he’d never shoot up. But he can no longer afford not to. Smoking wastes too much. It burns away, unused and useless.

Candice said her husband’s funeral was yesterday. She told him on Friday, tomorrow’s the funeral, and it occurs to him now that her saying that might have been her shy way of asking him to attend, might have been her way of asking him to sit beside her during a difficult moment. He should call her and see if she’s okay.

She needs a friend.

But his legs are cramping badly. He won’t be able to focus on the conversation if he calls her now. He’ll do this, then call her. That’s the correct order of things.

He picks up the syringe and brings it to the glass of water and pulls back the plunger, drawing in a few cubic centimeters of liquid. He sets it on the table. He knifes powder from the bindle into the spoon, then carefully squirts the water from the syringe onto it. His stomach is cramped, a painful knot. He’s sick. He picks up his lighter and makes a flame. His hand shakes involuntarily. He moves the flame back and forth beneath the convex surface of the spoon’s underside until the brown powder has dissolved. The flame blackens the spoon. He sets down the lighter. With the tip of the syringe he mixes the liquid, then draws it into the glass tube by pulling back the plunger. He sets it down on the table.

He reaches down to his pants to remove his belt, but finds he has no belt, because he’s not wearing pants. The pants he last wore lie in a pile on the floor and within the belt loops is a narrow strip of leather. He needs that strip of leather. He gets to his feet, grabs the belt, walks back to the chair. He puts the belt around his arm, pulling it taut, grips it in his aching teeth. He wonders if his gums are bleeding. He makes a fist and picks up the syringe.

He told himself he’d never do this, told himself he’d only smoke it, like they do in China. He wasn’t going to use the needle, had seen too many burned-out hipsters and jazz musicians to fall into that trap, and had been told that if he smoked it like opium he wouldn’t develop a dependency.

He believes he was lied to.

He shakes his head. He isn’t addicted. He isn’t. He’s just being smart. It’s wasteful to smoke it. This means nothing. It doesn’t mean nothing, it means he’s smart. It means he doesn’t want to waste the stuff. It isn’t free, you know.

He brings the needle to his arm, holds it mere centimeters above the flesh. A few drops splash onto the pale skin on the inside of his elbow. He pierces the skin, feels a sting of pain. He finds a vein on the first attempt. He believes so, anyway. He draws back the plunger, bringing blood into the needle, watching a cloud of it dissipate into the heroin. He thumbs down the plunger, opens his hand, lets go the belt from his teeth.

An indescribable feeling swims through his entire body, liquid emotion washing over him like a great wave, and his head drops down — just for a moment, or five minutes, or an hour; it doesn’t matter — and the world goes gray.

Then he’s back, back but better, back but perfect.

He looks down at the syringe hanging from his arm, stares at it for a long time. Finally, after some indeterminate period, he pulls it away, sets it on the table.

Blood leaks from the hole in his arm. It’s very red; it’s beautiful. No one ever thinks about what a beautiful color blood is.

He should call Candice. He will. Of course he will. But first he’s just going to sit here. It’s nice to just sit somewhere. It feels good to just sit somewhere.

So that’s what he’s going to do.

1

Eugene steps out the front door of his motel room and into the wet, gray morning. The rain that was threatening to come down all day yesterday is finally splashing against the asphalt and concrete which line the floor of the city. Something about the smell of rain always makes him feel nostalgic for an earlier, more innocent time in his life. Never more so than now, with everything broken. Even the small life he’s been living for the last three years — small, yes, but pleasant enough — even that is gone, vanished like something draped beneath a magician’s cape.

Goodbye, white rabbit.

Last night after checking into this crummy motel he lay in bed, stared at the ceiling, wondered if his life might be recovered. When he finally fell asleep he dreamed again that he was high up in an office building. He dreamed that he was stuck in that building alone. He called out but no one answered. He tried to find an elevator but there was no elevator. Where it should have been was only an empty shaft. When he looked down into it, vertigo sweeping over him, he could not see the bottom. It went down and down into darkness. He took the stairs. He walked for a very long time but never reached the bottom. In the dream he walked for months, for years, but it was never over. He just went down forever. Until he woke up, anyway.

He should have brought his typewriter. He’s owned it since he moved to New York eighteen years ago. Every story he published he banged out on that machine, and now it’s gone. Somehow, even with everything that’s happened in the last few days, it feels like a great loss. Some big part of him sunk to the bottom of a murky sea.

He flips up his collar. He lights a cigarette. He walks along the sidewalk, down Whitley Avenue to Hollywood Boulevard, looking for a newsstand. Two blocks on, the rain-soaked paper holding his cigarette together breaks apart. He spits it into the gutter and it’s immediately swept away on a filthy river.

He finds a newsstand on Cahuenga, red bricks resting on top of the stacks of newspapers to keep the wind from carrying the profits away, an awning overhead doing a reasonable job of protecting them from the rain. He grabs a local paper, pays, heads back to the motel with the news tucked under his arm. He’s almost afraid to look at it. He is afraid to look at it. Afraid he’ll see his picture on the front page. Wanted on suspicion of murder. That might make it difficult for him to get around the city without being recognized, and he thinks he’s going to have to get around the city if-

First just read the goddamn paper and see how bad it is, Eugene.

He walks to his motel room, number 13, marked by a stone by the door with the number painted on it. He keys his way into the place and steps into a pile of squalor he immediately wants to scrape from the bottom of his shoe. A sagging bed in the middle of the room with a small night table on either side of it. In the corner, an easy chair with torn upholstery. A card table with gashes cut across its gray surface. Two wooden chairs on either side of the table, and a lamp with a torn paper shade sitting on top of it. Everything seems old and dirty and used, even the lamp’s dim light.

He walks to the bed and sits down. He arms water from his face, wipes it from his eyes with the heels of his hands. He unfolds the paper and looks at the front page:

1

Sandy sits at the desk in his room. He looks out at the rain. There are great puddles in the recreation yard, reflecting clouds and looking like small pools of sky, though the rain continually breaks apart the images, and the storm is slanting down diagonally, and the light seems somehow ill.

He doesn’t like it here.

The other boys with whom he shares this room are playing a card game, he can hear them behind him talking and laughing, but he wasn’t invited to participate. He’s still not made any friends. He thought he might make friends with his roommates at first, they talked to him and tried to include him in things, but within the first couple days they decided they didn’t like him. They flicked his ears. They wiped boogers on his shirt just to see how he’d react. Now he avoids them. There’s something about the way he speaks, or his posture, or something, that people simply don’t want to be around. During recess, which they call recreation period here, he plays alone. If there’s a free basketball court he shoots baskets, despite the fact that he’s not very good. If there isn’t a free court, and usually there isn’t, he bounces the ball against a brick wall and catches it, until someone takes it away from him, as someone inevitably does. He doesn’t know why people pick on him. He hasn’t done anything to anybody. He wouldn’t care that they don’t like him if they would just leave him alone. If everybody would leave him alone he’d be fine.

So far it hasn’t been that bad, but even so he feels something vicious inside him, something he’s afraid of, some terrible black liquid filling him up again. He poured some of that violence out when he shot his stepfather but a week later he’s once more near to overflowing.

He gets to his feet and walks to the door and steps through it. He looks to his right. The hall monitor sits in his chair. He seems bored.

‘Permission to use the bathroom.’

‘Go ahead.’

He turns left and walks to the end of the hallway.

Once in the bathroom he stands in front of a urinal and unbuttons his fly and pulls out his penis. He’s glad no one else is here. When other boys are in here they make fun of the way he stands. Why you stand with your legs apart? You squirting from a little pussy and don’t want it to dribble down your leg? Why don’t you sit down to pee like all the other girls? Have you started your period yet?

He has to wait a long time. He didn’t really have to go. He just wanted to leave his room. He was tired of sitting at the desk, tired of staring out the window, tired of listening to his roommates play behind him. He wanted to be alone, even if only for a couple minutes. Finally he begins to urinate. It’s just a trickle.

He stares down at his penis and wonders if it will always be so small. He’s seen some of the other boys in the shower. It makes him embarrassed. He hates to be naked in front of them. Some of them are beginning to look like men, but his body looks the same as it did last year, and the year before that.

Skinny and hairless and pale.

Behind him, out in the hallway, the sound of a door creaking open and swinging shut. Two voices: request, response. Footsteps echo in the hallway, growing louder.

He finishes with a final spurt, shivers, shakes off, tucks his penis away. He should have gone into a toilet stall. He could have been alone for a little while. Now someone else is coming and will see him and he’ll have to leave. He can’t just stand around doing nothing while someone else is in here peeing. That would be weird. People already don’t like him, already think he’s strange.

He doesn’t want anyone to think he’s a pansy.

He walks to the sink and turns on the water. He washes his hands. In the mirror he sees another boy walk into the bathroom, and recognizes him. A couple days ago he came up to Sandy and took the basketball he was playing with and threw it across the recreation yard. Sandy wanted to punch him in his stupid face, but the boy’s much bigger than he is, and already has a mustache.

His name is Raymond.

They make eye contact in the mirror.

‘What are you looking at, germ?’

Sandy drops his gaze to his hands, rinsing the soap away. ‘Nothing.’

He turns off the water. He grabs a few paper towels and dries his hands and throws the towels into the bin. He turns around.

Raymond stands inside the bathroom door, leaning against the tile wall, arms crossed. He stares at Sandy.

Sandy tries not to look back, tries to pretend he doesn’t notice him at all, and walks toward the bathroom door. I don’t see you, please don’t see me, please don’t see me, please don’t see me.

Raymond puts out his arm, blocking Sandy’s path.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘What?’

‘You retarded or something? You a retard?’

Sandy blinks, feeling something terrible inside. ‘No.’

‘I think you are.’

‘Just leave me alone.’

‘Just leave me alone.’

‘Please.’

‘Please.’

Sandy tries to push past Raymond’s arm, to get out of the bathroom, but Raymond pushes back hard. He sends Sandy backwards. His legs can’t keep up with the force of the shove, and after a couple scrambling steps he loses his footing and falls onto the tile floor. He bites his tongue as his backside hits, bites the left side of his tongue between molars, and tastes blood.

Tears of pain sting his eyes.

‘Such a retard you can’t even walk.’

‘I didn’t do anything to you.’

‘I didn’t do anything to you. Drop dead, germ.’

He kicks Sandy in the thigh, sending an immense pain through his leg. Sandy rolls onto his side and clutches himself. From the corner of his eye he sees Raymond pulling back to kick again. He scrambles out of the way quickly. Raymond’s leg continues past the spot he expected Sandy to be, and Sandy, with tears still stinging his eyes and with fury in his heart, moves in and takes the other leg out from under him, rushing forward and knocking it away. Raymond falls sideways, tries to catch himself on the wall, and instead hits his head on it before continuing to the floor.

Sandy leans over him and punches him in the nose. It sends a sharp pain up his arm from his hand, from the backs of his fingers. It hurts terribly, but the pain feels good too. He punches again. Raymond holds out his hands to block the blows, but Sandy shoves them aside with the swipe of an arm and swings again. He can see blood on Raymond’s face now, and he’s glad of it. He doesn’t feel guilt or remorse or anything like empathy. He feels mad glee. His fist is simply screaming with pain, and he’s glad of that too. The pain in his hands is pain inflicted as well.

‘I told you to leave me alone,’ he says, and swings again, and again, and again, until the hall monitor comes rushing in and pulls him off the other boy, and even then he continues swinging at the empty air in front of him.

1

Carl drives through the rain while his windshield wipers cut water off the glass, squeaking with each swipe of their thin rubber blades, clearing his view of the empty street before him. He thinks about Eugene Dahl, the milkman, and the evidence against him. He was at the scene with the murder weapon in his possession. They searched his apartment and found bloody shoes that matched shoeprints tracked all over the room in which Stuart and that cop were killed. They also found a box of bullets and a blackmail note. Cases don’t get much tighter than that.

During their brief encounter he didn’t strike Carl as the kind of man who’d be able to cold-bloodedly sever a man’s spinal cord with a knife, but in this situation that’s less important than where the evidence points. People, everyday people, can be surprising in their brutality.

Carl would like it better if they knew who tipped off the police, and he’d like to get his hands on the typewriter used to bang out the blackmail note, but those are insignificant pieces in this otherwise finished puzzle, corner pieces that won’t change the overall image even if he finds them. Maybe the milkman told someone his plans while drunk and that someone called the police before the murders even happened. Maybe the accountant had an accomplice who typed up the blackmail note and delivered it. Those things don’t matter. There’s simply no way the milkman didn’t do the murders. Not a chance. The pieces fit together too well for them to go any other way.

He parks the car in front of Friedman’s house and gives the horn two quick taps. He lights a cigarette and takes a deep drag. He rubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands. They’re dry and they sting.

Friedman steps into the car and slams the door closed behind him.

‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

Carl puts the car into gear.

1

Evelyn, wearing only her silk nightgown and a cotton robe, her hair mussed, her eyes red from lack of sleep, knocks on the door in front of her. After what feels like a long time Lou pulls it open from the inside. He wears black slacks and an undershirt, his pale feet bare, and small for a man of his height. Greasy strands of pomaded hair hang over his Neanderthal brow.

‘Have you seen this?’

She thrusts today’s paper forward, holding it out for him to examine.

‘I’ve seen lots like it.’

‘They didn’t catch him.’

‘What?’

‘Eugene. The police didn’t arrest him.’

Lou takes the paper from her and silently reads the news story. When he’s done reading it, he hands the paper back to her and shrugs.

‘So what? They know who he is and they have evidence against him. That’s all that matters.’

‘What do you mean, that’s all that matters? He’s still out in the city and knows he’s been framed for murder.’

‘They’ll catch him today or tomorrow. He’s a goddamn milkman, Evelyn, in way over his head. It don’t matter if he knows he’s been framed, he’s been framed. The evidence points to him and he ran, as a guilty person would. When they catch him he can say whatever he wants. Denial won’t mean nothin.’

‘And if they don’t bring him in in the next day or two?’

Lou shrugs again. ‘I don’t care. I got nothing against the guy. Point was to make it look like he was responsible for Teddy Stuart’s murder. That’s been done. What happens to him now, whether the police catch him or he gets away, that’s got nothing to do with me, and it’s got nothing to do with you.’

‘He knows I framed him.’

‘He knows he was framed. He might not know you’re behind it. But say he does, you really think he’ll come after you?’

‘I think he might.’

‘He’s wanted for murder. He’s on the run. He’s not coming after anybody.’

‘What if he does?’

‘What if he. . I don’t know, Evelyn. What do you want to do?’

‘Get a room in a different hotel.’

‘If everything goes well we’ll be out of here day after tomorrow anyway.’

‘You’re not the one at risk here.’

‘You’re not either, and if I thought you were you’d know it, because if you’re at risk, I’m at risk. Your dad would kill me dead if I let anything happen to you.’

Evelyn is silent. What Lou says has the ring of truth to it.

And yet part of her also knows that Lou wouldn’t mind at all if she took two to the back of the head. Until she started working in the business it looked like Lou might take over once Daddy retired. Now it looks like Lou will be working for her, and a man like Lou doesn’t want to take orders from a woman. She doubts Lou would want to take orders from anybody. He planned on inheriting the business. He spent years working for Daddy, getting close to him, becoming his most trusted friend, and in she wanders, all of twenty-one, and puts everything he’s worked for into question. Evelyn thinks he’d be just fine if her blood went still. He might look sad at the funeral, hug Daddy and tell him it’s a great loss for everyone, but in the privacy of his home he’d celebrate her death with a shot of something strong and a thank you, Jesus.

She’s sure of it.

And yet: what he says has the ring of truth to it.

If he let anything happen to her Daddy would kill him.

And he’s probably right. Her initial fear at hearing Eugene avoided apprehension was the fear of a woman used to dealing with criminals. He isn’t thinking about her, he’s thinking about how to avoid arrest. Hell, he’s probably at the border by now, about to cross into Tijuana. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it? She felt crummy about what she had to do to him, about helping to frame him. He deserves to get away.

‘You’re right,’ she says.

‘The police probably have him in custody already.’

‘Maybe.’

But she hopes not. She likes the idea of him living in Mexico, wearing colorful tropical shirts and white canvas shoes, drinking beer by the ocean.

‘Are we done? I have to talk to someone about a job.’

‘Okay,’ Evelyn says.

‘Okay.’ Lou closes the door.

She turns toward her room, and blinks at what she sees.

Eugene stands in the corridor, soaking wet, his hair hanging down around his face in clumps. In his right hand he holds a Baby Browning, a lady’s gun, but lady’s gun or not it shoots bullets, not flower petals, and it’s aimed at her face.

‘Evelyn.’

‘Eugene.’

‘We need to talk.’

1

Carl stands in the rain. He looks at the door in front of him and waits for the slow bastard on the other side to pull the thing open so he can put a roof between himself and the pissing gray clouds overhead. Friedman stands beside him. Neither man says a word. After a while Carl raises his hand and knocks again. The crease at the top of his fedora catches rain while he stands and waits. The water pools there till the crease can no longer hold it, then it pours down the front of his head in a stream, splashing on the brim of his fedora and down to his scuffed shoes.

Finally someone pulls open the door. That someone is Darryl Castor, known to most people as Fingers. His eyes are red and he looks tired. He blinks to clear his vision and glances from their faces to their badges and back again.

‘Detectives.’

‘Mind if we come in?’

He steps aside.

Carl enters the small first-floor apartment. Friedman follows.

The curtains are drawn, giving the place a claustrophobic feel, making it seem smaller even than it is, darkness crowding the corners.

Darryl Castor scratches his head and sniffles. ‘Excuse the place. I work nights and I was trying to catch a little shut-eye.’

‘We’ll just be a minute,’ Carl says. ‘We’re here about Eugene Dahl.’

‘Thought you might be.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘He hasn’t come into work last couple days, boss said the police called and asked after him, and next thing I know two detectives are banging on my door. I ain’t a genius, but I can do a little arithmetic.’

‘That’s all?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Has he been in touch with you?’

‘Why would he be in touch with me?’

‘You’re friends,’ Carl says.

‘We work together.’

‘You never associate except on the job?’ Friedman says.

‘We might.’

‘You either do or you don’t.’

‘Then I guess we don’t.’

‘I hear different,’ Carl says.

‘What did you hear?’

‘I hear you’re a horn player.’

‘Trumpet.’

‘And I hear you play bebop music in a Negro bar.’

‘Okay.’

‘And I hear Eugene Dahl’s gone down to see you play. Rumor has it he even took a dolly once or twice.’

‘So what?’

‘So that makes him your friend,’ Friedman says.

‘Lots of people come to see me play.’

‘Lots of white people?’

‘I don’t see how that has anything to do with anything, man.’

‘Fellow drives down to 57th Street to see me blow my horn in a Negro bar, I’d call him a friend.’

‘Fine, he’s my friend. So what?’

‘So you admit to lying?’

‘About what?’

‘You said you didn’t see him outside of work.’

‘I don’t see him outside of work. Every once in a while.’

‘Was one of those times in the last two days?’

A slight pause, then: ‘No.’

‘I think you’re lying,’ Carl says.

‘I think you’re ugly.’

An open hand whips out and slaps his mouth.

‘Enough bullshit,’ Friedman says.

Darryl Castor touches the corner of his mouth, fingertips coming away red. He absently rubs the blood between his fingers.

‘Look,’ he says finally, ‘I can’t help you.’

‘We know your reputation. Even if you don’t have anything to tell us now, you know people. You can get information.’

‘I got no reason to stick my neck out for a couple cops never did nothin for me. Especially not to help you get to Eugene.’

‘He’s a murderer.’

‘Murderer. Man sends back steak if it’s bloody. He’s a good guy, but square all the way down.’

‘People are surprising.’

‘Not in my experience. And like I said, I’m not in a position to help you.’

Carl scratches his cheek, thinking. He didn’t want to have to do what he’s about to do, but it looks like the only way to get the information they need.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘I’ve heard your name more than once in the last couple years. You’re smart enough not get mixed up in murder, so I never paid much attention, but when I heard it again today I called a friend of mine in the hop squad. He’s been watching you, even dug into your history some.’

‘I’ve never been arrested for anything, man.’

‘Not your arrest record I was interested in.’

‘Then what?’

‘Your mother.’

‘What?’

Carl pulls a notepad from his inside pocket, ignoring the syringe tucked in beside it, and flips past several pages of unrelated case notes. Finally he reaches the correct page and scans his own handwriting, telling himself to only think about what’s happening right now in this dimly lit room.

‘Darryl Castor,’ he says, ‘born Darryl Jefferson in Metairie, Louisiana, fourty-two years ago to a widowed Negro cook named Loretta Jefferson, and sent to an out-of-state boarding school by Herman Castor, the Louisiana businessman your mother worked for. You attended boarding school until you were sixteen, at which point you ran away, disappearing for several years before turning up in California, where you began passing as white. Does your boss know you’re really an eight ball? What about the people you work as an intermediary for? They have a lot of colored folks in their organizations? When I talk with them all I hear is nigger this and spade that, so I have my doubts. And what about the people at the Negro club where you blow your horn? You think they’d look kindly on a man who denies what he is so he can enjoy the benefits of society they’re not entitled to, meanwhile slumming with them when the urge strikes? Seems to me you could find yourself in some seriously ugly situations if it got out that you’ve been lying about what you are for the last twenty years.’

Darryl Castor stands silent for a long time, expressionless. Then, after the silence has stretched to nearly a minute, he speaks. ‘Herman Castor raped my mother and faced no consequences for it. Some folks who knew about it even blamed her. She tempted him, right? She must’ve. But I remember when I was six or seven this colored boy whistled at a white lady in town, and two days later he was found strung up in a tree, beetles feeding on his corpse. Just a boy, thirteen years old. Maybe she smiled at him, or swayed her hips in that way ladies sometimes do when they know they’re being admired. Don’t matter, though, because it’s always the nigger’s fault. They just can’t control their animal urges, right? A white man rapes my mother, it’s her fault. A Negro boy whistles at a white lady, gets lynched for it. That’s the way of the world we live in. I’m not ashamed of what I am. I never lied to nobody. I just let people think what they want to think. I might as well benefit from what my mother had to endure. And I guess I’m as much that man’s son as I am my mother’s. I only look like this because of it.’

Carl closes his eyes, opens them.

‘That’s a tragic story,’ he says, ‘but it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happening right now. You have a decision to make. You can continue to be stubborn, in which case we start fucking with your life, letting people know you’ve been passing, and what happens as a result of that happens. Or you can be sure of things and help us get to Eugene Dahl, a murderer despite what you may believe, in which case nobody finds out anything. I’m a Johnson myself, a live-and-let-live type guy, and I’d rather not have to meddle in your business. But like I say, the choice is yours.’

Darryl Castor looks down at the floor for a long time. Finally he says, ‘I’m gonna pour myself a drink. You guys want anything?’

Carl shakes his head and taps a Chesterfield from his packet.

Friedman simply says no.

‘Okay.’

Darryl Castor turns and walks into the kitchen, and when he emerges once more a few minutes later, it’s with a glass of something strong on ice. He walks past them and sits on the couch. He stares off at nothing. He takes a swallow from his glass.

‘What’s it gonna be?’

1

Eugene watches Evelyn walk to her hotel room and key open the door, following closely as she slips through so that she can’t shut the door in his face. Once they’re both in her room, he slides the deadbolt into place.

‘Sit down.’

She sits on the bed. He looks at her and she looks back. He hates to admit it, but seeing her again, even after what she did, stirs something within him. They’ve spent only hours together, but those hours were somehow both comfortable and exciting, and the way she’s looking at him, not with fear but with sadness, makes him believe that despite what she did afterward, she felt the same as he did.

But that’s over now. That’s a faucet he needs to shut off.

‘I’m sorry for what I did.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Just the same, I’m sorry.’

‘I thought. . I thought we had-’

‘We did. We do.’

‘You framed me for murder.’

‘It was my job.’

‘I know.’

‘That doesn’t mean I don’t care for you, Gene.’

‘Shut your fucking mouth, I’m not here to work this out with you. You can go to hell, and the sooner the better. I’m here to find out how to clear my name. I‘m here to find out how to get out of this mess you got me into.’

‘You can’t. It’s too late for that.’

‘I’m innocent.’

‘You’re wanted for murder. I can’t make that go away. I’m sorry for my part in it, but it’s done. The best I can do is help you get to Mexico, and get you some money, enough to live on for a long time down there.’

‘I don’t want your money. I want my fucking life back.’

‘But can’t you see that that’s over?’

‘Don’t you try to tell me what’s over. You don’t get to make that decision. You don’t get to make any-’

A knock at the door, three quick taps. Eugene’s first thought is that he was too loud, that the man in the next room heard him in here, heard him and is now just outside the door, waiting to make sure everything is okay.

Then he speaks: ‘I’m stepping out. You might want to make sure your door is chained. Don’t want the milkman to get you.’

Then silence stretches out for a full minute.

‘Don’t move,’ Eugene says.

Keeping an eye on Evelyn he walks to the door and unlatches the deadbolt. He pulls open the door. He glances left, then right. The corridor is empty. He closes the door and locks it once more, the deadbolt clacking into place.

He turns his attention back to Evelyn.

‘Where were we?’

1

Eugene wakes in darkness. He wakes from a dream. In the dream he was trapped in an office building, a skyscraper. Because the elevator was broken, he walked down the stairwell, trying the reach the bottom. He walked for days and days but the stairs never ended. There was nothing to eat. He lost weight. At first he believed he was alone, believed the building was empty but for him. But soon enough he began to hear voices. They were distant, always a floor below. Sometimes there was laughter, and the laughter wasn’t the laughter of the sane. He checked the corridors, the offices, but they were always empty. So he’d continue down the stairs. Then one time an office wasn’t empty. He walked into the room and found four men in tattered clothes, covered in filth and blood, with long beards and long hair, sitting in a semi-circle. In the middle of the semi-circle was another person, a young boy. He was lying on his back. He was dead. His eyes were open. They had a white film over them, like the eyes of a rotten fish. The mouth was open, swollen tongue protruding. Eugene felt like he should recognize the boy, and in some shadowed corner of his mind he did, but his conscious mind couldn’t pull it from the darkness. Some mental barrier prevented it. One of the four men reached out with a knife and cut a piece of meat from the boy’s arm. He put it into his mouth and chewed. Then grinned at Eugene through filthy teeth. He cut off another piece. He held it out to Eugene. Blood dripped from the meat, ran down the man’s grimy hand.

‘No,’ Eugene said, ‘thank you.’

‘You might as well. It’ll spoil soon, anyway.’ Then the man laughed the mad laughter Eugene had heard so many times before. Spittle flew from his mouth, clung to his tangled beard.

Eugene turned and ran, ran down the corridor to the stairwell, pulled open the door, stepped through, and the door slammed shut behind him.

When the door slammed he woke.

And now he lies here in bed, staring at the ceiling, his heart thudding wildly in his chest. He wonders what time it is. He feels lost. He feels like he felt the first time he slept away from home as a child — a week at his grandfather’s — and woke up in unfamiliar surroundings, recognizing nothing.

He reaches to the night table and grabs his watch. He blinks at it in the darkness, holding it close to his face, as he isn’t wearing his glasses. His hope is that it’s nearly four o’clock. He knows it won’t be later, he’s up by four every morning, but he hopes four o’clock is near. After a few moments his eyes adjust and he can see the time. It’s just past midnight, two minutes past, and he knows his sleep is over despite the fact he tossed and turned till at least eleven.

After he talked with Evelyn yesterday there was nothing for him to do. He was filled with adrenalin from the confrontation, but there’d been nothing in it to expend the energy. They had a conversation, came to a tenuous agreement, and he left. He came back here. He listened to the radio. He listened to the radio and he thought. He thought about Evelyn’s plan. It was simplicity itself. It was a hammer. Frame for murder the man who committed the murder. It shouldn’t be difficult.

But they need to get into his room and find out what evidence is still in his possession, perhaps plant further evidence, and that means getting a key. Evelyn has promised to do so. He’ll call her hotel room at eight to see if she got it, but eight is almost eight hours away, and already he feels as though he’s waited too long. He remembers thinking recently that he didn’t understand boredom. He still isn’t sure he does, people who get bored must think themselves very poor company, but he understands something that lives right next door to it. The emptiness of waiting for something to happen. The nagging at the back of the mind from which nothing can distract you. Could be something as simple as a letter in the mailbox or as catastrophic as the bomb, the point is the wait. The empty hours in which distraction is an impossibility. The time between each tick of the clock carries in its short span an entire day — a day filled with the sound of the sea, like your ear to a shell — and nothing in it but nothing.

He looks at his watch again. It’s still two minutes past twelve. He throws the watch across the room. It hits the wall and falls to the floor. He will lie here and go back to sleep and he will not think of the time. He won’t think of time at all. He won’t get up and find the watch. He won’t obsessively check it. He’ll lie here and close his eyes, like this, darkness on top of darkness, the cover of eyelids over the cover of night, and he’ll picture sheep jumping over a brick wall, a red brick wall, two feet high — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. . twelve-oh-two. Maybe it’s twelve-oh-three by now. It almost has to be. He should find out.

He gets to his feet and walks through the darkness to the place he heard the watch land. He sits on his haunches and feels for it blind, his fingertips moving across the coarse surface of the carpet, occasionally brushing over a strange and suspect crumb. Eventually he finds it. He gets to his feet. He looks at the watch.

Twelve-oh-two.

It doesn’t seem possible. A single fucking minute hasn’t passed? He’s almost able to convince himself it’s broken, but the second hand is moving, tick, tick, tick, around the face of the watch.

He stares at it. And stares at it.

Twelve. . oh. . three.

1

Sandy watches the deputy at the counter scrawl his signature across a form in order to take custody of him. Then the two of them, he and the deputy, walk side by side down a white corridor, through a metal door, and into the crisp morning air. Though the rain has stopped, it stopped last night while Sandy slept, small pools of glistening water still dot the ground, marking its low points, leveling the earth. The puddles reflect blue sky and wispy white clouds and bursts of glistening sunlight like jewels.

The deputy, who will be driving him to his meeting with the district attorney, has a reddish-blond mustache, graying sideburns, and light-blue smiling eyes. He folds a stick of Wrigley’s chewing gum onto his tongue.

‘Trying to quit smoking. Wife hates the smell. Car’s over there.’

He nods toward the vehicle. It’s splattered with mud, which is drying in the morning light, forming a dull crust on the fenders.

Sandy and the deputy walk toward the car.

Today is the day he finds out just what lies he’s to tell when he testifies before the grand jury. He doesn’t even know what a grand jury is. Probably something like a grandmother: a jury of really old people. Maybe they’re wiser than a normal jury. It doesn’t matter; he doesn’t want to do it. Just thinking about talking in front of a group of adults makes his stomach ache. He isn’t sure he can lie the way he’s supposed to lie. In the past when he’s lied it was to get out of immediate trouble. It was thoughtless lying. Like a tapped knee kicking out, a reflex lie shot out of his mouth before he could think to be honest. This will be a story given to him by someone else, a story he’s supposed to speak as if it were truth remembered. He’s afraid he’ll forget what he’s supposed to say, or say it wrong.

He can’t do that. This is a lie to get him out of trouble too, more trouble than he’s ever been in before, and he doesn’t even have to concoct a story, only remember one. He can do that. He’ll be nervous and sick to his stomach the whole time, but he can do it. They probably won’t even think there’s anything strange about him being nervous. Anybody would be. Even someone telling the truth.

He can do it. He can do it because he has to.

He reaches for the back-door handle.

‘You can sit in front with me if you want.’

‘Okay.’

He slides into the front passenger’s seat and pulls the door closed behind him.

The deputy slips in behind the wheel, his weight rocking the car.

‘I got a boy about your age,’ he says. ‘Good kid. Great shortstop. You any good at baseball?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Bet you would be with a little practice.’

Sandy doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says nothing. He simply looks at the deputy for a moment, wondering what it might have been like to have a father like him, a father with smiling eyes and easy conversation, then, realizing he’s been staring too long, he looks away embarrassed. He looks out through the water-spotted windshield to the dirt driveway curving out to the street. He’s glad to be leaving this place. He knows it’s only temporary, but he’s glad all the same.

The deputy starts the car. The engine rumbles to life. The deputy puts the car into gear, and they roll down the driveway.

Sandy looks back over his shoulder and watches the buildings shrink. He wishes they would get so small they’d disappear.

Then he wouldn’t have to come back.

1

Carl stands naked over the bed for a moment and looks down at the sleeping woman who lies upon it. She’s on her side, one of her arms tucked beneath her pillow, the other stretched across the bed as if feeling for the man who should be lying there. Her blonde hair is splayed across her pillow. Her eyes are closed, her lips slightly parted. The blankets were kicked to the foot of the bed during the night, but she’s covered in a thin sheet to the waist. Her upper half is bare. Her small breasts hang slightly, the left resting in her armpit, the right hanging toward the middle of her chest, which is marked by a small patch of freckles. Only hours ago his mouth was on those breasts, on that stomach, buried in the woman’s sex now hidden beneath that sheet. It’s difficult to understand how it happened. But it did, and part of him is glad it did. Maybe most of him is glad. It felt strange and wonderful to be close to a woman again. Several times while they made love he thought of his dead wife, and in the end he wasn’t able to orgasm, but that didn’t seem to be the point, neither for him nor for her. Being close to another human being was the point. He slept the night through lying beside her. He slept with his back to her and she had her arms wrapped around him and he could feel her breasts pressed against his back and her heart beating there as well like a small bird fluttering.

It made him feel, for a time, almost human.

But now he feels as though it was a betrayal. His wife is dead, but her spirit still occupies their house, and he has yet to face it. He has yet to say goodbye.

But it was the cramps and the sweating which pulled him from her bed, and the urge like a rash in his mind needing salve.

He picks up his pants from the floor and steps into them without bothering to fasten the button. He grabs his coat from a chair in the corner and walks out of the bedroom, down the hallway. He looks out to the living room where Candice’s new couch sits, a blue couch with red stripes. He walks to the bathroom and closes the door.

He doesn’t want to do this here. He wants to be normal. He wants to cook eggs and bacon and sit across the table from Candice while they eat breakfast and talk about nothing, flipping through the paper, chuckling about something amusing in one of the comics. But what he wants doesn’t matter. His legs are cramped. He’s covered in sweat. He feels sick to his stomach.

He drops his pants and sits on the toilet. His guts come rushing out. He either can’t force out anything or else he has diarrhea, there’s no in-between. And there’s that itch at the back of his brain. That itch that demands attention. That itch that will not allow him to focus on anything else until it’s scratched.

Goddamn it, he misses his wife.

Goddamn it, he wishes he could have a relationship with someone new without fucking it up and without it feeling like betrayal.

Maybe someday. He hopes so. But not today.

He wipes, checks for blood, flushes, and sits back down. He grabs the syringe box from the inside pocket of his coat. He looks at the inside of his arm, at the puncture wounds dotting it. He’s glad it was dark last night when he and Candice undressed one another. He’ll have to put on a shirt before she wakes up.

He opens the syringe box.

1

Leland Jones stands in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. He wears no shirt, only a pair of dark pants. He isn’t muscular, but his torso is tree-trunk solid and tanned from mowing the lawn shirtless every Saturday. His hair is wet and finger-combed back. His nose is swollen and purple. His eyes are black.

1

Seymour Markley pulls a white cloth from his pocket, snaps it, and cleans his glasses, wiping the lenses in a circular motion one after the other. Without them, the men sitting across from him are mere flesh-colored smudges without eyes or noses or mouths, like someone smeared out their oil-paint faces with the swipe of a thumb. Once the glasses are clean he puts them back on and blinks at Barry and the man sitting beside him, Peter Burton, the deputy district attorney charged with providing the grand jury with legal advice on this investigation once the indictment is presented. They have once more been made human, features having grown from their faces as he placed the glasses upon his nose. He folds the cloth into quarters and puts it back into his pocket.

He has but one question on his mind. What are they going to do about this investigation now that Theodore Stuart is dead? The police haven’t yet apprehended the man who killed him, despite their confidence two nights ago, so he can’t question him about a possible connection to James Manning, and even if he could it doesn’t look like there is one. And he needs one.

He’d planned on presenting the indictment to the grand jury tomorrow morning, once he’d finished lining everything up. He wanted to hand them most of a case. But just as it was coming together, fate knocked it apart. He’s postponed till Friday. He needs at least fourteen members of the twenty-three member grand jury to return an affirmative vote if they’re going to indict, and this is unprecedented legal ground.

When he had Stuart in custody he was sure he’d get the votes, and with a true bill from the grand jury he wouldn’t be standing alone behind a shaky case. Their vote for indictment would protect him, to some degree, from allegations of recklessness. He’d still have to work hard to convince his supporters in the movie industry that this case wouldn’t end up hurting them — he’s gotten more pushback than he expected there, but then the threat those whores made against him clouded his thinking — but at least he wouldn’t be standing alone. Now he’s not so sure the jury will come back with the votes, and if he doesn’t get the votes, it’s over. And his career is irreparably damaged.

Seymour looks at the two men sitting across from him.

Barry, with his elbows on the arms of his chair and his fingertips pressed together, looks like a man preparing for prayer.

Peter Burton, all nerves, with a head of curly blond hair in need of a trim, sits peeling the paper off a cigarette while bits of tobacco fall into his lap.

‘Okay,’ Seymour says. ‘The way I see it, the investigation must to do three things if there’s to be a case. One, it must result in evidence that James Manning is the money behind E.M. Comics. We had testimony to that effect until Theodore Stuart was killed, now we don’t, but I’m confident we can get there. You can’t run a business without leaving a paper trail somewhere. We just need to uncover it. Two, it will need to result in evidence that Down City compelled the boy to commit a murder he would not otherwise have committed. We’ll have the testimony of the boy himself for that, as well as the testimony of Frederic Wertham, an expert in the field. With the way people feel about comics these days, this is the least of our worries. Mothers are already throwing them into trash bins and church groups are burning them. Half of the grand jury will be convinced before any evidence is presented to them. Three, it must result in evidence that James Manning was criminally negligent in allowing the comic to go to press. We need evidence that he knew of the dangers and let the comic end up on newsstands anyway. That’s the tough part, and that’s what might stall the case before it’s even begun. We’re out on a limb here, and to be perfectly frank, it has me worried. Any thoughts?’

Seymour’s telephone rings.

He looks down at it. It rings a second time. He told his girl not to put any calls through, so why is his telephone ringing? It had better be important. He holds up a finger to the two men sitting across from him, picks up the receiver midway through the third ring.

Sandy hops out the back of a truck, swinging out over the side and dropping to the sidewalk, both feet slapping the ground. He wears a pair of khaki slacks and a T-shirt. The khaki shirt with the detention facility’s initials stenciled onto the back is now lying in a ditch several miles away. The revolver is tucked into his pants, pressed against his stomach. He lifts a hand to the driver and says thanks mister though he doesn’t know if the driver can hear him. The driver lifts a hand in return, then pulls his truck back out onto Olympic Boulevard. Sandy watches it shrink and disappear. Once it’s gone he turns in a slow circle, taking in his surroundings. He’s never felt more alone. The streets have never been wider, nor the sky emptier. He’s back in the city and has no idea what to do. He can’t go home but has nowhere else to be. He feels planted where he stands, rooted, and his brain won’t help him, frozen in indecision. His stomach growls. He’s hungry and should get something to eat. He likes that idea. It gives him a way to move forward. He begins walking. At first he drags his feet, but he doesn’t like the sound of that or the feel, so he begins taking big steps instead, begins stomping. That’s better. His feet like hammers falling. Cars roll by to his left. He wishes he had a cigarette. He would feel like a man if he had a cigarette. He’s smoked a couple before, on the back of Bunker Hill, sitting on a truck tire that had been tossed there, and it made him feel sick, but it also make him feel ten feet tall. He should feel like a man right now, not lonely or scared. He never has to go to school again. He never has to say yes sir or no sir or please. He never has to tell other people’s lies.

Not if he doesn’t want to.

He has a gun tucked into his pants. That means he can do whatever he wants. It doesn’t matter that he’s thirteen years old. It doesn’t matter that he’s small. Being meaner than everybody else makes you bigger than you really are, and having a gun makes you bigger still. He only wishes he’d learned that lesson sooner. He spent so much time being scared. Even now he feels afraid and hates it. He wishes he could banish the feeling from his heart. That’s why he killed his stepfather. Because he didn’t want to be afraid anymore, didn’t want to feel sick to his stomach every time he walked through his own front door. He tells himself there’s no place for fear. He’s not a lightning rod and he’s not a cup. He’s a vicious dog. He’s a wild horse. He’s anything he wants to be.

Up ahead on the right he sees a small shop. He decides he’s going to get his lunch there. He’s hungry and he’s going to get lunch and it doesn’t matter that he has no money. He doesn’t need money. He’ll take what he wants. That’s what men do. They take what they want and they don’t say please.

He steps into the store and walks up and down the aisles looking at the loaded shelves, at the jars of pickles and mayonnaise, at the tubes of toothpaste. He stops in front of the canned meats. Rows of corned-beef hash, Spam, tinned herring snacks in sour cream, oysters, sardines. He glances toward the man behind the counter. He’s looking directly at Sandy, watching him. When they make eye contact he nods. Sandy quickly turns back to the canned meats. He shouldn’t have looked. He doesn’t know why he did. Now the man behind the counter will know he’s up to something. But he has no choice. He’s very hungry.

He picks up a tin of sardines, reads the label as if considering the purchase. Boneless, skinless sardines in cottonseed oil. Lightly smoked. He nods to himself and steps away from the canned meats. Continues down the aisle toward the back of the store. He wants to find a place where the man behind the counter can’t see him. Then maybe he’ll be able to slip the sardines into his pocket. Then maybe he’ll-

‘I know what you’re up to.’

He turns around and looks at the man behind the counter. His face feels suddenly hot. The skin tingles. The man looks back, a heavy-set Greek guy with a bushy beard and a sweat-glistening forehead. He stands casually, one hand resting on the counter near a glass ashtray, a brown cigarette between his lips sending up a thin stream of smoke toward the ceiling. He has sleepy eyes. He blinks at Sandy. A small breeze blows in through the glass front door, disturbing the stream of smoke, breaking it apart, and causing a small plastic American flag jutting from a cigarette rack to wave briefly before once more going still.

‘What?’

He takes a drag from his cigarette, taps ash into the tray, blinks again.

‘I know what you’re up to.’ His tone is flat, unconcerned.

‘I’m not.’

‘You got any money? You gonna pay for those sardines?’

Sandy has a decision to make. After a moment’s thought he nods and walks toward the counter. He licks his lips.

Then grabs a packet of cigarettes from the rack on the counter, knocking the rack over in the process, cigarettes spilling across the counter and falling to the floor, and runs for the exit. The man behind the counter yells after him, get back here you little shit, but he doesn’t stop and he doesn’t look over his shoulder. He runs through the door, out into daylight. He runs down the sidewalk. His feet pound against the pavement. Thud, thud, thud like falling hammers.

Once he reaches the corner he stops running. He looks back. The man stands in the shop’s doorway, looking in his direction, but he doesn’t give chase. Sandy turns away and turns the corner, heading up a small street, looking for a place to eat his lunch.

He should’ve pulled out his gun. He should have waved it around. That would have let that fat Greek bastard know he meant business. Then he could have taken his time, took as many cans of sardines as he wanted and as many packets of cigarettes too. He could have emptied the register and had a nice lunch at a restaurant, like it was Easter or something. That’s what he should have done, but he didn’t think to. Still thinking like a little boy, he only wanted to get away. He needs to stop that, needs to stop thinking scared. Next time he goes into a store it’s with his gun drawn.

He’s a vicious dog. He’s a wild horse. He’s anything he wants to be.

As he continues north apartment buildings give way to houses with neat square lawns. Eventually he arrives at one with a

1

Eugene leans hard into a turn, swinging onto Sunset Boulevard, and speeds his way west toward Schwab’s Pharmacy. He squints ahead at the palm trees lining either side of the street, narrow trunks bending into the air topped with sagging fronds both brown and green. Behind them, a sky the color of faded denim in which a few wispy clouds blow past slow as they disintegrate.

He still doesn’t know what to do. He only knows what not to. He simply can’t go along with Evelyn’s plan. He’d never walk away alive. The police need someone to pin those murders on and he is that someone. He can blather all he wants and they’ll simply think he’s trying to talk his way out of the rap. It’s what a guilty man would do. But if he manages to pin the murder on Louis Lynch, he’s no longer of use to James Manning. Instead he’s a threat, he knows too much, and there’s only one way to ensure that guys who know too much don’t say too much: fill their mouths with dirt.

If he knew he could trust Evelyn he would tell her his concerns. Maybe together they’d be able to work something out. But he doesn’t know he can trust her. Just the opposite. He’s almost certain he can’t. He wants to, his heart wants him to, but hearts are stupid. And love is a liar.

For now he must keep his thoughts to himself. He must start planning what he’s going to do. In the back of his mind, in the darkness beyond the light of conscious thought, just beyond the edge at which that lamp’s glow fades, something is pulling itself from the mud, an idea, but he doesn’t yet know what it looks like. He can merely sense that it’s there, picking itself up, taking shape.

He pulls to a stop at the curb behind the Schwab’s delivery motorcycle. He steps off the bike, toes down the kickstand, and walks across the wide sidewalk to the front door. He pushes through.

Just inside the doorway he lights a cigarette, picks a bit of tobacco from the end of his tongue, and scans the anonymous faces lining the counter. He and Evelyn see one another at the same moment. She raises her hand in a wave, a touch of a smile on her gash-red lips. He nods, takes a drag from his cigarette, and makes his way toward her, reminding himself that she betrayed him, that she can’t be trusted, that she’s a serpent and has proven it by striking once already. But as he approaches her his palms begin to sweat. His mouth goes dry.

1

Carl walks through the hallway. He looks down at his scuffed black shoes as they kick one in front of the other. His feet are beginning to hurt as the drug wears off, but at least he managed to stop the bleeding. He wishes he felt better. The junk doesn’t do for him what it used to do. It used to make him feel blissful nothingness. Now it simply takes away the sickness, and that horrible itch at the back of his brain. That’s something, of course. But he can’t bring back that bliss, that feeling that he’s a silent echo bouncing against the emptiness of the universe, bouncing out further and further into nothing, free of trouble and thought and doubt and worry.

He needs to make Candice understand that he’s not addicted. If he can do that maybe he won’t feel sad anymore.

The trick is to feel nothing. To keep your soul winter-numb.

He pushes his way through a door labeled

HOMICIDE DIVISION

and into the squad room. He starts toward his desk, but only manages three or four steps before he sees Friedman get to his feet and start toward him. He’s about to say good morning, how you doing, but doesn’t get the first word out before Friedman grabs him by the arm and starts pulling on him. He says what are you doing, have you lost your goddamn mind, but Friedman doesn’t answer, only pulls him into the bathroom.

‘Do you think you’re fooling anyone?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘How long have you been using?’

‘What? I don’t-’

‘You think people don’t talk? You want to know what most secrets are? They’re things everybody knows but whispers about in hushed tones. If more than one person has a piece of information, it’s not a secret anymore. How long have you been using?’

Carl says nothing. He stares at his partner and wonders about his future. Will he be suspended? Lose his job? Go to jail? He doesn’t even know if he wants answers to those questions. He supposes he doesn’t. He supposes he’d like to echo against the emptiness and pretend none of this is happening. He doesn’t want answers, but his mind forms the questions anyway.

‘I was hoping you’d pull yourself out of this, but all I can see is you sinking deeper into it. You’re not far from drowning in it.’

‘I’m fine, Zach. It’s fine.’

‘You’re not fine. You’re not even close.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Because you’re my friend and I can’t watch you kill yourself when-’ He looks away, blinks several times, looks back. ‘Because you’re my friend.’

‘Fine, then. We’re no longer friends. Go fuck yourself.’

‘Carl.’

‘No, if you’re doing this because I’m your friend, then I won’t be your friend. We’ll be enemies instead. Come on.’

Carl puts his fists up in front of his face, swaying slightly, glaring at Friedman. He wants Friedman to hit him. He doesn’t know why, but he does.

‘Come on.’

‘I’m not gonna fight you.’

‘Then I’ll fight you.’

He throws a punch, fist swinging only through air as Friedman pulls back, and next thing he knows he’s lying on his back looking up at Friedman and past him to the glowing lights in the ceiling. They’re very bright.

Friedman holds a hand out, offering to help him up. Carl slaps it away.

‘Fuck you.’

Friedman nods.

‘Okay. But you need to pull yourself together. I know things have been rough for you since Naomi died, I know you’re having a hard time, and I understand it. I’d fall apart if I lost Deborah. But you’re killing yourself. You’re killing yourself, and I refuse to stand by and watch it happen. Think about that.’

Friedman pushes out of the bathroom, leaving him alone on the cold tile floor.

He doesn’t move for a long time. Then after a while he does. He pushes himself up to a sitting position, finds a packet of cigarettes in his pocket, lights one. He reaches to the counter and pulls himself up.

He pushes out of the bathroom, then out of the building.

He’s going to lose his job anyway, and maybe he should. He doesn’t care one way or the other. Why should he? It’s pointless work. Everybody dies. Take all the murderers off the streets and the very next day someone will die choking on a cold roast-beef sandwich. You can’t arrest a heart attack and you can’t arrest cancer.

You can’t prevent death. You just pretend you can so the living can remain oblivious to it right up until a pain shoots through their left arm or they find the tumor.

The dead, meanwhile, don’t care; it’s a one-way door they’ve gone through.

He walks to his car and gets inside. He starts the engine, puts it into gear.

He doesn’t know where he’s going. Somewhere.

1

Leland Jones stumbles from the bar, the evening air cool and crisp. He was in darkness, inhaling stale air for hours, so stepping outside feels a bit like stepping from a dream with the dream still clinging to him. As a boy he felt this way when he left a movie theater following a double feature. He’d been so caught up in the film experience that it still seemed more real than reality, even as he walked through reality. The films were more vibrant and alive than the small Texas town he lived in.

But now he’s caught in a different kind of dream.

When he first arrived at the bar he simply sat hunched over his beer, drinking slowly, thinking the situation through and wondering what he might do about it. But the more he drank the angrier he got. He began telling the bar-keep what was on his mind.

The district attorney is a miserable son of a bitch, ruined my life. Thinks he can just kick me like a bad dog and he won’t get bit. He’s got a surprise coming. Leland Jones has teeth. I’m gonna make that no-good son of a bitch pay for what he done to me. He ruined my life and I’m gonna make him pay for it. You see if I don’t.

He feels disoriented and unsteady. And he feels angry.

He squints at the darkening sky. Night is coming. The moon visible as well as the egg-yolk sun, which is spilling across the horizon. Thin haloed clouds scud by overhead. The brighter stars have begun revealing themselves, making the sky look like a nonsensical connect-the-dots picture.

That cocksucker.

He walks to his truck and slides in behind the wheel. He starts the engine. It rumbles to life.

He’s gonna make that son of a bitch pay, and unlike this morning, ain’t nothin gonna stop him. He won’t be able to live with himself if he lets the district attorney get away with what he’s done. He won’t feel like a man.

He puts the truck into gear and pulls out into the street.

1

Candice reaches into her dress and lifts her breasts, pushing them together to create more cleavage. They’re sticky with sweat and feel heavy in her hands. She leans forward slightly and looks at herself in the mirror, tries to smile but can’t make it look real, can’t bring light into her eyes. She hopes the makeup can at least hide their puffy redness, the fact that she’s been crying.

She’ll do the best she can tonight.

Maybe once the evening begins in earnest she’ll forget about her real life. Maybe the music, flirtation, dancing, and drinks, watered-down though they are, will help her briefly forget everything. She doesn’t think so, doesn’t think anything could make her forget that her husband is dead, doesn’t think anything could make her forget that her thirteen-year-old son is a murderer, or that he’s missing, doesn’t think even the junk Carl shoots into his veins could make her forget those things, but maybe she’s wrong. Maybe there will be a moment, just one, in which she’s able to feel like herself again. Maybe something will make her laugh. Or distract her enough that, for a time, she’s completely free of thought and worry.

She picks up a compact and clicks it open, loads the applicator with powder, and is bringing it toward her face when a knock at the front door stops her. She sets the compact back down on the counter.

She hopes she doesn’t find Carl on the other side. It’d be one thing if she didn’t care for him. She could slam the door in his face and that would be that. That’s the way it should be. But it was difficult to shut him out the way she did. It was difficult, and she doesn’t know if she has the strength to do it again. A big part of her wants him around to lean on. But she knows, too, that he isn’t really present most of the time. He’s only a husk, and there’s no point leaning on a husk. There’s nothing solid within to support you. It could blow away in the wind. Certainly it would crumble beneath your weight. You might as well try leaning on a column of smoke.

Anyway, she hopes it isn’t Carl.

She walks to the front door and looks through the peephole but sees no one and nothing but empty space. After a moment’s hesitation she pulls open the door. The welcome mat is empty but for a small bundle of white flowers. Several of them still have brown clods of dirt hanging from them, held in place by thin roots.

She leans down and picks them up and smells them, earthy and pleasant with a slight pollen sharpness. It reminds her of being a teenager. When she was fifteen she was courted by an eighteen-year-old Mexican boy named Albert. He gave her flowers like this and they went for walks. Once they did more than walk. She lay back and let him take her virginity. It was sweet and awkward and brief. She wonders what happened to him, but supposes she’ll never know.

She smells the flowers again. She wants to bring them into the house and put them in water, but something tells her she shouldn’t. They’re sure to be from Carl, she can think of no one else who’d leave flowers for her, and she doesn’t want to be reminded of him every time she looks at them over the course of the next week.

He was a mistake and she doesn’t want to think about it.

She tosses them aside, into the dirt to the left of the porch, looks toward them briefly with some regret, and closes the door.

Then she heads back to the bathroom. She has to finish getting ready for work.

Eugene twists the key, listens to the thwack of the deadbolt as it retracts, and pushes open the door. He knows the room’s supposed to be empty, but his mouth is dry and his heart beats erratically in his chest. Last time he did something like this he ended up stumbling upon a couple corpses, and is still wanted by the police because of it.

He steps inside and closes the door behind him. No one else is here.

A bed fills the room, nightstands resting against the wall to its left and right. A Gold Medal paperback, something called The Brass Cupcake by John D. MacDonald, sits open on one of the nightstands, its narrow spine broken. A chair sits in the far right corner with a pinstriped suit coat draped over its arm. A desk and a lamp. An oak dresser with two suitcases resting on top of it, laundry piled high on the floor beside it.

A lived-in hotel room.

He pulls the switchblade knife from his pocket and walks to the nearest nightstand. He opens the drawer. But for a Gideon bible the drawer is empty. He sets the switchblade knife in the drawer beside the bible and pushes it closed. He walks to the dresser. A large leather suitcase sits on top of it beside a small square leatherette case. He begins with the large suitcase, unlatching it and looking through the contents. He finds socks, underpants, some T-shirts, half a bottle of whiskey, and a dress shirt. The dress shirt’s presence in the suitcase is strange. It’s the only piece of clothing which should be on a hanger. It’s the only piece of clothing that looks to have been worn. He picks it up. A bit of color catches his eye, blood on the left cuff. A few drops like an ellipsis. But enough for the police to find if they search the room thoroughly.

Evelyn might be right. They might simply be able to pin those murders on Louis Lynch. They belong to him, anyway. Come here, sweetie, let Momma stick this note to your shirt so you don’t lose it on the way to school.

But Eugene doesn’t think a switchblade knife and a shirt with blood on it will be enough to do the job. That police detective, Bachman, saw him at the murder scene, saw him drop one of the murder weapons. A knife and a few splashes of blood won’t convince him that someone else did the murders. Without a story to make them mean something, a knife and a shirt are just random items. Even if the police searched this room and found them, Eugene would remain the most likely suspect. The police have a story for him. They have motive, and they have him at the scene. They search this room, what do they have? A switchblade knife like a million other switchblade knives and a few drops of blood that could be the result of careless shaving.

He closes the suitcase. He needs more.

He looks to the small leatherette case. He unlatches it and pulls open the top, revealing a black Royal typewriter. He looks down at its QWERTY grin.

What were you expecting, the queen of England?

For some time he merely stands there unthinking. Then turns in a circle, looking around the room, not quite sure what he’s looking for. Then once more looking at the typewriter it comes to him. He needs a piece of paper. He walks to the desk and finds a few sheets of hotel stationery there. He peels off the top sheet and rolls it into the typewriter. He stares down at the keys for a long time, puts his fingers against them. The gloves provide a distance he doesn’t like. It makes him feel disconnected from what he’s doing. He misses the feel of cool plastic against the pads of his fingers. He begins typing, simply banging out the first words that come to mind:

1

In the dream, they finally catch up with him. He isn’t sure how. He’s been walking down and down constantly for months — years, decades — and no one went past him, but one of the cannibals managed to get below him anyway, managed to get in front of him and block his downward journey. This lone cannibal now stands in rags before Eugene, slump-shouldered but full of vitality and madness. His skin jaundiced, the color of a fading bruise. His eyes bloodshot, the eyelids red-rimmed and raw. His hands are black. His beard thick with filth and glistening with oily moisture around the mouth. He grins, revealing yellow teeth from which the white gums are receding bloody and swollen. He reaches into a leather satchel and removes a human heart. It throbs in his hand. He holds it out to Eugene. Thick strands of blood run off it, dripping from ragged meat-hoses, splashing to the concrete floor.

‘It’s the boy’s,’ the cannibal says. ‘We saved it for you.’

‘No,’ Eugene says, shaking his head. ‘Thank you, but. . but no. . no.’

He turns around, heading back up the stairs. He doesn’t know where he’ll go. He simply knows he must get away. The cannibal doesn’t follow him, but as he reaches the next landing he hears the others only a floor above, and they’re heading down.

They’ve pinned him in. Somehow they managed to pin him in. He looks to his right and sees a door. He can’t go up and he can’t go down, but he can go through the door. He pushes into a corridor, the door slamming shut behind him. He walks down the corridor despite the fact he knows there’s nowhere to go.

The overhead lights flicker.

The door behind him opens and closes, followed by the shuffling of feet.

He looks over his shoulder.

The cannibals walk slowly after him, the one with the heart in his hand leading the way.

He looks forward once more and continues his retreat. He walks to the end of the corridor and steps into the last door on the left, the only place to go. It’s an office like all the other offices. There’s a desk against the wall with a typewriter and a telephone on it. A chair pushed up to the desk. A sheet of blank paper rolled into the typewriter.

He walks to the window and looks out.

The sky is gray. Lightning flashes in the distance. Sheets of clouds block his view of the ground below. He still has no idea how close he is to the bottom, no idea what floor he might be on. He wonders if he’s any nearer escape than when he began. He supposes he must be. The ground is down there somewhere and he’s been steadily heading toward it.

A voice behind him: ‘There’s only one way out.’

He turns around.

The cannibals stand in the doorway.

The one with the heart in his hand holds it out toward him. Behind the beating heart he grins with yellow teeth.

‘You must be hungry.’

‘No,’ Eugene says, backing away. ‘No.’

But then he’s against the wall and can back away no further.

‘You haven’t eaten for months,’ the cannibal says, pushing the beating heart toward his face.

It smells of iron; it smells of blood.

He turns his head away.

‘It’s the only way out,’ the cannibal says. ‘You’ll see. Eat.’

Then: a strange knocking sound from within the walls. The floor drops out from under him and he’s swept into a brief blackness before sitting up in bed.

Someone is knocking on the hotel-room door. It must be Evelyn.

What time is it? He picks up his glasses and puts them on. He looks at his watch to see it’s just past midnight.

He hadn’t planned on falling asleep. He was only going to lie down a moment, exhale some of this tension he feels. But he did fall asleep, and he’s now disoriented. He feels lost, detached from everything that’s happening. He isn’t ready for this. He isn’t at all ready for this.

Doesn’t matter what he’s ready for. Evelyn is here. It’s time.

He inhales, exhales.

It’s time.

He gets to his feet, turns on the lamp. As well as the rest of the room it illuminates a roll of duct tape, a pair of leather gloves, and his Baby Browning. They sit beside one another on the room’s rickety dining table.

How’s he going to do this?

He doesn’t want to hurt Evelyn but needs her immobile, and the only way he can think to get her that way is with a fight. She won’t simply sit still while he tapes her up, and he can’t hold a gun on her to force her to, because if he’s close enough to tape her up he’s close enough for her to take the gun away and turn it around on him, and she would. This is the business she’s in. He’s a mere tourist.

She knocks again and says his name.

‘I’ll be right there.’

He picks up the pistol and tucks it into his pants.

He walks to the door, pulls it open.

Evelyn stands on the other side, the black night behind her. Her red hair frames her pale, slender, reptilian face. Her blue eyes are large and glossy with alcohol. Her red lips are moist. She smiles when she sees him.

‘How’d it go?’

‘Why don’t you come on in?’

‘You’re starting to trust me.’

She steps into the room and walks to the bed and sits down. She kicks off her heels and rubs her feet against one another and splays her toes as much as her pantyhose will allow. He closes the door and puts his back to it. He stands looking at her and she looks back smiling her beautiful-ugly smile.

She pats the bed beside her with a slender-fingered hand.

‘Let’s talk,’ she says.

He thinks of the pistol tucked into his pants.

Pull it out, Eugene, use it to smash her nose to smithereens. Tape her up while she’s incapacitated. It’s going to get ugly eventually, you might as well start it ugly. Do it now before she suspects anything. This is your best chance and you know it.

He walks to the bed and sits down.

She puts a hand on his thigh, rubs the flat of her palm against his leg. Even through the thick fabric of his pants her touch brings goosebumps out on his flesh.

‘How’d it go?’

‘He has a shirt with blood on it in his suitcase. He also still has the typewriter he typed the blackmail note on. Typewriters have distinctive prints, same as people. And the police must’ve picked up the note from my table when they searched my apartment, so they’re sure to put them together. And I put the knife in a drawer.’

‘You wore gloves?’

Eugene nods.

‘Good. Then it’s all set up.’

‘It is.’

‘We can call the police tomorrow and end it.’

Just do it, Eugene. If you don’t want to hurt her face, take the gun out and hit her in the back of the head. Hit the soft spot at the back of her skull and knock her out. Do it and get it over with. There’s no sense in prolonging any of this.

He nods. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Then tonight is ours,’ she says. She rubs her hand up the inside of his thigh to his groin. He pulls away.

‘You’re drunk.’

‘I want to feel close to you, Gene. We’re almost on the other side of this and I want to feel close to you.’

She leans in, puts her mouth against his mouth. He can taste the whiskey she’s been drinking, both sharp and earthy. At first he doesn’t respond to her kiss, tells himself this can’t happen, but it does happen, and he finds himself pushing his mouth against hers, biting her lip. He loves her taste and her scent. She smells of that flowery perfume of hers and beneath that sweat and salt and sex. He reaches to her neck and strokes her smooth skin. Then moves his hand down her chest, across her breasts, feeling them through the fine thin fabric of her clothes.

You’re being stupid, Eugene. You need to get on with this. You let her seduce you you’ll fall in love with her all over again and won’t be able to follow through with it. Then where will you be? Prison, that’s where. Or dead.

She reaches her hand into his pants and stops, pulls back from the kiss blinking at him in surprise. She removes her hand from his pants. In it, his pistol. She looks down at it for a time with an unreadable expression on her face, then smiles.

‘You won’t be needing this anymore.’

She leans over and sets it on the nightstand.

‘Now where were we? Oh, that’s right.’

She pushes Eugene so that he falls back on the bed. He picks up his head as he lies there and looks toward her. She gets to her feet, reaches up under her dress, and pulls down her pantyhose. She almost falls as she pulls them around her left heel and kicks them away while hopping on her right foot, but manages to catch herself on the edge of the bed before going down, and laughs at her own clumsiness. Once she regains her balance she stands and looks at him smiling.

Her eyes full of knowledge she’s ready to impart.

Carl sits up in bed and tries to read a story called ‘I Joined a Gang of Hoods’ in the most recent issue of Stag, but is finding it impossible to concentrate. Instead his mind turns to his last conversation with Friedman. He went to his partner’s house and said we need to talk. He said you’re right, I need to get this under control, but now isn’t the time. We’re wrapping up this case. If I try to quit now I’ll get sick, I’ll be useless. Let me finish this case, bring in the milkman, then I’ll take time off and clean up. I have vacation days coming. I know how you feel about me using, you made that clear, but I need time. Friedman looked at him in silence, then nodded. Keep yourself as clean as possible. Use as little as you need to to keep yourself functioning, but when we wrap up this case you get yourself clean. I mean it. I won’t watch you kill yourself. Okay, Carl said. Okay. And about earlier, when I said we weren’t friends, I didn’t mean it. Friedman nodded, said I know, I’ll see you tomorrow at work, Carl, and went inside.

So he bought himself some time, which is good.

And if he finds another source he might not have to quit. It only got out because he was buying from within the department. That was a mistake. He can find another source. He can wave his badge around some jazz club and confiscate what he wants. He won’t arrest anybody, he’s not that big a hypocrite, just scare them a little and take their junk. Why not? There’s no downside.

Except he really does need to quit. He hates that his life now revolves around using. He hates the control it has over him. He lost Candice to it already, and she was the first glimpse of light he’d seen since Naomi’s death. For months he’s been walking toward a dark horizon and when light finally appears there, a faint white line, he runs in the opposite direction so that he can remain in darkness.

Only a fool would do such a thing.

If he’d known at the beginning this would lead to the needle he’d never have used in the first place. He just wanted a little quiet in his mind. He wanted to get away from himself. And he got what he wanted, didn’t he? For a while he got exactly what he wanted. But things have turned and he knows it, and he knows too he needs to do something about it. He needs to quit.

He’ll maintain until this case is closed, and then he’ll take some time off. He needs to do exactly what he told Friedman he’d do. He needs to regain control of himself and his life. He’s fifty-six years old, not twenty. He shouldn’t be living in some rooming house making mistakes he knows better than to make.

And what’s he going to do about this case?

Neighbors and coworkers have been questioned. Evidence has been catalogued. Reports have been written. The only thing left is to find the guy and arrest him. His picture is out to the uniforms, and his apartment and the bar at which he works are being watched, so it’s now nothing but a waiting game.

Part of him hopes they wait forever. Then he never has to quit. The case can remain open till the sun explodes and its fires envelop the earth. That would be good. He could use junk forever and Friedman wouldn’t be able to call him a liar.

He needs to quit.

They should follow up with Darryl Castor tomorrow, find out if he learned anything about where the milkman might be.

Then something occurs to him, and he sits up in bed unable to believe a connection he’s overlooked until now. They’ve been operating under the assumption that Eugene Dahl was working alone when he killed Theodore Stuart, but Carl now thinks that Darryl Castor might be reason to doubt that. The man is called Fingers because he has them in everything. He knows everybody. Someone has a product they don’t know what to do with, Darryl Castor can find him a buyer. Someone needs something extra delivered with the morning milk, Darryl Castor knows where to get it. There’s a chance he worked for James Manning at some point, peddled goods for him. He could easily be the connection between James Manning and Eugene Dahl.

But if that’s true, if that’s a legitimate piece of the puzzle, it means the picture he’s been putting together is wrong. It means he might have to tear the whole thing apart and start again, start with this piece and work outward.

If his mind was clear he’d have thought of this much sooner. He’d have investigated it sooner. He used to be a good cop. He used to take pride in being a good cop. He can’t believe he let the junk get to him in this way. It’s confused his mind. He’s either on the stuff or sick and in need of it.

This job was the only thing he had left that he gave a damn about after Naomi died, and he’s thrown it away. He let himself stop caring. He told himself it didn’t matter. But he needs to care again, and he should care. Despite what he sometimes tells himself, he knows it matters.

He needs to get some sleep. It’s late and he needs to get some sleep. His eyes sting and he knows his mind isn’t functioning at full capacity. He needs to get some sleep, and tomorrow he needs to start approaching this case like a real cop. He needs to become a real cop again. He needs to start with that new piece of the puzzle and see if he can’t put together a different picture.

But not tonight. His brain is too worked over. He needs rest.

He throws the magazine he’d been reading to the floor, then reaches to the nightstand and clicks off the lamp.

1

Next morning, with sunlight just beginning to seep in through the curtains, Eugene lights a cigarette and watches Evelyn as she stirs in bed, asleep on her stomach, taped up so she can move neither her arms nor her legs. Until this is finished, he’s stuck in a dangerous situation with a dangerous woman. He might still feel love for her, but that’s got nothing to do with anything. If they ever had a chance together, and he doesn’t think they did, that chance is a thing of the past.

You should kill her. You’re going have to do it eventually. You know that, right? If you’re to walk away from this situation she can’t live to walk away from it herself.

He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, lifting his glasses and rubbing the skin where they usually rest.

You don’t know that. I might think of a way for her to live.

God, he’s tired.

No, you have to kill her. You might as well do it now.

But he can’t kill her now. If his plan is going to work she can’t have been dead for days when the police find her. They have ways of determining such things.

I can’t think like that. She doesn’t have to die. I’ll think of a way around it.

It’s been a long night. He hasn’t slept at all.

1

Carl sits in a chair in the corner of the room and stares at the wall, disoriented. He must have nodded off there for a minute. He blinks and looks down at his arm. A bead of blood rests in the crease on the inside of his elbow. He imagines a small green stem growing from it, from some subcutaneous seed, and thorns emerging from the stem, and leaves, and then a red flower, a red rose, and the red rose opening like a fist unclenching. It would be beautiful. He lazily reaches over with an arm that weighs twice what it should and smears the blood away with an index finger. He looks at the red on his fingertip and unthinkingly licks it off.

Okay. Time to get to work.

He pushes himself from the chair. He unrolls his shirtsleeve and buttons his cuff. A dot of blood appears on his shirt. Apparently he didn’t wipe all of it away. It doesn’t matter. No one will see it. He slips into his coat. He picks up his fedora from the bed and sets it upon his shower-wet hair after combing his fingers through it. If his hair’s still wet, thin as it is, he didn’t nod off for too long. That’s good.

And that’s it. That’s what he gets for the daylight hours. He’s using no more till he gets off work. He’s taking nothing with him. He doesn’t want to be tempted. And he will not call his man in the hop squad because his man in the hop squad doesn’t know how to keep his goddamn mouth shut. He’ll be a little shaky toward the end of the day, a little sweaty, but he thinks he can make it. He made a promise.

Just enough to get him through. No more.

He steps out of his room, making sure the door is locked behind him, then walks downstairs and into the cool morning air, which wraps itself around him. He stands still on the front porch and inhales its scent.

If his wife were alive, this moment, even without her in it, would be perfect. The simple knowledge that she was alive would make it perfect.

But she isn’t. And it isn’t.

Still, it’s pretty nice, and he stands there a moment before walking to his car.

1

Fingers steps through his front door and squints at the bright morning. His head throbs with pain. He took some aspirin after he got off the phone with Eugene, but it hasn’t done any good. At least not yet. This is some bad shit he’s got himself stuck in, and he has no idea how to pull himself out of it.

Well, that’s not entirely true. He knows one way, but he doesn’t want to do it. He doesn’t want to push his friend’s head under as he climbs out. He has to give the police something, they made that clear, and while he could give them Eugene, he knows only a coward would do so. The man is his friend, and he’s ashamed of himself already for what he’s done to him, ashamed of the cowardice he’s displayed. He twice betrayed the man. Eugene would never do to a friend what’s been done to him.

And he doesn’t even know the extent of it.

Fingers hoped he wouldn’t hear from Eugene. If he didn’t hear from him he’d have nothing to tell the cops, no decision to make. They might then go about dismantling his life, probably would, cops being cops, but if he really had no information there’d be nothing he could do about it.

He could take some small comfort in that knowledge. It was done to him; he didn’t do it to himself.

But he did hear from Eugene. The man called him and asked for his help. So now he’s got to figure out what he’s going to do. The police will be back asking questions soon, and he has to know how he’ll deal with that. He has to learn as little as possible about what Eugene is up to while still helping him as much as he can. He’d like to know nothing, the less he knows the less the police can get out of him, but he owes Eugene his help. He got his friend into this by talking to Louis Lynch, and he made it worse by talking to the cops. He’ll be damned if he leaves him to dangle.

Then stop thinking about talking to the police at all. What you need to think about is this. Do you have it in you to do what’s right even if it means the cops tear your life apart? If you do, then don’t worry about anything else. Go help your friend and when the cops come back around with question marks on their faces you tell them to go fuck themselves. If that means they destroy your life, so be it. You’ll be a man, and a man can build a new life. You’ve done it before. What the cops want is for you to be their boy. You fetch water for them once, they’ll never stop coming around with their empty pails.

So, again, the question. Do you have it in you to do what’s right even if it means the cops dismantle your life?

After some time he nods to himself.

Yes, I do.

He walks to his car and slips in behind the wheel. He sits there a moment, staring at the dials on his dashboard. He starts the engine. The radio comes on, playing a Cole Porter tune. He turns it up, turns it up loud.

Yes, I do.

He grabs the transmission handle on the right side of the steering column and yanks it down to drive. He pulls his foot off the brake pedal.

1

Carl and Friedman sit parked at the curb in front of a pink stucco apartment building. They watch the building, but nothing happens. Carl wishes he were somewhere else. This sitting and waiting is giving him too much time to think and too little to think about. It means his mind is turning inward again, the last thing he wants or needs.

His arms itch, he’s beginning to feel sweaty, he’s very tired. How long has it been since he’s eaten a proper meal? A couple days at least. How long has it been since he took a shit? That was only yesterday morning, and while there was no blood in his stool, he wishes there had been. That might mean he’d get to see Naomi soon. If he doesn’t have the courage to tell her goodbye he might as well be with her. Living in-between as he has been isn’t living at all.

‘Here he comes.’ Carl looks up the street.

A cream-colored Chevrolet Bel Air rolls toward them. Thank Christ — something outside himself to focus on.

1

Eugene stands in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel with a ringing telephone pressed against his ear. With each ring he dreads the answer more. From now on everything will have to line up or he’s dead. Yet he knows if he does nothing he’s also dead, so he must try. He doesn’t feel up to this. He isn’t the type of person who does what he’ll have to do if he’s to make it out of this alive. He isn’t the type of person who does much. He likes simplicity in his life, calm, which is perhaps the reason he was never in a serious relationship, and the reason he was happy working as a milkman. He had a simple life and a simple job with a simple routine. He liked the job and he liked the routine. And he liked having a dream — a perpetually unrealized dream. But now all that’s gone and he’s being forced to make decisions a man like him was never meant to make.

‘Hello?’

He swallows. This is it.

‘I have Evelyn Manning.’

‘Who is this?’

‘The person who has Evelyn Manning.’

A long pause, then: ‘I don’t believe you.’

Eugene swallows. His mouth is dry.

‘Open your hotel-room door,’ he says. ‘I’ll wait.’

Fingers sits in silence. The uniformed officers stand by the door. He’s tried to speak with them two or three times now, empty chatter to fill the empty minutes, but they responded only with one-word answers to his queries, which filled no time at all. He’s been here at least two hours. Even without a clock or a watch available he knows he’s been here that long, and maybe longer. He briefly wishes he’d remembered to put on his watch when he left the apartment this morning, but supposes the cops probably would have taken it, anyway.

He wonders if Eugene’s still alive. He might already have gotten himself killed. Lou might have already put a bullet into him — or six. He wishes Eugene hadn’t told him what he was attempting. It’s insane, will never work. He’s tempted to tell the police everything, the truth beginning to end, simply to save his friend’s life, but he won’t. He tells himself he won’t. He’ll tell them the story he’s supposed to tell them and no other. That may mean he’s helping to kill Eugene, he’s almost certain that’s exactly what it means, but he’ll not betray his friend’s trust a third time. And maybe Eugene will even pull it off. Maybe he’ll manage it and walk away unscathed.

Don’t kid yourself, man, you know better than that.

He supposes the chances are small.

The chances are nonexistent. Eugene might come across as cool, but he’s square and you know it. He can’t kill nobody. Man gets nervous in the presence of a few reefers. You let your friend surround himself with criminals and cops, you’re letting him kill himself. He don’t have it in him to do what he’s planning to do, and when the time comes, he’ll find he’s nothing but a mouse in a snake pit. They’ll eat him alive and you’ll be the one who let it happen, because you’re the only one in a position to stop it.

So ask yourself this. Is it a betrayal to save your friend’s life?

Three knocks at the door. One of the uniformed cops pulls it open. The older detective steps into the room. His face is beaded with sweat. A uniformed cop pushes the door closed and locks it. The detective carries in his hand a white paper bag. He walks to the table and sets it in front of Fingers. The bottom is translucent with grease.

‘Got you some food. Eat up, then we’ll talk.’

The detective pulls out a chair and sits across from him.

1

Eugene carries Evelyn’s purse to Louis Lynch’s rented car, opens the door with a gloved hand, tosses the purse into the back seat. It falls to the floorboard, where its contents spill out across the carpet.

He slams shut the door.

At nine twenty, with the Lazarus sun drowned once more in the western sea, a heavy-set man in a gray suit with a blue silk tie wrapped around his neck and a matching handkerchief poking from his breast pocket steps from a DC-6, descends a set of rolling steps, and, trailed by three men, makes his way across the tarmac, through Los Angeles Airport, and out the front doors. Crowds, without realizing they’re doing it, part for him as he walks. People simply glance in his direction as he cuts through space with the ease of a sharp knife and step out of his way. They do it as a unit, a group of people suddenly moving as one, like a sheet of paper unfolding.

He carries in his right hand a black leather briefcase.

1

Next morning, the sixteenth of April, the sun breaks past the horizon at five twenty-one. The temperature is fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, though it will increase to sixty-eight before the day is finished. The air is clear enough to see Mount Wilson to the north through the morning haze and to the northwest the Santa Monica Mountains. The wind speed is a little over five miles per hour. The sky is cloudless and when the sun rises fully will be a one-color canvas — solid blue. In other words, it’s a beautiful spring day, last weekend’s rainstorm nothing but a distant memory.

1

Carl steps from the shower and dries off. He puts on slacks, a clean white shirt, and a coat. He combs his hair and looks at himself in the mirror. His cheeks are hollow, and his eyes tired, but he’s healthy and his mind is clear.

He almost never thinks of junk these days, and when he does he finds he can push the thought aside. Sometimes it’s difficult, but he can do it — and every day it’s easier than the last. He relapsed once, four months ago, but it won’t happen again. He won’t let it happen again.

He puts on a hat and steps into the October evening. It’s cool and crisp and wonderful. He inhales its scent and walks to his car. He gets inside and starts the engine. He drives toward Bunker Hill with his window down, the chill autumn air blowing against his face.

He parks in front of a small house where a blonde woman in her thirties lives alone. She’s had husbands, but her first left and her second was murdered. She’s given birth, but her son is missing and has been for months. She still reads the newspaper daily hoping to find him lurking between the lines in stories of burglary, armed robbery, and car theft. Sometimes she thinks she sees evidence that he was there.

On Saturday nights Carl drives to her house, picks her up, and they roll through the streets while she looks for him. Probably she’ll never find him, he’s just one small boy in a city of two million, but there’s a kind of bravery in her refusal to give up despite the odds, and there’s hope.

He’s learned a lot about that from her.

He steps from his car and walks up the path to her front door. He raises his fist, hesitates a moment, and knocks. After a while Candice pulls open the door. She smiles at him. He smiles back, kisses the corner of her mouth.

‘Are you ready?’

She says she is, and steps outside.