13

I drove Anna back to the Villa that night. She was tired and went straight to bed. Diane and I sat in the kitchen and talked. Diane said that the police had come again, but they didn’t indicate that they would be back tomorrow. They seemed to know about Larry’s drug habits. They weren’t in mourning, and an o.d. wasn’t suspicious considering Larry’s history. Kalso, who had called the ambulance, had told them that he had found the body. Anna hadn’t yet entered the picture. But she would. We agreed that the police would want to talk to Anna, since she was living with Larry. If nothing else, they’d want to know where she was that night.

“Do you think she killed him?” Diane asked in a rush.

“Of course not,” I said.

“No,” Diane agreed. “Why does she insist she did?”

That was a trickier question and I sidestepped it entirely. “You know,” I said, “I wouldn’t feel any differently about Anna if she had killed Larry. It would have been self-defense, really.”

“I doubt the police would take that view.”

But we overestimated their interest in a dead drug dealer. For the next couple of weeks, we waited for something to happen. Having a talent for paranoia, I assumed the quiet bid some Hitchcockian maneuvering on the part of formidable sleuths. Slowly, I realized that the cops had been glad to see the last of Larry, were uninterested in the precise nature of his demise, the nuance of circumstance. No one expressed the least interest in Anna’s part in Larry’s death. The coroner’s inquest swiftly settled on accidental death by self-administered overdose.

I moved back into the Villa, back into the old studio room. I would have preferred for Anna to come live with me, but there was no extricating her from the room she had shared with Larry. Indeed, although we were still lovers, she would always leave at some point in the night to return to her own room.

This behavior, which I found exasperating, was a bountiful source of argument.

“I need my privacy,” Anna said.

“I love you,” I said.

Anna folded her arms and glared at me. “That’s cheating,” she said. Which was, of course, true.