5.52 p.m.

In the lobby of my building, I asked Grogue: ‘You still have a key to my office, John?’

‘Always do, doc,’ he said. He surveyed me; he must have noticed the oil-stains on my suit, observed the awkward way I was holding myself. But he said nothing. My ribcage ached as if the bones were held together by wire. I felt like a prehistoric skeleton, reconstructed for a natural history display. I couldn’t get rid of George Rocco’s image. When I closed my eyes, I could still see him. He was dead and it was my fault for asking questions. If I hadn’t spoken to him, he’d still be alive.

If I’d just handed over the goddam envelope from the safe-deposit box. But I hadn’t. And why not? Was it some underlying macho turbine that drove me? Some skewed sense of ethics that lingered still? I remembered the voice on the telephone. You still feel a responsibility towards her. Dare I say a fondness, even? Was that what it came down to finally – that I cared, in my own fashion, in a manner that wasn’t absolutely professional, for Emily Ford?

‘Mind if see it?’ I asked.

‘No problem.’ Grogue unlocked a drawer in his desk with a silver key attached to a chain of keys, and took out a small envelope marked Dr Lomax. The key to my office suite was inside. He showed it to me, a little grudgingly.

‘Have you ever mislaid this key, John?’

Grogue looked at me as if the idea of him losing a key indicated a suspension of natural law. ‘Never.’

‘So there’s no chance somebody could have taken it and made a copy?’

Grogue laughed, a kind of rattling sound, pebbles loose in his throat. ‘They’d need the key to my drawer first. And that never leaves this chain.’ He flashed his chain of keys. I looked at his uniform. Dark blue serge, the Sunset Beach Holdings logo – a gaudy orange half-sun sinking behind a bed of blue – stitched to the breast pocket. Sunset Beach Holdings owned a dozen office complexes in the city.

I leaned over, glanced at Grogue’s drawer. It was filled with keys, paperclips, Bandaids, postage stamps, rubber bands. The lock looked flimsy; anyone with some expertise might open it in twenty seconds with a metal pick.

‘What’s all this about, anyhow?’ Grogue asked.

I came up with an excuse that struck me as feeble. ‘I’m thinking of raising the insurance on my office and its contents, John. You know how it goes. The insurance company will send a guy out to check the existing security. I was curious, that’s all.’

Grogue looked halfway convinced. ‘No Tom, Dick or Harry comes here and walks straight past my desk to the elevators without stating his express purpose to me. That’s what I call security, doc.’

I told him he was doing a good job and thanked him. I heard him slam his desk drawer shut as I walked to the elevator. I stepped inside the car and rode up to the seventh floor. Jane was at her desk when I entered my suite. She looked at me in a grave way. She was too polite to ask, but I could hear her questions, anyway: What’s going on, Jerry? Why do you look like something the dog dragged in?

I asked if there had been any messages. Harry Pushkas had called a couple of times.

‘Where do you keep your office key, Jane?’

‘It’s in my purse,’ she said.

‘And it’s never out of sight?’

‘Most women don’t stray very far from their purses, Jerry. You should know that. It’s a security thing.’

‘When you go home at night, the key stays in the purse?’ I was sinking into a morass of keys and possible duplicates and locks.

‘Correct,’ Jane said. ‘And the purse sits on the bedside table.’

‘Has anybody ever broken into your home?’

‘No,’ she said, and she looked at me. ‘Jerry, what’s going on here?’

I wasn’t sure how much to tell her. I skipped over her question and asked one of my own. ‘Has anybody ever threatened you in any way?’

‘Threatened me? I’m not sure I follow.’

‘Has anyone ever said they’d hurt you if you didn’t do them a certain favor?’

‘I don’t know where this is going,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s threatened me. Besides, I can look after myself. I carry a pistol everywhere I go. At night I keep it beside the bed.’

A pistol? I was surprised. I couldn’t imagine Jane having a gun. But there was an ocean of guns in this land. Guns were part of our culture, our birthright. They were the major icon of our democracy. Why shouldn’t Jane have a pistol? A woman who lived alone needed a handgun in a climate of violence.

‘It’s a Jennings J-25, six-shot magazine,’ she said. ‘I go target-shooting a couple of nights a week. I’ve also developed a social life with other gun-owners. You’d be surprised. They’re nice people. They’re not all rednecks.’

I speculated on how little I really knew about Jane, what she did when she left work, how she lived her life. I knew she had an apartment in one of the canyons, and that was all. Now I had to start filling in blanks, and imagine a life that included target-practice and – what? Line-dancing? Barbecues with fellow shooters? Did they discuss the relative merits of Heckler & Kochs and Glocks, or how much they approved of Emily Ford’s position on gun laws and law enforcement? I was brain-dead when it came to pistols. I couldn’t work up an interest in them.

I heard the echo of the automatic in the parking-garage, remembered how George Rocco had expelled air as he dropped to the ground. I loathed guns, that whole killing culture.

‘Speak to me, Jerry,’ she said.

‘OK. A file’s missing from my office.’

‘Are you sure it hasn’t just been mislaid?’

‘I’m sure. It was in my floor-safe, now it’s not.’

‘You sure you didn’t take it home with you?’

I said I hadn’t.

‘You think it’s been stolen?’

I shrugged, then I went inside my own office and shut the door behind me before Jane had time to ask me if I’d thought about calling the cops. I walked around the edges of the rug, trying to imagine an intruder here. Somebody rolling the rug back. Opening the safe. Plucking out Emily Ford’s records. Walking away. Easy as that. I tried to put a face to this thief. One of my patients? I scanned their faces in my mind. It was absurd. How could I imagine Joe Allardyce in a clandestine role? Or Teddy Newberg, a schizophrenic scriptwriter, or Callie Wronk, an angelic twenty-year-old obsessive-compulsive from Venice Beach, or any of the others who came to me for therapy – how could I ascribe this theft to any of them? And yet –

I looked at Sondra’s photograph on my desk, taken two years ago. She was smiling into the camera. She was carefree and lovely and the world was filled with promise. I felt a stab of bitterness, anger. Why hadn’t I built an elaborate high-tech security fence around our whole life? Something capable of charbroiling anyone who tried to intrude? We’d have been secure behind it, Sondra and I. We’d have stayed home in our sealed enclave and made love behind steel shutters that snapped shut at the slightest sound. And life, cocooned, protected by electronic sensors, would have gone on. I was suddenly weary, enervated – what was I doing, playing detective, asking questions about locks and goddam keys and wondering who to trust? I was a trained psychiatrist, for God’s sake. I was living in a world I hadn’t chosen for myself. But I’d been forced into it, hammered like a nail into a plank of hard wood.

I fingered my ribs lightly, then I went inside the bathroom and put my head under the cold-water faucet. I took a towel and dabbed at the soiled spots on my jacket and pants. Then I ran a comb through my hair.

Presentable. Up to a point.

I needed to move. Forget the goddam keys. Forget who had one and who didn’t, and whose might have been stolen and copied. I thought of the list I’d given Emily Ford. I imagined her going through the names, feeding each into the brain of the computer, links and connections and buzzing in cyberspace … But how did I know she was really doing that? How did I know she didn’t want the list for some other inscrutable purpose? What if she somehow contrived to get her records back and didn’t tell me?

I needed to know what Emily Ford had discovered, if her wonderful computer had spat out anything that might bring me nearer to Sondra.

Problem: how did I contact Emily if I’d been forbidden by people who thought nothing of murder? While I was thinking my way around that, I called Kit Webb at the hospital. I asked him about Consuela.

‘She’ll be fine,’ Kit said. ‘Gastric lavage to the rescue. She’s pretty dopey right now, but she’ll be compos mentis in a couple of hours. You going to give me some details of her OD?’

‘Later,’ I said. ‘I owe you, Kit.’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘Has she said anything about what happened?’

‘She’s not saying much of anything, Jerry. If she speaks, it’s mainly mumble.’

I put the phone down, picked it up again, dialed Emily Ford’s office. An assistant informed me she’d gone home. I knew where she lived: if I wanted to see her, I’d go to her house near Sunset. The trick was to make sure I wouldn’t be followed there. I stood by the telephone and wondered about this for a moment – how could I make myself invisible? How could I avoid detection?

I stepped into the reception room.

Jane looked at me, but didn’t ask anything.

‘My car’s busted,’ I said.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘You need mine?’

‘Does that cause you a problem?’

‘Not really.’

‘Take money out of petty cash for a cab home,’ I said.

She opened the middle drawer of her desk and removed a car key attached to a bright red Goofy keyring. I thanked her, told her I’d call her later at home to make an arrangement for returning the car, then went down to the lobby. I could have traded her my BMW for her car, but there was a chance she’d be mistakenly followed if she was driving my vehicle, and I didn’t want her dragged into this. I didn’t want to think of her and George Rocco sharing a common destiny.

I stepped into the elevator. On the way down, I had a moment of dizziness, tidal drift, as my ribs flared with pain. By the time I reached the lobby it had passed.

As I walked out of the elevator, I saw Harry Pushkas coming towards me. He had his arms extended in a friendly way, and when I got within touching distance he hugged me. His breath smelled of cognac. His black hair, which he dyed, stood up from his scalp as if he’d received an electric shock.

Harry stepped back and looked at me. ‘You tell your secretary to cancel lunch with me? You can’t tell me yourself, hot-shot? This I find an insult. Old friends cancel their own lunch dates.’

‘I’m sorry, Harry. Something came up.’

‘Something came up? What? You had a fight with your dry-cleaner?’ Some-zing. He fingered the lapels of my jacket, like a concerned father assessing his son’s clothing. He shook his head. ‘You got a stain here, another here.’

‘Harry, I’m pushed for time. Maybe we can get together later.’

‘What’s going on, Jerry? You don’t have a moment for your old professor, your friend and your former tormentor? May I remind you that without me – ach, where and what would you be? A GP in Bakersville? Bandaids for little boys? Flu shots and nosebleeds?’

‘Probably,’ I said. When Harry drank brandy, he liked to take credit for whatever success I’d achieved. Usually I didn’t mind. But today was different.

‘You look half-dead,’ he said, and punched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘What’s the trouble? Are you ill?’

‘Later, Harry. I’ll call you when I have a minute, I promise.’

‘What? I should sit by the phone and wait?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

‘Now I’m deaf. I’m not hearing things properly.’ He placed his hands on my shoulders and gazed into my eyes. ‘I’m worried with you.’

‘About me.’

‘Whatever. Stupid sonovabitch prepositions. I never mastered them, all the years I been here.’

I had the urge to tell him about the sudden fissures in my life. I wanted to put my arms around him and hold him as if he were the only reality in the world; an anchor, a safe harbor.

‘You need to slow down and smell the brandy.’ He nudged me with his elbow and winked. His mouth opened in a sly expression. I noticed he’d lost one of his bottom teeth since I’d last seen him. ‘Promise me for later, OK?’

‘I promise you,’ I said. ‘We’ll open a fresh bottle and we’ll get sloshed.’

‘I like sloshed. Sloshed sets the mind free. I’ll hold you to that promise,’ he said. ‘I go home now, and you call me.’

We embraced again.

‘I need to piss,’ he said.

‘Over there. The men’s room.’ I pointed across the lobby.

‘Old men need to piss all the goddam time, Jerry. The bladder becomes like a colander.’

I watched him walk slowly away from me. I couldn’t let him go like this, I couldn’t leave him without a word of explanation, even if I couldn’t tell him the whole truth; if he knew too much, he might be endangered. I followed him into the men’s room. He stood with his back to me, unzipping his fly.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Whatever’s on your mind, get rid of it. You’ll feel better.’

I didn’t know what to tell him, how much to leave out. He urinated, walked to the sink, soaped his hands and ran them under the faucet. A tuft of his shirt protruded through his zipper.

He glanced at himself in the mirror. ‘I look at my face for some sign of recognition, Jerry. Who is this old geezer I see every day in the mirror? What has become of the bold young man who treated all the bourgeois neurotic families of Budapest? Gone, gone, gone.’ He looked at me. ‘So, speak.’

So, speak. I remembered my student days. I remembered Harry’s lectures. When a student had a question and raised a hand, Harry always said the same thing. ‘So, speak.’

I saw a certain loneliness in his face, a quality that had become the condition of his life since his retirement, and the death of his wife Hattie, whom he’d met during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. They’d been devoted to each other for more than forty years of squabbling and making up. Sometimes they’d seemed to me like a double act throwing pies in each other’s faces. Three years ago Hattie had died of a heart attack, and Harry had never really recovered. It struck me that I was perhaps the human being closest to him since Hattie had gone.

‘It’s an ethical matter,’ I said.

‘Ethical? Ah. How serious you sound. Tell me more.’

‘I may have to provide a list of my patients to a certain party.’

‘A certain party? Do you mean the law? Is that what you mean by this coy expression? The police want your patient list?’

I didn’t answer his question about the police.

‘You have made a decision already?’ he asked.

‘I think so.’

‘And now you have the armed peasants of conscience swarming your castle, is that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘With musket and cannon-fire,’ he said. ‘And what is it you wish? Advice from me?’

‘Maybe. Maybe I just wanted to run it past you.’

‘How can I advise you if I don’t know the details, the circumstances? You believe there is some general principle involved here?’ He stared at me hard. ‘OK. You asked. I will answer. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would make me give up my clients and the details of their sicknesses and treatment.’

‘If it was a matter of life and death, Harry?’

‘Pah’ – he waved a hand vigorously. ‘A man or woman comes to you and asks you to explore the sickness in their soul. They confide in you. They lay their heart open for you. And you probe, you explore, you go gently. You make them better if you can. The last thing you do is betray this man or woman.’

‘If you could have saved Hattie’s life, if somebody had said to you that he’d spare your wife’s life in return for the secrets of your patients – would you have let Hattie die?’

‘That is the worst question I have ever been asked.’ He looked crushed, as if his face were a creased old flower that had just been flattened. ‘How do you expect me to answer it? It’s hypothetical. It’s unreal. Hattie is dead. I cannot travel back down time to make bargains with the devil. You don’t make sense, Jerry.’ He stepped closer to me and laid a hand on my arm. ‘Is this about your wife? Is this something to do with Sondra?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘She’s in danger, is that it?’

‘I can’t tell you any more, Harry.’ I turned away from him. ‘I’ll call you later. I promise.’

‘Wait,’ he said.

‘I can’t wait,’ I said.

‘Let us discuss some more, Jerry.’

‘I don’t know what else there is to discuss,’ I said.

‘Then why waste an old man’s time asking advice?’

I stepped out of the men’s room into the lobby. Harry came after me. ‘We should talk some more,’ he said. ‘We’ve barely scratched the surface.’

I looked back at him. He had his hands held out towards me in an imploring gesture. ‘Do the right thing,’ he said.