6.55 p.m.

The sheet of paper seemed to wilt in my hand. I shivered because I felt suddenly cold, raw. I saw through the sliding-glass doors the figure of a man move among shrubbery. He was present only a moment, then he was gone.

I looked at Emily and said, ‘A trespasser or a protector?’

She walked to the glass doors, and stood in front of them, as if to obscure my view. ‘That’s just Danny. One of my police shields.’

‘Like bodyguards.’

‘On the taxpayer’s nickel.’ She came back to where I was sitting and flicked the paper in my hand with a fingernail. ‘Sondra didn’t tell you about this, did she?’

‘No …’

‘Why not?’

‘I guess maybe she was ashamed. She’d also be worried about bad publicity and how it might affect my practice.’

Emily Ford said, ‘Are there secrets in good marriages?’

‘We’ve never had any secrets until now,’ I said.

‘I guess some stuff gets hidden in every relationship,’ she said. ‘Partners keep one another in the dark.’

In the dark, I thought. Like the submerged bulk of an iceberg.

Like Emily Ford’s own life.

‘Why the hell did you run my wife’s name through your computer, anyway?’

‘I ran everyone who has had access to your office, Jerry. I did the same with Jane Steel who, incidentally, has sixteen unpaid parking-tickets. And her gun license is out of date, and her work-permit expired last year –’

‘This is ridiculous, it’s petty,’ I said.

‘The efficient secretary who overlooks something as important as a work-permit, Jerry? Really?’

‘So Jane has forgotten to fill in a couple of goddam forms, what’s the big deal?’

‘This is where we differ, buddy. I believe the big picture’s hidden in the tiny details. But you think the details are just too tiresome, don’t you? You’re a guy that jumps right into the lake without testing the waters.’

Emily Ford’s need for order and thoroughness, her desire for exactitude, annoyed me. I glanced through the glass doors. A sparrow rose off the diving-board. I wished Sondra would just materialize in front of me with a surprised smile: Oh, Jerry, I was thinking about you! What a surprise! Let’s have a drink and dinner. We’d embrace. I’d kiss her. And life, as we’d once known it, would go on. The baby would grow inside her and we’d move to another town. Our new home would have a stained-glass window and a porch and a terrific attic and a couple of acres where we’d grow tomatoes and green beans and oranges and whatever else people cultivated in one Stop-sign towns. The rooms would smell of fresh paint and baking cookies, and on Thanksgiving turkey juices would scent the air.

Emily Ford was watching me carefully, as if she expected me to explode like a firework and shower incandescent bits and pieces of myself all across the room.

Cocaine. Goddam coke.

I’d never tried the stuff. I’d been in the presence of it, of course, I’d seen it razor-chopped and carefully laid out on mirrors, and I’d watched people bend over powdery lines with a straw pressed to a nostril. I’d heard the garrulous talk at parties that always followed cocaine, the bright-eyed energy that lasted only so long before people vanished again inside bathrooms to recharge flickering batteries.

‘All right, sure, I knew Sondra had done drugs as a kid,’ I heard myself say. ‘She was born and raised in LA, she hung out at the beach, she surfed, she was into all that when she was a teenager, skinny-dipping and healthy, unashamed sex in the sand. She’d smoked pot. Who hasn’t? It’s no big deal. She told me. She told me everything.’

‘Except this one thing,’ Emily Ford said.

I looked at her hard. ‘So she never mentioned doing cocaine. But it’s natural she’d come in contact with it. It’s the fuel of the business she’s in. Musicians and their entourages use it. So Sondra is in this loop, the promo parties, the receptions, and maybe one night when she felt depleted …’

I quit talking. My voice seemed to come, not from myself, but from a stranger. Why hadn’t Sondra mentioned this tawdry business to me? We discussed everything, it had always been our way. But this one time she’d failed to do that. She hadn’t taken me into her confidence. It prompted the question: Did she keep other things from me? I had to let that one go. I had no time for that kind of exploration, that entanglement.

‘Using coke and buying it are two different things,’ Emily said. ‘She was busted for making a buy, Jerry.’

‘My bet is that she was only doing a favor for Gerson. He owns LaBrea Records. He probably snapped his fingers and told her to find him some blow for one of his musicians. I can imagine it happening that way. He shouts, she jumps. His whole staff jumps. Look, the fact that Sondra was picked up by an undercover cop for buying cocaine doesn’t alter this situation. Nothing’s changed. She isn’t free. I have a few hours to find her and fuck all to go on except a patient who gave me a fake name – maybe. So what difference does it make that she bought cocaine from an undercover cop, who then dragged her off to jail?’

Emily said, ‘OK, maybe it doesn’t have any relevance to her present situation, but here’s the odd part. She walked, Jerry. She was held for an hour and released, and that was the end of it. No bail. No follow-up. No court date. The report I showed you said she and a man named Timothy Dole were collared by an undercover officer called Lawrence Nimble on the night of March 7 at a place called Joolie’s on Sunset. And that’s where the matter just died. She and this guy Dole were sent home and nobody bothered to slap her wrists with a fine or some nominal community service. She wasn’t even photographed or fingerprinted, Jerry. Neither was Dole … Do you know him?’

‘Never heard of him,’ I said. ‘Maybe Gerson pulled a string or two.’

She said. ‘Tod Resick was the one pulling strings. You know that name? Resick’s a shill for my old pal, Dennis Nardini, one of whose clients I recently subpoenaed. Resick is Nardini’s trusted lieutenant and doesn’t dare breathe unless The Man tells him to suck air. Nardini, for Christ’s sake. This is no ambulance-chaser, Jerry.’

‘I can’t see a guy like Nardini coming into Sondra’s orbit,’ I said. ‘Unless it was through Gerson. Maybe he’s Gerson’s lawyer.’

‘Dennis Nardini, Jerry, is one hundred per cent monster. Oh, he comes across as your well-oiled charmer with his Harvard degree, his imported shoes, his handmade suits, but he’s still linked to the old ways. The main difference is that he knows some ten-cent words and how to schmooze influential people and he goes to Giselle instead of The Godfather. He prefers ballet to bullets. When we run into each other, it’s smiles and back-slapping. But he knows I’d sling his ass in jail if I could. Intimidation of witnesses. Bribery of judges. Jury tampering. Wholesale corruption. Dennis doesn’t care how he gets his clients out of the shit …’ She hesitated before she added, ‘I just can’t see a guy like Dennis Nardini dealing with this in the middle of the night, Jerry. I can’t see him getting out of bed and ordering Resick to spring your wife and her companion for something so banal as a cocaine rap.’

I was quiet for a moment, then I said, ‘I guess it’s safe to say Nardini isn’t fond of you.’

‘An unassailable truth.’

‘He represents people who’d prefer you didn’t go to Washington. His associates. His clients. People who have sleepless nights when they think of you sitting up there in the hot-seat in DC. People who don’t want Emily Ford trawling through crimes and issuing subpoenas like they were inflated currency in a Third World republic. People who are very happy with the status quo.’

‘Hold it there, Jerry. If you’re suggesting Nardini’s a factor behind your wife’s abduction, I’d have to draw a line. If he is behind it – and that’s truly slim, Jerry – he’s so far removed from the action you couldn’t trace it back to him in a hundred years. You’d never get through the chain of command, who ordered who to do what, et cetera. I think we’ve got a better chance of trying to track down the guy who passed himself off as Stam than we have of dumping Sondra’s disappearance anywhere near Nardini’s doorstep. Believe me.’

‘Did Resick pressure the arresting officer … what’s his name?’

‘Larry Nimble.’

‘What did Resick say to him?’

‘Jerry, let’s leave Nardini and his patsy out of the picture. Concentrate on the phony patient. Stam.’

‘Have you talked to Nimble?’

‘Dear Christ. You’re dogged. I tried to reach him. Apparently he’s on leave of absence. He’s ill. Ulcers or something. Satisfied?’

No, I wasn’t satisfied. I couldn’t imagine Sondra in a holding-cell. I couldn’t imagine Nimble or any cop handcuffing her. And who the hell was Timothy Dole? Maybe he was another lackey at the record company, and he’d gone with Sondra to make the coke buy. And now Dennis Nardini had come into the frame, and suddenly the picture had altered, but I wasn’t sure how.

I said, ‘What if Nardini owed Gerson some big-time favor, and that’s why he sent his gopher to deal with the coke situation? Maybe Gerson’s a major client.’

‘It’s possible,’ was all Emily said, but in such a way I knew her mind was elsewhere. She had the look of a novice highwire artiste, withdrawn in concentration, alive to the fear of slipping.

I thought about Gerson. I’d been to a party at his ostentatious home once, but I didn’t have any special insights into his world. For all I knew, he could have connections in the same dank places as Nardini allegedly had them. I thought: Fine, intriguing, but none of this is taking me closer to Sondra. She was slipping further and further away, as if she’d been dragged out to sea by a hungry tide and I couldn’t do a damn thing except watch from the shore.

I wondered if she’d fallen into a drugged sleep, if she was dreaming, the baby still and motionless in her womb. And then I was rushing into a place of dire possibilities, that space in the head where you imagined only the worst. Sondra had tried to escape and they’d shot her. She’d tried to climb from a window and lost her hold and fallen, and her neck was broken. She’d overdosed on drugs and slipped into a coma. The time-frame was a sham, a scam. She was already dead.

I thought: Godammit, enough of this pressure, this anxiety and dread. I’d get the man what he wanted, I’d give it to him after his next call. I have the goods, I’d say. I’d make the arrangements, and they’d give me Sondra back.

And I’d trade Emily Ford as if she were a baseball card I didn’t need in my collection.

What would happen to her world then?

I looked at her face, and then away. I didn’t have the heart to stare into her eyes. Suddenly, she leaned towards me and put her arms around me. I felt her hair against my eyelids, her cool hand moving to the side of my face, where it rested. The gesture touched me, even as it disturbed.

‘We’ll work it out just fine in the end,’ she said.

How could she sound so goddam confident?

I gazed back towards the garden, the shrubbery, and I saw one of Emily’s private guards. For a moment I was stung by surprise, and upset; was it a coincidence, or was it something else, something of more sinister design? The man didn’t know I’d seen him. He moved back into the shade of the shrubbery, it parted before him, he disappeared. It was the same man I’d glimpsed so briefly earlier, the one Emily had called Danny. I hadn’t seen his face clearly at the time, but now I knew who Danny was.

Detective Petrosian.

Emily moved back from me, as if she were embarrassed by the spontaneity of her embrace. She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead in a brisk way. ‘You still don’t really trust me, do you?’

The word ‘trust’ was like a plum-pit in my throat. I wondered about Petrosian. Did he combine his regular cop duties with a little overtime protecting Emily? What were the chances that the cop investigating last night’s assault on me would also be detailed to guard the home and person of the Chief Consultant to the West Coast Division of the Presidential Task Force On Crime? How many cops were on the LA payroll? How many thousands? What were the odds against Petrosian being involved with both me and Emily?

‘You didn’t answer me,’ she said. ‘About trust? Remember?’

I felt a certain tumbling inside, questions spinning wildly this way and that. What if she’d invented the cocaine story? How did I know she was telling the truth about Phil Stam? But why would she fabricate these things? What did she stand to gain?

Truth, falsehood, half-lies. I wanted to trust her, dear God, how I wanted to trust her. I wanted to trust somebody. I felt very alone, lost in a place where people and the words they uttered were prisms that distorted the purity of light. Now I wished I’d told Harry more, confided in him, because what you saw with Harry was what you got, there was nothing hidden, no rage of unfulfilled ambition, no empty office waiting for him in the justice department. I contrasted that with Emily’s burning appetite for Washington, and it seemed to me that she might be capable of anything in her drive to get what she wanted.

‘I trust you,’ I said quietly.

‘You lie so goddam badly, it’s totally pathetic.’

‘I’m not having the best of days,’ I said.

‘Yeah, and all this is a walk in the park for me too, Jerry. I don’t think you can even begin to grasp what I stand to lose.’

‘You’re not the only one that loses, Emily.’

‘Then let’s have a little more faith here, huh? You think you can come up with just a wee bit more belief in me?’

She was asking me to trust her.

She’d never asked if she could trust me. We were in different playing-fields.

The things we plan to do with other people’s lives. The little treacheries that sicken us.

I looked through the glass doors. The yard was empty. Maybe I’d never seen Petrosian. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity. And if it had been Petrosian, so what? It didn’t have to mean anything sinister. It was an accident, a coincidence, Petrosian was sent wherever his superiors wanted to dispatch him, he didn’t pick and choose his duties. It was my head playing sick games, looking for connections, little flashes of insight in the murk of things. But I felt choked, panicked, and I was under the pressure of time. I wondered if my anxiety showed on my face, or if I’d become good at hiding my feelings. Pain rippled suddenly through my chest and I clutched the area and sucked in my breath quickly.

‘You OK?’ Emily asked.

‘Heartburn or something.’

I needed to get out of this house. Get away. I didn’t want to sell Emily Ford. Not yet.

I knew where I had to go next. And I knew I had to move quickly. Time, what was the time? But I couldn’t look at my watch, didn’t want to, didn’t want to think of seconds elapsing and hours rushing away from me, and the idea of a void at the end of it all. I’d been given less than four hours, and a part of that span had been devoured; the collapse of time was a kind of torture.

And he’d known that only too well when he’d given me what he called a ‘gift’. He’d set the clock running in my brain. He’d turned my life into pie-shaped segments of time, each slice dwindling all the time. I’m an understanding guy when you get to know me, he’d said. But not in any sympathetic way. No. What he understood was the nature of pain, and how to inflict it. He might just as well have touched me with a cattle-prod. The ‘gift’ he’d given me wasn’t one of time; it was of fear. He’d imposed upon me a timetable, a schedule that would eventually run out.

I walked to the door that led to the garage.

‘Where are you going?’ Emily asked.

‘I’m not sure yet.’

‘You’re lying again.’

I wanted to say: Forgive me for what I might have to do. Forgive me if I have to trade your world for somebody else’s. And even if it doesn’t come to that, forgive me for thinking these thoughts.

‘Can you stay out of trouble?’ she asked.

‘Who knows.’

‘Try,’ she said. ‘As for me, I’m going to find Stam.’

‘How?’

‘Some people in this town owe me, Jerry. I’m not a complete pariah.’

‘Nobody ever said you were, Emily.’

‘Hey, I read my press. I don’t have too many clippings I’d save. Some people think I’m the founder member of a local coven that meets every full moon to cast spells.’

‘Spells? What I heard was you don’t do anything more harmful than test-drive new broomsticks.’

‘Malicious gossip.’

I walked into the hot garage, got into the Honda. The automatic door slid open. I saw Emily standing in the doorway that led to the kitchen. She was watching me but I couldn’t see her expression.

‘Call me,’ she shouted. ‘Use the cellphone.’

I backed into the driveway. Emily went into the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind her. I wondered what she’d do now, what contacts she’d work, what kind of juice she had.

I backed onto the street, and the garage door descended behind me.

A man in a stylish, lightweight powder-blue suit stepped around the Honda and moved towards the side of the house in a proprietorial manner; it wasn’t Petrosian, but it was somebody vaguely familiar to me only I couldn’t place him until he turned his head a fraction just before he vanished – with some haste, as if I wasn’t meant to spot him – under the deep green fronds of a palm.

Then I knew.