7.36 p.m.

I sat in the passenger seat of Bobby Stone’s treasured ’67 Olds Cutlass in the parking-lot of a Ralph’s market a few blocks from Sepulveda. Planes roared overhead; flying out of LAX or landing. The skies were crowded. I remembered my dream of planes colliding. How long ago that seemed. I checked the parking-lot. I was sure nobody had followed me here. As sure as I could be. I’d driven a circuitous route, even as I was conscious of the fact that I didn’t have time to take a labyrinth of back streets, or drive through a maze of suburbs.

I thought of the guy stepping round the side of Emily Ford’s house, the parting of fronds: You’re mistaken, I told myself. You’re off the wall. But there was no mistaking the eyes that were too close together and the memory they evoked of the scarf that muffled the mouth and the baseball cap and the knife that had turned out to be a prop.

Bobby was rolling a cigarette, filling a ZigZag paper with tobacco. His black hands, big and fire-scarred, worked at this task with the skilled patience of a craftsman.

I said, ‘Thanks for coming.’

‘No problemo,’ Bobby Stone said. He stuck the skinny cigarette in his mouth and flicked flame from a gunmetal Zippo. ‘I owe you, Jerry.’

‘You don’t owe me,’ I said. ‘We did it together.’

‘What a team we made back then, hey?’ Bobby Stone sucked deeply on his cigarette and his cheeks hollowed out. He was bald. After the fire, his hair hadn’t grown back. A few scars crisscrossed his scalp, but they’d been diminished by cosmetic surgery and were hardly noticeable. His back, severely burned, had required twenty or more grafting operations. I tried to imagine the physical pain he’d undergone. I knew enough about the other scars, the ones inside, the ones we’d healed.

‘I was a wild sonofabitch,’ he said. ‘I wanted the world in a goddam sandwich, so’s I could chew it and spit it out. Funny how a guy changes.’ He laughed, coughed, spluttered. Smoke came out of his nostrils. ‘I’m OK now. I’m getting along real well. The desk job keeps me outta mischief.’

‘You don’t want to go back on the streets?’ I said.

‘Naw, the streets are for younger animals. I’m pushing forty, doc. I did my time out there.’

I looked across the parking-lot. A few scattered cars, the lights in the market windows burning even though the sky wasn’t dark yet; the sun was slipping down towards nightfall, but for the present it was a California dusk, pale-blue deepening to navy, here and there a splash of pink. Darkness was next. I suddenly wanted everything to stay just as it was. The sun frozen. Eternal twilight. I didn’t want night and streetlights, that other world on the far side of daytime.

I didn’t mention George Rocco’s slaying. Bobby hadn’t raised the matter; it was possible he hadn’t heard of it yet. Another murder in LA, a security guard shot in a parking-garage; news at eleven.

‘You mind me saying you look like shit, doc?’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘You got trouble, judging by the appearance of you.’

‘You could say,’ I remarked. ‘You think he’ll show?’

‘He’s a funny cat,’ Bobby said. ‘Keeps to himself. A loner. He told me he’d be here. But he was, like, reluctant … you wanna fill me in on all this, Jerry?’

‘I can’t. Not now.’

Bobby Stone shrugged. ‘Holler if you need me, OK?’

‘I will.’

Bobby crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. A plastic daisy dangled from the rearview mirror on a length of red twine, and he put up his hand and touched the fake petals. I thought that perhaps it had some sentimental value for him, but I didn’t ask. I knew his wife had left him in the wake of the fire when he’d been drinking and shooting up and every day was a day in hell, and that she’d taken their daughter – maybe this cheap flower was a souvenir of a kind. I wasn’t going to pry.

‘You ever run into a Detective Petrosian?’ I asked.

‘Once,’ he said.

‘What do you know about him?’

Bobby Stone shook his head. ‘He’s the guy they get when it comes to, like, celebrity protection. You know, when there’s a federal judge being threatened by criminal types, or some movie hot-shot’s being stalked, that kind of thing. It’s like he has his own private colony inside the LAPD. He picks his own personnel, he’s got maybe a half-dozen operatives at any given time. You don’t hear much about his office.’

‘He wouldn’t investigate an attempted robbery?’ I asked.

Bobby smiled. ‘That would be way beneath him, doc. He might get his fingers dirty.’

‘The name Sy Lancing mean anything to you?’

‘He’s one of Petrosian’s gang. How come you’re asking about Petrosian, anyway?’

‘Simple curiosity,’ I said. I let this knowledge simmer inside. I wanted to see what shape it might assume when it was done on the back-burner.

Bobby Stone said, ‘For a guy who always told me to be open, you are into some very serious mystification these days, doc.’ He looked across the parking-lot. ‘Here comes my man.’

I turned my face.

The man approaching the car walked with an exaggerated swaying motion; he might have been on a ship in a storm, and clutching ropes to keep his balance. He wore a long leather coat and wraparound sunglasses, and his jeans were slightly flared. He opened the back door and got in. I smelled his aftershave, a sweet, heavy musk. The lenses of his glasses were reflective and when I looked at him I could see a small, distended image of myself. I found it disconcerting.

‘Larry Nimble,’ Bobby said. ‘This here’s Dr Lomax. Jerry.’

Larry Nimble made a slight downward gesture of his head, a terse acknowledgment. His skin was as pallid as that of a man who’d spent his life in the dim fluorescence of pool-halls.

I said, ‘Thanks for coming.’

‘Thank Bobby,’ Nimble said. He had a deep, rich voice. ‘I done it for him. I don’t have a lot of time, doc. So say what’s on your mind and I can be moving along.’

‘You arrested my wife,’ I said.

Larry Nimble nodded. ‘I figured it was that when Bobby asked for this meet. Yeah. I busted Mrs Lomax and a guy called Dole.’

‘You freed her the same night,’ I said.

‘Yeah. So?’

‘She bought cocaine from you,’ I said. ‘How come you sprung her?’

Nimble looked at Bobby Stone and said, ‘Duh? This guy serious?’

Bobby shrugged. ‘I think maybe this is territory I don’t want to enter. Hear no evil.’ He got out of the car and slammed the door. I saw him pace up and down, hands in his pockets. The Ralph’s sign burned behind him.

I turned my attention back to Larry Nimble. ‘You want to explain?’

Nimble adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. ‘Are you wearing a wire?’

‘A wire? Christ, no.’

He stared at me for a time, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk. Then he said, ‘Bobby Stone says you’re OK. Fine. Look, doc. I work a hard shift. I lay my life on the line day after day. There are people out there who’d take great pleasure in shooting me straight between the eyes. The way I figure it, I ain’t gonna make it to no pension. Am I getting through?’

‘Money changed hands,’ I said.

‘That’s a fucking quaint way of putting it,’ Nimble said, and laughed. It was a bass sound, a thud of a laugh, jazzy. ‘Every day of my life is a hassle, doc. I get tense. I get migraines. I’m sick to my stomach. I’m bleeding inside. I drink two pints of low-fat milk and six cartons of yogurt a day. I gobble Zantac like it’s going out of production. I don’t eat solid food. I used to live on burgers and fries, but I ain’t well, because this fucking work is eating me up. And I’ll tell you something – the remuneration ain’t exactly an incentive. So. You figure it.’

‘Who paid you?’

‘I only take cash, doc. No credit, and no promissory notes.’

I took my wallet from my pocket and looked inside it. ‘I have a hundred and twenty dollars, that’s all.’

‘It’s less than my asking price. What the hell, Bobby says you’re a good guy.’

I gave him six twenties. He stuffed the bills in his coat pocket without looking at them.

‘We’re going back to last March,’ he said. ‘Your wife and this guy Dole meet me at Joolie’s, which is this dump on Sunset. I never saw your wife before. Dole comes recommended to me through another source. It don’t matter who. They want to buy, I want to sell. Supply and demand. Capitalism. They want an ounce. I got that. No sweat. We go out to my car, the deal is done, and jiminy fucking ker-ricket – I bust them!’ He laughed again and slapped his hands on his knees. ‘I always get a kick outta their faces when that happens. Jaws slump about six miles. Whoooooeeee and down.’

‘You booked them and took them in,’ I said.

‘That’s it. Did some prelim paperwork. Then the lawyer turns up.’

‘Resick.’

‘Tod Resick, right.’

‘And Resick runs errands for Nardini, right?’

Nimble paused. He slid his fingers beneath his glasses, massaged his eyelids. ‘Sure, Resick’s the gopher for the big guy. He’s like Nardini’s fucking glove-puppet. Anyway, he makes it clear he wants to spread some bills. Take care of biz on the q. t. We settle. He’s in and out like a fucking rattler through a hollow log.’

‘How much?’

‘Trade secret. Let’s just say my ulcers were really giving me shit that night, OK? Your wife and this guy Dole, they get to go home.’

‘And you killed the whole thing.’

‘I killed it. But I was careless. I let some paperwork get away from me and it’s sucked into the system before I can get it back. It don’t matter. Anybody asks, I say it was a wrongful arrest. Nobody’s ever gonna ask, though. This fucking city is awash in crime. We got it coming out the woodwork. It’s a terminal condition. You think anybody’s gonna lose sleep over a dope rap that’s been thrown out by the arresting officer? Fuck no.’

I gazed a moment at Bobby Stone, who was leaning over the hood of the car. He’d pulled out a corner of his shirt and was using it to dab at a stain or mark on the metal. He kept the Cutlass shiny. He was compulsive when it came to his car.

‘Tell me about Dole,’ I said.

‘What’s to tell? I asked him his name, he told me, and I wrote it down.’

‘Did you see ID?’

Nimble shook his head. ‘I asked. He said he didn’t have any.’

‘You took him at his word.’

‘Yeah. Look. Everything’s rushed. It’s bedlam downtown. Everybody’s crazy. Shouting. Pushing. Swearing. People throwing up. Pissing their pants. Fistfights. You don’t worry about niceties like ID. That comes later. You just want to get back on the streets because there’s always another sucker to pop, and he’s waiting out there in the dark. ID? Fuck that shit.’

‘Describe him,’ I said.

‘Lookit, I think you’ve had your hundred-and-twenty-bucks worth.’

‘It’s the last question I’ll ask,’ I said. ‘I give you my word.’

Nimble sighed. ‘OK. About this high. Five-five maximum. Muscular little fucker. Gray hair sorta swept back. Blow-dried. He was a salesman type. Glasses kind of like that old rock guy used to wear. The dead guy, what was his name? Buddy Holly? You know, heavy frames. Oh, yeah, and he smoked a cigar that was about half the size of him.’ He reached for the door handle, opened the door, stepped out. He bent down and looked in at me. ‘Good luck, doc. Whatever it is you’re doing.’

I said nothing. I was picturing the man called Dole. Muscular. Gray hair sorta swept back. Glasses. Cigar. I saw him, I conjured him in my mind. I thought of trick mirrors, Disneyland, haunted houses, holographs, cops who broke the law even as they pretended to maintain it. This was the world I’d entered.

I watched Bobby Stone get back in the car.

‘You through, doc?’

‘Yeah, I’m finished.’

‘Was he helpful?’

‘Yeah.’ My ribs were aching again. I gazed through the windshield at Larry Nimble strutting towards the front of the market. I had an urge to go out and call him back and ask him more questions about the man who’d been arrested in Sondra’s company; but I knew the answer, I didn’t need to ask Nimble anything else.

Bobby Stone said, ‘He’s crooked.’

‘So’s this town,’ I said.

‘Ain’t that the truth.’ He smiled at me. ‘You ain’t gonna tell me, are you, doc?’

‘Some other time, maybe,’ and I opened the door. ‘Thanks a lot, Bobby.’

I raised a hand in farewell and looked once again across the lot. There was no sign now of Larry Nimble. He’d faded into the texture of the same twilight where he’d first taken shape. He might just as well have walked off into another world altogether.

I tapped the roof of the Cutlass with the palm of my hand and Bobby gave his horn a single short blast. I walked back to my car. The withering sun came off the big window of the market, a yellow rectangle.

Emily Ford hadn’t lied to me about the coke bust. She’d told me the truth as far as it went. But truth was selective in her world. If Petrosian was way beyond the investigation of a mugging, why had he been sent to talk with me? And then the attacker himself turned out to be one of Emily Ford’s personal courtiers … what did it all mean?

Only one thing, so far as I could see. You think you can come up with just a wee bit more belief in me? she’d asked.

No.