I have a thing about funerals.

The entire ritual from start to finish strikes me as senseless. You stand in a mortuary reeking of the perfume of already withering flowers and stare down at a wax dummy in a satin-lined box, a dummy with the vague features of someone you once cared for. You sit in a church or synagogue and listen to well-intentioned but hollow eulogies and a lot of words about mortal troubles ended and everlasting life in the Kingdom of Heaven that have little to do with the departed and everything to do with the living. You stand beside a rectangular hole in the ground, listening to more hollow words, smelling grass and freshly turned earth, and if you�re a man like me, what you think about is not the prospect of a blissful eternity but the futility of man�s earthly existence, living and dying both.

Some people, the fortunate ones who have an unshakable faith, find comfort in all of this; it gives them hope to honor the dead in a formalized ceremony. But as far as I�m concerned there is a better, less painful, just as hopeful way to pay your respects. One that has nothing to do with perching on a cemetery lawn waiting for an object like a half-formed pod creature to be lowered into a hole and covered up with a mound of dirt. Honoring the dead ought to be a personal and private act, like making love. And it ought not to involve a preoccupation with death but rather a celebration of life, of one person�s time on this earth and its interaction with your own � memories of good times shared, days lived with pleasure and purpose.

Kerry says my feelings have to do with mortality itself, that it isn�t really funerals I hate but the concept that everyone and everything must eventually cease to exist. She says this gently, without censure; she doesn�t care for religious ceremony or ground burial any more than I do. We have a pact: no service of any kind for either of us, cremation and the ashes scattered to the winds. Could be she�s right about the way I feel. I�ve seen too much death over the years, too much waste. It doesn�t frighten me, it makes me angry because I can�t seem to come to terms with why it has to be that way. Issues without apparent meaning, questions without answers, frustrate me. It�s the sort of man I am. It�s what makes me good at my work.

So there I stood next to Kerry in the Olivet Memorial Cemetery in Colma, half listening to the minister delivering his graveside incantation, thinking these thoughts and waiting for Eberhardt�s remains to finally be planted and the ordeal to be over. And the irony was, for all I believed in honoring the dead privately and through a celebration of life, I couldn�t seem to dwell on the good memories of my ex-friend and ex-partner. The way he�d died kept intruding, taking over. And what I felt was anger and frustration.

When I�d first heard of his sudden demise, the shock had been like a physical blow. It couldn�t have been suicide; Eberhardt wasn�t the kind of man who took his own life. It must�ve been foul play, or some freak accident. But the circumstances and the police investigation pretty much ruled out any other explanation. It was suicide, all right. And why had I even questioned it? A lot of cops and ex-cops finish themselves off with a bullet, for reasons that all too often involve stress and alcohol. Eating their guns, they call it.

Once I accepted the suicide verdict I not only lost the sense of shock but the feelings of guilt and sadness that had followed it. Friends for thirty-five years and yet I could not seem to feel any grief, any real sense of loss. The fact that he�d killed himself was part of the reason; I�ve always considered suicide to be cheap and selfish, the ultimate act of cowardice. Another part was our estrangement for the past four years � not one word spoken directly to each other in all that time. Still, I should�ve felt something more than the dull anger, the nagging frustration, shouldn�t I? It was Eberhardt lying down there inside the ornate box fitted into that tight little hole... Except that it wasn�t. A damn wax dummy. The real Eberhardt, the man who�d once been my closest friend, had been gone physically for three days now and from a place in my heart and gut a lot longer than that.

Morbid thoughts, making me even twitchier, more impatient. Kerry sensed my discomfort, moved closer and linked her arm through mine. �You okay?� she whispered.

�Yeah. More or less.�

�It�ll be over soon.�

I squeezed her hand, thinking: He�d have hated this, same as me. That�s another little piece of irony. Born Jewish, lost his faith early on; not just nonreligious but a virtual atheist. And here he�s being buried in a sanctioned nondenominational cemetery in a service presided over by a Lutheran minister from Bobbie Jean�s church.

I made an effort to focus on the other mourners. Bobbie Jean standing in a tight little cluster with her two daughters and the married one�s husband, Cliff Hoyt. Thin and pale and shrunken inside a loose-fitting black dress that covered all of her except for face and hands, the hands washing each other constantly as if she were trying to rub out a stain. Dry-eyed and in rigid control; she�d done all her grieving in private. Dana Macklin, Eberhardt�s ex-wife, remarried to the Stanford professor she�d left Eb for ten years ago and now one of the pillars of Palo Alto society, wearing a moist look of bewilderment. Joe DeFalco, once almost as close to Eberhardt as I was, looking rumpled and as ill at ease as I felt. Jack Logan and a handful of other SFPD old-timers � Eberhardt�s cronies from the days when he�d been a detective lieutenant. Barney Rivera, tubby little Barney, popping peppermints on the sly and glancing at his watch the way a man does when he�s worried he�ll be late for an appointment. He caught my eye, scowled, turned aside. He didn�t like me much any more and the feeling was mutual. I�d tried to talk to him shortly after I heard the news; he�d shut me off cold. I knew why and maybe one day I�d confront him about it, get it out into the open. But not today.

Two other men completed the graveside gathering, neither of whom I knew. Cops, probably; or maybe clients Eberhardt had developed over the past four years, or casual drinking buddies. People who cared enough to attend the funeral, but who wouldn�t care long or deeply. Eberhardt hadn�t made friends easily or been close to more than a handful of persons in his sixty years. Dana, Bobbie Jean, Joe, Barney, Jack Logan, me � that was about all. A loner and a workaholic, at least in the old days. Introspective, oversensitive, stubborn and sometimes inflexible, and given to dark moods...

Just like me.

Right. But I had saving qualities he hadn�t: drive, a sense of worth and purpose, an intense desire to create order out of chaos. I also had a woman I loved too much to want to hurt, an agency that was reasonably profitable, and a line of work I found fulfilling. And I cared too much about life to want to give it up so easily and cheaply, or to leave so much pain behind.

The minister finally finished speaking. Time, now, for the first small shovelful of dirt to be tossed onto the coffin, Bobbie Jean�s last good-bye. I couldn�t watch that; I looked away, out over the trees and rolling lawns and jutting monuments. It was a cool, blustery day with a high wind that sent broken clouds rushing inland from the sea. The pale sunlight and the fast movement of the clouds created shadow shapes on the cemetery landscape � an animal running, a tall-masted sailing ship, a gigantic ice cream cone, a zeppelin. Illusions. Like the attitudes we build up toward others and toward ourselves that turn out to be false or distorted, so much vapor and so many tricky shadows.

Why�d you do it, Eb? I thought. Who were you, really?

The homicide inspectors had found a suicide note in the glove compartment of his car. A few words scrawled on a piece of notepaper that explained nothing: I�ve had enough. I can�t keep hurting anymore. You won�t believe it Bobbie Jean but I love you.

Bobbie Jean�s words to me on the phone three days ago explained nothing either. �All I can tell you,� she�d said, �is that he was deeply depressed and drinking way too much. No, he never mentioned suicide. He didn�t talk about anything that mattered, hadn�t in a long time. He wasn�t the same man, the man I fell in love with five years ago. The last year or so... I was sleeping with a stranger.�

A stranger to Bobbie Jean made him twice one to me. The Eberhardt I�d known, or thought I knew, wasn�t the same man who�d put a .357 Magnum to his chest and blown his heart to shreds. The bottom line was, I hadn�t known Eberhardt at all. I�d been surprised when he ended our partnership and our friendship on such a bitter note; surprised that he�d maintained four years of silence; surprised that he�d suddenly broken it by calling my office last week for an unspecified reason; surprised that an apparently moderate drinker had turned into a depressive alcoholic; and surprised that he�d been capable of killing himself. All the surprises added up to one harsh truth: The Eberhardt I�d thought I knew was an illusion created and solidified through a series of misconceptions. Even my reading of his private demons had been false.

More than once I�d tried to imagine the way it�d been for him that last night. Sitting alone in his car at three A.M., in an alley out near Islais Creek � the fifth straight night he�d been there on a futile stakeout to catch a thief who�d been stealing cases of expensive hooch from a liquor distributor�s warehouse. Brooding because this was the only job he�d had in over a month and his future prospects were just as bleak. Drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel�s, finishing it, throwing it on the floor where the homicide inspectors found it. Taking out the Magnum, a big, deadly piece he�d bought sometime after opening his own one-man agency. Holding the weapon in his hand, peering at the shape of it in the dark, feeling its coldness, nerving himself. And then instead of putting the muzzle in his mouth the way most of them did � pressing it tightly against his chest and squeezing the trigger. I could visualize all of that with no trouble, but the man who�d done those things had no face. He was all shadow and silhouette, the way Eberhardt would be in my memory from now on.

Kerry moved against me and I realized the burial rite was done; the other mourners were already drifting away. We went too. Ahead I saw Joe DeFalco say something to Barney Rivera, who ignored him and hurried on. Joe stopped, frowning, and when Kerry and I reached him, he fell into step alongside me.

�What the hell�s the matter with Barney?� he said. �He acts like the two of us have leprosy.�

�You know the answer to that, Joe.�

�Yeah. But for Christ�s sake, we didn�t have a clue Eb was suicidal. Not a clue.�

�We might�ve if I�d returned Barney�s calls.� Rivera had telephoned my office twice last week.

�You don�t know he was calling about Eberhardt. And even if he was, why the hell didn�t he say something?�

�Maybe he didn�t know how bad the situation was, any more than we did.�

�Then why blame you and me? We�re not miracle workers.�

�I didn�t return Eb�s call either,� I reminded him.

�And he told Barney you didn�t? Yeah, I suppose. Still, Eb�s message to you didn�t say why he wanted to talk. Didn�t have to be that he was looking for help, somebody to keep him from pulling the trigger on himself.�

�Why else, Joe? His message did say it was urgent I contact him by Sunday night. Figures that was his original target date. The fact that it took him another two days to nerve himself up indicates second thoughts.�

�Maybe. So why didn�t he call me when he didn�t hear from you? Or go to Bobbie Jean? Or call the suicide hotline? Why you and nobody else except maybe Barney?�

I had no answer for that. I shook my head.

�Anyhow,� DeFalco said, �it�s not your fault any more than it�s Barney�s or mine. You were two hundred and fifty miles away, up to your ass in white supremacists. I wouldn�t�ve returned personal calls either, in your place. I didn�t get in touch with Eb, for that matter, and I could have. We talked about it on the phone, remember?�

�I remember.�

He blew out a heavy breath. �So what about you?�

�What about me?�

�You�re not shouldering any blame, are you?�

At first I had, a little. No longer. Even if I had talked to Eberhardt and he�d unloaded on me, what could I have done or said from a distance of two hundred and fifty miles and four bitter years? How can you stop a stranger from acting on a death wish you don�t condone and can�t really understand?

�No,� I said.

�I hope not.�

�Let�s drop the subject, okay?�

�Sure. Over and done with anyway, the whole sorry business. I don�t even know why I put myself through today. I should�ve stayed home with Nancy.� Nancy was his wife. DeFalco�s only religion was the newspaper business, but she was a strict Catholic and Catholics consider suicide a cardinal sin.

�We all should�ve stayed home,� I said.

�I can use a drink. How about you? Kerry?�

�Too early for us,� she said.

�I know a place in Daly City, not far from here. You can both have mineral water or something. I feel like company.�

But I didn�t, and it was plain that Kerry felt the same. �Not today, Joe,� I said. �We�d only talk about Eberhardt and I�ve had enough. More than enough.�

In the parking lot DeFalco went off to his car, and as Kerry and I neared mine, Dana came over in hesitant strides. We�d exchanged a few words before the church service; it was the first I�d seen her in several years. She looked trim and fit, her face so smooth and unlined I decided she�d had it lifted not too long ago. The good life in Palo Alto. There was a time when I�d resented her for cheating on Eberhardt, breaking up their marriage, but that had been long ago. I wondered now if she�d woken up one morning to find herself lying next to a stranger, the same as Bobbie Jean had, and if that as much as anything else was what had driven her into the professor�s arms.

She said tentatively, �I wish there was something I could say.�

�Me, too. But there isn�t.�

�I can�t even cry for him. A man I was married to for nearly twenty years.�

�You didn�t know him anymore, Dana. None of us did.�

�Yes, but still... I wish I could shed just one tear. You loved him too, once. You know what I mean.�

�I know what you mean.�

�Well.� She produced a pallid smile and said, �Take good care of yourself.� The smile shifted to Kerry. �Take good care of each other.�

I watched her hurry off, thinking that it was the last time I would ever see her and not feeling anything one way or the other. And a few seconds later Bobbie Jean was there, alone, Cliff Hoyt and the two daughters looking on solicitously from a short distance away.

I remembered Bobbie Jean as young-looking, active, high-spirited in a controlled way. In the past few years she had aged visibly: a fine tracery of lines and wrinkles marring her facial skin, the brightness leeched out of her blue eyes, her movements stiff and slow like an old woman�s. The years themselves weren�t responsible, I thought. Eberhardt, the stranger in her bed, and her life with him were to blame.

She said, �Thank you both for being here,� in the formal way of speaking people adopt at funerals. Oddly, her South Carolina accent, which she�d all but lost after more than a decade on the West Coast, had become pronounced again. Or maybe it wasn�t so odd: a yearning, conscious or unconscious, for home and better days.

�Nothing to thank us for, Bobbie Jean,� Kerry said gently.

�I don�t know that I�d�ve come, in your place. After the way we treated you � not going to your wedding, no card or anything. I wanted to accept the invitation, truly, but...�

�But Eb didn�t,� I said. �No part of it or us.�

�He still blamed you for what happened to our wedding plans. Stubborn and bitter and carrying a fool�s pride. I�d still have married him if he�d asked me again, or I would�ve until recently. But he never did. I�m so sorry I let him talk me around to his way of seeing things.�

�Past history, Bobbie Jean. None of that matters now.�

�I just want you to know. So sorry about everything.�

�Us, too. You going to be okay?�

�In time. My girls, and Cliff, have been real supportive. I�m staying with Pam and Cliff for the time being. That house, Eb�s house... I couldn�t keep on living there. He willed it to me but it isn�t mine, not my home. I can�t go back to it.�

Kerry said, �Of course, not for a while.�

�No, I mean ever. Not even to pick up the rest of my things. Pam will get them for me. I don�t want any of the furniture � it can all stay with the house when it sells.� She drew a shallow, wincing breath. �Eb�s things, his personal belongings, I don�t know about those. Cliff and the girls can put them all in boxes and have the Goodwill come for them, but that doesn�t seem right. Without somebody sorting through it all first, I mean.�

Her eyes were on Kerry, but it was obvious enough what she was leading up to. I said, �No. Not me.�

The burned-out eyes slid my way again. I could almost feel them like too-dry fingers moving on my face. �I don�t have any right to ask you, I know that, but there�s no one else��

�Barney Rivera.�

�He and Eb weren�t close. He never once came to the house after the poker game you all had broke up.�

�Joe DeFalco then.�

�He�s not the right person, if he�d even agree to it. And I don�t believe he would.�

�What makes you think I�m the right person? That I�ll agree.�

�You and Eb were such good friends once��

�Were we? I�m not so sure of that.�

�Closer in some ways than he and I were,� Bobbie Jean said. �But that�s not the only reason. There�s more than just his personal things � his business affairs, too. His office files and all. You�d know what to keep, what to throw out. Some of his clients you might want to��

�I�m not interested in taking on a dead man�s clients.�

That came out harsher than I�d intended; Bobbie Jean winced again and Kerry�s fingers dug into my arm. There was a brief, awkward silence before Bobbie Jean said in a labored voice, �Oh, God, I didn�t mean... I don�t know what I meant. I know how you must feel. I shouldn�t be trying to burden you at a time like this. I�ll find someone��

�No, you won�t,� Kerry said. �You have too much to deal with as it is. We�ll take care of it � it�s the least we can do.�

I threw her a sharp look. She answered it with one in kind. She has greenish chameleon eyes, the sort that change color shades according to her emotions; the darker they get, the more determined she is. They were very dark now, more black than green, jadelike.

�We�ll take care of it,� she said again, as much to me this time as to Bobbie Jean. �One or both of us.�

�Are you sure?�

�Positive.�

�The keys to the house and his office are at Pam�s...�

�Cliff still works in the city, doesn�t he? Well, he can drop them off one day next week. Or if he�s too busy, we�ll pick them up at his office.�

�He�ll drop them off. Kerry, thank you. Thank you both.�

Another wan smile, and Bobbie Jean went slowly to rejoin her family. As soon as she was out of earshot, Kerry said, �Take it out on me, not her.�

�What?�

�Your rage at Eberhardt for killing himself. Bobbie Jean doesn�t deserve to be hurt any more.�

�All right,� I said.

�I can�t turn my back on her. I don�t see how you could.�

�I don�t want any part of his leavings.�

�Fine. Then I�ll do the sifting and sorting myself.�

�No. No, you won�t.�

�You just said��

�I know what I just said. But it�s not your place, it�s mine. I don�t like it, not one damn bit, but I�ll do it.�

She gave me one of her analytical looks. �You�d have agreed to it eventually on your own, even if I hadn�t stepped in, wouldn�t you.�

�What makes you think that?�

�I know you. Grumble and grouse, get it out of your system, then you�re reasonable again. Most times anyway.�

�Don�t be too sure you know me as well as you think you do.�

�Tough guy. Mr. Macho.�

�Just set in my ways.�

�Mr. Bluster with a heart of cream cheese.�

�Get in the car,� I said. She went around and got in. I slid under the wheel. We sat there for a little time in the cemetery quiet, not looking at each other. Or at least I didn�t look at her until I said, �I�m not doing it just as a favor to Bobbie Jean.�

�I know that, too.�

�Yeah? Then why else, smartass?�

�You think there might be something in Eb�s leavings to explain what made him shoot himself. It bothers you, not having a clear idea. It�s why you haven�t slept more than a few hours a night since it happened.�

Without answering, I leaned forward to start the engine.

�See?� she said. �I do know you just about as well as I think I do.�

The rest of the weekend was lost time, empty time. And that�s another thing I have against funerals � they leave you at loose ends, depressed to one degree or another. Everything seems gray for a while afterward; nothing looks or tastes or feels quite right, as if the loss of a friend or loved one has been made even more acute by your attendance at the ceremonial coverup of the remains. Even the time-honored wake � I�ve been to a couple of those, too � has the same hollow, dreary effect, at least on me. The gaiety always seems forced, the party atmosphere faintly repellent and disturbing, as though you were taking part in an ancient pagan rite designed to ward off evil spirits.

Kerry and I spent Saturday afternoon and evening at her condo in Diamond Heights. Neither of us felt like going out; but staying in was a monotonous string of gin rummy games, bad TV programs, reading matter that wasn�t particularly involving, tasteless food, and careful avoidance of mentioning Eberhardt�s name in any context. Shameless, the black-and-tan kitten we�d adopted, sensed our moods and pretty much left us alone, proving that cats can sometimes be wiser than humans. We went to bed early and made love, and in keeping with the rest of the day, it wasn�t very satisfying for either of us. I didn�t sleep well again. Kerry was almost as restless in the early-morning hours.

She had a Sunday brunch with one of Bates and Carpenter�s out-of-town clients � �one of the many perks,� as she put it wryly, �of being Creative Director of a large, aggressive ad agency.� So I left her a little before nine and drove to my Pacific Heights flat. A married couple maintaining separate residences has its drawbacks, but for individuals like Kerry and me, who value and require a certain amount of privacy, it�s an arrangement that has more plusses than minuses. Most of the time I like her condo, but when she�s not there I always feel more like a visitor than a resident. On days such as this one I prefer the old-fashioned, semi-sloppy ambiance of the Laguna Street digs I�ve leased for nearly three decades.

I hadn�t spent much time there lately and the rooms had a musty, closed-in smell. The day was a carbon copy of Saturday, cool and cloudy, so I opened windows in the bedroom, bathroom, and living room bay to air the place out. Then I wandered around trying to find something to occupy both my hands and my mind. Carbon copy of yesterday in that respect, too: nothing appealed, nothing held my interest for more than a few minutes. By noon I was wrapped up hard and tight like an oversize handball, metaphorically bouncing off the walls. I bounced myself out of there finally, into the car and down to Union Street. Sunday crowds made parking all but impossible; both garages where I can usually find space were full. To the Marina then, where I lucked into a curbside spot just off Chestnut. I walked over to Fanucci�s and treated myself to a calzone. Fanucci�s makes the best Italian sausage calzones in the city, but this one did nothing for my mood; for all the enjoyment I got out of it, it might have been a plain burger from the Mickey D�s on Lombard.

After lunch I walked to the Palace of Fine Arts. Clots of noisy tourists drove me away again, back to the car. So then I went driving. Not headed anywhere in particular, just killing time and trying to work through the restless, out-of-sorts mood. That was what I thought at first, anyway. It wasn�t until I was down on the Embarcadero, aimed toward the China Basin Bridge and Third Street, that I admitted to myself I�d had a destination all along, drawing me as surely and inexorably as a magnetic field draws particles of iron.

Ira Erskine was not what I�d expected. He was younger, for one thing � no more than thirty-five. And well turned out and prosperous-looking in an expensive silvery gray Brioni suit and a hand-painted silk tie. Short dark hair and a neatly groomed mustache were both frost-edged with premature gray. He had the look and confident carriage of a successful businessman, which is what he admitted to being: he owned what he termed �a small but forceful financial consultancy firm� in Santa Fe. You might have taken him for a satisfied, complacent man, the kind people refer to admiringly as pillars of the community and who are often approached to run for political office, if it weren�t for his eyes.

The eyes were gray, direct; he locked them onto mine and maintained the contact the entire time we talked. But the thing about them was that they were almost scintillant with strong emotion, the dominant one being pain. I could feel his hurt as well as see it, as though he were emitting little pulsing waves of radiant energy. It made me both sympathetic and uncomfortable. Emotion that naked is never easy to face, particularly when you have empathic tendencies as overly developed as mine.

He was packing a load of woe, all right. The root cause of it was his ex-wife, Janice, but she was no longer the main ingredient. It took him a while to get around to what was currently ripping him up inside, and when he did I felt twice as sympathetic and twice as uncomfortable. Most private investigators attract clients whose problems require little or no emotional involvement; they do the job, get paid, and move on unaffected to the next. Not me. All too often I get the bleeders, men and women with such intense personal predicaments that I can�t seem to avoid being sucked in to the point of bleeding right along with them. And maybe carrying around a scab or two myself afterward.

Erskine had accepted a cup of coffee when he arrived; he�d also asked if he could smoke, and when I said I�d prefer he didn�t, he�d accepted that without argument or smoker�s belligerence, even though it was obvious he needed the nicotine. Instead he�d swallowed two cups of black coffee, the caffeine acting as a partial substitute, and asked for a third. That one he nursed, sitting with both hands wrapped tightly around the mug as if he were taking in the bitter warmth by osmosis.

His posture was both relaxed and tense, the way a man who is normally at ease in any social or business situation sits when dark things are warring inside him. He didn�t shift position once during our conversation. Or glance once at the voice-activated tape recorder whirring away on my desk. I�d taken to taping all interviews and telephone exchanges, one of the many good suggestions Tamara had made, and while most clients didn�t object, they were aware of the recorder and would look at it nervously or suspiciously now and then, as if it might somehow be altering their words or taking them out of context. A few inadvertently altered the pitch of their voices or phrased things in more self-conscious ways once the machine started running, but Erskine didn�t seem to be affected that way either.

�Janice and I met at a fund-raiser for the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture eight years ago,� he said. His tone was tender, almost reverent, whenever he spoke her name. �From the moment I saw her I knew she was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Love at first sight... I�d always considered it a ridiculous concept. But it isn�t, it really isn�t.�

I remembered my reaction to Kerry the first night we�d met. �I know.�

�We were married after three months. The first year... I can�t describe how wonderful it was. Janice was working at the Salishan Gallery when we met, but of course there was no need for that after our marriage. She�d always wanted to be an artist, had done some oil and acrylic painting in her spare time. With my support she was able to paint full time. She is, or was, quite good. A very distinctive style and vision. She had two showings while we were together, the second at the Salishan. I think if she hadn�t gone off the beam, she would�ve honed and refined her talent. Become quite successful in her own right.�

�How do you mean, �gone off the beam�?�

�Drugs,� Erskine said sadly. �Curse of our times.�

�Hard drugs?�

�Cocaine. It started after Thomas was born... our son, Tommy. She had a very difficult, very painful pregnancy. Tommy was born Caesarean and there were complications. She couldn�t have another child. The combination of that and the pain... I suppose that�s why she turned to drugs. She seemed to stop caring. Not that she stopped loving Tommy or me, at least not at first. It was a loss of passion, of zest, rather than of love.�

�Her zest for everything, including her painting?�

�Yes. After I found out about the drugs... she never completed another canvas, as far as I know.�

�When was that? That you found out?�

�Tommy was about a year old. I knew something was seriously wrong, but drugs... well, that never occurred to me. She�d never used them before. And she was careful to hide her addiction from me and our friends.�

�How did you discover it?�

�By accident. A packet of cocaine hidden in her studio. I was looking at some of her older canvases, admiring them, and there it was. I confronted her and she admitted she was hooked.�

�And then?�

�I convinced her to enter a rehab center,� Erskine said. �She was there six weeks, but it did no good. She was using cocaine again a week after her release and she no longer bothered to hide the fact. She went downhill rapidly. Neglected Tommy. Began staying out half the night. Then she disappeared for three days. I was frantic, I thought something had happened to her. When she finally did come home... well, she�d been in Taos with a man, another addict. No shame or remorse when she confessed it to me. That was the final straw. I couldn�t keep on forgiving her, watching her destroy herself, colluding in her destruction. For Tommy�s sake I filed for divorce.�

�How did she take it?�

�She didn�t seem to care. Didn�t contest it or my claim for custody of the boy. Drugs and money were all that seemed to matter to her by then. After she moved out of our home she lived in an apartment downtown, near the Plaza. Then, three months later, she disappeared completely.�

�Before the divorce was final?�

�Yes. She already had the settlement we�d agreed on.�

�You let her have it early? The entire amount?�

�She insisted on it and I was afraid not to comply. Afraid she�d do something crazy. I couldn�t stand to see her suffer, even then. In spite of everything, I loved her. Even now, after three years, I still love her. I know that sounds foolish��

�No, Mr. Erskine. Love is pretty hard to kill sometimes.�

�Yes. Yes, it is.�

�How long had she had the settlement when she disappeared?�

�Nearly three months. I gave her the money when the papers were filed.�

�Then what prompted her to leave Santa Fe so suddenly?�

�I don�t know. There was no reason I could find.�

�Just there one day, gone the next?�

�That�s right.�

�Cleaned out her apartment or were her belongings still there?�

�She took some things with her. Not everything.�

�Any idea where she went?�

�To Albuquerque. From there... no.�

�How do you know she went to Albuquerque?�

�I hired a private detective to look for her. I couldn�t bear not knowing if she was all right. He traced her to Albuquerque but lost the trail there.�

�Did she contact you at any time after that?�

�No. Not a word in three years.�

�Your son? A birthday card or present?�

�Nothing,� Erskine said. �I kept hoping. Trying to make myself believe she�d find a way off drugs, turn her life around, and then... if not come back to Tommy and me, at least let me know she was all right. After a year or so... I thought she must be dead. An overdose or something like that.�

�But now you think she�s alive.�

�I don�t think it, I know it. Alive and recovering.�

�What changed your mind?�

�A postcard. A blessed postcard.�

�Sent to you or someone you know?�

�An old friend of Janice�s in Santa Fe. She received it two days ago.�

�Written by your ex-wife?�

�Yes. And postmarked San Francisco.�

�Arrived out of the blue?�

�That�s right.�

�Saying what?�

�I can quote the message verbatim,� he said.�� �I�ll bet you thought you�d never hear from me again. Tell Ira and Tommy I still love them. Tell them I�m okay now and sorry for all the pain I�ve caused them.� �

�That�s all? No indication of where she might be living?�

�No. It could be anywhere in this area.�

�Unless she mailed the card en route to somewhere else.�

�No,� he said, �no, she�s here in northern California. I know it. I can feel it.�

�Why do you suppose she sent the card to the woman friend and not to you?�

�I don�t know. Guilt, maybe.�

�She could be gearing up to send you one, too.�

�It�s possible, but I can�t just wait and do nothing.�

�Are you sure the handwriting on the card is hers?�

�No doubt of it. Janice wrote it, and thank God she did. It couldn�t have come at a more necessary time.�

�Necessary, Mr. Erskine?�

�Because of Tommy. That�s why I�m so desperate to find her, as fast as humanly possible. Because of our son.�

�I don�t understand. Is something wrong with the boy?�

The radiant pain in Erskine�s eyes was so intense I had to look away from it. �He has leukemia. The doctors... they give him no more than a few months to live.�

There is nothing you can say to a statement like that that doesn�t sound lame or inadequate. A simple �I�m sorry� comes closest to being adequate, so I said the words and then we both sat there in heavy silence and waited for enough time to pass so we could get on with the interview. Across the office Tamara was very busy at her Apple PowerBook, pretending not to listen. Ms. Corbin, I thought, I ought to kick you in the pants for letting me get hammered like this.

Erskine finally broke the silence. �They told me a little over a week ago. The boy�d been ill... they gave him a battery of tests... there�s nothing they can do. Janice is his mother, she has a right to know. To see him, be with him before it�s over. Even as terrible a mother as she�s been, I couldn�t deny her that right even if I wanted to. And I don�t want to.�

Nothing much you can say to that either. I kept my mouth shut.

�Funny, isn�t it?� Erskine said, but he was talking to himself, not to me. �The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I�m going to lose Tommy, but maybe...�

False hope, even after three years. I cleared my throat before I said, �Did you bring a photo of your ex-wife, Mr. Erskine?�

�Yes. I brought several.� He took an envelope from his coat pocket, slid it across my desk. �Keep whichever ones you like. I have the negatives.�

There were a dozen or so photographs, a mix of professional studio shots and candid snaps, all in color. Most were head-and-shoulders and full-body poses of a woman alone. One was of her cradling an infant in her arms � the boy Tommy, I supposed. Two others were relative close-ups of oil paintings, one hanging on a wall, the other propped on an easel.

Janice Erskine had been in her mid to late twenties when the photos were taken. She was an ash blonde, slender, narrow-hipped. Eyes green or maybe hazel. Strikingly attractive, though her nose was too flat and her ears too large for the Vogue model and movie star kind of beauty. Her mouth was her best feature: wide, well shaped, so that her smile was fairly dazzling. There were no signs of the ravages of drug abuse in any of the pictures; they�d probably been taken early in their marriage.

�Beautiful, isn�t she?� Erskine said with that near-reverence in his voice. �Back then she was the most stunningly beautiful woman I�d ever seen.�

I said �Yes� and let it go at that. �I take it those are her paintings in the other two snaps?�

He nodded. �I suppose it�s a small hope that she has started painting and displaying her work again. No one in Santa Fe has heard any more of her since she left. But I didn�t want to overlook any possibility.�

I studied the two snaps. He�d said that her style and vision were unique; I don�t know much about art, but even I could see that it hadn�t been just pride talking. Both paintings � one of an old church stark against a sky full of thunder-heads, the other of an age-wrinkled Native American seated on a bench � were so realistic and finely detailed that they approximated photographs. There was no color in either; they were done in primary black, white, and silver, without shading of any kind. The effect was impressive, made even more so by clearly defined lines and angles and the minute detailing.

�Is all of her work like this?� I asked. �No color and no shading?�

�Yes. Janice saw all her subjects in terms of black and white. She said color spoiled the true essence of objects and people. Remarkably talented, wasn�t she?�

I agreed that she was.

He said, �Such a shame, a waste to have thrown it all away,� which was exactly what I was thinking.

�Is there anything else you can tell me, Mr. Erskine, that might help me find her? Did she have any hobbies, for instance?�

�No, no hobbies. Art was her only real interest.�

�Places she frequented, special events she attended?�

�None that weren�t art-related.�

�Did she have a favorite charity? Do any charity work?�

�Museum and gallery fund-raisers. And early in our marriage, she helped organize a Cancer Society benefit.�

�Was she politically active?�

�No. Apolitical.�

�Did she ever live in California? Spend much time here?�

�I don�t think so. She was born in Chicago, grew up there, and moved to Santa Fe when she was nineteen. It was the art scene that drew her.�

�Any visits to this area, with or without you?�

�Not before her fall from grace,� Erskine said. �At least none I ever found out about.�

Fall from grace. Odd phrasing. But he seemed unaware of it; his pained eyes had a squeezed, remote look, as if he were seeing or trying to see something deep in the past. So I let the remark ride, waited until his gaze cleared and focused on me again.

�Did she know anyone, even a casual acquaintance, who lived in northern California?�

�No, no one I know of.�

�Are either or both of her parents still living?�

�Both dead more than ten years now.�

�Other relatives?�

�None. Janice was an only child.�

�What was her maiden name?�

�Durian. D-u-r-i-a-n.�

�Did she start using it again when you filed for divorce? Or was she still going by Erskine when she disappeared?�

He sighed. �Durian,� he said, as if the fact distressed him.

�She may or may not still be using it. Depends on what she�s doing now, whether she�s in fact clean again and how much connection she still feels to her past. The postcard would seem to be a positive sign. Then again, it could�ve been no more than a momentary attack of conscience.�

�I�m afraid that�s all it was,� he said. �If she were thinking of coming back to us, or making amends in some way, I�d have heard from her directly by now. Too much time has gone by... the only way is for me to go to her.�

�And if a meeting should happen? What do you think her reaction will be?�

�Reaction? To me?�

�To the news about your son.�

�She�ll come back then. She has to.�

�Her maternal feelings can�t be particularly strong,� I said, �or she�d have made some effort to see the boy by now. Did she want a child in the first place?�

That seemed to stir him to the edge of anger. �Of course she wanted him. We both wanted a child, our own child.�

�And yet she was an unfit mother��

�I didn�t say that. I said she neglected Tommy. That isn�t the same thing at all. It was the drugs. She wasn�t herself, she wasn�t the same person who... It was the goddamn drugs!�

�Easy, Mr. Erskine. I�m on your side here.�

He stared at me blankly for a few seconds. Then he seemed to shake himself; rubbed a hand over his face as if wiping away the sudden irritation. �I�m sorry,� he said, �it�s just that the way I feel about her, even now...�

�You don�t need to apologize or explain. I understand.�

�Do you? I hope you do.�

�How long are you planning to stay in San Francisco?�

�How long? Until you find Janice.�

�That could take some time, and it might not happen at all. Frankly, given the circumstances of her disappearance, the time factor, and the lack of any definite leads, the odds are against it.�

�You�ll find her,� he said. �You have to.�

�Why wait around while I try? Don�t you want to be with your son?�

�Of course I do. But he�s in the hospital, he has the best of care, there�s nothing I can do...� Erskine broke off, scrubbed his face again. �You�re right. I know you�re right. I should go back to Santa Fe, and I will. But not just yet. A day or two... I�m at the St. Francis. You can reach me there any time, day or night.�

I didn�t argue with him; it wasn�t my place to tell anybody how to deal with the tragedies in their lives. I had him sign one of the standard agency contract forms, accepted a five-hundred-dollar retainer � he insisted on paying with hundred-dollar traveler�s checks � and told him I�d get to work right away. When he left, his shoulders were a little rounded and there was sweat on his neck that hadn�t been there before he opened himself up to me.

After he was gone, Tamara said, �Told you you�d take the job.�

�Yeah. You should�ve told me about his son, too.�

�Better you heard it from him, wasn�t it?�

�Wrong, Ms. Corbin. I don�t like being blindsided, emotionally or any other way. From now on I want any and all details up front.�

�Okay.� She asked then, �What�d you think of the man? Kind of strange, if you ask me.�

�Strange? How so?�

�Seems to care more about his ex-wife, woman who hurt him bad, woman he hasn�t seen in three years, than about his dying kid.�

�He�s torn up inside. Pain has different effects on different people, you know that.�

�I know it. Boy�ll be gone pretty soon and there�s nothing he can do about that, but she�s still alive. So he figures maybe he can talk her into coming back to him, sharing the grief.�

�Seems to be what�s in his head.�

���The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.� Uh-huh.�

�Don�t be cynical. It happens. Probably won�t in this case, even if we can find Janice Durian, but if Erskine believes it and it helps him get through, what�s the harm?�

�No harm, no foul,� Tamara said and shrugged. �But I still think he�s a strange dude.�

Skip-tracing can be easy or it can be difficult as hell, depending on the person you�re trying to find, how much detailed information you have, how long he or she has been missing, and how much effort the individual has put into covering past tracks and/or in building a new life. Three years is a long time, but I�d once located a man who had taken considerable pains to remain hidden under another name for a full decade. And I�d done it, with the aid of a little luck, in less than a week.

The thing is, it�s pretty hard in the society we live in to drop out of sight and keep on functioning without leaving a paper trail. You can change your identity, your means of earning a living, your habits, but unless you become one of the faceless soldiers in the traveling army of the homeless, the new identity still builds a paper trail that can lead straight to your door. In my dinosaur days � a woman at the state board of worker�s compensation had referred to me in those terms, not long ago, when I�d told her I didn�t own or know how to operate a computer � I�d conducted my skip-traces by personal interviews and document searches and by telephone through contacts at various city, state, and federal agencies. Now, thanks to my good sense in hiring Tamara and her hacking skills, I let her handle most of the paper-trailing and then do whatever follow-up legwork is necessary myself. She has instant access to all sorts of information that would have taken me long hours, even days, to gather. As a result, most skip-traces are simpler and faster to manage, with a higher success rate. The same is true with the bulk of my other cases � personal background checks, suspected insurance fraud, adoption searches, that sort of thing. With the two of us working together, we could handle a third more investigations per month than I�d been able to do alone. We could, that is, if we were able to get the work. The competition in the private detection racket, like the competition in so many other businesses these days, is fairly cutthroat, and it�s the big agencies that wield the sharpest knives. Eberhardt wasn�t the only one who�d found that out with a vengeance.

The Janice Durian Erskine trace didn�t look promising in the early stages. No apparent paper trail for Tamara to tap into. No driver�s license, credit cards or credit rating, bank accounts, or Social Security number under the names Janice or J. Durian, Janice or J. Erskine. The American Cancer Society had no record of her. She also had no local, state, or federal record of criminal arrest, nor so much as a parking ticket, under either name. Which was mildly encouraging in one sense. It indicated she might in fact have managed to overcome her drug addiction. On the other hand, it might also have meant that she�d avoided being picked up on a possession rap or for one of the illegal activities, like prostitution, that junkies drift into to support their habits. It was also possible she�d been arrested and charged under a wholly different name, though most individuals have been fingerprinted for one reason or another these days and a computer check would have turned up her true identity.

Tamara and I contacted each of the various drug abuse treatment centers in the Bay Area. Some refused to give out patients� names; the ones that were willing to cooperate when we explained about Tommy Erskine�s terminal leukemia had nothing to tell us.

The postcard indicated Janice Durian Erskine was still alive. But it could�ve been written by somebody else, despite Erskine�s certainty about the handwriting, or penned months or even years ago and just now mailed by someone else for motives of his or her own. So Tamara ran a check on the California death records for the past three years. No listing under either name. Still inconclusive, though. She might have died in another state; and drug addicts often enough perish under circumstances that put them in the morgue as a John or Jane Doe.

Our next step was the art angle. There are dozens of professional arts organizations in San Francisco alone; Tamara and I started with the larger ones � Artwork Marketing and Publishing, Brava for Women in the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Education Foundation � and worked our way down to the small specialty outfits. None of them had ever heard of the subject. Neither had any of the fifteen or so artists� agents operating in the city. That left art galleries, dealers, and consultants, of which there are three full pages in the San Francisco telephone directory; and art schools, art restorers, fine arts artists and commercial artists, which take up another page or so in the directory. And that was just for the city proper. It gave me a headache just thinking about how many more organizations, galleries, schools, and individuals there are in the nine counties that comprise the greater Bay Area, not to mention how many in the entire state of California.

Canvassing the local ones would take days; canvassing them all would take weeks. And Tamara couldn�t do it by computer. We�d have to divvy up the San Francisco listings and call each one, with me doing most of the telephone work because she has a full school schedule on Tuesdays; and chances were the effort would net us zero. If there was no paper trail on Janice Durian Erskine, she was probably using another name and therefore not trading on or even mentioning her past affiliation with the Santa Fe art scene. And she didn�t have to be living in this area if she was living at all; she could be anywhere in California or one of the other forty-nine states or even in another country. And she didn�t have to be working at a job that had anything whatsoever to do with art. Or any legitimate job, if she was still hooked on cocaine.

Anybody who thinks the private eye business is exciting ought to spend a few days sitting in on a problematical skip-trace like this one. They�d be in for a rude awakening. Not to mention a sore head and an even sorer tailbone.

It wasn�t Tamara who got the line on Janice Durian Erskine; it was me. And it wasn�t because the missing woman had begun painting on canvas again, or taken to exhibiting any of her work old or new in a San Francisco gallery. Rather, it was a case of luck and coincidence combined in equal parts � the sort of thing a detective runs into more often than you might think, even on a cold trail, and that can make all the difference between a successful trace and a dead-end one.

The place where I picked up the lead was The Artful Vision, a small but high-class gallery on Pine on the downtown side of Nob Hill. The last one on my list for the day. My watch said a quarter of five when I walked in, and Tamara and I had agreed to meet back at the office at five-thirty to compare notes. I was tired, my feet hurt from all the pavement-pounding and hill-climbing, and I felt put upon and grumpy. In addition to headshakes and verbal negatives, I�d been subjected to down-the-nose sneers and a genteel form of the bum�s rush from more than one overdressed, haughty gallery owner or hired help. One glance was enough to tell these snooty types that I probably couldn�t afford one of the frames in which their paintings hung, let alone the art itself, and therefore I was not there to buy or even to browse discerningly. When I told them my profession, it pushed their noses further out of joint. A private investigator, to that sort of mind, is a cut above a homeless panhandler, and not a prime cut at that.

There was no one in evidence, haughty or otherwise, when I entered The Artful Vision. But a bell tinkled over the door, so somebody was bound to appear pretty soon. While I waited I looked around at the smallish number of artworks on display � a dozen or so paintings, mostly oils and water-colors of various sizes and subject matters, a few ceramic jars and urns and some metal, stone, and marble sculptures on pedestals. The largest of the sculptures, free-standing, looked to my untrained eye like a go-cart that had hit a wall at forty miles an hour. A brass plate on its base said Divinity, which would be enough to scare hell out of you if you thought about it very long. The price, no doubt, would scare hell out of me immediately, though I didn�t need to worry about that; The Artful Vision�s artful vision was such that it did not insult its clientele by the gauche display of a price tag.

I was peering up at a ten-foot-wide canvas composed of asymmetrical triangles interspersed with blobs, smears, and streaks of off-yellow and pale green, trying to decide if I were just a lowbrow or if it really did look as though the artist had upchucked a plate of succotash, when the woman bustled into view from somewhere at the rear. She was in her forties, stylishly dressed and coiffed, wearing a bright professional smile and a hopeful glint in her eye. The smile slipped a little when she got a good look at me, but she didn�t lose it or shift it into a sneer; and the glint also stayed put. I could almost read her mind: I didn�t look like a patron of the arts, but you couldn�t always tell and I might just be one of those eccentric millionaires who take pride in dressing like the common man. You had to keep the faith, after all.

She said, �Hello, I don�t believe we�ve met. I�m Ms. Weissman. That�s lovely, isn�t it?�

�What is? Oh, the painting.�

�Perrault�s most impressive work, a genuine triumph.�

�Very nice.� If you liked secondhand succotash.

�Does it interest you?�

�Actually, I�m not here as a prospective customer.�

Her smile slipped a little more at that, and all but vanished when I showed her the photostat of my investigator�s license and explained that I was trying to locate a missing woman who had once been a successful artist. The glint dulled and finally winked out. What replaced it was neither coldness nor aloofness, but a kind of resigned neutrality. The kind that permits cooperation, but only up to a point.

�If I can help,� she said. �The woman�s name?�

�Janice Durian Erskine.� I let her have the now well-thumbed set of four photos. �The first two are of her, the last two of her work.�

�Her face isn�t familiar.� Then Ms. Weissman frowned and said, �Erskine, did you say?�

�Janice Durian Erskine.�

�You know, that name is familiar...� She shuffled the snaps and studied the likenesses of the old church and the wrinkled Native American patriarch. �Of course. Silver, black, and white. Southwestern subjects. Janice Erskine.�

�You know her?�

�Not her, no. Her work.�

�From where?�

�The Salishan Gallery in Santa Fe. As it happens, I was employed there for several months before I moved to San Francisco.�

�When was that?�

�Almost two years ago. Twenty-two months, to be exact. I sold one of her paintings while I was at the Salishan � a small acrylic of an Indian pueblo in a rainstorm, if I remember correctly. She had such a wonderfully original style. Utter absence of color, you know, in all of her work.�

�So I understand. Were you aware that she dropped out of sight about three years ago?�

�Well, yes, it seems to me I heard something about that. But I don�t recall the details.�

�They�re not important. What is important is that her former husband is eager to locate her because of their young son. The boy is gravely ill.�

�Oh, I�m sorry. But I really haven�t any idea where she is now.�

�There�s a chance it may be the Bay Area, which is why I was hired. Tell me this, Ms. Weissman. Have you seen any of her work since you�ve been out here?�

�Her oils and acrylics? No. No, the only place I�ve ever seen them is at the Salishan.�

The way she phrased that, the question and her inflection, prompted me to ask, �If not oils and acrylics, some other kind of painting that might be hers? Or one that reminded you of her work?�

�Well... yes, as a matter of fact. But not a painting. Not art at all, really.�

�What, then?�

�A wine label.�

�...You said wine label?�

�That�s correct. I know it sounds odd, but my husband and I were at a dinner party several weeks ago and one of the premium wines the hostess served... well, the style of the label reminded me of Janice Erskine�s work. At the time, and even more so now that I�ve looked at these photos.�

�A strong similarity?�

�Yes and no. The label was done in silver, black, and white, with lines and angles sharply defined, as in her oils and acrylics. But there was color in the design as well as in the lettering. Vivid blues and greens.�

�Even so, in your judgment it could�ve been done by Janice Erskine. Is that right?�

�I won�t swear to it, of course, but yes... yes, it could have been.�

�What was the name of the winery?�

�Oh, Lord, I don�t remember.�

�Please try, Ms. Weissman.�

She tried. And, �I�m sorry, I simply can�t remember. Wines... well, I don�t know much about them, I�m afraid. All I can tell you is that it was local.�

�Local? You mean a California wine?�

�Yes. Napa Valley? That may be it. The woman who hosted the dinner party makes a point of never serving any but local wines. Nothing foreign, you know.�

�Would you mind calling her, asking if she can identify the winery?�

She said she wouldn�t mind but she couldn�t; the woman and her husband were away on a Caribbean cruise.

Minor setback. I thanked her for her help and went out with more energy than I�d had when I walked in.

The Alexander Valley is a nearly two-hour drive northeast of San Francisco, some distance above its more famous neighbors, the Napa and Sonoma valleys. Twenty-four miles long, gradually broadening toward its southern end, it lies between the small towns of Cloverdale and Healdsburg. Highway 101 runs along its western perimeter; so does the Russian River, the valley�s main irrigation source, for two-thirds of its length. The most fertile sections are below the hamlet of Geyserville, where the river veers eastward and meanders down the center of the valley. That part is flat, bordered by low, rolling hills whose slopes and clefts are clotted with oak and madrone; the topsoil is so thick and rich, the weather so vineyard-perfect the whole year round, that the cabernet and zinfandel grapes grown there are considered to be among the best in the state.

Until the past decade or so, the Alexander had only a couple of resident wineries. Most of the vineyards were owned by absentee landlords and after harvesting, the grapes were hauled off to wineries located elsewhere. That began to change in the eighties, when northern California underwent its wine-production boom. Dozens of new, small wineries whose emphasis was on quality rather than quantity opened for business, most in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys; but Dry Creek Valley, the Russian River Valley, and the Alexander each got their share of the entrepreneurial newcomers as well. Nearly twenty wineries now operate in the Alexander Valley, the best of them producing what is known in the trade as signature reds that rival any made elsewhere, including the overly aggrandized Napa Valley. Even I had known that before my talk with the wine shop clerk, which is testimony to how far and wide the word has spread.

The Alexander is a little too far north and a little out of the way to attract the volume of visitors from San Francisco and the East Bay cities that Napa and Sonoma do. The resident wineries might not like this fact, but I was all for it; if I were going on a wine-tasting outing I�d want to do it at a leisurely pace, without having to fight traffic and crowds or pay tasting fees or be limited to two or three in the number of types available for tasting at a given winery. In any event, at noon on Thursday the traffic was light all along Alexander Valley Road to its intersection with Highway 128, another two-laner that follows the north-south course of the river. I turned south on 128. Not many cars along there, either. A pleasant, relaxed drive in the country, past vineyards and oak groves, an occasional winery and small cattle ranch.

Silver Creek Cellars was at the southern tip of the valley. A sign at its graded but unpaved entrance lane said that the tasting room was open from ten until four-thirty daily. The winery buildings weren�t visible until you�d gone a hundred yards or so along the lane; then the trees that screened them opened up and I saw two stone structures set some distance apart, the larger one on slightly higher ground. Both were built back into notches cut in the hillside and shaded by live oaks; a section of the creek that had given the place its name ran through the trees to the south. The buildings figured to be no older than Silver Creek Cellars itself, but they were so artfully made that they not only blended into the landscape but looked as though they�d been there half a century or more.

There was only one car in the parking area. I put mine alongside it. Unlike the fogbound city, the day up here was sunny and dry and mostly windless; the air smelled of the oaks and of the rich scent of fermenting grapes. The building higher up was probably a storage warehouse; a guy on a forklift trundled a pallet-load of oak barrels out through a doorway in its side as I crossed to the smaller building.

Inside, the temperature was ten degrees cooler and the dank cellar aroma twice as rich. The tasting room was at the far end of an aisleway between rows of huge oak and stainless-steel vats. A heavy set, red-haired woman in a white smock and a lean man in overalls were bent alongside one of the metal vats � conducting some sort of test on the wine it contained, judging from an open kit full of vials and other apparatus. The woman said, �There�s too much residual sugar, dammit,� and the man answered, �I just don�t see how that�s possible, Gail,� as I passed.

The tasting room was small, filled with stacked cases and racks of bottles on display, the counter L-shaped and taking up most of two walls. Absent were the T-shirts and crest-embossed wineglasses and other tourist items most wineries peddle along with their vintages these days. Limited space may have been the reason, but it might also mean that James Woolfox cared more about making and showcasing premium wines than he did about ringing up a few extra bucks. The bottle of �95 Century Vines Zinfandel last night had been pretty wonderful.

Only two people occupied the stone-walled room, a woman behind the counter and a male customer in the process of buying half a dozen bottles of Chardonnay. I pretended to browse among the racked wines, waiting for the transaction to be completed and the customer to leave. Most of the bottles wore the distinctive silver, black, and white label, but there were a few 1994 vintages that carried a different and inferior label. That told me the new one had been designed sometime in �95, for the �95 bottling.

The man left as I was reading the label description on a bottle of �94 Sauvignon Blanc, which some neo Bulwer-Lytton had rhapsodized as being �ripe, soft, plump, a passionate delight to the tongue.� Wine people get downright orgasmic about their product at times, as if you ought to be making love to it instead of drinking it.

When I stepped up to the counter, the woman � taffy blond about forty � greeted me with a bright smile and said, �Welcome to Silver Creek Cellars� as if she meant it. She gestured to a blackboard on which half a dozen whites and reds were listed. �Our current selections. Would you care to start with our Reisling?�

I explained that I wasn�t there to taste and asked if James Woolfox was on the premises. No, he wasn�t. �You�re a day early,� she said.

�Early?�

�He�s still in Los Angeles. Due back tonight. Is it business or�?�

�Not exactly. As a matter of fact, you may be able to help me.� I tapped one of the bottles in the service well. �I�m looking for some information about this label.�

�...Our merlot?�

�No, the label itself. Can you tell me who designed it?�

�Why, yes. Sondra Nelson. It�s wonderful, isn�t it?�

�That it is. Is Sondra Nelson a local artist?�

�She isn�t an artist. Well, not professionally.�

�That sounds as though you know her.�

�I ought to. She works here.� The woman smiled again and added, �But not for long. At least not full-time.�

�Oh? Why is that?�

�She and Mr. Woolfox are getting married.�

�Is that right? Good for them.�

�In July. They�ve been engaged nearly a year.�

�You seem pleased about it.�

�Oh, I am. Sandy�s a nice person, and Mr. Woolfox... do you know him at all?�

�I haven�t had the pleasure.�

�Well, he�s quite a catch. In every way.�

�How long has Ms. Nelson been employed here?� I asked.

�Let�s see... she came about six months after we opened.�

�About two and a half years, then.�

�Closer to three, actually.�

�Did she know Mr. Woolfox before that?�

�No. He hired her through a newspaper ad.�

�What sort of work?�

�Back then? Same as my job � tasting-room hostess.�

�What does she do now?�

�Mr. Woolfox calls her our woman-of-all-trades. You know, PR work, advertising, special-events planning.�

�Is she here today?�

�No, she went to Los Angeles with Mr. Woolfox. Why are you so interested in Sandy?�

�I think she may be a woman I�ve been trying to locate.�

�Locate? Why?�

�Has to do with her past life.�

�Oh, God, you mean something bad�?�

�Nothing like that, no. It involves a child from a former marriage.�

�...I didn�t know Sandy was married before. Or that she had a child.�

�Not one to talk about her past?�

�Not much. Hardly at all.�

I handed her the photos of Janice Erskine. �Is this Sondra Nelson?�

Pretty soon she said, �Well... Sandy has dark hair. Short and curly.�

�Facial resemblance?�

�I suppose so. Yes. How old are these pictures?�

�Four or five years.�

�Sandy�s about thirty, so that seems right...�

�Try to imagine this woman with short, curly, dark hair. Or Ms. Nelson with long, ash-blond hair. The same person?�

It took her another fifteen seconds to decide, but when she did she sounded positive enough. �Yes. That�s Sandy.�

�And you say she and Mr. Woolfox are due back tonight?�

�That�s right. Originally they were going to stay until next week, but Sandy has jury duty starting Monday.�

�Will she be here at the winery tomorrow?�

�As far as I know she will. Are you coming back to see her?�

�Probably not.�

�Should I tell her you were here?�

�Not necessary. Someone she knows will contact her.�

�Are you sure it�s nothing that will hurt her or Mr. Wool-fox? They�re so much in love...�

�It won�t affect her relationship with him,� I said, and hoped I was right. If Sondra Nelson was Janice Erskine, then it seemed she had in fact kicked her drug habit and built a clean new life for herself here. She deserved as much happiness as she could find after she faced the imminent loss of her son.

Outside again, I noticed that the workman on the forklift was still bringing oak barrels out of the warehouse. By the time I walked up there, he and the lift were back inside. I waited until he reappeared with another load and set it down alongside the others, then approached him.

�Excuse me. Talk to you for a minute?�

He was a fortyish, burly guy wearing Levi�s and a white T-shirt with purple lettering across the front: �I Heard It Through the Grapevine.� He looked me over, shrugged, and switched off the lift�s engine.

�What can I do you for?�

�I�ve got a couple of photographs here. Mind taking a look at them and telling me if you recognize the woman?�

�Woman, huh? What kind of photos?�

�One portrait, one snapshot.�

�So she�s got her clothes on? Too bad.� He laughed at his own wit. �Okay, let�s see �em.�

I passed them over. He took a good look at one, a shorter look at the other. �Sure,� he said, �that�s Sandy. Sandy Nelson. Boss�s fianc�e.� He pronounced it �fee-ahn-cee.�

�You�re sure?�

�Positive. Hair�s different now, brown and curly, but that�s Sandy.� He favored me with a man-to-man grin. �I oughta know. I�m her best friend�s main man.�

So. She�d designed the label, all the dates seemed to check out, and now I had double corroboration on a photographic ID. Good enough for me. I could go to my client with reasonable assurance that I�d earned my fee and leave the rest of it up to him.

I spent the evening alone in my flat, going through Eberhardt�s paper files. It was cheerless work, as much for what they told me about his deteriorating mental state as for the cold, bleak facts they contained. When I was done I had a pretty good idea of the shape and substance of his professional life over the past four years, and of how it had contributed to his suicide. But with the exception of a couple of small question marks that may or may not have had any significance, I could find nothing past or present that pointed to the trigger.

He�d never been a very conscientious report-maker or record-keeper; during our partnership days, all his paperwork � client reports, expense accountings, research data � tended to be sloppily organized and incomplete. But in the first year or so of Eberhardt Investigative Services he�d made an obvious effort to be more painstaking. You could see a kind of stolid enthusiasm in his early transcripts and correspondence, his detailed financial records. I�d speculated once that opening his own agency was his way of taking charge of what remained of his life, recapturing both his dignity and a self-worth that had been badly eroded by a combination of factors, among them a dependance on me and an inability to forgive himself for the one huge mistake that had ended his police career. Those first-year documents intimated that I�d pretty much been right. He�d tried the best way he knew how to make a success of his new venture. Taken a strictly professional approach in everything he did, to the point of buying and learning to use a computer.

And still he�d failed. Not immediately, but inevitably. The fault wasn�t his; the fault was competition, the stack of problems faced by every small businessman just starting out, the tenor of the times. There�d been a small flurry of activity in the beginning � friends and associates like Barney Rivera tossing bones to help him out. He�d done the work capably enough, but even when you build a string of repeat clients, as I had over a quarter of a century as an independent contractor, jobs are often sporadic. The big agencies, the ones with manpower and financial backing and technological know-how, get the cream; the rest of us have to scramble for the leavings. Eberhardt couldn�t compete. I�d gotten work that might have gone to him, even though he knew the clients as well as I did, because of my experience and success rate; the same was true of other established contractors. He�d got through the first year and a half all right, mostly on handouts, low-end divorce work, and one profitable three-week stint as an investigator for the defense in a felony trial. Even so, there were two stretches of more than two weeks each when he hadn�t worked at all, and his total gross income for the first five and a half months was only $13,800, the first full year just $23,000 and change.

His second full year he�d had a quarter fewer jobs and made six thousand less than the first. The third year: $9,987.00. And for the first four months of this year: $1,150.00.

The quality and quantity of his record-keeping reflected the downward spiral. The stolid enthusiasm disappeared after fifteen months or so; the reports grew thinner, less detailed, and if it was plain enough to me that he�d begun expending less effort on the skip-traces and insurance claims and divorce work, it had to�ve been just as plain to the clients. The professionalism had crumbled in other ways, too. By the beginning of last year he was cutting corners. There were indications that he overbilled on the number of hours it took him to finish a job. And I was pretty sure in two cases, both new corporate clients, that he�d done some expense-account padding � and none too creatively, since neither of the clients brought him repeat business.

This year, from January first to the last week in April, he�d had just three jobs: a personal background check, a Great Western claims investigation that he�d done a poor job on, and the liquor distributor�s theft stakeout. The first two had taken him eight days total, and he�d spent five days and nights on the O�Hanlon Brothers job. Thirteen days of work in four months. And the rest of the time? Drinking, brooding, building his own private gallows day by day, board by board. No clients, no prospects, no money. He�d never been much of a saver; as far as I knew, he�d had no more than a few thousand in the bank when he busted up our relationship. Most of that would�ve been spent in setting up his agency and the rest would�ve disappeared by the second year. The bank statements on his business account showed a balance at the end of last month of $36.18; they also showed periodic charges for overdrawn checks, nearly a dozen of them, and over the past eighteen months more than a dozen small deposits of between $100 and $300. So he and Bobbie Jean had been living on her salary at least that long and probably longer, and she�d also been feeding him enough cash so he could keep his office rent and utilities and other expenses more or less current. And her job at a San Rafael real estate brokerage company couldn�t have brought in much more than $35,000 a year gross. The Elizabeth Street house was paid for, but city property taxes are high and so are utilities; they must�ve been just squeaking by. More blows to Eberhardt�s pride. Another few boards for the gallows.

I took a close look at the three jobs he�d had this year. An item in the CURRENT file flagged my attention: one of the sheets of stationery headed �O�Hanlon Bros., Distributors� contained a list of eleven names and addresses. Employees or former employees of the firm? Possible suspects in the liquor thefts? A single name on the list had been heavily circled in felt-tip pen: Danny Forbes, with an address on Silliman Street in the Portola district. The circled name interested me enough to pull the sheet and set it aside.

Eberhardt�s appointment calendar had no notations for the week before his death and only one for last week. That one was for the day prior, his last full day on this earth: Disney, 2:00, Tues. The name was unfamiliar and I couldn�t find it in his address book.

The book had about twenty-five entries, a couple of which were scratched out � one, a bail bondsman I�d worked for a few times, with such apparent anger that the pen he�d used had ripped through the paper. Only five of the names were unknown to me, all of which appeared to be businesses of one kind and another. But he hadn�t dealt with any of them recently, judging from his phone bills and copies of his correspondence.

The most recent phone bills were among the handful of envelopes I�d lifted from the mailbox. No long-distance or toll calls from his office number; whatever calls he�d made from there had been local and Pac Bell doesn�t list those on its statements. The other bill was from Cellular One, which does list all outgoing cell phone calls. Why Eberhardt had continued to pay high mobile-phone rates, when he and Bobbie Jean were living hand to mouth, escaped me � unless a cell phone had been some sort of symbol to him, an independence lifeline that hadn�t done him a bit of good. He�d given up his life before he�d given up his portable phone. In any event, that bill listed a total of six outgoing calls over the ten days prior to his death: the first and last to his home number, the one to my office, one to Barney Rivera at Great Western, one that I matched to O�Hanlon Brothers, and one that I was unable to match to any in his address book or elsewhere. That one had been made at 1:07 last Tuesday afternoon, and had lasted a minute or less. A connection to the two o�clock appointment with Disney, whoever Disney was? I wrote the name and number down in my notebook.

Finished, I sat looking at all the papers piled on my desk and on the living-room floor. Nearly four years of a man�s professional life, and every damn bit of it would go into the trash. Not a single scrap of paper worth saving. And all I knew now that I hadn�t known when I started was that Eberhardt�s four-year descent had been a little worse than I�d originally believed. He hadn�t just been a despondent drunk; he�d turned into a careless and pettily deceitful drunk. If he�d set out to recapture his dignity and self-worth, he�d wound up trampling on what was left of both.

Sad, pathetic. And one more piece of proof that the real Eberhardt had been hidden from me all along, that the one I�d called my friend for thirty-some years had been shadow and silhouette, sham and mirage.

Elizabeth Street, climbing one of the hillsides in the upper reaches of Noe Valley, is old residential San Francisco � quiet, middle-class, single-family houses on good-size lots and the neighborhood not much changed since Eberhardt and Dana bought their house shortly after they were married forty years ago. It was a large two-story frame with an open front yard and an attached garage � the one joint possession he�d insisted on keeping as part of the divorce settlement. Until four years ago he�d maintained the property well enough, but he seemed not to have bothered much since. Its green-and-brown paint job was flaked and peeling, one of the porch railings had been broken and left unrepaired, weeds and untrimmed shrubbery made a jungly nest of the yard.

�My God,� Kerry said when we drove up in front late Saturday morning, and I said, �Yeah, but I�m not surprised.� Neither of us had been by here since the estrangement.

Kerry hadn�t wanted to come with me. It had taken part of the morning to wear down her resistance, convince her that misery needs if not loves company. After all, I�d reminded her, she was the one who�d caved in first to Bobbie Jean and committed herself to the task of sifting and sorting right along with me. I may not know my wife as well as she knows me, but if I work at it I can usually push the right buttons and get her to agree to just about anything within reason.

We�d brought cardboard cartons with us; I hauled four out of the trunk and up onto the porch. The mailbox was stuffed full, and a number of magazines, catalogues, and oversize pieces of junk mail were strewn on the floor underneath. Bills, more junk, a letter to Bobbie Jean from somebody in South Carolina. I put all of it into one of the cartons while Kerry unlocked the door.

The place looked better inside, more or less the way I remembered it. Bobbie Jean�s domain and she�d always been a tidy housekeeper. Shadows filled the living room, but I could make out the shapes of the old familiar furniture, the big fireplace, the wall hangings. But what I stood staring at was the section of carpet stretching from the hallway into the living room. Less than ten years old, this carpet. The original, the one I was seeing in my mind�s eye, had been replaced on account of the bloodstains � blotches and smears that had soaked into the wool nap and couldn�t be eradicated. Little prickles of cold moved along my back. So much blood...

Sunday afternoon in August, nine years ago, not long after Dana left him for her Stanford professor. Eberhardt and me in the backyard drinking beer, commiserating while we wait for the coals in the barbecue to whiten. We step inside to open two more cans, ready the steaks, and the doorbell rings and he goes to answer it. I hear his voice exclaim, �What the hell�� and then the two gunshots, and I run in there and he�s down and the shooter is framed in the doorway with the smoking gun in his hand; and before I can react he pops me once, high in the chest, and I�m down, too, and he�s gone and I crawl around in my own blood until I reach Eberhardt, see the hole in his belly and the wound on the side of his head, and I think he�s dead, I think I must be dying, too...

The memory was so painfully sharp it might have happened a week or two ago instead of nine long years. The shooter, a hired gun, had been after Eberhardt and I�d gotten caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all because the honest, crook-hating cop had slipped and taken a bribe. And when he�d tried to back out, the man who had corrupted him had made him a target. The bribe nearly cost both of us our lives. It had cost Eberhardt his career. Not because the department found out about it, but because I did; and when I confronted him he�d seemed unable to forgive himself for what he�d done. If he had opted to sweep the whole thing under the rug I might have let him get away with it, but it would have ended our friendship and he didn�t want that on his conscience, too, he said. But he also hadn�t wanted to lose his pension, so he�d compromised by taking the early retirement. The easy way out for both of us. A man shouldn�t have to be punished for the rest of his life for one mistake, should he? An honest man, a good cop, a friend?

I never took anything in thirty years � not a nickel, not even a cup of coffee. His words to me in the hospital, after the shooter and the one who�d hired him had gotten what was coming to them. Tempted a couple of times; who doesn�t get tempted? But I never gave in. I didn�t think it was in me to give in... But things happen. Some things you prepare for, like you get old and tired. Some things you don�t prepare for, because you figure they can�t happen. Like your wife walking out on you, taking up with some other guy. Taking the guts right out of your life. You say to yourself: I got to hang on, it�ll all work out. So you hang on. What the hell else can you do? But then maybe you get tempted again, one day right out of the blue. Not small potatoes this time, a whole goddamn feast. And all you got to do is look the other way on something nobody gives a damn about anyway. You get mad, you say no at first � but maybe you keep on listening. And maybe you break open inside and for a little while you stop caring. And maybe the no turns to yes.

I�d thought I understood, and so I�d been the one to forgive, but now I wasn�t so sure. Could be he�d stopped caring for good back then. And some or all of what he�d said to me had been lies or bullshit. Could be he�d been jerking me around, playing me so I�d do just what I did � let him off the hook, take him in as a partner, teach him the ropes and carry him until he didn�t need me anymore. One thing for sure: I couldn�t forgive him again, for what he�d done to himself and to Bobbie Jean�

�Hey, are you okay?� Kerry�s voice in my ear, and a nudge to go with it. She�d turned on the lights; the shadows were gone. Her face, close to mine, showed concern.

�Yeah. Little trip down memory lane, that�s all.�

�Bad trip, from your expression. The time you and Eb were shot?�

I nodded. �Faster we get done and out of here, the better I�ll like it.�

�Where do you want to start?�

�Upstairs. I�ll take his study, you do the bedroom.�

We climbed the creaky staircase, went separate ways at the top. The last door on the left had originally led to a third bedroom; he�d converted it into a study for himself. More shadows, and the faint, stale residue of the lousy pipe tobacco he�d smoked. I opened the curtains partway to let it daylight. Everything in there was as I remembered it, too. Desk, sideboard, Naugahyde couch, overstuffed chair, bookcase with some out-of-date police manuals and a few other books stuffed into it, an electric Olympia beer sign on one wall. The framed photograph of our Police Academy graduating class was missing; so was his model train layout. Took the photo down because I was in it, maybe. Got rid of the model train because he�d lost interest in it, just as he�d lost interest in everything else that had once mattered to him.

At first it seemed that he hadn�t spent much time in here recently. The desktop was bare except for a telephone and a rack of pipes, and thin layers of dust had settled throughout. But then I saw that the ashtray on the chair arm was full of dottle, that a dirty glass and a nearly empty fifth of Four Roses were on the sideboard. And over near the chair you could still smell the bourbon that had slopped onto the carpet. He�d spent time in here, all right, the same as always. Sitting and smoking and swilling cheap whiskey. He�d called this room his sanctuary; Dana hadn�t been allowed in and Bobbie Jean probably hadn�t been, either. In the last year or so the sanctuary had turned into a drunkard�s crib.

I knelt in front of the sideboard. His safe was built into the bottom, concealed by a sliding panel. Small, just large enough to hold documents and a few valuables. I removed a full bottle of Four Roses and some extra glasses, slid the panel aside to expose the dial. He�d given me the combination long ago, �in case of emergency,� and I�d written it down in an old address book that I�d dug out last night. I wouldn�t have been surprised if he had changed the combination, but it was still the same. So were some of the contents I�d seen the one other time I�d opened it. A small jewelry case that contained his wedding ring; his marriage license and final divorce decree; two insurance policies, both lapsed. None of it seemed to have been touched in a long time. Nine years ago the safe had also held his bribe � one thousand shares of stock in an electronics outfit that could have eventually been worth as much as six figures if the company had prospered � and fifteen hundred dollars in U.S. savings bonds, a bank savings passbook, and an envelope with a small amount of cash. All that was gone now. Long gone.

The desk next. In addition to a welter of canceled checks, paid bills, and other household records, all more than sixteen months old, I found his checkbook and current check register. The register contained two puzzling entries. On the Tuesday before his death he had made a deposit of five hundred dollars to his account; and he had also written a check in the exact same amount to an unspecified payee, just the date and amount noted. The deposit receipt was tucked in there and it told me the five hundred had all been in cash. Where had he had gotten that much in one lump? And who had been the recipient?

I put the checkbook and register in my pocket, then emptied the drawer into one of the cardboard cartons and added the contents of the safe. Bobbie Jean wouldn�t want any of it, but I saw no reason to leave it for the Hoyts to deal with.

Carrying the box, I went down to the master bedroom. Kerry was coming out of the walk-in closet with a plastic-draped sport coat on a hanger. A few other articles of clothing were laid out on the bed. When she saw me she said, �This coat and those things there are brand-new, never worn. Presents, I suppose. Bobbie Jean can have them sold in a consignment shop if she needs the money. Otherwise... Well, I thought I�d separate them out anyway.�

�Anything else?�

�His jewelry case. Cufflinks, tie tacks, a gold chain, half a dozen silver dollars, and some other old coins.�

�That all?�

�In the case? Yes.�

�You know what I mean.�

�I�d�ve told you if there was.�

I left her to finish up in there and wandered downstairs. In the living room was another desk, the small kind with a hinged flap that folds up when you�re not using it. The more current household records were in there, all the checks written in Bobbie Jean�s spidery hand. Eberhardt had always done his own bill-paying; the fact that Bobbie Jean had taken over sixteen months ago meant that he�d either lost interest or fouled up the accounts as a result of his drinking. Without going through any of the papers, I dumped them all in with the stuff from upstairs and then set the box in the hallway.

There was nothing else worth bothering with in the living room. I went into the kitchen. More unpleasant memories: My last visit four years ago, after Eberhardt called off his planned marriage to Bobbie Jean. He�d been hung over that day, his eyes looking as though he were bleeding internally; out boozing the night before, wallowing in self-pity. I�d flung angry words at him about that and about driving drunk, and they�d escalated into an attack on his careless work habits. I�ve spent half my time either doing your work or covering your ass... When are you going to grow up, accept responsibility? We were here in the kitchen then, him sucking down orange juice for his hangover thirst. And he�d flung angry words back at me. You come into my house and dump shit all over me, now it�s my turn. Hard to get along with... reckless as hell... self-righteous pain in the ass... Standing nose-to-nose, trading insults, and I�d lost my temper and shoved him, and he�d bull-rushed me, and my unthinking reaction was to hit him. Sucker-punch in the gut, not pulling it, putting him on the floor and then afterward into the bathroom to vomit. Kid stuff; I�d regretted it instantly, tried in vain to smooth it over. Hurt pride, fuel for the grudge he�d never stopped nursing. But our friendship and our partnership had been dead for him long before that. If it hadn�t been for that stupid punch in the belly, he�d have found some other excuse to walk.

Same thing last Wednesday morning, I thought. Ready to go out, and all he�d needed was a final excuse.

I didn�t linger in the kitchen, the hell with it. I shoved through the connecting door into the garage. Years ago he�d turned it into a home workshop, cramming it so full of woodworking equipment he�d had to park his car and Bobbie Jean hers in the driveway or on the street. Another of his lost interests: dust everywhere, rust on the blade teeth on his table saw and band saw, a half-finished table so long abandoned the wood showed cracks and mildew stains under its dust shroud. Maybe Joe DeFalco could use some of this stuff; he collected and restored antique gambling equipment, his one passion other than newspaper work, and he had a workshop of his own. I made a mental note to ask him next time we talked.

Against the rear wall was a storage area. Most of what was there was junk, but among the litter was the metal locker in which he�d kept his fishing gear. It was all still there gathering dust and cobwebs: spinning rods and fly rods, including the Dennis Bailey parabolic bamboo rod that had been his favorite; reels and hip boots and the beat-up rattan creel he�d had since he was a kid; tackle box and the two big fly cases. I opened one fly case, then the other. Nymphs, streamers, dry flies, wet flies. Bugs with names like Bitch Creek Special and Gray Fox Variant. Dozens of top-quality lures, among them two I�d always admired � a #8 Jay-Dave Hopper and a #12 Hairwing Coachman for better visibility in heavy water. I hesitated, looking at the flies. Take them along? At least the Hopper and the Coachman... maybe the Bailey fly rod, too? It would be a shame to let them go to Goodwill and some fisherman who might not appreciate them. But did I want even this much of a reminder of him, the fishing trips we�d taken together to Black Point and the Sierras, the good times before the bad?

No, I thought, no. I don�t want anything of his. Not a goddamn thing.

I shut the locker, went back inside the kitchen. Kerry had come down and was halfheartedly poking around in there. She shook her head; I shook mine. Her expression said she was already fed up with this morbid bone-picking and couldn�t we for God�s sake hurry it up and go home?

We hurried. Another forty-five minutes and we were through with the rest of the rooms and all the closets. And what we had separated out, including the articles of clothing from the bedroom, fit into just three cartons. So damn little worth saving, and at that, some if not most of what we were carrying away � the household records, for one thing � would eventually be discarded or given away to strangers.

A man lives sixty years and this is all he leaves behind in the way of worthwhile material possessions. This little pile, along with memories good and bad in those he touched, is the sum total of his existence.

We took the stuff out and loaded it into the car and I returned to the porch to lock up. I had the key out and ready when I changed my mind. There was no thought involved; it was impulse, or maybe a sudden compulsion. I called to Kerry, �Hold on a minute, I�ll be right back,� and hurried inside and through the kitchen into the garage. I emptied the storage locker of everything except the wading boots and tackle box and spinning rods and reels. Loaded myself down with the rest so I wouldn�t have to make a second trip and brought it out to the car.

Kerry didn�t say anything; neither did I. There are some actions that don�t need words. Or rationalization or justification, either.

Pam and Cliff Hoyt lived in Ross, one of the more affluent Marin County communities. Their house was a neo-Victorian with a half-wraparound front porch, shaded by conifers and spiky yew trees and one enormous magnolia in the middle of the lawn. A basketball hoop and net above the double garage doors pointed up the fact that they had a son. He was nine now and his name was Jason; he was Bobbie Jean�s only grandchild.

All three Hoyts came out to greet Kerry and me when we arrived at two on Sunday afternoon. I was of two minds about being there; I wanted to talk to Bobbie Jean but I didn�t really want to see again what Eberhardt had done to her. The visit had been Kerry�s idea, the first stop of a two-part Sunday outing. Bobbie Jean and the Hoyts first, then a short drive south and some socializing and an early dinner with Kerry�s mother, Cybil, at her seniors� complex in Larkspur. I�d let her talk me into it without much protest, as a payback for her accompanying me to Elizabeth Street yesterday. An hour or so with Bobbie Jean and her family was something to get through, but I liked Cybil now that she was independent and writing fiction again after a forty-year hiatus. She�d finished one novel and was into another, and it looked as though the first would be bought by one of the better New York publishers. The Eberhardts of the world make life seem bleak and futile; the Cybils are beacons of light, symbols of hope.

Cliff shook my hand and said again, as he had to Kerry on the phone, that he was glad we�d decided to stop by and that Bobbie Jean was eager to see us. His cheerfulness had a hollow ring. And Pam�s smile was wan and thin, like one of those happy faces crookedly pasted on. Even Jason seemed subdued. All of which pretty much told me what to expect as we trooped in to where Bobbie Jean was waiting in what Pam called the sun room.

She was sitting in a lounge chair, an afghan tucked around her legs and a sweater over her shoulders despite the sun streaming in through tall rear windows. She didn�t look any worse than she had at the funeral, but she didn�t look any better, either. Drawn and tired-eyed, pain lines puckering the corners of her mouth, the flesh loose and wrinkled on her neck and under her chin. She�d put on rouge and lipstick, but it only called attention to the sickly pallor of her skin. The lingering impression I had was of an elderly hospital patient, propped and primped for the coming of callers.

But Kerry and I had our own masks on; we pretended she looked fine, made meaningless small talk designed to lift her spirits. I handed her the nonjunk mail I�d collected from the house yesterday; she barely glanced at it. I told her we�d pretty much finished going through both house and office, had separated out a few things we thought she might want. They were in the car, Kerry said � would she like us to bring them in? No, not now. When we do give them to her, I thought, she won�t want a single item. Wouldn�t weaken as I had with the fishing gear. The part of her life that had included Eberhardt was as dead to her as he was, and understandably so. He�d hurt her far worse than any of us.

So then everyone except Jason sat around and drank coffee and didn�t eat the carrot cake Pam had set out and made more small talk for forty interminable minutes. Eberhardt was such a presence in the room, though none of us mentioned his name, that his shade might have been sitting on one of the empty chairs, leaking ghost blood from the gaping wounds in his chest and back. I stood it as long as I could, finally got up and made excuses that were met with token protests from the Hoyts, silence from Bobbie Jean.

We were all on our feet except her when I said, �Bobbie Jean, I�d like to ask you a few questions before we leave.�

�Questions?�

�Some things that turned up that puzzle me.�

Faint smile. �Always the detective. Go ahead.�

�Last Tuesday Eb deposited five hundred dollars in cash in his checking account. Do you have any idea where he got the money?�

�...No. Five hundred dollars? Are you sure?�

�Deposit slip in his checkbook. He also wrote a check to somebody that same day for the same amount. No payee�s name in the register. It wasn�t to you?�

�No. I wrote him checks, not the other way around.�

�That makes it even odder. Five hundred in cash is a lot of money, and for him to be writing a check for that much the day before he... Well, you see why it�s bothersome.�

She nodded. �I suppose it could have something to do with that liquor warehouse business.�

�It�s possible. Did he talk to you about the job he was doing for the O�Hanlon brothers?�

�No. He never said much about his work.� She sighed, shifted position in the slow, careful way of people whose joints ache from arthritis. �If you want me to, I�ll call the bank in the morning, find out if the check�s been cashed.�

�I�d appreciate it, Bobbie Jean. Just one more thing. Did you know Eb was seeing a psychologist, a man named Disney?�

Surprise flickered in her eyes, vanished and left them dull again. She said in a matching tone, �No, I didn�t know that.�

�There was a notation on his appointment calendar � two P.M. last Tuesday.�

�He was a busy bee Tuesday, wasn�t he.� Still the dull voice, but bitterness was implicit in the words. �Have you spoken to the psychologist yet?�

�No, but I will.�

�What can he tell you that you don�t already know? He didn�t do Eb any good, did he? Nobody could do him any good, least of all me. When a man wants to die as badly as he did, there�s no way to change his mind. He�s better off dead.�

Pam said, �Mother...�

�It�s the truth, dear. He�s better off, I�m better off, you all are better off. He wanted to die and he�s dead and that�s the end of it.�

Not as simple as that, Bobbie Jean, I thought. If it was, you�d be in far better shape right now. We�d all be in better shape, skipping right along with our lives. And none of us is.

But I kept all of that to myself. Yielded to Kerry�s warning glance and tendered my good-byes. Each of us kissed Bobbie Jean�s cheek, and out we went with Cliff for company. Pam stayed with her mother.

Outside Cliff said, �I wish you hadn�t asked all those questions. It still doesn�t take much to upset her.�

�I didn�t mean for that to happen.�

�I know you didn�t, but good Lord, what importance can Eberhardt�s actions his last few days possibly have?�

�None to anyone but me, I guess.�

�That sounds as though you intend to keep investigating.�

�For a while.�

�Well, then, talk to Richard Disney or anyone but Bobbie Jean.�

I said I wouldn�t bother her anymore. I didn�t add that I meant after she called the bank about that five-hundred-dollar check.

I cooperated fully with Sheriff�s Lieutenant Battle. It would have been foolish to do otherwise even if Ira Erskine was still among the living; cooperation with police agencies is vital to a private investigator if he wants to maintain friendly relations and avoid any official complaints to the State Board of Licenses. I gave him a quick rundown of Erskine�s reasons for hiring me and the results of my investigation, and offered to fax him a copy of my report; he said that might be helpful and provided their fax number. Whatever Erskine had done with his copy of the report, it hadn�t been among his effects in the motel room or in his rental car. What had been found that led Battle to me was my business card, tucked inside Erskine�s folder of traveler�s checks.

Even after the lieutenant rang off, I had some difficulty coming to terms with Erskine�s sudden death. I hadn�t liked him much, but I had empathized with his problems, and for him to die the way he had was a bitter nut to swallow. Cleaning a .38 Police Special with a round in firing position... stupid as hell. But it happens more often than you might think, and the fact that a cleaning woman and two guests had heard the shot and within minutes found the body locked inside the ground-floor room seemed to support an accidental-shooting explanation. What gnawed at me was that Erskine had had the weapon in the first place. Why bring it with him from Santa Fe? Or if he�d gotten hold of it out here somehow, that made the situation even odder. Had he had some screwball idea of trying to force his ex-wife into returning to New Mexico with him? A man as in love with an ideal as he�d been was capable of something like that. Yet if she was any kind of human being, with even a shred of compassion or maternal feeling left in her, she�d have gone willingly to be with their dying son. From the impression of Sondra Nelson I�d been given by the hostess at Silver Creek Cellars, she was anything but cold-hearted.

Still... I�d told Erskine where to find her late Thursday afternoon. He�d had three full days to contact her, tell her about the boy. So why had he still been at a Healdsburg motel this morning unless she�d turned him down flat? And not just hanging around there, waiting, but cleaning that .38 Police Special?

Strange dude, Tamara had called him. No argument there. Well, maybe the .38 hadn�t had any direct connection to his reunion with his ex-wife. Maybe he�d been one of these paranoid gun nuts who see menace lurking everywhere they go and can�t travel ten miles without packing heat for protection. And San Francisco, after all, as everybody east of Reno knows to be gospel fact, is a wicked, wicked city.

I asked Tamara to fax a copy of the Erskine report to Lieutenant Battle, and while she did that she offered her take on the situation. Which was suicide. Sondra Nelson had blown him off; refused to go back to Santa Fe to be with their son, given him no hope of reconciliation. And he�d been �whacked out� enough to take himself out. I said I didn�t buy it, but that was because I�d had enough of people ending their own lives with handguns; I didn�t want to deal with the issue even in theory. It was possible, though. At this stage anything was possible.

Ira Erskine was dead, that was all anybody knew for sure. And his son was still dying alone back in Santa Fe. Sondra Nelson�s past had caught up with her with a vengeance. Yes, and I was more than a little responsible.

Feelings of guilt began to build in me, to the point where I considered contacting her and expressing my regrets. But I didn�t give in to the urge; I was the last person she�d want to talk to, now or ever. In a few days I could call Battle, get a follow-up on Erskine�s death and find out what Sondra Nelson�s plans were regarding her son. Otherwise I was out of a tragic and difficult situation and I�d be smart to keep it that way.

Clouds were forming a low, dark overcast and there was a sharp ground-hugging wind when I reached the junction of Alexander Valley Road and Highway 128. It was only two-thirty but shadows were already long in the folds and hollows of the hills, among the thicker stands of oaks that flanked 128. Rain later on, I thought. Maybe even a good-size storm. I could smell the ozone in the air even with the windows tightly shut.

The public parking area at Silver Creek Cellars was deserted. For the most part, wine-tasting is a fair-weather, weekend pursuit. The tasting room was still open, though; small wineries can�t afford to pander to the vagaries of weather or to make blanket assumptions about human nature. I parked as close as I could to the smaller stone building and let the wind hurry me inside.

The tasting room had two occupants, the blond hostess I�d talked to last Thursday and the heavyset, red-haired woman who�d complained about too much residual sugar in one of the fermenting vats. They were having a conversation in a small office behind the counter. The blonde noticed me as I entered, came out smiling and saying �Welcome to�� Recognition put an abrupt end to both the greeting and the smile. �Oh,� she said in chilly tones, �it�s you again. The liar.�

�Me again.�

�You have a lot of nerve coming back here.�

�I know it. Is Sondra Nelson��

�I�m not going to talk to you,� she said, �not after what you did, the way you lied to me. Why don�t you go away? You�re not wanted at Silver Creek.�

�Look, miss��

�What�s going on, Paula?� That from the redhead, standing in the office doorway. She moved forward to join the other woman and I had my first good look at Gail Kendall. A nametag pinned above the pocket of her white smock read �Gail,� so I assumed that was who she was. Late thirties, solid and big-boned rather than overweight, with a wedge-shaped chin and a generous mouth. Homely, but in an appealing way. The old saw about opposites attracting sometimes applies to same-sex friendships, too: she was nothing at all like the woman in Ira Erskine�s photographs.

The blonde, Paula, said, �He�s that detective, the one who found Sandy for her pig of an ex-husband.�

The look Gail Kendall fixed on me would have clabbered milk. Except that in her anger-hot eyes I was a different and much darker substance, the kind you detour around when you spot it dirtying the ground. �What the hell do you want?�

�To see Sondra Nelson. Or James Woolfox, if she�s not here.�

�Why?�

�I�d rather tell her personally.�

�More trouble, is that it?�

�No, ma�am. Not from me.�

�You know what you almost did, siccing that son-of-a-bitch on Sandy? You have any idea?�

�I do now. I didn�t last Thursday.�

�That�s no excuse. Couldn�t you see what he was? Or didn�t you care?�

�I wouldn�t be here if I didn�t care. And yes, I should�ve seen what he was but I didn�t.�

�Why didn�t you at least talk to her, give her some warning? What right does a man like you have to poke into people�s lives without them knowing anything about it?�

�I made a mistake, Ms. Kendall, and I�m sorry for it.�

�How do you know my name?�

�Sheriff�s Lieutenant Battle.�

She made a spitting mouth. �I suppose he�s sorry, too. Everybody�s so damn sorry. You think that makes it all right, being sorry?�

�No. But it�s all I have to offer.�

�Leave Sandy and Jim alone. You�ve caused them enough grief.�

�No more grief, just a few minutes of her time, or his. Is either of them here?�

�No.�

�At his ranch?�

�They�re not anywhere in the valley right now, thanks to you. Not anywhere in the state.�

�Come on, Ms. Kendall. The lieutenant wouldn�t have let them leave the county, much less the state, with his investigation still open.�

�...Did he tell you that? He�s still investigating?�

�Yes.�

�Why, for God�s sake? Erskine shot himself. It was an accident, how could it be anything else?�

�Nobody�s saying it�s anything else.�

�Then why isn�t the goddamn subject closed?�

�I think you�d better ask him.�

�I will, if he comes here again. Sandy�s had enough, more than one person can take. Enough, you hear me?� She shook an angry finger a couple of inches from my nose. �Get off this property or I�ll call some of the workers and have them throw you off. Now!�

I said mildly, �That�s quite a temper you have.�

�When I�m provoked. Keep standing there and provoking me and see what happens.�

�No, thanks. I�ll be going.�

�And don�t come back. Ever.�

Hard-shell woman, I thought as I left the building. Full of fire when it comes to people she cares about. That was admirable, but I couldn�t help wondering how far she�d go to protect a friend. How explosive her temper was when she was really provoked.

A fairly routine background check kept Tamara and me busy all of Wednesday morning and into early afternoon. The daughter of a well-off Hillsborough widow had met a man on a Mexican cruise and become engaged to him by the time the cruise ship docked again in L.A., and the widow was concerned that he might be a fortune hunter; she went to her lawyer and he called me. The check turned up some interesting information about the boyfriend�s past, including one arrest and conviction in Galveston, Texas, for bilking a woman of forty thousand dollars in a real estate investment scam. The lawyer was pleased to hear my report; the widow would be pleased to hear it. The daughter wouldn�t be, but she�d get over it and thank her mother someday. And I�d be pleased when I received the check to cover my fee. The only loser was the con artist, which was as it should be, and why the hell couldn�t all my investigations turn out to have such simple happy endings?

Shortly before two I had a call from the claims adjustor at one of the small insurance companies I work for now and then. Would I be able to come in this afternoon for a brief conference concerning a personal injury claim the company considered suspect? I would. We made an appointment for two-thirty, which gave me just enough time to drive downtown to the insurer�s offices on lower Market, garage the car, and allow myself to be shot upward fourteen floors in a box not much larger than the one Eberhardt had been planted in. Elevators have a claustrophobic effect on me. God forbid I should ever find myself trapped in one between floors for any length of time; the ordeal would probably reduce me to a bag of gibbering clay.

The personal injury claim was suspect, all right. A thirty-three-year-old man who slips and falls in the produce section of a supermarket and claims to have suffered such grievous injuries as recurrent back spasms, impaired use of his left leg, and a groin pull so severe he is unable to sit comfortably in any kind of chair, and whose attorney is whoring after a settlement of two hundred thousand dollars in lieu of a million-dollar lawsuit against the supermarket chain, is either the world�s most fragile human being or a fraud trying to happen big-time. I told the adjustor I�d see if I could get his employers off the hook, we settled on my usual fee, and I was out of there.

It was three-oh-five when I exited the building. Last night�s rain had turned into a misty overcast with just enough moisture to keep a sheen of wetness on the sidewalks. And as I made my slippery way to the garage, it occurred to me that Embarcadero Center was only a few short blocks away. Great Western Insurance had its offices in one of the Center�s high-rises, and among GWI�s rabbit warren of glass-walled cubicles was the large one in which Barney Rivera held sway. Well? I was going to have to see him sooner or later, whether he liked it or not. Might as well be sooner, and at my convenience instead of his.

I changed direction, hoofed it over there, put myself into another elevator and let it hurl me like an object in a pneumatic tube twenty-nine floors above the city streets. When I popped out, I was facing a young male receptionist, who treated me to a bored look and asked what, please, he could do for me. I said Barney Rivera and offered my name; he wanted to know if I had an appointment; I said no, and he told me to have a seat, he�d see if Mr. Rivera was available. Ritual scene. I wondered, as I waited, how many times I�d played it over the past thirty years, mouthing the same dialogue or any number of dull variations, with a legion of faceless receptionists, secretaries, and factotums of both genders. Thinking about it, I decided I understood exactly what T. S. Eliot had meant with his oft-quoted line about measuring out his life in coffee spoons.

Pretty soon the receptionist replaced the handset on his switchboard unit and said to me in his bored voice, �Mr. Rivera is sorry, he can�t see you today. He�s very busy.�

�Is that right?�

�Yes, sir. Would you care to make an appointment?�

�I don�t think so,� I said. I stood up and headed not for the elevator but for the door that led into the rabbit warren.

The receptionist was caught off guard; visitors were not supposed to act in such aggressive fashion. He gawped at me and said, �Wait a minute, sir, you can�t��

I said, �Yes, I can,� and opened the door and went on through. I�d been in the warren enough times over the years; I knew where Rivera�s cubicle was and how to get there through the maze. His double-size glass office had a door, which told you right away how important he was in GWI�s scheme of things. I yanked it open, walked inside, and banged it shut behind me.

�I guess you�re seeing me after all,� I said.

He was probably surprised, but he didn�t show it; he seldom showed much of what was going on inside his head, which made him a good poker player and a bad risk for personal intimacy. He peered up at me from behind his desk, his tubby little body so dwarfed by it that he looked like a doe-eyed, mop-headed kid playing executive. Women, for some insane reason, found him cute and cuddly and either wanted to mother him or screw his brains out; in all the years I�d known him, he had never lacked for female companionship. There had been a time, pre-Kerry, when I�d been a touch jealous of the man. Now his success with women and the careless way he treated his conquests were just two more reasons to dislike him.

He said, �What do you think�� and then broke off because the door opened and the receptionist poked his head inside. �I�m sorry Mr. Rivera he just barged in do you want me to call security?� all in a breathless rush. Barney said no, it was all right, he�d handle it, and the kid retreated and closed the door so softly I didn�t even hear it click.

Rivera reached out to the dish on his desk and popped a peppermint before he finished what he�d started to say to me. �What do you think this macho act is going to buy you?�

�Some cleared air. I don�t like being given the runaround.�

�And I don�t like former friends showing up unannounced.�

�Former friends. Right. Just like that, huh?�

�You treated Eberhardt like shit,� he said.

�Oh, sure. And he treated me like royalty?�

�You know what I mean.�

�Four years and not a word from him, and then he calls up out of the blue, no explanation, and I�m supposed to drop everything and rush to his aid?�

�You could�ve talked to him, at least.�

�I was two hundred and fifty miles away, for Christ�s sake, and jammed up in that Sentinels mess. I had no idea he was in trouble, any kind of trouble. Nobody told me. Not Bobbie Jean and sure as hell not you.�

�I didn�t know it was as bad as it was until two weeks ago,� Rivera said, �right before I phoned your office the first time. You didn�t bother to get back to me and you were still in town then. Your secretary said so.�

�Tamara�s my assistant, not my secretary. And you told her it was personal and nothing urgent.�

�The hell I did. Personal, yes, but I didn�t say it wasn�t urgent.�

�Did you say it was?�

�I don�t remember.�

�Well, maybe she misunderstood. Or maybe she took it for granted because you didn�t tell her otherwise.�

�Passing the buck?� he said snottily.

�No!�

�Either way, you didn�t return the call. My second one, either.�

�I was up in Creekside by then and you still didn�t tell Tamara what you were calling about.�

�It wasn�t her business. I told her personal. She told you personal, didn�t she?� When I didn�t answer, he reached for another peppermint. Outwardly he seemed his usual calm, unruffled self, but there was a kind of savagery in the way he was looking at me � a hint of the cruel streak that ran deep and dark in him. �You used to be somebody who returned personal calls right away.�

�I used to have friends named Eberhardt and Rivera, too. Friends who gave as well as took.� I moved forward and leaned on a corner of his desk with both hands, more to keep him from seeing that the hands weren�t quite steady than for any other reason. �I couldn�t have saved him, can�t you see that? You couldn�t stop him from killing himself, Bobbie Jean couldn�t, how was I supposed to after four years.�

�That�s not the point,� he said. �The point is, you didn�t even try.�

�This is crazy, this whole conversation. We�re like a couple of guys trying to shoot each other down through a bulletproof glass wall.�

�You�re the one who came busting in here.�

�Bang. Now it�s my turn again, right?� I leaned closer, my body bowed across his desk and my face only about a foot from his. He didn�t pull back; whatever else he was, he wasn�t a man who could be intimidated. �No more bullshit, Barney. What happened two weeks ago with you and Eberhardt?�

It was a few tense beats before he answered. His jaws moved, crunching on the peppermint; his breath smelled like a scratch-and-sniff add for Brach�s. He swallowed before he said, �I called him at his office to offer him a claims investigation. Eleven o�clock in the morning. He was so drunk I could barely understand him.�

�What day was that?�

�Same day as my first call to you.�

�Monday?�

�You know it was. Monday morning.�

�And?�

�And what?�

�Come on, man. You must�ve known he was drinking heavily before that. You didn�t call me just because he was drunk at 11 A.M.�

�He mumbled something about being ready to throw in the towel. I thought he meant quit the detective racket, but when I asked him he said no, he might as well check out for good. I figured it was the booze talking � I tried to kid him out of it. He wouldn�t kid. He said he was afraid he�d go too far, and even if he didn�t, it was too late for him to come back.�

�Go too far? Meaning what?�

�I don�t know. I couldn�t get a coherent answer out of him. He mumbled some more and then hung up. Concerned me enough to want to talk to you about it, get your input. My mistake.�

�Put the frigging needle away, Barney. Second time you called was Wednesday. Follow-up, or had you talked to him again?�

�Both. He called me Tuesday afternoon.�

�Drunk or sober?�

�Sober. Mostly, anyway. Wanted to apologize, he said. Hadn�t meant to lay all his crap on me but he was at the end of his rope. Didn�t see much point in trying to hang on anymore. I asked him flat out if he was seriously thinking about doing away with himself. Took him a while to answer. Then he said, �Don�t be surprised if you hear I ate my gun.� �

�Those exact words?�

�That�s right. And he hung up again before I could say anything else.�

�What�d you do about it besides call my office again?�

�What you didn�t do,� he said. �Kept trying to get in touch with him. He wasn�t at his office any of the times I phoned, or home when I called there or when I drove out Friday night after work. I left messages on his machine and with Bobbie Jean, but like you, he never got back to me.�

�You didn�t leave messages after Friday night. You see or talk to him over the weekend, or Monday or Tuesday?�

�No, I told you, he never got back to me.�

�The day before he died,� I said, �he deposited five hundred dollars in his checking account. You know anything about that?�

�How would I know anything about it? No.�

�He also wrote a check for the same amount to an unspecified payee. Wouldn�t have been you, would it?�

�Why would he be writing me a five-hundred-dollar check?�

�Payback of a loan, maybe. I�m asking you.�

�No. He didn�t send me any check.�

�So why no messages after Friday night? You quit on him, Barney?�

He didn�t like that, which probably meant it was true. He drew himself up and slammed his hand down on the desk blotter. �I was busy over the weekend, I had other commitments��

�Me, too, only mine were up in Creekside.�

That bought me a glower. His lips formed an obscenity but he didn�t give voice to it.

I said, �Exactly why do you think Eb tried to get in touch with me?�

�Pretty obvious, isn�t it?�

�Say it anyway.�

�He was having second thoughts. Wanted you to talk him out of killing himself.�

�Did he? I thought so, too, for a while, but now I�m not so sure. Why me and not you? You�re the one who was still his pal.�

�But I�m not a hand-holder or a bleeding heart. You are.�

�So he turned to me just like that, after four years? Not Bobbie Jean, not Joe, not a suicide hotline � me, the ex-partner he hated and wanted nothing to do with.�

�Maybe he didn�t hate you as much as you think. Maybe he was just ripped up by all the crap you laid on him before the split.�

�He say that to you?�

�He didn�t have to.�

�Rivera the Omniscient. Did he mention my name either of the last two times you talked to him? Drunk or sober?�

�No, but that doesn�t mean you weren�t on his mind.�

Anything was possible with a man in the throes of a suicidal depression. Including a visit to a breed of doctor he�d always distrusted. I asked Rivera, �Did he mention a psychologist named Richard Disney?�

�...No. Why?�

�How about a Dr. Caslon? Night ER resident at S.F. General.�

�No. What do they have to do with Eberhardt?�

�That�s what I�d like to know,� I said. �He made an appointment to see Disney last Tuesday. He didn�t keep it � canceled at the last minute. Dr. Caslon is the one who referred him.�

�An ER resident? What�s the connection?�

�You tell me. Eberhardt say anything about a recent visit to the hospital?�

�No.�

�Involvement in an accident of some kind?�

�No. Drunk and banged up his car, maybe.�

�There wasn�t any damage to his car.�

�Fell down, got in a fight, whatever.�

�Not according to Bobbie Jean.�

�All right, so he met this Caslon some other way. On one of his cases. Or in a damn bar.� Another peppermint disappeared between the chubby lips. �Why does it matter to you? What he did or didn�t do at the end?�

�It doesn�t matter to you?�

�No.�

�Except where I�m concerned.�

He sucked and chewed and said nothing.

�Well, maybe you don�t care what triggered his suicide,� I said, �but I do. Something had to push him over the edge. I want to know what it was.�

�Maybe it was you,� Rivera said.

�...What?�

�His last resort, last hope, and you didn�t care enough to call him back. You could�ve been the push.�

The skin on my neck and between my shoulder blades seemed to bunch and curl upward. The possibility had never even occurred to me. I said, �Bullshit,� but the denial lacked conviction in my own ears.

Me? For God�s sake, me?

It was frustration more than anything else that sent me over to the Portola district rather than home to my fiat or Kerry�s condo. Proximity had something to do with it, too � Silliman Street, just north of McLaren Park, is only a few miles from S. F. General and easily reachable by freeway � but I might have gone there even if it had been twenty miles out of the way. Now I�ll never know kept repeating inside my head, a kind of mantra of the perverse. I could not make myself believe it because I didn�t want to believe it; you can deny anything, even the most fundamental truths, if your desire for the opposite is strong enough.

That part of the city is working-class residential, on the downscale side as the result of any number of urban problems, one of them being the drug-infested housing projects on the Visitacion Valley side of McLaren Park. Dowdy row houses dominated the block between Gambier and Harvard; the one owned or rented by Danny Forbes was near the Gambier corner, small and saggy and nondescript. The double garage door under its bay windows was wide open, light from inside spilling out into the street. No other lights showed at the front.

Well, I thought, at least he�s home. I had no idea what I would say to him. Scratch his surfaces, see if there was anything underneath worth burrowing after.

I parked across the street and went to the open door. A beat-up Mercury sedan, twelve to fifteen years old, squatted in one half of the cavelike interior. The other half was either a catchall area for garage-sale junk or a haphazard retreat created by a man who preferred holing up in his garage to occupying his normal living space. Among other items were a couch covered in hideous pseudo-leopard skin, a recliner with a busted footrest, an ancient six-sided poker table with a torn felt top, and a portable TV on a wobbly-looking stand. The TV was turned on; figures that looked as though they were trying to swim through snow made semiarticulate sounds punctuated by gunfire. Nobody was watching them or listening to the noise. For all I could see, the garage was empty.

I stepped inside by three paces for a better look. Next to the chair, I noticed then, was a low table on top of which sat an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel�s and two glasses. I was staring at the bottle when wood creaked under descending footsteps and a voice said, �That you, Bert?� and then, explosively, �Hey! The hell you want?�

The stairs were at the rear, beyond the Merc; he came running off the last of the risers, around the front of the car and over to where I stood. Danny Forbes, dressed in a loud plaid sport jacket several years out of fashion and a pair of chocolate-colored slacks. His red hair had been slicked down with a gel whose sweetness assaulted my nostrils as he came up close. His broken nose had healed except for a knot at the bridge and what would probably be a permanent ten-degree list to the left; a scab showed where he�d been cut over one brow. His eyes snapped at me. So did his mouth.

�I don�t know you, man. What the hell�s the idea comin� in my garage?�

�Door�s wide open. Lights and TV are on.�

�That don�t give you no right to walk in. Who are you? What you want?�

�Few minutes of your time.�

�Whatever you�re selling this time of night, I�m not interested.�

�I�m not selling anything. I�m buying.�

�Yeah? Buying what?� He licked thin lips; his eyes shifted, shifted back to hold on mine again. �I got nothing for sale.�

�How about some information on a dead man named Eberhardt?�

He was the type who couldn�t stand still. He�d been shuffling and bouncing around like one of those mean and hyperactive little dogs, but when I mentioned Eberhardt�s name he froze. Not for long, but long enough. He backed up a step, trying not to look worried, and put another sheen of spit on his lips before he spoke again.

�Who the fuck�s Eberhardt?�

�You know who he was, Danny. Man who killed himself on Bolt Street last week. The detective T. K. hired to find out who�s been stealing from him and Nick.�

�What�s that got to do with me? I don�t know nothing about any of that.� He was dancing again. The eyes flicked to the watch on his wrist, flicked back to my face. �What�re you, another one? T. K. hire you, too?�

�Suppose he did?�

�Suppose you get outta my garage before I throw you out.�

�Something to hide, Danny?�

�Don�t call me Danny. Only my friends call me Danny. I�m telling you, man, get out right now.� Happy feet, and those shifty, shifty eyes. �I mean it.�

�Sure thing, Danny. I�ll be seeing you.�

�Not if I see you first.�

I took my time turning and walking out. He followed me onto the sidewalk, dancing and glaring, and stayed put as I crossed to the car and put myself inside. He was still there, still watching, as I drove off.

I followed Silliman as far as Yale, turned right, turned right again on Felton and came back to Gambier. Halfway along Gambier I shut off my lights and drifted slow toward the Silliman intersection. When I got to where I could see Forbes�s house he was no longer standing in the outspill of light from the garage. Back inside somewhere; about all that was visible from this point was the back half of the Merc.

The last space at the corner was a No Parking zone. I eased the car into it and shut off the engine and sat hunched low in the dark to wait and watch.

It didn�t take long, only about ten minutes. The fifth set of headlights that passed by on Silliman swung into Forbes�s driveway and immediately went dark. The vehicle was a four-by-four of some kind; the light wasn�t bright enough for me to tell the make or model. The man who got out and entered the garage was nobody I�d ever seen before � fat, bald, middle-aged, outfitted in a long leather coat over a pair of baggy pants held up by suspenders.

He could�ve been an old pal dropping by for a drink, but I didn�t think so. Forbes�s eagerness to get rid of me said it was something else; so did the fact that he�d spiffed himself up, not so much in the fashion of a man preparing to socialize as of a salesman looking to impress a customer. I wasn�t selling anything tonight, but maybe Danny Forbes was. Maybe I�d stumbled smack into a telltale piece of bad action.

Either way, the bottle of sour mash and the two glasses said they�d have at least one drink together. So I left the car quickly and hurried across Silliman and hugged shadows until I was close enough to the four-by-four to see that it was a Ford Bronco and to read the license plate. Then I hurried back to the car to write down the number and do some more waiting.

It was another ten minutes before they showed, both of them together. Forbes shut off the lights and lowered the garage door, and they got into the Bronco. If they ended up in a bar or nightclub or bowling alley, I�d have to retrench. But the tingly fleeing in my gut said I hadn�t misread either Danny Forbes or the situation.

I let the Bronco get under way to the east before I started the car; let it make a left-hand turn onto Harvard before I swung out after them. Highway 280 was where they were headed. They took the closest southbound entrance, and after that the tail was easy enough. A moderate flow of traffic helped, too. South to the Daly City exit, west on Highway 1 to Skyline Boulevard, south on Skyline to Westridge, right on Westridge to South Mayfair � and straight into the entrance drive of Mayfair Self-Storage. I rolled on past as the four-by-four stopped at the gate, traveled another block and turned around. They were inside, the gate closing behind them, as I passed the second time.

No point in trying to get in there or in waiting around here. I headed back to 280, back to the city and Silliman Street.

On the way I called directory assistance. Luck was still with me: there was a San Francisco listing for T. K. O�Hanlon, and the woman who answered my ring said he was in. His surprise gave way to happy rumblings when I told him why I was calling.

�I�m pretty sure Forbes is your thief,� I said. �I just followed him and another guy to Mayfair Self-Storage in Daly City. I could be wrong about this, but I think the other man is a potential buyer and the stolen liquor is stored in one of the Mayfair units.�

O�Hanlon said he�d be a son-of-a-bitch. �You won�t let me hire you, then you go and nail the bastard on your own. I don�t get it. How come?�

�I wasn�t trying to nail him. Just happened to pick the right time to go talk to him.�

�They still at this Mayfair Self-Storage, Forbes and the other guy?�

�Yeah, but I don�t know for how long. It may be an outright buy tonight, but if so I doubt it�ll be for every case he has stored. A better guess is that Forbes is showing off the contraband, negotiating a price for later pickup. The two of them went in the other one�s four-by-four from Forbes�s house, which means a return trip. Odds are they�d�ve taken two cars if more than a few cases were being sold and moved out tonight.�

�I�ll get hold of Nick,� O�Hanlon said. �We�ll meet you there in half an hour��

�Too late by then. I�ve got a better idea.�

�The cops?�

�No, not yet. Not enough proof to bring in the law. I could be wrong � I wasn�t able to get inside the storage facility to verify that the liquor is there � and we don�t want to run the risk of a lawsuit.�

�So what�s your idea?�

�You and your brother meet me at Forbes�s house. It�s on Silliman Street off Highway 280, Portola district. Either we wait there for Forbes, or if he�s already back when you get there, we go right in and brace him. If he is dirty, that should crack him.�

�Sounds good to me.�

�Two conditions, T. K. No rough stuff unless Forbes or the other man provokes it. And I get at least ten minutes alone with Forbes at the outset.�

�How come you and him alone?�

�Personal reasons. Fair enough?�

�Fair enough,� he agreed.

�You or your brother have a cell phone or car phone?�

�I got a cell phone I can bring along.�

�Okay. I�ll be at Forbes�s house long before you; I�m almost back there now. When you get off the freeway and into his neighborhood, call me and I�ll tell you where I am and what the situation is and we�ll take it from there.�

He agreed to that, too, and I told him my number and the location of Forbes�s house. He said then, �We owe you, pal, and the O�Hanlons always pay their debts. I�m not talking handshake, either.�

�The handshake�s enough. I don�t want your money, T. K. All I want are those ten minutes with Forbes.�

�You think he had something to do with Eberhardt killing himself? That it?�

�Could be,� I said. �One way or another I�m going to find out.�

So Eberhardt had been much dirtier than I�d imagined. Corrupt his whole life, maybe, down deep at the core; sure as hell rotten at the end. My partner the crook. My pal the stranger. Shaking down a two-bit thief for five hundred dollars and a couple of bottles of Jack Daniel�s. So far gone, so lost, that even his final act of corruption had been weak, petty.

Was that the trigger, then? Disgust, self-loathing at how low he�d sunk?

Part of it, possibly � but there had to be more, some other factor. Who had been the recipient of that five-hundred-dollar check? And what was it in payment for? Key questions that still had no answers. I�d know the answers when the check finally cleared, unless for some reason it wasn�t cashed at all; but even if I knew that much, I might never get at the whole truth. Right now, with the foul taste of Eberhardt�s dishonesty in my mouth, the prospect didn�t bother me as much as it had before. I was no longer sure I cared to find out any more than I already had.

I went to my flat because I needed to be alone tonight. Too late to call Kerry; it was nearly eleven-thirty. But she�d understand when I explained it all to her. Our marriage worked because we were sensitive to each other�s needs: when one of us had to have space, the space was allowed without fuss or question. There for each other even when we weren�t together, in spirit and by tacit agreement.

I rummaged around in the fridge, found a can of Bud Light. It did nothing for the sour taste; in fact the smell and the first sip built a faint nausea that spread upward into my throat. I poured the beer into the sink, returned to the living room and put all the lights on and some moody jazz on my old turntable. Then, in spite of what I�d been thinking in the car, in spite of myself, I sat at the desk and went through Eberhardt�s papers again item by item.

Waste of time, just jerking myself around. It was all dead matter in every sense of the term. And yet when I was done, an hour or so later, I had the feeling I�d missed something, that something important had been staring me in the face twice now and I�d overlooked it both times. It was like smoke in my mind; I�d reach for it, almost grasp it, and it would break up, drift away.

Bed. But no sleep. And lying there, I wondered if I had after all been jerking my own chain; if the smoke was imaginary, just one more illusion among the many...

The Pinecrest Lodge was on the northern outskirts of Healdsburg, along a frontage road that paralleled Highway 101 and clearly visible from the freeway. Not large and not small � some sixty units in a pair of two-story wings that extended out from a central lobby, restaurant, and lounge. All the room entrances appeared to face the highway; close behind the complex were stands of trees and a couple of low hills that folded in against each other. On the thirty-foot-tall sign above the entrance drive, the word �Vacancy� burned palely in red neon.

The next exit was a short distance ahead; I took it and came back on the frontage road. This early on a Friday afternoon, only a few cars were parked in the lot. I added mine to the total and entered a lobby that looked and felt and smelled like every motel lobby from California to Maine; the only difference was that they had the heat turned up too high. Nothing at all special about the Pinecrest that I could see. Quite a comedown from the St. Francis for a man like Erskine, but then he hadn�t been interested in comfort or anything else except his ex-wife when he came up here from the city. He�d picked the motel for its location, no other reason. And it would�ve been his last stopping place, I thought, even if he hadn�t died here. He�d been ready to die somewhere in Sonoma County, but not alone: I had little doubt that he would have killed Sondra Nelson and then himself if he�d had the chance.

Behind the desk, a young woman wearing a green blazer with a gold pocket crest of three pines was busy on both the phone and a computer keyboard. She and I were alone in the lobby. I smiled at her; she smiled back, miming the words �I�ll be with you in a moment, sir.� The other party kept her on the line longer than she anticipated, though. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head as if she were mildly exasperated, then smiled at me again. In response I told her silently that it was all right, I was in no hurry. So we had already established a rapport when the conversation finally ended.

�Sorry about that,� she said as if she meant it. �Would you like a room, sir?�

�Well, I�m not sure.� The apologetic note I squeezed into my voice sounded genuine enough. �You do have more than one vacancy?�

�Yes we do. Our rates��

�Oh, the rate doesn�t matter. What matters is the room.�

�Sir?�

�Not to me, you understand. Any room is fine with me, all I care about is that it has a bed in it. But my wife... well, she�s picky.� I manufactured a sigh. �Very picky.�

The young woman nodded and smiled and said, �Picky in what way?�

�The size of the room, for one thing. Do you have any suites or large rooms with fireplaces?�

�No, I�m sorry, we don�t.�

�So all of your accommodations are the same? I mean, I understand some rooms are singles and some doubles, but the size and general floor plan are identical in each?�

�That�s right. A few do have connecting doors that you can leave open to make up a suite��

�Not an option, I�m afraid. I wonder... I know this is an imposition, but would it be all right if I looked at one of your ground-floor rooms? My wife insists on the ground floor, and the size and layout really are very important to her.�

�Well...�

�Just a brief look. I�m sure it�ll be suitable, but if it isn�t and I�ve already checked in... I�m being a pest, aren�t I?�

�No, no, not at all. I�d take you out and show you one of the vacancies but I�m here alone right now... Would you mind if I gave you a key and let you go look by yourself?�

�That�s very kind of you. Five minutes or so is all I need.�

�Take as much time as you like, sir.�

We traded smiles again, and I went on my way with a key. Simple as that. I hoped the next person who took advantage of the nice young woman�s trust had motives as relatively benign as mine.

The number on the key was 116, a room more or less in the middle of the south wing. Average-size rectangle, only slightly deeper than it was wide, with a half wall separating the bed and sitting area from a bathroom cubicle and an adjoining space containing a countertop with two sinks, a mirror, and an open closet. Double bed, round table and two uncomfortable cane-backed chairs, dresser, writing desk, TV set on a stand. Blue-and-green decor, blue-and-green seascapes that nobody in his right mind would want to steal screwed tight to the walls. If the room were to survive intact into the twenty-second century, anthropologists of that time could stick it into a museum as a perfect example of Standard American Motel Room, Late Twentieth Century.

I stepped inside, leaving the door partway open, and took a long look at it, the jamb, and the locking mechanisms. The knob lock was a deadbolt and so was the security lock above it. There was also a chain fastener of the sort that makes some people feel safe in strange surroundings, as well as in their own home, but that in reality provides little protection; a hefty twelve-year-old can kick or shoulder through ninety-eight percent of them. The deadbolts were of decent manufacture and durable enough, and the door here fit snugly in the jamb, which indicated that the same would be true in the other units. Battle had told me both deadbolts had been set in Erskine�s room; the chain lock must�ve been off for the cleaning woman to passkey her way in. There were methods an expert locksmith could use to gimmick a couple of dead-bolts like these, but the average person working without foreknowledge and the proper tools couldn�t hope to manage it. Besides, the cleaning woman and the two guests had been close enough to hear the shots and to get out to where they could see Erskine�s door in a hurry. There would not have been time for anyone in the room to either gimmick the locks or get out through the door unseen.

The same went for the curtained window next to it. Two overlapping halves, one of which you could slide open to let in air; that half was screened. The latch was a simple snap type, but the sliding half was fitted with one of those security bolts that you can screw down to prevent the window from opening even when the latch is released. Forget this window as an exit, too.

That left the bathroom. It wasn�t much larger than an upended packing crate, with just enough space for a toilet and a compact tub and shower; put three people in it and you�d be inviting an orgy. The only window in there was above the tub � an oblong, overlapping-halves job similar to the one out front, except that it was much smaller and the glass was opaque and unscreened. Three feet long, not much more than eighteen inches high. I swung over into the tub, leaned up to look more closely at the window. Same kind of snap catch as the other but without the screw-down bolt. I slid the one half open. No outside screen or bars. I stuck my head through the opening. Trees, hillsides, not much else to see.

Somebody could have gotten out this way without being seen, all right, but it would�ve had to have been a slender and agile somebody to squeeze through such a small opening. I couldn�t have done it if my life depended on it. Gail Kendall couldn�t have, and I doubted Woolfox would�ve fit, either. Sondra Nelson... maybe. But she was the one with the tightest alibi of all: jury duty fifteen miles away.

I took a couple more passes through the room, looking at each of its contents, trying to figure an angle. Suppose the shot the maid and guests heard wasn�t the one that had killed Erskine? Some sort of second-shot delay gimmick, like putting a long, slow fuse on a stick of dynamite. Firecrackers, air-filled and then popped paper bags, a shot recorded on tape and played back later... I�d heard of or personally encountered all of those little tricks. The problem with something like that, though, was that the perp either had to be on the premises, which in this case wasn�t feasible, or there had to be some leftover evidence to reveal the gaffe. Battle would�ve mentioned having found the remains of a blown firecracker or anything else that obviously didn�t belong, and if there�d been a recording device he�d have replayed its tape; trained investigators don�t miss things like that. And there was nothing in the room or its furnishings that suggested any cute possibilities. Scratch the second-shot delay theory.

What else? Some other type of misdirection? I couldn�t imagine any that fit the circumstances as Battle had outlined them to me. If Erskine had been murdered, even with malice aforethought, it had to�ve been a simple, straightforward crime. Not enough time to plan anything elaborate or even clever; and homicides involving overheated passions don�t generate fancy schemes anyway. Any trickery would�ve been improvised on the spot, to take advantage of the situation as it developed, and in this case it didn�t seem likely or even possible. Scratch trickery of any kind. What you saw was all there was. So if it had been murder, the perp had gone out through that tiny bathroom window. Or managed to hide behind the door and then slip out after the cleaning woman and male guest came in � an even more unlikely prospect.

I left the room, locked the door behind me. As I started to turn back toward the lobby, I spied a maid�s cart down at the end of the wing. Sight of it prodded me into a switch of direction. When I neared the cart, a middle-aged woman in uniform came out through the open door of room 130 with an armload of dirty linen. She looked to be Latina, and tired and beaten down by her daily grind. She gave me an indifferent look that didn�t change much when I said, �Excuse me. I�d like to talk to you, please.�

�Yes?�

�About what happened here last week. The shooting.�

She rolled her eyes upward. Muttered to herself, �Ai, Dios mio. Un otro agente inquiridor con otro interrogati�n. Cada vez m�s.�

�No tender nada un secreto, eh, se�ora?�

�...Habla Espa�ol,� she said, surprised.

�Si, un poquito.� She thought I was a cop, a mistake a lot of people make: I have the look and I walk the walk. I let her think it. You can�t be accused of impersonating an agente inquiridor unless you make the claim yourself; other people�s perceptions don�t count. In English I asked, �Are you the woman who found the dead man?�

�No, that was Carmelita.�

�Is she here now?�

�S�. Upstairs.�

�I�d appreciate it if you�d take me to her.�

�Como quieras,� she said and sighed, and led me up the nearest staircase to the second floor.

Carmelita was vacuuming one of the rooms back toward the front; she shut the machine off when we walked in. She was younger and thinner than my escort, but hard work and hard living had already carved the same deep lines of weariness in her brown face. Looking at the two of them put me in mind of the volatile rhetoric of too many compassionless politicians and their minions these days. Yes, sir, all those south-of-the-border immigrants, legals and illegals both, sure do have an easy time of it here in the land of plenty, stealing jobs and living the good life. Just ask them. Just spend five minutes looking at the world through their eyes.

The older woman spoke to the younger one in rapid Spanish, too fast and idiomatic for me to follow. Carmelita looked nervous and a little frightened. One kind of cynic might have said it was because she didn�t have a green card and wanted nothing to do with authority in any form; my kind of cynic thought it was probably an ingrained fear born of poverty, oppression, and racial hatred.

Carmelita admitted in broken English that she had found �the dead one� � she crossed herself as she spoke the words � but had told the other polic�a all about it, she didn�t know anything more, she was only a mujer de la limpieza, a cleaning woman. I asked her in Spanish to tell it one more time, por favor, but the politeness didn�t do much to put her at ease. She rattled off her story, not making eye contact, getting it all out in a rush as if she were purging herself of a virulent form of bile.

Erskine had had the end room on the ground floor, north wing; she�d been two rooms away, waiting for �the Mr. and Mrs. Doyle� to move their luggage out so she could clean. All three had heard the report at seven-forty. She knew the time because Mr. Doyle had looked at his watch and later she�d heard him tell the police. Mrs. Doyle said the noise sounded like a gunshot; Mr. Doyle said it was a gunshot and ran to Erskine�s room and listened at the door and then pounded on it. When no one answered, he told Carmelita she had better use her passkey, somebody might be hurt inside. She hadn�t wanted to do that, it was against motel rules, but when he insisted she gave in. She and Mr. Doyle both went inside. �I wan to scream when I see the dead one,� she said, and crossed herself again, �but I can�t make a sound.� Mr. Doyle took her arm, led her outside, told her to stay there with his wife while he went to the lobby to call the police. And that was all that had happened, all she knew.

I said, �Just a few questions, Carmelita. Si usted no dene inconveniente. How long was it from the time you heard the shot to the time you unlocked the door?�

�I doan know for sure. Quatro, cinco minutos.�

Enough time for somebody to wiggle out through that narrow bathroom window; more than enough time. �When Mr. Doyle listened at the door, did he say if he heard anything inside?�

�No, he doan say.�

�Did he act as if he had?�

Headshake.

�When you were inside the room, did you or Mr. Doyle go to look in the bathroom?�

�The bathroom? No, se�or. We go out again, quick.�

�How quick? Un minuto? Dos?�

�No! Diez segundo, cuando m�s.�

Ten seconds at the most. �Did you or Mr. Doyle touch anything in the room?�

�No. I wan to pick up the pitillo but he doan let me.�

�What cigarette, Carmelita?�

�On the carpet. Mr. Doyle say doan touch nothing so the carpet, it gets burn.�

�Where was it burning the carpet?�

�Where?� She shook her head, not understanding.

�Close to the dead man or not?�

�Close.� Carmelita shivered. �Almost burn him, his hand.�

�As if he�d dropped it when he fell.�

�S�.�

�And where was he lying, exactly?�

�Near the bed.�

�Closer to the bed than the table?�

�Si.�

�You�re sure of that?�

�The bed, s�.�

�Where was the chair he�d been sitting in?�

�Como?�

�Was it on the floor too, knocked over?�

�No. At the table. Both chairs.�

�Close to the table, you mean?�

�S�, close.�

�The things he was using to clean his gun � rags, oil, things like that. Were some of them on the floor?�

�I doan think so.�

�All still on the table?�

�S�.�

�Knocked over, scattered around?�

Blank look, another headshake; she said something in Spanish to the older woman, who shrugged and remained silent. The older one didn�t want any part of this interrogation.

I said patiently to Carmelita, �When you bump into a table, the things that are on it sometimes fall over, even if they don�t roll off onto the floor. Comprende?�

�S�.�

�Is that the way the things on the table looked?�

�No, se�or. Everything... you know, not fall over.�

Battle hadn�t mentioned the burning cigarette to me; or the positioning of the chairs and the body; or the fact that the cleaning supplies were still in order on the table. Maybe he hadn�t seen anything suspicious in any of that or all of it combined. But I did. Why would anyone clean a handgun with a lighted cigarette in his hand or mouth? Cleaning fluid is flammable, for one thing. And you need clear eyes and both hands free throughout the process to do a proper job. It wasn�t inconceivable that a distracted, obsessive man would make the mistake of lighting up; in fact, it could�ve been the cigarette that led to an accidental firing of the weapon � smoke getting in his eyes, hot ash dropping on his hand, that kind of thing. Still, it didn�t feel right to me. None of it did. If he�d been sitting at or close to the table when the gun went off, the impact of the bullet would have kicked both him and the chair backward, toppled both to the floor. Chances were he�d have also whacked the table in reflex, sent some or all of the supplies toppling over and off. The fact that none of that had happened said to me he�d either been standing when the slug hit him, or he�d been perched on the edge of the bed � and it didn�t make much sense that a man would stand up to clean a weapon, or sit to do the job five feet from where the supplies were...

The two women were watching me, Carmelita fidgeting and the older one in a kind of rigid, waiting-to-be-activated posture not unlike the vacuum cleaner. I smiled at them and said, �That�s all, you can go back to work now,� and plucked a pair of sawbucks out of my wallet and handed one to each woman. �Mil gracias.�

They looked at the money, at me, at each other. Their expressions were mirror images � an openmouthed mixture of incredulity and awe. An Anglo policeman who spoke Spanish, even if it was of the schoolbook variety, and handed out ten-dollar bills for no apparent reason? In their world, the not-so-brave new world of Los Estados Unidos, it was as much a miracle as any they were ever likely to encounter.

Geyserville. Village a dozen miles or so north of Healdsburg, at the upper end of the Alexander Valley. Surrounded by wineries, vineyards, long stretches of flatland and low rounded hills. Tucked away in the hills were numerous mineral hot springs that gave the hamlet its name. Friend, fellow investigator, and licensed pilot Sharon McCone, who has flown over the area on her way to a Mendocino County retreat she shares with her significant other, once told me that from the air you can not only see and even smell steam rising from the underground springs, but also see a huge network of PG&E pipelines and energy-harnessing pumping stations. From ground level around Geyserville, though, your only view is of mostly pastoral countryside split by the concrete corridors of Highway 101.

The village is laid out along the east side of the freeway � a few dozen buildings, most flanking Geyserville Avenue and old enough to give the place a 1940s aspect that I found appealing. There were a couple of service stations, the one affiliated with the American Automobile Association, Kane�s Towing and Service, on the south end. I�d found that out by calling Triple A from the car phone on my way up. The service truck and driver were out on a call when I rolled in at one-thirty; wouldn�t be back until after two, the manager informed me. So I left the car there and walked back to the only restaurant, a well-regarded Italian place I�d eaten in a time or two, and killed forty minutes over a bowl of minestrone and some sourdough French bread. When I got back to the station, the tow truck was just pulling in.

The driver�s name was Pete Flynn. Three or four years younger than me, with a substantial pot belly that made him seem bigger than he was and hair, eyebrows, and mustache all growing in wild tangles, like brush on a boulder. He was the garrulous type, always a fortunate draw when you�re hunting information.

�Sure,� he said, �I�m the guy took that call last week. Mule Deer Road, right?�

�Gail Kendall, two-fifteen Mule Deer Road.� Tamara had gotten the address for me.

�Some name. The road, I mean. Ain�t been a mule deer out that way in forty years. You another cop?� He grinned.�� �Scuse me, officer of the law.�

�No. Private investigator.�

�Yeah, huh? How come you�re askin� same as the cops?�

�Insurance matter,� I lied.

�Insurance,� he said, as if it were a synonym for the next word out of his mouth. �Shit. One of �em screwed my brother-in-law big time three years back. Fell off the roof of his house, up there puttin� new shingles on, busted both his legs and couldn�t do nothing but sit around in a body cast for six months. Bastards wouldn�t pay off. Said he was drunk. Hot day, man works through a six-pack or two, that ain�t drunk. I ast you � you think that�s drunk?�

�Depends on your brother-in-law�s capacity for beer.�

�Capacity? Put my money on Hank against all comers in a chuggin� contest. Buncha freakin� crooks, you ask me. Insurance companies.�

�Some are worse than others,� I said agreeably.

�But not yours, huh?�

�Mine, too. I work for more than one. Freelance.�

�Then you ain�t exactly one of �em. Man�s got to work, I don�t hold that against nobody. What was it you wanted to ast me?�

�About the Kendall service call.�

�What about it?�

�What time did she call in? Can you look up the exact time for me?�

�Don�t have to look it up,� Flynn said. �I remember on account of the sheriff�s boys ast me when they come around. Eight-fifteen, ayem. On the nose.�

Eight-fifteen. And Erskine had been shot at seven-forty. The timing, at least, didn�t rule out Kendall as a suspect. I asked, �What time�d you get out to her house?�

�Musta been about eight-thirty. Left right away, takes maybe fifteen minutes to get to Mule Deer Road from here.�

�And Gail Kendall was there waiting for you?�

�Sure. Out in the driveway, standin� next to her car. Ford Taurus. Piece of crap, the Ford Taurus. Buy American, I believe in that, I own a Chewy myself, but a piece of crap is a piece of crap, no matter who makes it.�

�The car had a dead battery, is that right?�

�Dead as hell. Couldn�t raise a spark with the single cables. I hadda put the double jumpers on to get any juice.� Ridges appeared in the leathery skin of his forehead; he scratched his tangle of reddish hair with a dirty fingernail. �Funny thing, though.�

�What is?�

�Bugger was old and corroded, older than the damn car, looked like. But she musta got a spark out of it in the garage before she called us.�

�Why? Because the car was in the driveway?�

�Nah,� Flynn said. �Engine and block was warm.�

�As if the car�d been driven, you mean?�

�Yeah. Or set there idling for a while before the engine quit.�

�And you say it was an old battery? Older than the car?�

�Looked that way to me. Could be the original conked out on her, too, and she had that one layin� around and stuffed it in there instead of buyin� a new one. Women and their cars. Jeez, you can�t never tell what one of �em will do to a set of wheels, even a piece of crap like the Ford Taurus. I remember one time��

�Did you say anything to her about the battery? Mention the warm engine?�

�The battery � yeah. Told her she better get a new one or she�d be callin� us again because that old bugger wouldn�t hold a charge. Only I didn�t say bugger, not to her. Uh-uh.�

�No?�

He winked. �Stone fox,� he said. �Not that I cuss around any woman much, except my old lady, me bein� in the public service like I am, but around a stone fox I�m extra polite. That�s just the way I am. I don�t want the babes thinkin� I�m one of these crude guys don�t give a Frenchman�s fuck who they use shitty language to.�

�You think Gail Kendall is a fox?�

�Sure. I got an eye for good-looking women. And them skinny types with the pouty lips put a charge in my battery, if you know what I mean.�

I said, �Skinny?�

�Yeah, sure. Small, skinny, cute as a bug�s ass.�

�Pete, Gail Kendall is heavy set and thin-lipped.�

�The hell she is. You musta never seen her, that�s what you think.�

�Or you saw somebody else,� I said.

�Huh?�

�What color was her hair? What style?�

He shrugged. �Hey, man, hair�s hair. I�m a leg and ass man myself. Hers looked pretty fine to me, what I could see under that heavy coat she was wearin�.�

�Her hair, Pete. What color?�

�Couldn�t tell you if I wanted to. She had this scarf tied around her head, covered up everything �cept her face from the eyes down.�

�How old was she?�

�Who knows from age? Old enough, that�s for sure.�

�Around forty?�

�Nah, not that old. Thirty, maybe. Yeah, around thirty.�

�Wait here a second, okay? I�ll be right back.� I hustled over to my car. I�d put the photos of Janice Erskine in the glove compartment last week, after my first visit to Silver Creek Cellars, and they were still there. I brought the set back to Flynn. �Is this the woman you saw?�

He peered at one photo, then the other, turning each a little this way and that. Finally he said, �Could be.�

�But you�re not sure?�

�Could be. Got the same pouty lips. But this fox here, she�s younger.�

�Try to imagine her older by five years or so.�

�I ain�t got much imagination,� Flynn said, but he tried. �Could be,� he said.

�The woman on Mule Deer Road � how did she seem to you?�

�Huh?�

�Was she happy, nervous, upset � what?�

�I dunno, why?�

�It might be important, Pete. Think about it.�

Thinking was a chore for him and it took him a while to get his memory cells in firing order. Then: �Kind of upset, I guess. Yeah. Wired, you know? She wouldn�t hardly look at me, now I think about it.�

�Kept her face averted? Turned away from you?�

�Yeah. I figured it was on account of I�m no Paul Newman. My face, some women like it and some don�t, what the hell. Could be she was wired on account of the battery con-kin� out and she�s late for work. She said something about that when I got there, her bein� late for work.�

�Did you tell any of this to the county cop you talked to? What the woman looked like, how she acted?�

�Nah, I don�t think so.�

�How about the old battery and the fact that the Ford�s engine was warm when you got there?�

�Nah. They never ast me about none of that. You ast the right questions and they didn�t.�

That was it exactly. The key to finding out anything is whether or not you ask the right people the right questions.

I ran the garbage container over against the wall, twisted back to snatch up my jacket. There was just enough time for me to get it on before the car reached the top of the drive. Muddy brown Chrysler about ten years old, two people visible behind the windshield. When the driver saw me walking away from the garage he stood on the brakes hard enough for the front wheels to lock and the car to pull a quarter turn to the left before it stopped. I kept walking toward it, my hands in plain sight.

Five, six, seven seconds and then both doors flew open simultaneously. The driver was out first, moving fast � a burly guy in a corduroy jacket and Levi�s. The passenger was Gail Kendall; she called out sharply, �Vic!� and swung around the open door, but the burly guy didn�t slow or look back. His eyes were fixed on me and from the angry set of his mouth he already knew who I was.

I recognized him, too: the workman on the forklift I�d spoken to at the winery last Thursday. He plowed to a halt in front of me, blocking my way, and said heatedly, �What the hell�re you doing here, man?�

I made the mistake of ignoring him, changing direction to bypass him on his left. He jumped over to block me again just as Kendall, running toward us, yelled his name a second time. I saw his arm swing up, but not in time to take evasive action; his fist smacked into my cheek, mashed my upper lip against my teeth. Pain erupted, my vision went cockeyed, and the next thing I knew I was down on my butt on the macadam with him standing over me, a kind of stolid elation on his face like a heavyweight who�d just fattened his ego on a tired old sparring partner.

Kendall loomed up at his side. �Vic, for God�s sake, what�s the matter with you? What did you hit him for?�

�He had it coming.�

�What if he charges you with assault?�

�He�s trespassing, ain�t he?�

I was on one knee by this time. An incisor had sliced partway through the inside of my upper lip; I tasted blood, felt it trickling from a corner of my mouth. The punch had been solid enough but not square on or I�d have a worse cut and a couple of broken teeth. I shoved up onto my feet, spat out a gob of blood, smeared more of it off my mouth and over the back of one hand before I looked at Kendall and the burly guy again. He was still angry and she was halfway between anger and anxiety. Funny thing, but the knockdown hadn�t built any rage in me. In a way, Vic was right: I�d had it coming.

�Okay,� I said to him, �you win the round. But that�s all it�s going to be. One punch, one round.�

�Yeah?�

�Yeah. You come at me again, I�ll break something of yours.�

�Tough talk for an old man.�

�Come at me and we�ll see how old I am.�

Part of him wanted to push it; part of him didn�t. The part with whatever sense he owned won out. He stood with his legs spread and his hands folding and unfolding at his sides, but he didn�t do anything except glare at me. I let him maul me that way and turned my attention to Gail Kendall.

She said, �What�re you doing on my property?�

�Looking for you.�

�Why? What do you want this time?�

�Nothing much. A little talk.�

�I don�t have anything to say to you.�

�Not to me, maybe.�

�...What does that mean?�

�Ira Erskine,� I said.

Her anger was all but dead now, suffocating under the growing weight of anxiety. She wet her lips; her gaze wouldn�t quite hold mine, as if she were afraid she might betray something through steady eye contact.

Vic said, still with heat, �He was in your garage, babe.� The term of endearment stirred my memory and I heard him saying at the winery that he was Sondra Nelson�s �best friend�s main man.� So Kendall wasn�t a man-hater, just an abuse-hater.

�Is that right?� she said to me. �Were you in the garage?�

�No. Just looking around.�

�For what?�

�Just looking around.�

�Why don�t we call the sheriff?� Vic said. �Trespassing�s a crime, ain�t it?�

�Why don�t you shut up?� I said. �I�m talking to Ms. Kendall.�

�Listen�

�He�s right, Vic. Be quiet.� Then, to me, �I could do that. Call the county sheriff�s office.�

�Go ahead. Get Lieutenant Battle out here and the three of us will have a nice chat. About Erskine and the way he died.�

�For God�s sake,� she said, almost plaintively, �why can�t you just leave it alone? Leave Sandy alone. It was an accident��

�Was it?�

�An accident. He was a miserable son-of-a-bitch, he hurt her badly and he would�ve killed her. He deserved what he got��

�Like your husband nine years ago?�

Fresh anger darkened her eyes, bunched her face into a tight grimace. �You bastard,� she said.

And all at once, looking at her, at Vic standing combatively at her side, I felt bad and sorry and sour about this whole business. It was as complicated, as hurtful to the survivors as Eberhardt�s suicide was to its survivors, and here I was playing tough little mind games with a woman who�d suffered a kind of mental and physical anguish no man can fully understand. Never mind that she was almost certainly a co-conspirator in a premeditated homicide. She was also a victim, and who the hell was I to judge her anyway? Or Sondra Nelson or any other victim? I almost wished Vic would take another poke at me; if he did, I�d let him get away with that one, too. I was back to not liking myself again.

My mouth had started to hurt, the lip already to swell. I spat and wiped away more blood. �I�m sorry for that crack,� I said to Kendall. �It was uncalled for.�

�You�re still a dirty bastard,� Vic said.

�Yeah. All right.�

She said, �You think I had something to do with it, don�t you? Erskine�s death. That�s why you�re sucking around.�

I didn�t say anything.

�You think what you want to about me, I don�t care, but you leave Sandy alone. You hear me? You just let that poor woman try to pick up the pieces. She didn�t have anything to do with him dying.�

�Better leave Gail alone, too,� Vic said, �or by Christ you and me�ll tangle again.�

Empty voices blowing in the wind. Silently I moved around past the two of them, walked slow along the drive and across to my car. There was a first-aid kit in the trunk, but I wouldn�t treat my cut mouth here. Not here. I got in and started the engine and backed up and drove away without another glance at Gail Kendall and her boyfriend.

Sometimes you just can�t look back.

Sometimes being right is a hell of a lot worse than being wrong.

Before we left in the morning I called the office and accessed the answering machine, just in case any urgent messages had come in Friday afternoon. Tamara works part-time some Fridays, depending on her school schedule; she hadn�t been in yesterday at all. I was aware of a certain irony as I made the call, after last night�s avowal to back off on work, spend more time smelling the roses. But you can�t hurl yourself into a lifestyle change all at once � at least I couldn�t. Do it gradually, wean myself away from the work-as-number-one-motivator mindset, and I�d be much more likely to stick to my resolve. Besides, there was still the Erskine business to be dealt with. And Eberhardt, like a small tumor that somehow had to be cut out before any real healing could begin.

There were two messages on the machine, both from the same party: Sondra Nelson. One late yesterday afternoon, one at nine this morning. Both said essentially the same thing. Please call her as soon as possible, it was important she talk to me; she would be at the winery all day today, in the afternoon tomorrow, all day again on Monday. She sounded controlled, businesslike, but there was an undercurrent in both messages that I took to be fear. Source: Gail Kendall. They�d had a conference, decided it was Nelson who stood the best chance of finding out how much I knew and of trying to sway or dissuade me. She wanted me to contact her at Silver Creek so her fianc� wouldn�t be involved, which fit with my suppositions. Erskine�s murder was a two-person job, and James Woolfox wasn�t one of the two.

I rang up the winery, and she came on the line in a hurry. �Yes, hello,� she said. �Thank you for getting back to me so promptly.�

�What can I do for you, Ms. Nelson?�

�Well, I wonder� Could you hold a moment?� She went away for about fifteen seconds. Closing an office door or switching phones for privacy, I thought. �I�m back,� her voice said in my ear. �I wonder if we could talk in person, privately? Either up here or in the city, if you prefer.�

Uh-huh, I thought. Did I owe Sondra Nelson the courtesy of another meeting? Yes. I felt sorry for her and Gail Kendall, in spite of or maybe because of what they�d felt compelled to do, and there was no denying that I was partly responsible for putting her in a position where she had had to make that kind of choice. But the meeting would not go as she and Kendall hoped it would. If there was any swaying done, I�d be the one to do it.

I said, �I think that can be arranged. When did you have in mind?�

�As soon as possible. Today?�

�Can�t be done. I�m about to leave for the weekend. I won�t be available until Monday.�

Longish pause. �Monday morning?�

�Afternoon would be better. I have some business in the morning.�

�All right. Where shall we meet?�

�The winery. Or anywhere in Sonoma County. I�ll be in Santa Rosa, if you want to come there.�

�Oh? Are you... you wouldn�t be seeing Lieutenant Battle, would you?�

�Not before you and I talk.�

Another pause. �Would you mind coming here? Santa Rosa... well, there�re just too many people.�

�I don�t mind. Say one o�clock?�

�Yes.� The throat-clearing sound again. �There�ll be people here, too,� she said. �At the winery proper. But there�s another place on the property, the ruins of an old stone farmhouse. Would it be all right if I met you there?�

Dangerous games, Ms. Nelson? But I doubted it. She wouldn�t play them on Woolfox�s land, where he might be hurt by the backlash, and she couldn�t be sure I hadn�t already confided in Battle. Besides, I didn�t see her as the sort who would always resort to violence when threatened. She was a victim, not an aggressor.

�How do I get to the farmhouse?�

She told me. It was only three-quarters of a mile from Silver Creek Cellars and I would have to go through the winery grounds to get there.

�If I�m held up in Santa Rosa for any reason,� I said, �I�ll call and let you know.�

She said, �Thank you� before she broke the connection, but not in response to what I�d said. As if I�d given her something � a slender thread of hope, maybe.

Had I given her a thread of hope? I hadn�t meant to. Whatever she had to say, it wouldn�t make any difference in what I did. Murder was murder; motives and extenuating circumstances and emotional pleas didn�t matter. Neither did pity nor compassion. If she was guilty, and I was sure she was, it was my duty to see that she was held accountable. Convince her to turn herself in, if I could; and if I couldn�t, turn her and Gail Kendall in myself.

There were half a dozen cars parked at Silver Creek Cellars this afternoon, a knot of visitors in front of the tasting room entrance, even a young couple having a fair-weather picnic at a bench under one of the old live oaks. I envied them. The weekend in Mendocino seemed long past now, a memory that was already starting to blur at the edges.

Uphill beyond the warehouse was the vineyard road Sondra Nelson had told me to take; I drove that way, leaving the good and easy life behind. The road was in decent repair, hardpan overlain with gravel, but it ran an irregular route over and around rises and down through little swales and I couldn�t make much time. The rows of grapevines were tall, their leaves a chlorophyll green color that had a fresh-scrubbed shine in the sunlight. I passed a trio of laborers working among the rows; they stopped to watch curiously as I clattered by. At three-tenths of a mile by the odometer, the road hooked right and blended into another, slightly wider one that climbed into low hills. Old farm road, this one. The shallow, brush-banked creek that paralleled it on the south was probably the same one that ran behind the winery buildings.

The road took me up a moderately steep hillside, at the top of which the vast acreage of vineyards ended, and then dropped me down into a shallow bowllike valley. The three or four acres of flatland looked as though they had once been cultivated � hay, alfalfa, maybe hops � but that had been many years ago; now they were coated in grass and weeds and an encroaching section of wild mustard. Ahead, as I descended, I could see an old wooden bridge spanning the creek, and close beyond that, along the bank and partially screened by willows and aspens, the remains of the farm buildings.

I turned onto the bridge, thumped over its warped boards. The farmhouse was a tumbledown stone shell so overgrown with grass, bushes, wild berry vines, and climbing primroses that it seemed to be sinking inexorably into the earth. To one side, at the rear, was a huge jumble of weathered boards and one leaning wall, all that remained of a barn. A dark blue Lexus was drawn up between the house and the former barn, in what had once been a garden of some sort. I couldn�t see the front half of it from my angle of approach, but Sondra Nelson was probably waiting inside. The only outward sign of life on the property were a couple of birds having a mating argument on what was left of the house�s roof.

I pulled up just across the bridge. And the first thing I noticed then was the line of the creek coming out of the trees to the west, the willows and aspens stark against the sky. It was this scene that had been the inspiration and model for Sondra Nelson�s Silver Creek Cellars label.

The view held my attention for a bit. When I turned my head again I had company: Sondra Nelson was coming my way from the Lexus, and she wasn�t alone. She�d brought Gail Kendall along for backup.

It didn�t have to mean anything one way or another, but when you�re meeting somebody in an out-of-the-way place like this and the prearrangements turn out to be altered, it makes you wary. A touch paranoid, too. I leaned over and flipped the spring catch that holds the .38 Colt Bodyguard I keep under the dash; slipped the weapon from its hooks and slid it inside my belt on the right side, under my jacket where it wouldn�t show. Better to give in to a little paranoia than to get caught unprotected.

The birds were still making a racket as I exited the car, lunging and screeching at each other in a flurry of wings. Rough sex in the animal kingdom. Nelson and Kendall slowed as I moved toward them, so that when the three of us met it was in front of the broken and half-hidden farmhouse porch. Nelson wore a lined windbreaker over an ankle-length skirt, the jacket zipped to the throat and her hands in the pockets and her shoulders hunched as if she were cold. Kendall was in Levi�s and a plaid Pendleton. Tension was like an adhesive in both their faces, binding them into unnaturally stiff expressions. Anger burned in the older pair of eyes; the younger pair was bleak, caught halfway between resignation and desperation.

I said to Sondra Nelson, �I thought this was supposed to be a two-person meeting.�

�Coming along was my idea,� Kendall said. �I didn�t want Sandy seeing you alone.�

�Afraid she�d say something she shouldn�t?�

�No.�

�United front?�

�That�s right. How much do you want?�

�...What?�

�You heard me. How much to quit investigating us, leave us alone once and for all?�

�Are you trying to buy me off?�

�Oh for God�s sake,� she said, �why else would you be doing this? Let�s just get it out into the open.�

�I�m not the one who asked for this meeting��

�You would have sooner or later. How much?�

�I�m not for sale, Ms. Kendall.�

�Everybody�s for sale at the right price.�

�Not everybody.� My name isn�t Eberhardt, I thought. You can�t buy my soul for five hundred pieces of silver and two bottles of Jack Daniel�s. �I never had any intention of blackmailing either of you.�

Nelson said plaintively, �Then why are you persecuting us?�

�Persecuting, Ms. Nelson?�

�Investigating on your own when the county sheriff... They�re satisfied, why aren�t you?�

�Don�t be so sure Lieutenant Battle is satisfied.�

�He hasn�t bothered us again,� Kendall said. �But you... is it because you worked for Erskine?�

�No.�

�Don�t tell me you sympathized with him. You think he had a right to come after Sandy, tear her life apart?�

�No. Nobody has that right.�

�Then why? What do you expect to get out of it?�

�How about a little justice?� I said.

�Justice! For a piece of shit like Ira Erskine?�

�He was a human being, no matter how miserable an excuse for one. And he was murdered in cold blood.�

�You don�t know that.�

�Don�t I?�

�You don�t know anything.�

Sondra Nelson said, �If we could only make you understand��

�Understand what?�

�What a monster he was. How frightened I was.�

�You ran away from him once, changed your name, started over. You could�ve done it again.�

�No. No, I couldn�t.�

�Of course she couldn�t,� Kendall said. �The man she loves, everything she ever wanted is right here in this valley. How long do you think a person can go on living in terror of her life?�

�You lived that way for a lot of years, didn�t you?�

Her gaze raked my face. �I was a fool.� she said. �Sandy and I were both fools. The only way to deal with vermin��

��is to exterminate them.�

�Well? You said it, I didn�t.�

�I said it, but the two of you did it. Whose idea, Ms. Kendall? Yours?�

�You don�t know a damn thing,� she said, but this time as if she were trying to convince herself.

�I know the two of you conspired to kill Ira Erskine. And I know how you did it � the double switch, the whole plan.�

Nelson moaned, �Oh, God...�

�Hush. Sandy, it�s all right. He can�t prove whatever he thinks he knows.� The hot eyes scorched me again. �There�s no proof we did anything, either of us.�

�But there is,� I said. �Enough to have both of you charged with at least second-degree homicide.�

�You�re so fucking smart. Go ahead, then, tell us. How�d we do it? What�s your proof?�

Laying it out in detail was about the only chance I had of convincing them to turn themselves in. I still felt sorry for both of them, despite Kendall�s combative attitude; and whether or not they believed it, I hated this as much as they did and I was suffering right along with them.

�All right,� I said. �Last Sunday in the Napa Valley � that�s when you planned it, the two of you alone somewhere. The problem was to get rid of Erskine quickly and in a way that left you both in the clear. Solution: a double switch to create two solid alibis. On Monday morning you traded cars and places. You drove down to Santa Rosa to take Ms. Nelson�s place on jury duty, she went to Healdsburg to shoot her ex-husband and then back to Geyserville to pretend to be you stranded at home.�

If I needed any further confirmation that I was right, Sondra Nelson�s anguished face gave it to me. But Kendall said scornfully, �That�s ridiculous. How could I possibly take Sandy�s place on jury duty?�

�Easily enough in Sonoma County. When you�re selected here you receive a computer-generated postcard that you take with you on the day you�re to serve. The card comes in two parts, perforated, both of which have your name and juror�s number on it. You tear off one part and put it in a box when you arrive, then go into the jury room and wait for your number to be called. Meanwhile, a clerk in the commissioner�s office checks the stubs against a master list to make sure the summoned person is present. That�s all � nobody checks individual ID at any time. No reason to; it�s almost unheard of for one person to take on someone else�s jury duty.�

�Sandy was called for a rape trial that morning. She was almost seated��

�Her number was called. Everything is done by juror number � pool selection for a particular trial, individual selection for the jury. The judge or lawyers ask the called juror�s name and some general personal history, but you could answer those questions as easily as she could. And it wasn�t hard to talk yourself out of being seated. Plenty of ways to do that � claimed you were a rape victim yourself, or had a family member who was raped, or simply said you had a strong antirape bias and couldn�t be impartial. Once a juror is excused, that�s pretty much it unless the trial docket is heavy and the general jury pool thin for one reason or another, and those weren�t the cases on Monday. Out of the courtroom, out of the courthouse, and home free.

�And while you were handling things in Santa Rosa, Ms. Nelson drove your car to the Pinecrest Motel, talked her way into Erskine�s room, used her wiles to��

Nelson: �No!�

��to throw him off guard, got her hands on his gun, and shot him. She couldn�t go back out through the door because the shot had brought witnesses, so she wriggled out through the bathroom window, slipped around front to where your car was parked, and drove away. Somewhere between Healdsburg and Geyserville she stopped to call Triple A, using your name and card number and a public phone so the call couldn�t be traced. Straight to your house then, where she pulled another switch � the old corroded battery from the garage into the Ford in place of the good one. When the serviceman showed up and put in a charge in the old battery, she signed off as Gail Kendall and reswitched the batteries once he was gone. And then waited for you to return from Santa Rosa to reclaim her car.�

Neither woman spoke when I finished. The silence had a heavy, swollen quality; even the mating birds were still. Sondra Nelson was so pale I could see the fine tracery of veins in her cheeks; the bright-red lipstick she wore made her mouth look bloody. The older woman hated me with an unblinking intensity, as if by sheer force of will she might manage to make me keel over dead at their feet.

She ended the silence by saying, �You�re so goddamn smug, aren�t you?� in a choked voice.

�Smug, Ms. Kendall?�

�Smug and self-righteous. Sees all, knows all. Well, you�re not half as smart as you think you are.�

�Experienced and methodical, not smart. You�re mistaken if you think I�m enjoying this.�

�But that hasn�t stopped you, has it?�

�From doing my job? No.�

�Ruining people�s lives. That�s some job.�

�I didn�t conspire to kill Ira Erskine. The two of you did that.�

�You can�t prove it.�

�You keep saying that. But I don�t have to prove it. That�s up to Lieutenant Battle and the county prosecutor. And I wasn�t bluffing about there being enough evidence to have you both indicted.�

�What evidence?�

�The Triple-A driver can identify which of you was at your house that morning. And I found the other portion of the jury summons, the one you kept, buried in your garbage. There�re other things, too. And more to be found with a little digging.�

�You haven�t talked to Battle yet. Why not?�

�It�ll go easier on you if you confess. That�s why I agreed to come here � to give Ms. Nelson, and you, a chance to go to him first.�

�And if we don�t?�

�You know the answer to that.�

�Doesn�t it matter to you why? Any of the reasons why? Don�t you have any compassion?�

�More than you might think.�

�But not enough. Even though you�re right about only part of it. The rest... you couldn�t be more wrong.�

�What part am I wrong about?�

�Tell him, Sandy. Tell him what really happened in that motel room.�

Sondra Nelson jerked a little, as if she�d been touched with a live, low-voltage wire. She said, �No, I can�t go through all that again. What�s the use? It won�t matter to him, he doesn�t care...�

�Tell him anyway. I want to see his face.�

There was another period of silence, more charged than before. A breeze had kicked up and was rustling the trees, bringing the smell of green things growing and the vagrant scent of apple blossoms even though no apple trees were visible in the vicinity.

�Suppose...� Nelson began, and stopped and cleared her throat, passed a hand over her eyes to clear them, too. �Suppose we did plan to kill Ira, just as you said. Planning something like that and actually going through with it... they�re not the same. Even if you know it�s the only way to save your life, he�s still someone you once loved, had a child with. It�s not easy... it�s not... you can�t...�

She was trembling by then. Her eyes, round and moist, were like those of a spotlighted deer.

�Suppose I did go to his motel to... end the fear. With my own gun, one I�ve had for years for protection, in my purse. And suppose I took it out once I was in the room and pointed it at him, and he stood there looking at me in that arrogant way of his and saying, �You can�t do it, Janice, you can�t shoot me.� And he was right, I couldn�t... I tried, I wanted to, but I...� Pause, her throat working, her face paper-white except for red splotches spreading slowly, like patches of spilled blood, across her cheekbones. �And suppose he took my gun away from me, pulled it out of my hand and put it back in my purse and then he... suppose he... stepped up close, smiling the whole time, and hit me hit me hit me and threw me down on the bed and hit me and took my clothes off, not tore them off, took them off, oh he was very tender then, as if it was our wedding night, and tender when he raped me, all the while whispering how much he loved me and exactly how he would kill me if I didn�t go back to Santa Fe with him...�

Ragged breath, and then the rest of it in the past tense, without qualifiers, her eyes squeezed shut and her voice congealed: �Afterward he went into the bathroom and I crawled off the bed and managed to put on my clothes, and his gun was lying there on the table, and I picked it up, and he came out of the bathroom wearing his robe and smiled at me as if nothing terrible had happened, as if it was perfectly normal, and said �I love you, Janice,� just like that, and went over and picked up his cigarettes from the nightstand and lighted one, and I walked around in front of him and I... he looked at me and saw the gun and he said, �Oh Christ, Janice, not this again� and I... the gun... his head just seemed to... I couldn�t look at him lying on the floor, all the blood... outside there were voices and somebody pounding on the door... I couldn�t think, I ran into the bathroom...�

She sagged a little as the last of it dribbled out. Gail Kendall caught her arm, held her with a kind of fierce protectiveness.

Dry-mouthed, I asked, �If you were so distraught, why did you close the window after you were out? Make sure the catch was fastened?�

�I don�t know, I don�t remember anything about that. I was in the bathroom and then I was outside and then I was in Gail�s car driving away. It�s all... fragmented. Unreal, as if it were happening to somebody else.�

I had nothing to say to that.

Kendall said, �You don�t believe her, do you?�

�Why should I? The story�s convincing, she�s convincing, but so was Erskine the day he poured out his lies to me. I swallowed that sob story, but I�m not swallowing any more without corroboration.�

�Corroboration,� Sondra Nelson said in a dull voice. �All right, if that�s what you want.�

She pushed away from the older woman, unzippered her windbreaker. And then in a series of swift movements she opened her skirt and let it fall, caught the waistband of a pair of white briefs and yanked them partway down, and with her other hand lifted the blouse to her breasts � exposing the entire middle of her body.

Healing scrapes and welts, bruises still purple-black and piss-yellow at the edges. From sternum to crotch, a madman�s abstract design hammered out on human flesh.

�Well?� Kendall said savagely. �Now do you believe her?�

I�d seen and heard enough, too much. All of a sudden there were too many conflicting emotions swirling around inside me. I turned away from the two of them. Walked toward my car, not fast and not slow. I could feel the .38 inside my belt, the barrel digging into my hipbone, the grip tight against the pad of fat above. It felt like a dirty hand � Ira Erskine�s hand.

Hard steps behind me, hurrying to catch up. Hard fingers gripping my arm to halt me before I reached the car. Gail Kendall in my face again. �Are you going to see Battle now?�

�...No. Not now.�

�But eventually. You�ll still turn us in.�

�I don�t know.�

�We�d never be convicted, you know we wouldn�t. No jury would ever convict two battered women in a case like this. I don�t care about myself, but Sandy... you�d be putting her through more hell for nothing. Nothing!�

I shook my head. It had a loose feel on the stem of my neck.

�Hasn�t she suffered enough? You heard her, she�s sick about what he made her do. She�ll never get over it. Isn�t that punishment enough?�

�She killed a man,� I said, only this time it sounded hollow � a meaningless phrase in a legal brief, words blowing in the wind.

�Not a man,� Kendall said, �a rabid dog like the one I lived with for ten years. She killed a rabid dog to save her life, the same as the county SWAT team killed one to save mine.�

�You�ll hear from me. I won�t do anything without letting one of you know first.� I started moving again.

�When?� she said behind me. �When?�

I had no answer for her; I had no answer for myself. All I could do at this point, all I did, was to get into the car and drive the hell away from there.

�I thought I had it all figured when I went out there,� I said to Kerry. �Cut-and-dried, and no matter what Sondra Nelson said it wouldn�t make any difference. But when I heard and saw what he�d done to her, those bruises... it did something to me. Now it doesn�t seem half as simple as it did before.�

�He must�ve been a monster. Erskine.�

�Yeah. But I already knew that... Oh, hell, I don�t know. I just feel bad for both of them. Smug and self-righteous, Kendall called me, and she was right. I paid lip service to having compassion, but I didn�t take enough of it out there with me.�

�Are you saying you�re sorry you found out the truth?�

�Christ, no. I�d feel twice as bad if I�d heard it later, after I dumped my version on Battle.�

The water in the tub was cooling; I turned the hot water tap on full blast again. Steam rose in thick floating layers that gave Kerry, seated on the clothes hamper across the bathroom, an ethereal quality, as if I were talking to an ectoplasmic representation rather than a real person.

She said, �You are going to tell him, aren�t you?�

�I don�t know yet. I still haven�t made up my mind.�

�You will,� she said.

�Will I? What makes you so sure?�

�Because you know they won�t confess of their own volition and Battle probably won�t find out without your help. There�s nobody else to see that justice is done.�

�Honorable, dutiful, Mr. Do-the-Right-Thing.�

�That�s you. You couldn�t let two people get away with murder.�

�I�m not so sure about that.�

�Compromise your principles, jeopardize your career, for a pair of strangers�?�

�A pair of badly used human beings.� My principles aren�t exactly what they used to be, either, I thought, but I kept that to myself. �Kerry, what would you have done in Sondra Nelson�s place?�

�Come on, that�s not a relevant question.�

�It�s relevant to me. Suppose that screwball ex of yours was stalking you��

�Ray? He may be crazy, but he was never abusive.�

�All right, but suppose he was and he�d been stalking you ever since you left him. And he found you and threatened your life in front of witnesses and you knew he meant it. Would you throw away the new life you�d built, a man you loved and who loved you, and start running and living in fear again? Or would you take desperate action?�

�I can�t answer that,� Kerry said. �No woman can, really, unless she�s living in such a situation.�

�Right. Exactly. You get pushed to the limits and then you find out. So it is possible you�d�ve done just what Sondra Nelson did. You don�t rule it out.�

�I doubt I could kill anyone.�

�Not even if you were beaten and raped? Not even to save your own life?�

�In self-defense, yes. I came close to doing just that not so long ago, don�t forget.�

�I�ll never forget that night in Cazadero.�

�Premeditated murder, though... no, I couldn�t plan and carry out a cold-blooded act like that. Not many people could.�

�Neither could Nelson. That�s central in her case. She didn�t shoot him until he beat and raped and threatened her again. And when he did those things, he made it self-defense.�

�You�re splitting hairs,� Kerry said. �She went to the motel with the intention of killing him. She admitted that she tried to do it when she got there.�

�But she didn�t. Besides, does self-defense always have to be spontaneous to qualify? Always, in every case?�

�Maybe not. But taking a human life is still wrong.�

�So Nelson and Kendall should be punished.�

�Yes.�

�Because the law says so.�

�Well?�

�Even if they could be convicted,� I said, �and Kendall was right that it isn�t likely, what purpose would be served? Who�d benefit from them going to prison, two essentially law-abiding women who�re no longer a threat to any individual or to society at large?�

�How can you be sure they�re no longer a threat? What if somebody else harasses one or both of them? If they got away with murder once, they might be inclined to try it again.�

�I don�t think so. Erskine was the psychopath, not Nelson or Kendall.�

�You could be wrong.�

�I could be, sure. No absolutes.�

�Except for our laws � they�re the closest to absolutes we have. If there wasn�t punishment for people who break them, what good would they be? You might as well have anarchy.�

�No argument there. But what�s more important, punishment or justice? The two aren�t always synonymous. The law isn�t always inviolable, no matter what the legal profession would have us believe, and justice isn�t always best served by legal interpretation.�

�Now you�re rationalizing.�

�Maybe.�

�Or worse, thinking of playing God.�

�Babe,� I said, �judges and lawyers and juries play God every day. Strangers who know little and care less about the individuals they sit in judgment of. You think they always play strictly by the rules? That they don�t manipulate and maneuver and rationalize and exercise personal prejudice and deliberately misinterpret facts simply because they�re empowered by the legal system? That�s another illusion we keep fooling ourselves with. We all play God sometimes. And sometimes the God we play is more just than the God the lawmakers play.�

She sat quiet. The steam had dissipated again and I could see her face clearly. The frown she wore said she was doing a little God-playing herself at the moment, sitting in judgment of me and my heretical argument.

�Besides,� I said, �I�m the one who put Erskine in a position to harm his ex-wife, and her in the position of having to defend herself against him. So if I do decide to keep what I know to myself, all I�d be doing is reversing myself on the judgment seat. Trying to be a better God-player than I was before.�

�You really believe that? Everything you�ve been saying?�

�Fundamentally. And if you�re going to say that I�d be putting myself above the law, that�s not true. I�m bound by it and a slave to it just like everybody else, and you know I wouldn�t have it any other way. What we�re talking about here is interpretation by one man in one specific case. My interpretation of justice here doesn�t necessarily coincide with the laws of California. That�s the bottom line.�

�So you�re going to do it. Let those women get away with murder.�

�I didn�t say that. I told you, I still haven�t made up my mind. All I know right now is, I can�t stop thinking about Sondra Nelson and what that son-of-a-bitch did to her. I can�t get the image of all those bruises out of my mind...�

She was waiting for me on the porch, in the shade of the big magnolia tree. Wearing a lightweight, butterscotch-colored suit and a peach-hued blouse, all of which seemed to hang shapelessly on her thin body the way clothing hangs on a scarecrow. When I�d talked to her at the San Rafael real estate brokerage company � she�d gone back to work last week � she had thought at first that I was after her again about the uncashed five-hundred-dollar check. No, I said, I needed to talk to her right away on another matter, and not at her office or any other public place. And she�d said, �Home, then,� in a voice gone as dull and lifeless as it had been during that painful Sunday visit nine days ago. Meaning her temporary home, the only one she had now � the Hoyt house in Ross.

When I came up onto the porch she was on her feet and smiling, but there was no warmth or light in the smile. It was nothing more than a narrow stretching and upturning, like the stitched grin on the face of a rag doll. A pale-skinned rag doll with hollow cheeks and spectral eyes.

�You made good time,� she said with false cheerfulness. �I�ve only been here two or three minutes.�

�Not much traffic.�

�We can talk inside or out here...�

�Doesn�t matter.�

�Out here, then. The weather�s been so nice the past couple of days.� She sat down again in a padded redwood armchair. I leaned a hip against the porch railing; I didn�t feel like sitting. �Spring has always been my favorite time of year.

I had no comment on that.

�I hope this won�t take long, I can�t take more than an hour for lunch and it�s twelve-thirty already�� She broke off abruptly, and the stitched grin vanished and the shape of her expression changed, darkened. �Oh God,� she said, �I knew when you started asking all those questions it would come to this. The five hundred dollars, the psychologist, the emergency room doctor...�

�He was abusing you, wasn�t he, Bobbie Jean?�

The question seemed to hang in the air between us. She sat still so long it was as if the essence of her had gone away, leaving nothing but the shell of her body. Then, not quite looking at me, �How did you know?�

The way you moved at the funeral, stiff and slow � the same way Sondra Nelson moved that day at Woolfox�s ranch. The labored breathing, the winces � as if there might be bruises under your clothing, too. But all I said was, �How long?�

�Physically? Not long.�

�Weeks, months?�

�A few weeks. Before that, it was all words, looks, gestures... you know.�

�Yeah, I know.�

�It wasn�t much at first. A shove, a slap, a poke in the arm. But then it was happening every time he drank too much, every time we had a cross word about alcohol or money or any of the other things we fought over. He grew angrier, and the slaps and pokes harder and harder. I could see he was losing control. Of his work, his life, everything.�

�What did you do about it?�

�Tried to convince him to stop drinking, join AA, see a doctor. I threatened to leave him. Once I even threatened him with legal action. None of it did any good. It only made matters worse.�

�You could have left him.�

�I tried that, too. More than once I had my mind made up and my bags packed. The only time I actually put them in the car, he came after me and begged me to stay. Down on his knees, crying like a little boy, telling me how much he needed me. I couldn�t turn my back on him. I should have, I know that, but I couldn�t.�

Foul taste in my mouth again; I worked saliva through it before I asked, �What happened that last Sunday night, two weeks ago? The night you ended up in the hospital?�

�Another argument, a whole flock of vicious words between us. I was also drinking, I�d been drinking too much myself. I thought... I don�t know what I thought. We were both drunk. He slapped me and I slapped him back, the first time I ever hit him. His second slap was so hard my ears rang. It made me wild enough to try to knee him. He grabbed me, threw me on the floor, started yelling and kicking me. Half a dozen kicks in the side and hips.�

�Hard enough to break two of your ribs.�

�The last kick... I think I screamed before I passed out.� Her voice was brittle, without emotion. She was like a sponge that had had all moisture wrung out of it and been left to dessicate, curl inward at the edges until it was little more than compressed dust. �When I woke up I was in his car, he�d carried me out and was driving me to the hospital. Crying the whole way, telling me how sorry he was, how much he loved me and that he�d never hurt me again.�

�And after Dr. Caslon treated you, he talked to Eb and told him he�d better get counseling and gave him Richard Disney�s name.�

�Yes. He would�ve agreed to anything that night.�

�Including you paying the hospital bill. The records are in your name.�

�He had no choice then.�

�Not until Sunday night, when he caught the thief at the O�Hanlon Brothers warehouse. Instead of turning him in, he extorted five hundred dollars from him. Received the full amount the next night, deposited it in his account Tuesday morning.�

�Is that how he got the money? I knew it had to be something like that. He said he borrowed it, but I didn�t believe him.�

�The check he wrote was to you,� I said. �To pay you back for the hospital bill.�

�Yes.�

�What�d you do with it?�

�Tore it up and threw the pieces in his face. A mistake... but I couldn�t stand to take dirty money from him.�

�When did that happen?�

�Tuesday evening, after I came home from work.�

And later Eberhardt had gone back to Bolt Street. Not to stake out the warehouse; not to gouge any more wages out of T. K. O�Hanlon under false pretenses. Because he�d picked it as his dying place. Gone too far finally, so far he couldn�t come back. I�ve had enough. I can�t keep hurting anymore. Himself or Bobbie Jean. And the trigger wasn�t one thing but a chain reaction: him breaking her ribs, her having to pay the hospital bill, him sinking low enough to shake down Danny Forbes, and the last link, her tearing up his check and flinging the pieces in his face. You won�t believe this Bobbie Jean but I love you.

�Wednesday A.M.,� I said. �Tell me what happened.�

�He died,� she said.

�But not alone.�

�No. Not alone.�

A UPS van went rumbling by on the street. A couple of houses away, two boys � home for lunch or playing hooky � began yelling and performing loops and wheelies on their racing bikes. I listened to them while I watched Bobbie Jean, waiting for her to go on. But she just sat there in that gone-away posture, for so long that I had to prod her with words like barbs. Making them into a question because this was the part I wasn�t sure of, the part I hoped I was wrong about.

�Did he kill himself, or did you do it?�

She heard me because she made a sound in her throat, low and inarticulate. But she didn�t answer.

�Bobbie Jean. Did you kill Eb?�

�No,� she said. �Yes,� she said.

�Which is it?�

�I don�t know.�

�Don�t play games with me.�

�I�m not. I swear I don�t know. You�ll have to tell me.�

�How can I tell you? I wasn�t there.�

Mutely she shook her head.

�He called you at two-forty that morning,� I said. �On his cell phone.� The last call of his life. And the record of it � to his home number, along with the exact time � right there on the final Cellular One bill, staring me in the face every time I looked at it.

�Yes.�

�To say good-bye? Or was he still on the fence and wanted to be talked out of it?� One or both of the reasons he�d called me the week before, maybe. But more likely he�d been bitter and vindictive enough to want to lay a little of the blame on me. Leave me a legacy of hurt.

�Neither one. Help, my help.�

�Make sense, Bobbie Jean.�

�I�m trying to. I�ve been trying to make sense of what happened ever since that night.�

�What did he say when he called?�

�He was drunk. So drunk I could scarcely understand him. He said he was going to kill himself, that he�d been thinking about it a long time and it was the only way. He said he�d been sitting there for an hour with the gun in his hand. He said he... needed me.�

�Needed you. Meaning what?�

�He wanted me to drive down there. Right away.�

�The alley, Bolt Street.�

�Yes.�

�And you went.�

�Yes.�

�Why? You could�ve called nine-eleven instead. Or Rivera or Joe... somebody.�

�I was afraid if anyone but me showed up, he�d go ahead and do it. I believed I could talk him out of it. I wasn�t thinking clearly, I�d been asleep and I was groggy and scared... I crawled into my car and drove down there, that�s all.�

�And when you got there?�

�He was sitting behind the wheel with the gun in his hand, just as he�d said. Spilled liquor and vomit all over him. He started to cry when I got in. He said he wanted to die. Couldn�t stand to go on or to hurt me anymore. Said he�d written a note, it was in the glove compartment, and he�d been trying to finish the job ever since. Said he�d had the gun in his mouth a dozen times but he couldn�t make himself eat it. �I can�t squeeze the trigger, Bobbie Jean, I can�t make myself eat it.� His exact words.�

Don�t be surprised if you hear I ate my gun. And most handgun suicides by cops and ex-cops did go that way � barrel in the mouth, squeeze the trigger. A chest shot wasn�t Eberhardt�s way, the hard-line retired cop�s way. It had never seemed quite right to me, despite Jack Logan�s arguments. Join me for a midnight snack? Let�s eat. Lodged in my subconscious and manifested in the recurring dream.

I knew what Bobbie Jean would say next. And waiting for it, I was cold all over and filled with emotion like a viscous fluid clogging my chest, making it difficult to breathe.

�He begged me to help him,� she said. �I told him no. I tried to talk him into giving me the gun, coming home with me, but he wouldn�t listen or he was too drunk to listen. He drank what was left in his bottle, threw it on the floor and cried and begged some more. I kept saying no and then, real foolish, I made a grab for the gun. He turned ugly. Laid the muzzle against my temple and said he�d kill me first, kill me sure if I didn�t help him. He meant it. Dark in the car, I couldn�t see his eyes, but I heard the truth in his voice. He�d�ve shot me if that was what it took to shoot himself. That�s how much he wanted to die.�

�You had no choice,� I said thickly. �No other choice.�

�I didn�t see that I had. Maybe if... oh, Lord, I don�t know. I was so scared and he�d made me hate him for everything he�d done to me, to himself � I wanted him dead right then as much as he wanted it. He put that gun in his mouth again and I let him take my hand and fold it over his hand, my finger over his finger on the trigger, and he mumbled �Squeeze, squeeze� but I couldn�t. In my mind I saw his head exploding and I couldn�t do it, not that way. �Not that way, Eb,� I said, we were both bawling by then, and he took the barrel out of his mouth and pressed it against his chest, his hand and mine, and said �Squeeze� and I couldn�t and he said �Do it, please, for both of us, squeeze� and I squeezed...�

�Jesus, Bobbie Jean.�

�The shot was so loud... I jumped and I think I screamed. But after that, it�s crazy but I was real calm. Drug-calm, you know? As if I�d had a shot of something. I went from his car into mine and drove home just as if nothing�d happened. It wasn�t until I was in the house that it came over me he was actually dead and I�d helped him die. For a long time I was hysterical. But by daylight, when the police called and said he�d been found, I was calm again. I thought I could tell them, but I couldn�t. I thought: I�ve been through enough, I can�t go through anymore. But I�m still going through it, over and over. That kind of thing just tears you up inside. And the worst of it is, I don�t even know if I murdered him or not. Did I?�

�No,� I said. �He murdered himself.�

Her dark, dry, haunted eyes searched mine � the kind of look a supplicant might give to a priest. �You don�t hate me?�

�I don�t hate you.�

�Sometimes I hate myself.�

�You shouldn�t. Him, if anybody.�

�Funny, but I don�t hate Eb. Not anymore.�

Me neither, I thought. Maybe I never did. Maybe all along I was enraged at him for being sick, disappointed in him for being weak and flawed and culpable. And maybe I�d wanted to hang on to some of my belief in the old Eberhardt, the fantasy Eberhardt, even though I knew better. Some illusions die harder than others, and the ones closest to your own soul the hardest of all.

I said, �Look at it this way, Bobbie Jean. He felt he�d rather be dead than hurt you any more � and that�s a form of love, isn�t it? Bitter and twisted, but still love. So is what you did for him. An act of love as much as any other kind.�

�It�d be a comfort to really believe that.�

�Better than carrying the weight of him on your shoulders as long as you live.�

�Someday,� she said. �Someday.�

The energy-high kids rocketed by on their bikes, yelling. A woman being half dragged by a standard poodle appeared on the sidewalk, stopped when the poodle stopped, and looked on with benign obliviousness as the dog lifted its leg and peed all over one of the Hoyts� yew trees.

�What happens now?� Bobbie Jean asked.

�Now?�

�You, me. Where do we go from here?�

�You go to work; it�s almost one o�clock. And I drive back to the city and do the same.�

�You know what I mean.�

�No, I don�t know. The fact is, I haven�t seen or talked to you since last week. Any conversation we might�ve had after that is strictly imaginary.�

The haunted eyes probed my face again in that seeking-sinner way. Her mouth opened slightly; her throat worked.

�Don�t say it, don�t say anything. Whatever it is I couldn�t hear it because I�m not here.� I pushed off the railing, leaned down and kissed the papery skin of her cheek. �Forgive yourself, Bobbie Jean. I already have.�

And I said good-bye for the last time and left her sitting there and walked out of the rest of her life.

I told Kerry that night over dinner. All of it, every detail. She had as much right to know the truth as I did. We�d had secrets from each other once, before our marriage, but not since and not ever again. Anything, everything that mattered to one of us now belonged to the other.

Kerry, yes, but nobody else. Our secret and Bobbie Jean�s to the grave.

She took it as I expected she would: shock, bewilderment, sadness, understanding. �My God, that poor woman. What she must�ve gone through.�

�Six kinds of hell and still burning,� I said. �So you think I did the right thing? Not turning her in?�

�Yes.�

�Letting her get away with a crime.�

�I suppose so, but� Oh.�

�Sondra Nelson and Gail Kendall, that�s right. Nelson went through the same kind of hell, and for a much longer time, and she�s still burning, too. So is Kendall after nine years.�

�But Bobbie Jean didn�t murder Eberhardt.�

�Technically, no. But she did help him kill himself and then hid the fact. Assisted suicide is a serious offense in California, Kerry. Just about as serious as second-degree homicide.�

�Which means you�ve decided. You�re going to let Nelson and Kendall get away with their murder.�

�I have to, now. How can I do anything else? I�d be the most despicable kind of hypocrite if I let a guilty friend off the hook and gaffed a couple of poor strangers. The cases are too similar, legally and morally and in every other way. You can see that, can�t you?�

�Yes, I can see it.�

�But you still don�t approve?�

�I didn�t say that. Part of me keeps balking at the idea, but another part...� She sighed and shook her head. �It�s all so damn complicated.�

�And the suffering makes it more so.�

�You think any of them will ever find peace again?�

�I hope so. They wouldn�t if they had to go through due process, that�s for sure. Besides, if it happens I am wrong to be playing God this way, I�ll answer for it some day.�

�So will they.�

�Right. One thing for sure: Eberhardt and Ira Erskine already have.�

She was quiet for a time. Then, �I really don�t know you as well as I thought I did,� as if she were a little nonplussed by the admission. �Either that, or you keep changing in ways I�m not sure I understand.�

�Do I seem that different to you?�

�Right now, yes.�

�Maybe I am. But in only one way.�

�Which way?�

�I�m like the kid who comes to realize Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are a couple of big-time frauds. After nearly sixty years I�ve grown up. I don�t have any more illusions, pretty or otherwise. I�ll never have another as long as I live.�