second and took the next right, onto Castro, took it a little faster than he had to.

It was Friday night in the Castro. The after-work bar crowd had spilled out onto the street, drinks in hand, some of them. All men, in this block. They’d hang out there for an hour or two, and then the night crowd would start to show. Leonidas, even in his present stricken state, was put off by the scene, men with their arms around each other. He had his window up, but you could still hear the punch-bag sound of the bass speakers in the clubs. Techno and house.

Jimmy took a right, climbed a hill, just like he knew where he was going. There was a park to the right as the road curved around on top of the hill.

Buena Vista Park. So maybe he wasn’t lost after all. He stopped. There, below, was Lucy’s Victorian apartment building, lights in half the top-floor windows.

Les was in the dining room. He had the Les Paul guitar out of its case, had it on his knee where he sat at the head of the long dining table. The table was mahogany, deep red, shiny, with the point of a white lace cover hanging off each end.

So the borrowed apartment belonged to a lady. It would fit with everything else, another woman putting her arms around the waif. Jimmy wondered who she was.

There was a dim light in the front bedroom, Lucy’s room. It said she was there, that she was alive. Like Tinkerbell’s little light.

Jimmy got out of the car. Machine Shop took the opportunity to unpack himself from the jump seat. They stood beside the Porsche, left Leonidas where he was, still gripping the bar, even with the car parked.

“I appreciate you doing this,” Machine Shop said. “Saying the words. I never been any good at that.”

“I was mostly just talking to myself,” Jimmy said.

“I hear you. If there’s ever anything I can—”

Jimmy cut him off with, “There’s a woman in that apartment. That’s her brother, in the dining room. Her name is Lucille. Lucy. I don’t know what his name is. I call him Les. I need you to watch them, while I’m with him.”

“I should be at work,” Shop said.

“I have money.”

“I don’t do it just for the money,” Shop said. “It’s my witness, in its own way.”

“Her name is Lucy,” Jimmy said and opened the car door. He went to his pocket and took out a fold of bills. He gave a couple hundred to Machine.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t let her kill herself,” Jimmy said.

Then they were out of the car, walking, Jimmy and George Leonidas, down on the waterfront. It was the happening part of the night, crowds of tourists, even locals, enjoying the seafood joints and the street dancers and the jugglers and each other. It was Friday night.

“Here,” George said, pointing to a corner of one of the parking lots between the trolley tracks and the docks. “This is where I saw her, my Christina. There were no people then, or only three or four. Not all this.”

“What time was it?”

“Four o’clock.”

“Was she alone?”

“There were two others, a man and a woman. Away from her, but watching her.”

“What do you mean, they were watching her?”

“Like I was watching her, like she was mine. Like she belonged with me. They were watching her like that, too.”

“What did she look like?”

George Leonidas’s hand went toward the pocket over his heart again.

“I meant the one you saw,” Jimmy said.

The Greek father took the picture from his pocket anyway. He gave it to Jimmy. “Christina is on the right. She would always be on the right, Melina on the left. She looked like herself.”

Jimmy looked at the picture: He expected a yearbook picture, maybe the officers of the high school Greek Club. Or an all-dressed-up-for-the-prom picture: full, frilly dresses, a pair of dorky boys in tuxes between the gorgeous twins. What he got instead was a shot of the teens in one-piece swimsuits, Speedos, one black, one silver, standing with water skis beside the stern of a low-slung powerboat on the shore of some big-acre reservoir somewhere inland, brown hills in the background. Maybe Bethany, looking down on Altamont. The name of the boat was Zorba. Their black hair wasn’t wigs. It was real. They wore it longer and looser in the picture. And wet and ropey. The sun was dropping.

“I saw Christina,” the father said. “I saw her.”

His hands had