Verdes, a bluff overlooking the battered green Pacific.

“You’re early,” a voice behind him said.

Jimmy turned.

Vivian Goreck approached with a professional smile. She was another striking woman in her fifties. She didn’t offer her hand, was from a time just before that. She wore a print dress, bright, tropical.

“You’re the same color as the wall behind you,” Jimmy said.

“All part of the plan,” she said brightly. “Like a spider. Did you look inside?”

“Nope,” Jimmy said.

She stepped back slightly and put a new smile on her face and he went where she wanted him to go.

The house was empty, high ceilings, blond floors, a lot of glass, Moderne. A man had lived here, alone, Jimmy could tell that right away. If a woman had lived here anything more than overnight she would have found something to take away at least some of the edge, to get the willful solitariness out of the air. A woman who cared about you, if you wanted her, alone was enough to do it.

There was an open kitchen with a pair of chrome sinks sunk in granite. Jimmy turned on the water, cupped his hand, bent and drank.

Vivian watched him. You see it all. Besides, she could tell he had money.

“The stove’s a commercial Wolf,” she said. “The fridge is Subzero. There are double Blankenship disposals, double Nero trash compactors.”

Jimmy turned off the water. “Was there a murder or divorce in the house? I always heard people ask that.”

She handed him a black dish towel. “They do. No, the house was owned by the builder and—”

Jimmy stopped the pretense. “My name is Jimmy Miles,” he said. “I’m not your buyer, I just wanted to talk to you. Your office told me where you were.”

She didn’t even blink. She was solid. Secure. Jimmy wondered what had made her that way. It was something else you didn’t see much anymore.

“Talk to me about what?” she said.

“The Jolly Girls.”

She stood up straighter, almost laughed. “Really. Why?”

“I’m an investigator.”

“I’m sure there’s a statute of limitations on public drunkenness . . .” she said. Here was another beauty who still had her looks but kept reminding you of what had been, the way the fire must have flared once and how everybody, or at least the men, had gathered round to watch it. Jimmy liked her, wanted the time back when she was young.

“Gee, I sure hope so,” he said.

“So what is it?” she said.

“The Kantkes.”

“Really?”

Jimmy nodded. And waited.

“Who wants to know about that? Why now?”

Jimmy didn’t answer.

She leaned back against the counter and crossed her still pretty legs at the ankle. “I used to always say I don’t talk about those days,” she said. “And now it’s been ten years since anybody asked.”

“We all used to be jolly,” Jimmy said.

“You’re a little young to be world-weary, aren’t you?” she said in a voice, a Mrs. Robinson voice he could hear her using in a bar. “I have a daughter your age.”

Then somehow she guessed it. Her mind had been working though she hadn’t let him see it.

“Jean,” she said.

Jimmy didn’t say yes, didn’t say no.

“I saw her picture in the Times a few years ago. The business section. She’s very pretty.”

He didn’t deny that either.

“What does she want to know?” she said.

“Who. It’s who she wants to know. Her mother,” Jimmy said. “Or maybe her father.” He hadn’t thought of that angle until just that moment, that Jean was doing this to get closer to her father. Or close enough to never come close to him again.

Jimmy walked away from her and into the living room. It was big enough for jai alai. Except for a planter with a ficus in it, which looked brought in for the sale, there was no furniture, no coverings on the windows, nothing but a brass telescope on a mahogany tripod in front of floor-to-ceiling glass tinted the merest green.

The gas fireplace was lit, though it was summer and even here along the coastline there was no chill in the air. Jimmy stared at the stone logs, burning yet not consumed, like something in the Bible. Like me, was what he was thinking. He heard her follow him into the room, heels clicking on the wood floors.

“So,” Jimmy said without turning from the fire, “did Jack Kantke kill them?”

“No.”

Now he turned to look at her. If there was any pain in her memory of those days, of those people, she had found a way not to betray it.

“How do you know?”

“I knew him,” she said.