drinking, and found a shaggy arica palm to screen him.

Mary and her husband were at one of the front tables. With two other couples. Jimmy was across the broad room, with twenty tables between them, but he thought she looked his way once, fixed her eyes in his direction. But then someone in the foreground waved, and Mary waved back. So much for I somehow sensed you were there. She went back to her conversation with the man next to her. They were seated boy/girl.

Jimmy looked at her husband again. He was caught up in a conversation with the woman seated to his right. Or was pretending to be. Who was he? So far, Jimmy had held himself back from thinking too much on it. That was too high school, too. What difference did it make? He hadn’t seen Mary in almost ten years. So what if she still looked the same to him? Ten years had passed. She had found someone. What did he think, that she had joined some I-can-never-love-another order? What was that phrase that everyone used now? She had moved on.

She flashed a smile to the others at the table and pushed back and stood. She took her clutch bag off the table. She moved toward opened double doors, the exit.

It was risky business, but Jimmy moved out from his blind and started on a line that, if he kept on it, would intersect her path. She stopped to talk to someone. She was only thirty feet away from him. He stopped. If she looked any direction except straight ahead when she finished talking, they’d be face-to-face. It would make for a dramatic scene, if drama was what he wanted.

So. It’s you.

But she didn’t look his way, walked straight out the exit.

He went through another open door into the hallway. He looked for the doorway where she would have come out. There were restrooms there.

Jimmy ducked back into the ballroom, found another potted plant to meld with. And snagged another kir royale from the tray of a passing waiter.

Mary’s husband was impatient, maybe even suspicious of where his wife had gone. He kept up his end of the conversation with the woman next to him but still managed to look over at the exit every ten seconds. He did everything but check his watch.

Then he checked his watch. He got up, tossed the napkin in his lap onto the table. Jimmy realized he was older than he’d thought. Older than Mary. She’d be in her early thirties. Her husband was in his mid-forties.

He touched the shoulder of the woman he’d been talking with and said something and started off where he’d been looking all along, toward the exit.

And then she appeared in the doorway. She looked altogether innocent, refreshed, touched-up, relaxed. Until she saw the look on her husband’s face, coming toward her.

He smiled but meant something nasty by it.

When he got close enough, she said something to him.

It didn’t change the look on his face.

They were stopped beside one of the buffet tables, the dessert table. She said something else to him. Her tone had changed. She walked past him, or tried to. He took her by the wrist to stop her.

She said one word, glaring at him. Jimmy guessed it was probably his name.

He let go of her wrist.

Now it was his turn to say her name, as she walked away from him. She kept going.

Maybe it was the light, or that there was a tall ice sculpture behind him, but there was blue behind his head and shoulders, a blue edge. Blue.

But when Jimmy looked away, at Mary, and then looked back at her husband, the blue was gone.

Was it too late to get simple back?

On his way, he looked them up on the seating chart out in the foyer, where he’d laid down his check.

Dr. Marc Hesse and Mary Hesse.

When he drove onto the plaza in front of the Mark Hopkins, to leave the Porsche with the valet instead of driving down into the garage himself, Machine Shop was there. Pacing. Scrubbed out of his silver paint.

He had a wild look in his eyes.

It was late. Jimmy was tired. When he got out, left the motor running, Shop was right there.

“Your girl killed herself,” he said. “Your Lucy.”

TWELVE

It was too nice a night for it, hot as hell, but clear. Jimmy roared up Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills in the huffing old Cadillac, fouling the air behind him. It was a cruising