“Very well. We all knew each other very well.” She gave the last line room to breathe, opened up a space for speculation. “Jack didn’t care about Elaine and Bill.”

“So he knew about the affair?”

“Of course.”

“And he didn’t care?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Does that shock you? Sometimes I shock my daughter.”

Jimmy wasn’t shocked.

“I think Jack thought Bill Danko was rather . . . below all of us,” she said. “But Elaine enjoyed him. And Jack had other fish to fry, as we used to say.”

“He had a girlfriend, too?”

She smiled a quick, complicated little smile Jimmy would think about later. “Actually,” she said, “I wasn’t referring to his love life. Jack was very ambitious. Ten years after the fact, he was still out on the New Frontier. I think he would have been governor eventually. Or he thought so.”

She sat on the corner of the planter with her hip out. Jimmy thought again of the picture of the four of them, posing, full of themselves, at the bar.

“Was the Yacht Club The Jolly Girls’ clubhouse?”

“Only in an emergency.”

“Where then? Where did you hang out?”

“It’s embarrassing to say.”

“Where?”

“A place called Big Daddy’s.”

Jimmy remembered it. Marina Del Rey. A good forty-five-minute drive up the coastline, far enough away to see and be seen by a whole new crowd, and not be seen by people who knew your husband.

“That’s where Elaine met Bill actually,” she said.

“How close were you to her, to Elaine?”

“Not the closest of the group, but we were all close.”

Jimmy said, “So who killed them?”

She said, “I have no idea.”

There was a sound from the front of the empty house.

“It came out of nowhere, as so many things do,” she said.

A man and a woman stepped in. The man had a phone to his ear.

It was Jimmy’s cue. He touched Vivian’s arm. “Thanks, the house is perfect,” he said, loud enough for the prospective buyers to hear. “We’ll talk.”

She appreciated the gesture. “I’ll be in the office until six, Dr. Miles,” she said.

Nice touch.

Jimmy nodded to the couple and saw himself to the door.

Out front in the circular driveway was a cream-colored Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible with plates that read: “BUY BUY.”

The potential buyers’ Jag was parked behind it.

FIVE

Jimmy drank a Cel-Ray soda in a booth at the window under a sign that said, “We Never Close.” Canter’s was where John Belushi had spent some of the last hours of his life. There was the deli and then the bar in the other room, The Kibitz Room. There had been a time when Jimmy collected last hours facts, Belushi downing a pastrami at Canter’s then going out to Westwood for a chocolate-dipped doughnut at Dupar’s, Janis Joplin shooting pool at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica before the drive up Highland to the hotel, James Dean stopping for a burger at the diner in Saugus before the run to Paso Robles. But the fun had gone out of it in time, after the list of the famous dead got a little too long, or death a little less of a gag.

The waitress came. She was young and Israeli. He didn’t want anything else but he ordered a bowl of soup and another Cel-Ray. The place was empty for some reason and he liked her and it wasn’t going to be much of a night for her.

He’d picked up a couple of tails, pale men in matching cheap suits, one tall enough to joke about, the other with a shock of bleached hair black at the roots in the style that had passed through the club scene two summers ago. Sailors. They were at a table for two in the middle of the room. They’d been down in Long Beach, on the bridge just as he was leaving Naples to go out to meet Vivian Goreck. After he’d left the house for sale, he’d stayed up on the cliffs at Palos Verdes until the sun dropped and then gone by Ike’s, his hangout. They were parked on the street in a white Escort when he came out.

They weren’t any good at this. Jimmy gave the tall one a look and made him knock over his water.

The second soda came and the soup, a pair of bagel chips speared by the handle of the spoon. The tails decided to pretend they were finished and they got up and left, pretending not to look over at him.

Jimmy slid a Time magazine out of a cellophane wrapper. He’d bought it at a collectibles store