upper right-hand corner of the house, where there was a balcony. It went out. Ten seconds later it came on again. This time the kid stepped in, left the doorway, crossed the room, and stood at the foot of a king-sized bed. The bed where they’d been found, in that horrible configuration. (Jimmy had seen the picture, could see it too clearly still.) He just stood there.

This was the second part of the story.

The first part was the actual loss of the thirteen human lives. The reality of what they did in life, their jobs, their work, what they filled their days with. And the potential. What the writers at the papers and the TV stations like to call “the hopes and dreams.” Maybe she would have been a star. He might have been Teacher of the Year. She didn’t get to see her daughter graduate from preschool. Maybe they would have made a movie remake of one of his TV shows.

But the second part of the story was the subplot, the story of those who’d been left. Left in pieces. Left not understanding much of anything anymore. Left with your heart ripped out, too, or at least a deadweight in your chest. Left in a foreign country where somehow you don’t speak the language and the people don’t like you. Left with pictures you can’t look at. Left with songs you can’t stand to hear anymore.

Left to stand in his parents’ bedroom, “house-sitting” in his own life.

Jimmy ended the night, or at least the night ended around him, standing outside another house, standing at the foot of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset, his eyes on the penthouse and the railing.

FIFTEEN

“Where’s your little doggy?”

It took Jimmy a second to hear the spite in her voice. She was in her sixties, maybe seventies, and stood an arm’s length away from him with her feet apart and her hands on her hips, as if braced against a wind or on the pitching deck of a ship. She wore all black, a dress, a sweater, a shawl over that. Old Country. He was on the sidewalk across the street from a pricey condo building in Brentwood, a four-story taupe job with black trim, black wrought iron around the windows.

The seventh of the dead. A twenty-year-old woman.

“I don’t have a dog.”

“Today you don’t,” the woman said. “The other nights you did.”

“Must have been somebody else,” Jimmy said. What he didn’t say was that, generally speaking, dogs don’t like Sailors.

“I saw you,” the woman said. She pointed her finger at him.

Jimmy just let her go on to her next line.

“I think it’s revolting, you coming around here, over and over,” she said. “Let the dead bury the dead.”

Jimmy decided to take a shot with her. Maybe there was something here. “I don’t even like dogs,” he said.

She tilted her head.

Jimmy pressed on. “I think they’re a menace, fouling people’s yards with their feces. Snarling, snapping. Urinating willy-nilly.”

She liked the sound of this. “It wasn’t you?” she said.

“Not if the person had a dog,” Jimmy said.

“I don’t like dogs,” she said.

“I’m like you, then,” he said. “You live in the neighborhood?” Jimmy asked.

“Right behind you,” she said. Right behind him was a cute little Spanish-style bungalow. Covered with tile. From top to bottom, side to side. Ceramic tile, blue and white and green and yellow, every inch of the face of the house, every surface, and out into the yard, up and over fountains and benches and from the front steps to the street on a curving sidewalk. Tile. If it had had a pattern, it would have been a mosaic, but there was no pattern to it. It was a crazy-quilt house.

Jimmy hadn’t really looked at it when he’d parked the car and gotten out, his eyes on the condo, checking the number.

“Damn,” he said now, scanning the tile house. He tried to add a flip to it, to make it sound like he meant it admiringly.

“You’re as bad as him,” she said.

“How so?”

“Coming out here, drooling over this. The death of that poor girl.”

“I was just going for a walk . . .”

“No, you weren’t. You were rubbernecking. Or worse. Let the dead bury—”

“I am the dead,” Jimmy said.

She took a step back.

He let her wonder for a minute.

“I write television scripts,” he said. He named a show with a creepy attitude, then tried to look as much like Rod Serling as possible. He tossed his head in the direction of the condo. “I