them like that anymore down there in Lost Angeles?”

“I don’t make movies.”

“I meant the collective, editorial you.”

“So why are all these people killing themselves?” Jimmy said. He was still standing over the other.

Groner leaned back on the couch. “If you ask me, a better question is why not?”

Jimmy waited him out.

“I guess the ten of them this morning prompted this,” Groner said.

Ten?

“And then there was another one tonight,” Groner finished. “But the overnight ones were the headline. It’s a helluva story, I have to admit. Dayside got it, unfortunately.”

“The one tonight was the girl I told you about,” Jimmy said.

Groner heard that and knocked off some of the “colorful character” show.

“The girl I was supposed to be watching out for.”

“We didn’t have a name for her.”

“Lucy,” Jimmy said. “Her name was Lucille. I didn’t know her last name.”

“Hers was one of the better ones, actually,” Groner said. “Very public.” In the next breath, he said, “I was considerably less . . . entertaining myself.”

You never asked a Sailor how they’d died. You waited for them to say it, if you cared to know one way or another. Jimmy didn’t usually care. He had found out early that it never really added much to his understanding of another Sailor man or woman, so he never asked. Some people needed to tell you. If they decided to tell you, you listened. Or at least stood there and let them empty the bucket.

“A bullet to the brain, which I thought at the time was the source of my gloom,” Groner said. “Small caliber. A little chrome-plated Colt .25 automatic. I thought I was minimizing the mess. I had no surviving family, so I guess my concern was for the sensibilities of what we now call ‘the first responders.’ I didn’t know then how quickly they become dulled to the offal.”

“What year?” Jimmy said, surprising himself.

“Nineteen twenty-two,” Groner said. “So I didn’t even have the excuse of the crash, Black Friday. It was a Black Tuesday, actually. I was fifty-one.”

“What are the overall suicide numbers now? How many total?”

“Aha, you’re looking for a reason! For your Lucy’s act of negation.”

“Is there anything that ties them together?”

“United only in death . . . Twenty-eight Romeos and nineteen Juliets. Which is unusual, the ratio, the high number of women. Usually the men far outpace the women. As whites do blacks. Hispanics are moving up on the outside rail. Asian women, almost never. Asian men, after the age of sixty. Before sixty, they lag behind almost everyone, hari-kari, seppuku in popular entertainment aside. They’re spread all over the city, which is something of a surprise.”

“What about suicide contagion?” Jimmy asked.

Duncan Groner wasn’t the sort to raise an eyebrow in surprise, but something registered on his face. And it took him a beat before he spoke, as if things had to be aligned in his head. Or realigned.

“You are engaged in the subject,” he said.

“Well?”

“Even as we speak, I’m sure great committees are meeting, with the wringing of Great Hands,” Groner said. And here he paused with intent. “A number of the suicides now appear to be in response to the earlier ones, to the publicity. In response to, as you say, ‘the contagion,’ a wonderfully melodramatic phrase.”

Suicide contagion wasn’t the result of some recent research on Jimmy’s part. He’d run into it before.

“Copycats.”

“Not exactly,” Groner said. “More like, Now I see that life is maybe not so sacrosanct after all. With people hurling it at the fronts of buildings and such.” He stood and put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and said, “Something we in the brotherhood have known for some time.”

Jimmy looked at the bony, skeletal hand on his shoulder.

“I’m off work,” Groner said. “Rested and refreshed. Let’s go pretend it’s happy hour. I know a place where Sailors drink free. And freely.”

SEVENTEEN

The people of San Francisco didn’t look like they all wanted to die. Of course it was morning and, if the sun wasn’t exactly shining, it was up there somewhere on the far side of the “marine layer.” Jimmy was walking. Marina Green. They didn’t look suicidal. They didn’t look like the creeping cloud of death had o’ertaken them. The people of San Francisco looked like they wanted to play tennis, at least the ones standing at the back of the open hatch of the Porsche Cayenne all in white, in the parking lot of the private waterfront tennis club. They looked like they were thinking ahead to dinner, the ones coming out of