worth of food and water in the basement of the nine-bedroom house in Hillsborough.”

Jimmy waited.

“He has a house on Tiburon, too,” Groner said, reading. “And probably a cabin up in Sebastopol, where he dances naked in a fern-ringed redwood glen with a secret assemblage of men at solstice.”

Groner spun in the chair to look at Jimmy. “His wife is beautiful,” he said after a long beat. Then he looked back at the screen.

“Mary,” Groner said. “He doesn’t deserve her. Maybe none of us do.”

Jimmy took the reporter’s obvious, immediate dislike of Marc Hesse as an act of friendship, though Groner couldn’t know why Jimmy hated him.

“Any chance he’s a Sailor?”

Groner shook his head and said, “I’d know.”

And then they’d gone off into the night for that drink.

Hesse had offic es downtown, in a building across from the TransAmerica Pyramid.

Midmorning, Jimmy was standing out front. Groner had called him at the Mark with the address. Hesse had just moved from previous digs. This new place wasn’t even listed yet.

Jimmy knew enough about movies to know it was the building with the “florist’s shop” on the ground floor where Dirty Harry had faced down somebody, said something sharp while the punk was left to stare into the holey end of the .44 magnum. It wasn’t Dirty Harry itself or even Magnum Force. It wasn’t “You have to ask yourself, do I feel lucky?” or “Go ahead, make my day.” The movie was probably Sudden Impact, and the line wasn’t good enough to get remembered, the way it was with sequels.

He should have been off with Angel, looking for Les Paul. He hadn’t even knocked on Angel’s door when he left the Mark.

Jimmy rode up in the elevator. He felt lucky.

He didn’t know what his intentions were, what the plan was. What was he going to do, slap Hesse in the face with a glove? Challenge him to a duel? Go ahead, make my midmorning.

It never came to that. The doctor was in surgery.

The waiting room was empty. Everything was perfect. The magazines were unmussed, in neat stacks. Unread. Even the sports magazines. Even the swimsuit issue. Everything had a new smell to it. The receptionist was cute, didn’t have a drop of blood on her. She was a little flirty, maybe bored with a long, slow morning. Or it could have been that everybody who came in was old and pale and short of breath. Jimmy’s breath was just fine.

The art on the walls was original. Oils. One canvas pulled Jimmy closer. It was of a boat entering a harbor, a black-and-white sloop, a storm behind it like a giant with a puffed-out chest. The painting even had a name: In Time. It wasn’t pretty, as pictures went. It went right up to the edge of pretty, stopped just short; art that way, not decoration or entertainment. Jimmy wondered why a doctor, a cardiologist, would choose it for the eyes of those waiting. We found the blockage just in time? You’re safe here?

It made Jimmy want to eat a steak, drink a martini, Celebrate Life! with the new hippies in the Haight. What he remembered of it.

It made him want to hold Mary.

“Bye,” the flirty receptionist said to his back.

A call to Groner on the run got him the name of the hospital where Hesse was. Under the hood of some poor bastard. Valve job.

Groner kept the info coming, a second call. He told Jimmy to look for a deep dark red, big-dog Mercedes, a CLS500.

“A color called Bordeaux Metallic.”

“Sounds delicious,” Jimmy said. “Fruity, but not casky, I hope. But how am I going to find out what row he’s parked in?”

Jimmy was already at the hospital, in the corner of the lot. He was making a joke.

“Where are you?” Groner said.

Jimmy told him.

“Look straight ahead, on the right,” Groner said. “Under the carport.”

“Now you’re starting to creep me out,” Jimmy said.

“I can see through walls, across town, but only if the conditions are exactly right,” Groner said. “A friend works there, in the ER. I just called her. Hesse’s name is on a parking place.”

“Your friend a Sailor?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re sure Hesse isn’t a Sailor.”

“I would say no,” Groner said.

“Would you say any more?”

“I’ve never heard of him, never heard anybody speak of him,” Groner said. “Remember, I’ve been here a very long time. And then there’s the boy.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said.

Sailors were sterile. Some cosmic safeguard. Or joke.

“Of course, the boy is six. Hesse could have fathered him Before.”

“Yeah.”

“But then why would