dress and a sweater and slippers—had turned on the television manually. She now just stood there before it, blue/gray, dead-looking in its light.

She watched it a moment, stepped back, sat in a worn chair.

Jimmy was caught. There was no place to hide. He stood stock still in the pulsing light of the television.

Was it possible she hadn’t seen him?

No, now she looked right at him, as if he had said that last thought out loud. A cat jumped onto the arm of her chair. Then a second cat and a third and a fourth came out from somewhere to rub against her. She still looked directly at Jimmy where he stood, eight feet away, against the windows, in the wash of TV light.

The red cap to his penlight fell to the floor. He bent to pick it up. She watched him. He looked into her eyes and she looked into his.

He took a step toward the doorway. She followed him with her eyes, her expression unchanged.

And then she looked back at the TV.

SIX

On the office wall was a colored print of Jesus sitting in his robes across the desk from a businessman in a gray suit.

Jimmy was across the desk from Angel.

“You didn’t even see her, man?” Angel said.

“Not until she turned on the TV.”

“And she didn’t see you?”

“She looked right at me,” Jimmy said. “She saw me, but I guess seeing someone standing there wasn’t that out of the ordinary to her.”

“So who was she?”

“I don’t know. Nobody. A street person. Maybe just someone who comes in to feed the stray cats. It was easy enough to get in.”

“Sad,” Angel said.

Angel’s body shop was downtown ten blocks south of the City Center. Through the windows in the walls in the inner office you could see men at work on expensive cars. It was a beautiful old wooden building, once a Packard dealership, with a high arched roof. The floors were slick white. This wasn’t an insurance shop. You had to care about cars the way they cared about cars before they even let you through the door. Clean was about the highest compliment the men working here paid each other’s work.

Luis, the skinny kid from Angel’s backyard, worked alone in one corner of the shop, airbrushing a scene onto the tailgate of a chopped and lowered, scooped and stretched Ford F-150 pickup, an artful expressionistic rendering of the L.A. skyline, a pair of woman’s eyes emerging from the night clouds, and a blue moon.

Jimmy got up from the chair. There was a picture on one wall in a black wood frame, a World War II-era bomber rolled out in front of a hangar. Huge block letters white across the roof said: STEADMAN. There were palm trees behind it in the picture, Santa Monica behind the palms and an ocean beyond that, suitably gray, since it was wartime.

“You know anybody at Clover Field anymore?”

Angel shook his head. “Nah, it’s nothing but general aviation now, Wayne Newton flying in in his Gulfstar.”

“I like Wayne Newton,” Jimmy said.

“I think we all do,” Angel said. “It’s not Clover Field anymore.”

“Yeah, I know. Everything changes.”

Jimmy kept his eyes on the picture.

“So, you gonna tell me?” Angel said.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what you’re working on.”

“A couple of the dead,” Jimmy said.

“Lucky stiffs.”

Jimmy looked at another picture on the wall, next to the first, as he gave him the short version. “Double murder, 1977, guy killed his wife and her boyfriend down in Long Beach. He was convicted, executed.”

“Kantke. I remember it.”

“I’m working for the daughter. She wants to know if he really did it.”

“What’s the point?”

“I believe I asked her that.”

“What’s the connection to Clover Field?”

“The dead guy worked out of there. A pilot.”

In the other picture, Angel Figueroa stood alone next to one of the bomber’s fat wheels. The lettering said: “No. 2000 July 16, 1944.” He had shorter hair now, a buzz cut, but Angel didn’t look much different in the picture than he did here, sitting behind his desk.

“Good-looking guy,” Jimmy said.

“I tell people it’s Uncle Eduardo,” Angel said.

“Disco got a bad rap.”

Jimmy was buying lunch at Vern’s, a red Formica lunch spot out in The Valley on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, a half-gentrified art and artists’ neighborhood they were trying to talk people into calling NoHo.

Chris Post drew musical notes on a three-by-five card while they talked. They were at a table in the window with a view to the street. He’d look out the window and then say something