name for him, somebody who might know about Bill Danko and what had been called Clover Field.

Kirk pumped the hand once. “I told Angel I’d come in to your office.”

“Don’t have one,” Jimmy said.

“Well, let’s do it,” Kirk said, and then looked at his friends as he made a joke, “I don’t have all day.”

They walked down the taxiway. They were on the B-side of the airport, businesses in old wooden buildings and World War II Quonset huts, every third or fourth one vacant, airplane maintenance, radio repair, aerial photography, a skywriting company with one plane. Vines covered half the buildings. Most had peeling paint, gloriously neglected. Somehow, here in the middle of L.A. was a sizable section of the unimproved. There was probably an old person somewhere who’d so long ignored the men in suits with their Big Plans for the property that they’d stopped coming, now just waiting her out—it was usually a woman—waiting for her to die and get out of the way.

“Angel wouldn’t tell me what this was about,” Kirk said. “He said you were a private investigator. I guess one of my girlfriends’ husbands is onto us.”

They weren’t headed anywhere in particula but the old man walked at a good steady pace as if getting from here to there was something he’d be judged on.

“I told Angel, I got a photograph of your mother somewhere,” Kirk said. “Autographed. I didn’t understand those pictures she made over in Europe, but I sure liked her.”

It made Jimmy smile.

“Where do you know Angel from?”

“Big Brothers,” Kirk said. “I ran a unit until I got too old to stand up to all the bullshit.” He held up his hand as if testifying. “I mean, I’m not gay, but I can’t prove it.”

A sleek corporate jet took off behind them, screaming. The 10 freeway was less than a mile away to the north and the 405 almost as close to the east. The roars merged.

When it quieted, Jimmy said, “Angel said you were the guy to ask about the old days here.”

Kirk said, “He said it was about the seventies. You call that the old days?”

“It’s all relative, I guess.”

“I was on the line for Steadman twenty-eight years,” Kirk said. “I put Pitot tubes in ST-10s. Before the war, it was ST-3s. The 10s were built right over there”—he pointed to a massive hump-roof hangar, the biggest building at the airport—“and the 3s built in Hangar Nine that got torn down in September of ’73.”

Jimmy stopped to admire one falling-down building. They had walked almost to the end of the taxiway.

“So what’s this about?” Kirk said.

“You remember the Kantke murders?” Jimmy said.

“Sure.”

“Bill Danko.”

Kirk nodded.

“You knew him?”

“I saw him around,” Kirk said. “His outfit was up here behind what used to be the old Clipper Hangar. Everybody said he was an all right guy. That’s what you’re looking into?”

Jimmy nodded.

“I saw her once, the woman,” Kirk said. “She showed up, waiting for Danko to come back from a photo job, a flyover. He had a Cessna 152. Red over white, mortgaged up. She had an old-fashioned hat on her head, tied under her chin with a ribbon, like as if they were going to fly off together in an open-cockpit Waco. She looked like a barrel of laughs.”

The old man set out walking again and Jimmy followed him. Kirk talked fast and asked the usual questions, what they all wanted to know: what other cases Jimmy had investigated, the stories behind the stories, the moments when the flashbulbs flashed. Jimmy didn’t offer much. He never did. He’d long ago figured out that nobody wanted to hear the truth. Death and sex, that’s what most of it was about, sometimes money, but he didn’t take those cases. A case was never what it looked like from the outside and when it was over, what was important was never the big plot points, the flashbulb moments. It was what was going on unnoticed in the corner of the frame, the ambulance guys rolling out a woman on a gurney, the cops talking to the people in the next bungalow—and a boy steps up across the street into a clot of strangers, just coming home from school. Maybe it was why he did it, to notice the unnoticed, to find meaning there. Or try.

They’d reached the last of the buildings off on a side taxiway. “There,” the old man said.

It was a decrepit building, vacant, standing alone, barely standing, a faded Plexiglas sign on