Walkers. You’ve seen them on your streets, or at least in parts of your town. You’ve thought it was drugs or alcohol and maybe it began there. You’ve wondered why they keep moving, shuffling, how they went dead in the eye, where they could be going, where they sleep, where they go in the daytime. You wonder that, until the light changes, until your husband says something and you go back to your life, or you think of your wife and what’s for dinner in the regular world, leaving them behind, like on the street below the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

“What do you want me not to do?” Jimmy said. “Give me a clue . . .”

The two big men received another silent signal from the tall bony one and they shoved their charge out over the abyss and then yanked him back, like this was a school bully’s prank.

Jimmy didn’t let them see the fear they wanted to see. But they saw something and the very tall one turned his back and started away, which meant they were finished, that it was finished. The two lifted him down. They didn’t look at Jimmy again, just fell in behind the red-haired one with the long, long fingers.

EIGHT

It was late afternoon but the light wasn’t golden, just yellow, as it angled through the high windows of the lab at Jean’s perfume company. It was a longroomwithblack-topped tables and real-life blue flame Bunsen burners. Technicians in white smocks worked over chemical analyzers and beakers of liquids, swirling them, holding them up to the light, making notations, conferring with too-serious looks, like scientists in TV commercials.

Jimmy sneezed. One of the white coats looked over, annoyed. Jimmy waved his apology.

Jean stepped toward him from the end of the room.

They took his car, left hers in the lot. They went first to Ike’s for a drink. It was Jimmy’s hangout, a nouveau-something cave on a Hollywood street called Argyle. The light was blue light from the flying saucer fixtures suspended over the bar. There was a Rockola jukebox and it was playing Marvin Gaye, “Come Get to This,” the dead man’s song still rocking, somehow new again, like the light of a burned-out star just reaching earth. It was early yet.

The bartender, Scott, brought Jean a cosmopolitan and then set two drinks in front of Jimmy, a martini and a manhattan. The drinks waited, spotlighted, on the bar, like something about to be beamed up into the UFO light fixtures.

Jimmy picked up the martini, took a sip.

“Has Krisha been in?”

Scott shook his head. He looked like he could have been an actor waiting for his break, too, tall enough and still young enough and good-looking in an obvious, immediate way, but Scott didn’t want to act. He hadn’t come to California for its show business.

“I guess you’re still looking for her.”

“I just haven’t seen her lately,” Jimmy said.

Jean wondered who she was, tried not to show it.

Scott stepped away to talk to a customer at the end of the bar.

Jean smiled at Jimmy. She didn’t ask him about the case, his work. He wondered why. She had another cosmo and he had another martini and they talked about nothing, about the music and a solitary dancer on the floor.

And then they got up to go. She picked up her little purse on the bar. The manhattan was still there, untouched in its perfect circle of light.

It was almost nine by the time they got to the Long Beach Yacht Club. They’d driven by another place closer to downtown where her car was but the restaurant parking lot was too crowded for Jimmy and he changed his mind and waved to the valet parkers and made a loop through the lot and drove south. There wasn’t any boat traffic in and out of the marina so the lights were left to reflect clean and still on the black water. The club was quiet. The early crowd had finished and left. The late crowd was still drinking somewhere else.

Jean ordered a steak. The waiter took her menu.

Jimmy handed him his. “I’d just like a plate of tomatoes,” he said. “Bring it when you bring her steak. And another bottle of water.”

The waiter nodded and stepped away.

“I don’t think I know any women who still eat steaks,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I’m strange all right,” Jean said. She was making fun of him. She took a sip of her drink.

“What happened to your eye?” she said. He had a cut