one side, away from the others, not happy, as if the girls had waved her into the shot.

It was hard to imagine a .45 in the empty little hand at her side but not so hard to picture a murderous look in her eye.

There was a sound from the kitchen.

Rosemary stood in front of the microwave.

“Three zero zero,” she said, more than once.

It dinged. She opened the door and took out a package of macaroni and cheese. She pulled back the covering and set it on a plate to cool. She held her fork in her hand and waited, like she was counting seconds in her head.

She did all right with numbers. She just didn’t know what day it was. She had a broken sense of time and she didn’t know who was dead and who wasn’t anymore.

Jimmy felt a certain kinship.

It was a rough night on the strip, odd and ugly and edgy for some reason. Young men who’d all stripped off their shirts ganged in front of The Roxy, spilled out onto the sidewalks between a pair of shows for some metal band come round again. They were like natives on the banks of a river. Some of them were trying to get a fire going in a trash barrel to complete the picture. Ninety degrees at eleven o’clock and they’re starting fires.

Jimmy rolled past, Streisand’s “People” still looping in his head from the weird afternoon, making the scene all the stranger.

He slid in the CD his musician friend had made for him, the collection of disco music Chris thought he should be listening to. The first song was lush, symphonic, with a sexy chorus, women singing the same three words over and over. It was romantic, dramatic. It was soundtrack music, for the movie playing in the heads of twenty-somethings on the dance floor, overriding, at least for part of a Saturday night, their ordinary lives.

One of the Roxy natives jumped out from the others, slowly and deliberately flipped him off as he cruised past. Maybe the kid could hear the disco music.

Or maybe he just didn’t like Fords. Jimmy was in the Mustang. After spending the early part of the night with Rosemary in the house in Garden Grove, he’d taken a cab back to Naples where he’d left the car and then driven up from Long Beach on Pacific Coast Highway, the slow way, trying to sort it out. Estella Danko was dead but that didn’t make much difference to him, to the case. Now he’d met her. He even had her picture in his pocket. Dead now or not, there was a good chance she was the one who’d done the killing. Jealous, left-out wives pulled triggers in bedrooms all the time. D. L. Upchurch thought she had done it and he had brooded over all this more than Jimmy had or ever would.

She was five-foot-one.

And she wasn’t her husband’s Dancing Queen anymore.

So Jimmy thought he was getting closer to certainty, to an end to it, closing in on something he could take to Jean.

Your father didn’t kill anybody. She did.

He’d gone by Jean’s apartment. There was no answer downstairs, no lights in the penthouse. He still hadn’t seen her or talked to her since the night they’d come upon Drew. He wondered how gone she was.

Jimmy thought he was closing in on certainty, but what he didn’t understand was what this particula piece of old history had to do with Sailors. His tails were back, Lon and Vince, still in the subcompact Escort, almost bumping into him when he slowed.

And now there was another one.

At least this one had better taste in cars. He was in a black 745 iL BMW, smart because it blended in in most parts of L.A. better than a basic Ford. And this driver knew what he was doing, stayed two blocks back and turned off onto side streets just a half second before you really noticed he was there, making you think maybe you’d imagined it.

But Jimmy knew how to do this, too, and had caught a good look at the car twice, once on PCH and once when he was coming back down onto Sunset from Jean’s.

It was then that he got a look at his face. When the driver knew he’d been seen, he’d turned into the space in front of a restaurant, had even gotten out to meet the valet, very cool. He was tall, skinny, in an expensive black suit, slicked-back hair. He