daughter,” Jimmy said. “Her name is Rosemary.”

“I don’t care.”

“She was nine or ten when he was killed. Her mother died a year or so ago. Maybe that pushed her over the edge, sent her looking for the house in Naples.”

“I want this to end,” Jean said. “This is my choice. I don’t need to know any more.”

“I don’t think your father did it. Your mother was probably just in the wrong place with the wrong guy. There’s a woman who may have done it, one of her friends. Actually, there were two women who may have done it. Bill Danko had a wife.”

“Stop.”

“There’s some link to now, to today.”

“Stop it.”

“To the people who run things. But I don’t know why.”

“Stop!” Her fists were clenched.

But he wasn’t finished. He wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know all of it.

But he stopped himself.

She wanted to get out, to cool off, to ride somewhere, so they were on the streets of Hollywood in the yellow Challenger. It was after nine and still hot. They rode out Sunset, east, into East L.A. Jimmy pulled up into the corner lot where there was a Tommy’s burger stand, the original Tommy’s. A paletero, a Mexican ice cream man with his triciclo, a cart on rubber wheels, was supplying dessert for the crowd sharing the white-painted picnic tables. Jimmy bought Jean a cup of shaved ice doused in bloodred watermelon syrup so sweet it made your teeth hurt.

They doubled back on Sunset Boulevard in East L.A. The traffic was heavy but easy going. A real-life lowrider came past them in the other lane, bass notes thumping, echoing off the faces of the storefronts and second-story apartments that made the street a canyon. Maybe everyone was just trying to cool off, nowhere to go, to forget about what they would have to remember tomorrow.

Jean looked out the side window, a girl on her front steps, reading a book by streetlight. They were on Franklin now, one edge of Hollywood, in a neighborhood of single houses with no yards, sidewalks right up to the windows, rental houses, Russian families in this block, and a few busted actors.

“Who was it?” Jean said, still looking out the window. “Which friend of Mother’s?”

Jimmy thought, No one can look away. Everyone has to know.

“Michelle. Michelle Simmonds. She became Michelle Espinosa.”

“One of The Jolly Girls.”

“Yes.”

He told her about the five-foot-one angle.

“Have you talked to her?”

“She’s dead a long time.”

Jean nodded, still not looking at him. She thought that was all there was. She felt strong for asking.

“I think someone killed her,” Jimmy said. “But it wasn’t down as a murder. She drowned. In the Marina.”

Jean turned and he saw the sudden hurt on her face, the world-pain. Jimmy kept forgetting that most people didn’t see the world the way he did, the way he had for most of his years, full of treachery and death and dark motives. Most people thought almost everyone was good.

“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “I have to watch myself.”

“What do you mean?” She didn’t feel so strong anymore.

“Always thinking the worst,” he said. “People die all the time. Natural causes.”

They had passed into Los Feliz, a richer neighborhood of thirties and forties apartment buildings on streets sloping up toward the low hills, the backside of the Hollywood Hills below Griffith Park.

After a ways, Jean said, “You said this was somehow connected to other people. Who?”

Like an answer, there were headlights in the mirror.

They were back. They’d been behind them all the way from before Tommy’s, through four or five rights and lefts, a white Taurus, two heads haloed by the lights behind them.

Lon and Vince had traded in the Escort for a Taurus.

Now they were closing. Fast.

Jean looked over at him, saw him with his eyes on the mirror.

“Put on your seatbelt,” Jimmy said.

She turned around to look. “What?”

On the next side street, a second car, the black BMW 745 iL, waited at a stop sign—with a man in a peacoat and watch cap standing beside it.

“What’s the matter?” Jean said. “Who are they?”

Jimmy gunned it and the Challenger streaked away, blowing past the BMW on the side street, leaving the Taurus to try to catch up.

She put her seatbelt on.

The man in the peacoat next to the BMW stepped back and the driver pulled it into gear and spun into a U-turn and roared up the hill.

Jimmy was already two blocks away. He’d taken a hard left off of Franklin, onto Vermont, rolling up the rising