real it was hard to breathe. He had to fight the panic, the urge to jump from the car and swim frantically for the surface.

He tried to drive it out. He cruised the streets of Hollywood until the whores were gone, down through the canyon of billboards on the Strip, past the all night newsstand.

He didn’t go home.

He drove all the way out through the winding turns of Sunset Boulevard, all the way back out to Malibu, to the beach at Point Dume, almost where he’d started. He parked on the access road. He found at the edge of the dial a drifting Mexican pirate rock station with old music. When morning came, an offshore wind came with it and stood the waves up straight and tall. Jimmy watched at the water’s edge. The wind came up stronger until there was a wave that rose and rose and rose and wouldn’t break.

TWENTY-TWO

There was one last set of checks.

In the study, standing at his desk, Jimmy shuffled the deck until he came to one made out to somebody named Roy Pool with the notation “Payroll.” He turned it over. On the back was an endorsement by Mr. Pool, notably florid, and a deposit stamp that said, “Ringside Liquor.”

It was still there. It was in Hawaiian Gardens, south and inland, straight in from Long Beach. Everyone said there was no heritage in L.A., but some things survived the perpetual reinvention, like red sauce Italian restaurants and old-style Mexican places with dusty sombreros on the walls. And corner liquor stores. Most of them had come right after the war with names that meant more then than now, names like Full House, Victory Liquor, and Ringside.

The clerk was in his sixties. He came out the front door with Jimmy and squinted in the sun on the sidewalk and pointed down the block and then over.

Jimmy set out walking, drinking the bottle of water he’d felt obliged to buy. The heat wave had broken, but it was still hot. Hawaiian Gardens didn’t have much to do with either Hawaii or gardens, block after block of apartment buildings and strip malls, a few dead cars on every block painted with dirt and plastered with Day-Glo Notice to Remove stickers. A bus smoked past, covered top to bottom and front to back with an ad for a movie, a grinning black man with a .9 millimeter that stretched ten feet.

The clerk at Ringside Liquors had given Jimmy a number from his files, three-by-five cards in a green shoebox, but Roy Pool’s house was gone. Now a big ugly apartment building covered the space of four numbers.

But there was a neighbor, a sole survivor in a Spanish bungalow—they liked to call it Mediterranean—with peeling pink paint and a few yard-birds in even greater need of a touch-up. Jimmy knocked on the steel security door that ruined the look of the little house.

It took a long time, then an old lady answered. She never opened the steel mesh door, even after she saw that he was a nice young man, but she told him where to find Roy Pool, that he was “still kicking” as she said, though his house was long gone.

Capri Retirement Villa wasn’t as grim as it could have been. The sidewalk out front was clean, the paint was fresh, and a pair of fluffy Boston ferns hung from hooks in the overhang out front. Somebody cared. Jimmy stopped by the desk, then came down the corridor and found the room.

At least he was awake. Everyone else was sleeping.

Roy Pool, who looked to be in his sixties but was probably older, sat in a wheelchair looking out the sliding glass door at the concrete “garden” in the middle of the four-sided nursing home. He wore silk pajamas with a scarf at the neck. The vintage bodybuilder magazine hidden under the desk at the Danko flight school was his.

“Hi.”

He turned. “Hello.”

“I’m Jimmy Miles. You’re Mr. Pool?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I’m an investigator. Can I ask you about Bill Danko?”

“What kind of investigator?”

“Private.”

“My,” Pool said.

He wheeled around to face his guest and looked him over, his eyes lingering on Jimmy’s shoes, black suede loafers with silver diamond shapes across the top.

“This isn’t for one of those television shows, is it? I detest television.”

“I’ll watch a ballgame every once in awhile,” Jimmy said. “That’s about it.”

There were three or four old movie star pictures on the walls and a one-sheet for Now, Voyager. A magnolia blossom floated in fresh water in