Bibi was silent.
'Almost twenty years ago,' I said.
Bibi started to cry. Nothing dramatic, just some tears silently on her face. She made no move to wipe them away.
'Seems a long way back, doesn't it?' I said.
She nodded.
'Didn't work out so good,' I said.
She shook her head.
'We might be' able to make it work better,' I said.
She stopped walking and stood crying in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the Desert Inn. I put my arm around her shoulder. She stiffened and turned stiffly toward me and stood stiffly against me so she could cry on my chest. Hawk appeared to pay no attention, but I noticed he had moved in front of us so that he shielded her with his body and people couldn't see her crying.
We stood like that for a while and finally she stopped crying, though she made no visible effort to do so, and pulled stiffly away from my chest. She seemed no longer in concealment, as if the crying had revealed her and she had nothing left to hide.
'I met Marty my senior year,' she said.
'Everybody was scared of him but me.'
We began to walk again. The sidewalk was crowded but people seemed to give us room. When you walked with Hawk you never got jostled.
'Where'd you go when you got to L.A.?' I said.
'I had a friend in Oceanside, Dianne Lalli, I went to see her.'
'From high school?' ''Yes. I don't have any friends after high school. Did you really see Abbey?'
'Yes, she's married, three kids, lives in Needham, works in a bank.'
'What's her husband do?'
'Works for the telephone company.'
Bibi nodded gently.
'Mine don't,' she said.
'You stay with Dianne Lalli all this time?'
'No, her husband didn't like me staying there. I went up to Portland for a little while, then I came here.'
'Why here?'
'Anthony.'
'You think he's here?'
'I know he's here. He's got an answering service. It was how we used to get in touch, you know, when he couldn't call me at Marty's house, and I couldn't call him at Shirley's.'
'And you called it.'
'And he called me back. From here. The Mirage. He said I should come and join him.'
'After he run out on you that way,' Hawk said, 'wouldn't think you'd want him back.'
'I don't. It's why I'm staying where I'm staying,' Bibi said.
'He's crazy. He's got to finish what he started. He's got to lose everything.'
'He know you're here?'
'Not yet.'
'So why'd you come?' I said.
'The money he took was ours.'
'Where'd you get it?' I said.
'He skimmed it from Gino and Julius,' Bibi said.
'For us. It was for us to start a new life.'
'Whose idea was that?'
Bibi almost laughed.
'The new life was mine. The funny thing is the skimming idea was Shirley's. She got him to start holding out on Julius, said even if her father caught him he wouldn't do anything, because he was her husband.'
'She wanted to get out of the house?'
'Guess so,' Bibi said.
'Away from her mother, Anthony says.'
