around the stage with Amber on it. I put my arms around her. 'I don't think he killed her,' I said. 'I could be wrong, but I don't think so. The cops will be here soon. They're going to ask a lot of questions. I'm not going to mention Toby, and I don't want you to, either.'
She had nestled into my arms, her hot, moist forehead pressed hard against the front of my shirt. She was trembling uncontrollably. When I mentioned Toby's name, though, she pulled away quickly and gazed up at me with accusing eyes. Then she lowered her head and spat on the floor at my feet.
'Listen,' I said again. She shook her head sharply. Then she made a convulsive movement, trying to shake my hands from her shoulders. She took a step sideways, edging along the wall to get away from me. I slapped her arms, and she looked up at me.
'I'll get him,' I said, meaning it. 'Whoever it is, I'll get him. Even if it's Toby. Especially if it's Toby. I promise you by whatever you swear by, I'll get him. And if I have to, I'll kill him.'
My heart was pounding. I counted its beats for lack of anything else to do as she stood rigidly in front of me, her eyes fixed on the floor, her feelings a continent away. Then a long breath fled out of her, an impossibly long, serpentine kite of a breath. It seemed to empty her completely, leaving her small and frail in its passing. The trembling slowed and then stopped. My hands, wrapped around her thin shoulders, felt the fineness, the almost birdlike hollowness, of her bones.
She looked back up at me. 'You really promise?' she asked in the smallest voice I'd ever heard from a human being. She swallowed again. 'You'll kill him?'
'I swear.'
She blinked twice, quickly, and two more tears tracked their shiny ways down her cheeks. 'Then call the cops,' she said. 'Call them.' She shook an arm free to wipe the wetness away in a rough gesture. 'They won't do anything.' She sounded fierce. 'They won't give a shit. She was only a nude dancer, anyway.'
She looked around the club and then back at me. 'This place,' she said between her teeth. 'How I hate this place.'
'Hate it all you want,' I said. 'Just watch what you say to the cops.' I went to the phone and dialed 911.
II
7
Three a.m. had said hello and good-bye by the time we were grudgingly allowed to leave. We'd forked over our names, addresses, driver's licenses, and telephone numbers, and we'd had an illuminating opportunity to watch L.A.'s finest at work, measuring, photographing, fingerprinting, and gossiping to their hearts' content. In the midst of all the abstract quantifying, Amber's death seemed like an incidental backdrop to the flurry of efficient, purposeful activity. Unless you looked at her face. I tried not to look at her face.
Once the responding officers had decided we weren't Public Enemies Numbers One and Two, they'd identified themselves as Officers Strick and Losey and started to treat us with a passable semblance of common courtesy. Nevertheless, when we were allowed to leave, Losey had followed us out and ostentatiously made a note of Alice's license plate number.
I'd wanted to avoid the kinds of questions they would have asked if they had known what my job was, so I'd put my license inside my sock before they arrived. Nevertheless, I'd screwed up early on, volunteering that the body had been warm when we found it and that Amber couldn't have been dead long.
'Yeah?' Strick had said suspiciously. 'And what are your qualifications?'
Nana had jumped in before I could even work up a stammer, saying that she'd touched Amber when we came in and that she knew all about loss of body heat. Then she'd told an appalling story about having come home one day when she was eleven and found the dangling body of her father, who had hanged himself in the kitchen. At first, she'd said, she thought he was just doing another one of his magic tricks. He always did magic tricks. She'd sat on the floor for a few minutes, waiting for the payoff. Finally she had cut him down and he'd still been warm. The Texas medical examiner, she'd said, bursting into tears, had told her all about body temperature. Strick and Losey had patted her ineffectually on the shoulder, big hulking men who had no idea what to say.
We got into Alice in silence. As we turned right onto Santa Monica Boulevard, Nana sagged against me and rested her head on my shoulder. 'Yipes, cripes, Maria,' she said. 'I thought it would never end.'
'It wouldn't have, if they'd learned what I do for a living.' I blinked over scratchy eyeballs. 'Thanks for yanking my foot out of my mouth.'
'I had to,' she said. 'You had your shoe on.' She stroked my arm.
I headed north up La Cienega, on the way to Sunset and her apartment. Nana stopped stroking my arm and said, 'No.'
'No, what?'
'I can't go home. You know I can't go home. Do you think I could go to sleep now?'
'I know I have to. Tomorrow's going to be a year long. And that's if everything goes okay.'
She twisted to face me. 'Maybe you don't understand this,' she said. 'That was Amber back there. She wasn't some fifth-rate whore, she was my friend. I talked to her tonight. I said hello, and she said hello back. I asked her how she was, and she didn't kick me in the teeth. She lied to me, like she did every night when I asked her how she was doing, because she wasn't looking for pity. So her life was a mess. Whose isn't?'
Sunset was coming up fast, and I decided to dodge the question. 'Where do you want to go?'
'Where do you think? I want to go with you. Is that so unreasonable?'
'I don't know. I don't know what you think I can do for you. I don't know what I can do for you.'
'You can hold me if I start to cry again. You can wake me up if I scream in my sleep. I'm not asking for community property, for Christ's sake. But that was Amber.'
'And who was Amber?' I stopped at the red light at the top of the hill. It was either right or left from here on, either east toward Nana's or west toward Topanga and home. Amber's death hadn't slowed the planet's revolution any, and four a.m. was rolling toward us.
'Amber was Amber. She was fucked up, like the rest of us, and trying to get straight, like the rest of us. Don't
'Don't do what?' The DONT WALK sign had started blinking, its apostrophe a casualty of bureaucratic economy.
'Don't start acting like you're dense, even if you are a man. You're not that much a man, and I'm not that much a woman. We both know.'
'Know what?'
'That it's hard either way. Maybe it's impossible either way. Maybe it's all luck, and you either have luck or you don't. If you don't, maybe you end up like Amber. Or like me. Maybe you decide to check out.'
The light flickered and changed to green. Nana put her hand on my wrist and dug at the skin with her nails. I turned left and pointed Alice toward the ocean, toward home. Nana sighed. The pressure behind her fingers eased.
'Like your father,' I said.
'What?' Sunset was empty. The moon had gone down long ago, taking with it most of the Hollywood lights.
'Your father.'
She rubbed her head slowly against my shoulder, and then she laughed. 'My father. Dear old dad.' She laughed again. It wasn't the most pleasant laugh I'd ever heard. 'Dead old dad.'
I slowed the car. 'It isn't true,' I said. 'He didn't hang himself.'
