staring down into her coffee cup as if she expected to find a sugar cube floating on its surface.
'Don't we?' he demanded. 'Does anybody here really think it was me?'
'You, you, you,' Nana said, still facing the mountains. 'That's all you ever talk about. If you'd delivered the Gettysburg address, it would have been about you.'
'I know you didn't do it,' Saffron said grandly. 'You were with me.'
'The whole time,' I said.
'We've been over this,' Toby said.
'The whole time,' Saffron said.
'Maybe you did it together,' Nana said.
The great lady went out the window fast. 'You little gook
'That's enough. If you ladies want to punch each other out, do it outdoors, and wait until we're finished. Now tell me about Amber. Everything you can think of. Where she lived, who she knew, who didn't like her, who she didn't like, where she got her dope, everything you can think of. Nana, you, too. Saffron, we'll start with you. Everybody else keep quiet unless you hear her tell a lie. If you do, speak up.'
'I barely knew her,' Saffron said sullenly.
'That's lie one,' Nana said.
'Explain.'
'Amber was always nice to her. She always shared coke with her. She even talked to her. She was the only one who could stand her.' Nana sat back, daring Saffron to contradict her.
'Amber was nice to everybody,' Toby said in a low voice. I looked at him, surprised.
'That's true,' Nana said. Nobody spoke for a minute.
'She really was,' Saffron said finally. 'She was okay, Amber was.' Her chin trembled, and she blinked twice. Nana made a sniffling sound. Even Toby was quiet. He stared down at the rug.
'Oh, hell,' Nana said.
'Nana,' Saffron said, 'I'm sorry I said that. Amber was fine to me. She was the nicest junkie I ever met.' A tear slid down her cheek, and she didn't brush it away.
'Poor little jerk,' Nana said.
'Remember the garage sale?' Saffron was crying openly now.
'I told Simeon about it last night,' Nana said. 'That kid just couldn't pick a friend.'
'I hated that bugger,' Saffron said. 'Oh, Jesus, remember Homer?'
'Who?' Nana asked.
'Who was Homer?' I asked Saffron.
'This dork Amber was supporting for a while. Before Claude.'
'No,' I said to Saffron. 'We're going to have to be more specific than that. You're going to tell me everything you know about Amber, and we're going to start with Homer. Then we'll work backward. Then we'll work forward. Until we finish.'
Nana looked at Saffron, and Saffron looked at Nana. Then the two of them looked at Toby.
'We're going to start now,' I said.
Three hours later, I knew a lot more about Amber. I wasn't sure that any of it would help, but at least I had her address, a place to start looking, and someone who might have seen them drop her there. Toby had volunteered to give Nana a ride into town, and when they left she and Saffron were arm in arm. When women cry over someone they love, they forget who they hate.
I was on the way to the phone to call Eleanor when I heard a whirring sound. After a moment I identified it as the fan in the computer. The screen was dark. I touched a key, and words leapt onto the screen.
SIMEON IS OKAY WITH NANA, it said.
I looked at it for a long time and then went to call Eleanor.
9
I'd had lazier weekends. After finishing with Toby, Nana, and Saffron, I'd made an arrangement to keep Toby under wraps for the duration of Saturday and, probably, Sunday as well. Then I'd fooled around with the computer, writing down practically everything the three of them had told me about Amber. Sooner or later, though, I was supposed to do something about it.
Well, the first thing to do was check the alibi.
Amber had apparently been shifting from place to place, and when they told her they were going to take her home- according to Saffron-she hadn't known where she wanted to go. That had the ring of truth to it; I didn't think she could have found her leg in the dark. After some futzing around, they'd taken her to Pepper's place and let her off. The last they'd seen of her she was stumbling toward the door.
The apartment house was on Fountain, on a block where paint was allowed to peel and most of the shrubbery had gotten a jump on the summer heat by dying months before. The building was two stories high, built in the shape of a V open to the street. Someone was frying bacon when I climbed out of Alice, several pounds of bacon by the smell of it. It was almost two. People get up late in Hollywood.
There was no answer when I thumped on the door of Pepper's apartment, which was to be expected. I'd been told she spent most of her nights abroad.
That left the Peeper, as Saffron had called him, an old man who lived on the second floor in the unit nearest the street. 'I think he's got his finger caught in the window,' she'd said. 'I've seen him every time I swung by, and Pepper says he's always there. One of those, you know, voyers. One hand stuck in the window and the other one down his pants.'
I knocked again, looked down at my watch, and glanced up at the Peeper's window. A white curtain dropped into place. There were stairs at the juncture of the V, and I climbed them two at a time, tiptoed to his window, and ran my nails down the screen.
The curtain flapped back, and I found myself inches away from a pair of very bright eyes set into an absolutely hairless head. 'Well, hey,' I said. 'How you doing?'
'Who's askin'?' The voice sounded a lot like my fingers on the screen: scratchy and dry, as though it hadn't been used in years.
'It's about the girls downstairs,' I said.
'There's a lot of girls downstairs.' He sounded guilty, but he didn't drop the edge of the curtain.
'Those girls,' I said, thumbing back toward Pepper's door.
'The hootchy-koo girls,' he said. Then he laughed briefly, a sound like someone stepping on a glass in a paper sack. 'What about 'em?'
'Oh, come on. Weren't the cops here today?'
'You with the cops?'
'How else would I know they were here?'
'You didn't get around to me the first time,' he said. 'Sloppy work. Well, you might as well come in. Lot of nosy folks here, don't want 'em to see me talking to you through the window.' The curtain fell back into place. 'Door's open,' he rasped from behind it.
When I opened it, hundreds of girls smiled at me. Centerfolds gleamed down at me from the walls, all skin and teeth and amateurishly come-hither eyes. 'Quite a collection,' I said.
'They can't move very fast, either,' he said, giving me the laugh again. He was sitting in a lawn chair, dressed in a white T-shirt and white boxer shorts. An aluminum walker straddled the carpet in front of him. His calves were thinner than his forearms.
'Stop looking,' he said. 'You'll be old, too, you know. Sooner than you think. What happened to the hootchy- koos?'
