wasn't even looking at the room. If I hadn't been flat on my face and feeling like an idiot, I would have been flattered.
'You're okay?' she asked.
I waved away her offer of help and stood up. 'Yeah, sure. I'm fine.'
'Jeez,' she said, finally looking around. The words on the wall caught her eye. 'Oh. That's really sick.'
I waited until my pulse had slowed to double speed. 'What do you need?'
'For what?'
'To leave, to be gone for a few days while we arrange to get this cleaned up. Find what you need and let's get out of here.'
'Why? Why should I go? Some dickhead trashed my place and probably took everything I own, but why should I leave?' Her jaw was as knobby as Lincoln's before he grew his beard. 'Let's just straighten up a little, and I'll stay here.'
'You're leaving,' I said. 'I don't think anybody took anything. I think something's on the move and you're in its way. I don't know why, but you are. Get what you need. We're going.'
She took a steely look around. 'I don't need anything. You got a toothbrush and shampoo, right? You got aspirin? We
'Of course we are.'
'Oh, darling,' she said. 'I thought you'd never ask.'
The birds chirped at her when we let ourselves in. It had to be for her; they never did it for me. Nana moved to the birds' cage and made little kissing sounds at them. They both looked at her. Hansel, I think, cocked his head appealingly.
She pushed a finger into the cage.
'Careful,' I said. 'The little peckers peck.'
'Not me they don't,' she said smugly. Hansel jumped up onto her finger and perched there, looking more proud of himself than anything with the brains God grudgingly doled out to a bird had any right to look. 'He's sweet,' Nana said.
'I thought you hated birds.'
'Well, hell, I'd rather you had a Weimaraner trained to attack, especially after tonight. But women learn early to be satisfied.'
'Explain tonight.'
She coaxed her finger back through the bars, and Hansel leapt up onto the perch and let loose a volley of song. 'Who knows?' she said, watching him. 'Maybe it didn't have anything to do with anything. Maybe it was a bunch of skaggers who ran out of skag or some Jesus freaks who ran out of Jesus. Maybe they didn't even know who lived there.'
'Do you believe that?'
'No.' She turned to face me.
'Me neither. Where murder is concerned, I don't believe in coincidence. I'm just glad you weren't there.'
She looked away and then back to me. 'Me, too,' she said.
'Nana, do you have any idea what's going on? Any idea at all?'
'Somebody hates somebody,' she said. 'More than I've ever hated anybody, more than I hate snakes. It's somebody who hates even better than me. Somebody like Toby.'
'Toby didn't kill Amber.'
'Because Saffron says so? Little Miss Saffron?' She almost laughed. 'Saffron could lie to a Senate subcommittee with her left hand while her right was dealing blackjack. And winning. She lies for the sheer fun of it.'
'It's not just Saffron,' I said. 'Let's go to sleep.'
'No.' She crossed the room and took both my hands in hers. 'Let's go to
It wasn't. After her shower and my shower and some meaningless small talk, I smelled the warm yeasty fragrance of her skin and passed my tongue over its impossible smoothness. She laughed when it tickled and reached down to caress me, and I said, 'No, don't. This is a one-man show.'
'Don't be silly,' she said, grasping me, and our arms and legs tangled into the ancient knot, and after a while we achieved the ancient release. As I dropped into sleep I heard her voice, lazy and contented.
'I promise,' she said. 'I won't be a bother.'
III
18
So Saffron was a liar. It wasn't the first time I'd heard it, and it didn't mean as much as it would have if I hadn't talked to the Peeper, but it put her ahead of Pepper on my list of people to bother. The best time to catch all the ladies with their guards down was in the morning, so I woke Nana with a hot cup of coffee and a boatload of good intentions at six-thirty. The coffee went down quickly, and the good intentions hoisted anchor and set sail when she shrugged the sheet from her shoulders, placed the hot cup between her breasts for a moment, and then removed it and invited me to warm my unacceptable nose. 'No gentleman has a cold nose,' she said.
Following the dictates of etiquette, I warmed my nose.
It was nine-twenty, and we were both sporting satisfied Toby-class grins by the time we coasted down Topanga Canyon Boulevard toward the sea. As we hit the Pacific Coast Highway an offshore breeze kicked up, right on cue, fracturing the sunlit ocean skin into a tangled riot of scattered light. Two surfers slid gracefully down the smooth slope of a single wave.
The PCH was clogged with the usual rush-hour glut, a ten-mile-long line of cars two abreast, their drivers staring straight ahead at the rear end of the car in front, ignoring the hypnotic blue expanse of the Pacific, minds full of columns of figures, morning meetings, and the possibility of a pink slip at the end of the day.
'Where are they all going?' Nana said, surveying the traffic. 'Why don't they just stay here? Why don't
'They've got things to do,' I said as the light changed and I eased Alice out into the left-hand lane heading south. 'Money to make, promises to keep. Miles to go before they sleep.'
'I know that one,' she said. 'That poet with all the white hair.'
'Kris Kringle?'
'Something like that, something about winter.' She was wearing white shorts that had miraculously materialized from her purse and one of my shirts, so big on her that its shoulders hung to her elbows. Her hipbones jutted beneath the belt loops of the shorts. A wisp of black hair, still damp from her, or our, shower, was plastered to her cheek, nestled into the curved shadow below her cheekbone. I reached over and gently lifted it loose. It promptly fell back into precisely the same place. It knew where it belonged.
She turned her head and leaned over to nuzzle my neck as I tried to concentrate on not rear-ending the convertible Mercedes in front of me. The retro at the wheel was putting his top down so everybody could see him talking on his car phone. 'What I need now,' Nana was saying, 'is a complex carbohydrate.'
'For instance?'
'For instance, pizza.'
'At this hour?'
