Williams’ car was still in the driveway next to his truck. I put on the leather gloves before I got out of mine, careful to shut the door gently. I headed up to the front door slightly to the right of the walkway. I tried the door. It was open. I walked in and shut it behind me. I walked in far enough to look into the den. Emli was not in there. I continued through the living room toward the dining room. I went far enough in there to see that she was not in the kitchen. I turned back and moved down the hallway. In the master bedroom she was on her knees next to the bed, going through the contents of the lower drawer of the nightstand. There was a large shopping bag beside her. I startled her as she looked up, and she gave a half-scream, which she stifled when she saw it was me.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said.

“You about have everything?” I asked. “It’s going to get light soon.”

“I’ve gone through everything but what’s in the garage,” she said.

“Did you take care of the gun yet?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

“I’ll get it,” I said. I went back down the hall and into the living room. I retrieved the wallet from the end table and put it into my left hip pocket. I went into the den and the gun was still on the desk, beside another shopping bag with papers and some photographs in it. I retrieved the top photo. It was Emli and Williams on a deck – of a ship or a pier or a dock. There was railing behind them and behind that the ocean. They both looked happy. Williams had the same Mephistophelean smile he sported in the driver license photo, this time without the beard. I picked up the gun, checked to make sure the safety was still on and put it in my pocket. It fit, but made an uncomfortable bulge.

There was some shelving on the wall next to the desk, which contained some books. I glanced over the titles to get a feel for Williams. They were mostly sports oriented – a couple of biographies of baseball and football players, a few books on fishing, a thick golf course guide. There were a few how-to books on woodworking and cabinet making and a repair manual for a 1992 Oldsmobile Cutlass, which just about matched as best as I had noted the car out in the driveway. There were two popular best sellers thrown in there – Jurassic Park and a Stephen King novel I can’t remember the title of. There were a couple of photo albums up there as well. I took one of them down. I leafed through it. They were a hodge-podge of different types of photos, some of them taken by a 35-millimeter and some from an instamatic. The quality and composition of the shots varied, as if they had been taken by different people. Some were posed shots and others were more candid ones. One of the first was a photo of an obviously younger Williams, in his early twenties or maybe his late teens. He was washing a muscle car, a 1970s vintage Chevelle that was probably his own, because he looked like he was really proud of it. The lather beneath the chamois he was rubbing on the hood was thick and white and the sunlight gleaned off the chrome. There were a couple of him and some others dressed up in camouflage khakis, toting paint guns. They had goggles hanging down around their necks. You could see in one of the photos that someone had hit him on the left side of the chest with a yellow paint round. A score or so of the photos showed him in a baseball or softball uniform in all order of action or non-action, standing in a dugout, throwing a ball, batting, sliding into third base, posing with his adult league teammates. There were a few of him with a dark-haired, slim and attractive woman, probably an old girlfriend. Toward the back of the album, there were some spots where photos had obviously been removed from beneath the clinging plastic sheen that covered each page. I surmised that these might be ones Emli had removed because she was in them. One other photo in there caught my attention. It depicted an extremely intoxicated Williams sitting at a table on a veranda or a patio beneath an umbrella. The angle of the sun, however, was such that the umbrella was doing no good. The harshness of the lighting that was cast over him gave brutal testament to his state of total inebriation, his face bloated and sweaty, his eyes bloodshot and glassy. A good dozen empty beer bottles were spread around the table in front of him. That particular one was not the most flattering of shots, but I admitted to myself from what I had seen that in the looks department, he had it over me. Conservatively speaking, he was a good eight to ten percent handsomer than the guy I have to endure whenever I am in front of a mirror. Not a matinee idol exactly, but someone who would have turned a few female heads.

I was rearranging some of the photos toward the back of the album to fill in the gaps of the photos that had been removed to make it less obvious that some were missing. Emli came into the den as I was doing this.

She set the grocery bag she had brought in from the bedroom on the desk next to the other. I could see that one of the items it contained was a brazier. I closed the album and put it back into its place on the shelf.

“What did you do with… his… body?” she asked. She was not two feet to the side of me. I turned and looked at her straight on.

“The less you know about that the better,” I said. “It’s taken care of,” I lied. That reminded me and made me acutely conscious once again that I still had something very weighty yet to deal with.

“Just how, exactly, was this guy employed?” I asked.

“He’s a plumber,” Emli said.

“Who did he work for?”

“He was in business for himself. He has a little shop in Van Nuys.”

“Is there a partner?”

“No.”

“Does he have employees?”

“He had an apprentice as part of a mentoring program. A nineteen-year-old kid. Youth training partnership I think they call it.”

“So this apprentice shows up every day?”

“No, that was at least six months ago. He graduated or got his certificate or whatever it was.”

“And there wasn’t a new apprentice to take his place?”

“I don’t think so. Not that I know. Unless it was just recently…”

“Okay. We’re going to need to shove off. Everything in order? Let me take a last look around.”

I took a minute-and-a-half tour of the place. Emli had done a good job. Everything was neat and straightened. In the master bedroom the bed was made, but with the pillows on top of the bedspread, just like we men typically leave them. In the master bedroom’s bathroom, a pair of his underwear and sox were haphazardly on the floor next to the hamper. That was a nice touch, I thought. The other two bedrooms, neither of which had beds, had been converted to storage. One had sports equipment mostly – baseball bats, two sets of golf clubs, a tennis racket, some fishing tackle and poles, snow skis, water skis, a nine-foot kayak, a surfboard, among other items. The other bedroom had unmatched furniture in it – chairs, a sofa, a table, a wicker chair. A medium-sized dresser was set into the corner. Along the wall next to the door was the vacuum cleaner. In the kitchen, everything was in its proper place or just about. A lone drinking glass was in the sink. I picked up the dishrag and walked into the dining room, where I went past the far end of the table and held aside the drapes to lock the sliding glass door. I then shut off the lights in the dining room and kitchen and trudged out into the living room.

“Do you have the keys?” I asked.

Emli retrieved them from the couch. “Right here.”

“Which one fits the deadbolt?”

Emli located it on the key ring.

“Give that one to me.”

She removed it and handed it over. I put it into the small coin pocket at the top part of my right jeans’ pocket.

“You go out first. Drive his car back to your apartment and park down the block, up near that strip mall with the Laundromat and the pizza place. Park on the street. Wait right in the car. I’ll close up here and meet you there.”

She went over to the desk in the den and picked up the bags. I shut off the living room and entranceway lights just before she let herself out. I went over to the picture window and holding the drapes slightly to the side watched as she went to the driveway. As she approached it, the security light on top of the garage came on. She took it in stride though and got into the car like she owned it. I could see her putting the bags into the back and then getting in and adjusting the seat. The engine started up. She let it warm up for fifteen seconds or so and then backed out of the driveway. I pulled my hand back to let the drapes move into place. I turned on the lamp on the end table next to the sofa, which was the lighting fixture closest to the picture window. Assuming the bulb did not burn out any time soon, this would give the nighttime impression that someone was home.

I went into the den and gave it one last look around. I shut the den light off and stepped out into the entranceway. Using the dishrag, I thoroughly wiped the doorknob on the front door before opening it. I then secured the interior handle lock. Stepping out onto the porch, I shut the door firmly behind me and found the key Emli had given me and used it to lock shut the deadbolt. Before I repocketed the key, I used the dishrag to give the outside doorknob a thorough polishing.

With the casual air of a sailor on weekend port liberty, I strolled down the front lawn, again to the left of the walkway toward the street. The sun had not yet risen but it was no longer completely dark. The sky was gray and only the brightest of stars were now visible. I could see that in a few of the houses up and down the street and in the one directly across, lights had come on as people readied for the workday before them.

Just before I reached the sidewalk, I was obliged to break my leisurely stride and come to a halt. Rapidly moving along the sidewalk was a bicycle, the approach of which I first sensed by the sound of its whirring wheels. As it passed in front of me so close I could just about have reached out and touched it, I saw that astride it was a thirteen or fourteen-year-old kid. Draped over the front handlebars was a dual-sided white canvas carrying-bag. The kid gave me a long point blank look as he coasted by and he then threw a folded newspaper just to the side of me up toward the house. It landed on and then skidded up the walkway as he pedaled on.

I stepped back to retrieve the paper and continued down to my car. I got in and with some difficulty pulled the handgun out of my pocket. I bent to the right and slid it down underneath the seat on the passenger’s side. I sat up straight and fired up the engine. By the time I had swung out into the middle of the street to pull up into the driveway to back out and turn around, the paperboy had completed his turn up at the top of the cul-de-sac and was headed back my way along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. I pulled into the driveway and began to back up with caution. I could see in the rearview mirror that he was again giving me a long look. I made the slow backward turn toward the cul-de-sac, and trying to appear natural and nonchalant behind the wheel, headed out of the neighborhood. I made the right turn and then the quick left turn at the next corner, where, I noted with no little alarm, the kid had stopped and was using a pencil to make some kind of notation onto a wide dimension wire spiral notebook that hung around the right side of the bike’s handlebars between the canvas pouches.