“Okay,” I said, once we were in my Buick. “Where to?”

“Take the 101 up to the Valley.”

Emli had never been in this car before. I had purchased it new two years previously. We drove silently back down to Sunset and from there I got on the 101, known at that point as the Hollywood Freeway. There was little traffic at that hour and the occasional overhead lights were dimmed. Once in a while a fully lit one would illuminate the interior of the car. As we approached Victory Boulevard she told me to exit, and I did so. She then instructed me to go west and had me turn up Van Nuys Boulevard. The commercialized sections were better lighted. I threw an occasional glance Emli’s way. She sat there nervously, it seemed to me, locked in thought but intently watching the road before us. It was awkward in a way, being so close to her after all those years. There were millions of things we could have talked about. Five years before we would have been chattering non-stop, probably. But it was different now. For the first two years after our break-up I had been brimming with curiosity about what she was doing and how she was filling up her life without me. The last two years I had managed to keep thoughts about her from intruding on the peace I had made with the universe except on those too frequent occasions when I encountered something, a landmark such as a restaurant where we had dined or a movie on television that we had seen together during its theatrical release. And there were vague questions still circulating in my head, but they were suppressed by a reticence, a sense of caution and bitterness over the experience of the break-up, a wariness not to allow myself to ever get that close to her again. For a second or two I wanted to ask her how her grandmother was, but I let the urge pass. It seemed better to keep as distant as I could and take care of this chore for her and then retreat back to my bachelor existence as far removed from her world as I had been for the previous four years. It would be far less emotionally taxing that way. Bubbling below the surface too was the impetus to really lay into her verbally, to spew out in one torrent all the speeches I had silently rehearsed over the years, upbraiding her for abandoning me, sarcastically and caustically telling her she had done the right thing in disemboweling the one man on the planet who loved her more than anyone else possibly could. I wanted to rant at her about what a liar she had proved out to be, having said so many times that she loved me only to turn completely indifferent overnight. I wanted to wound her as deeply as she had wounded me. I wanted to tell her such ugly things about herself that she would ever after be mired in self-doubt. I wanted to tell her that I was once so stupid as to think that she had depth but that now I knew how shallow she was. I wanted to singe her ears with the taunt that, yeah, I had loved her once but I no longer did and that I cared more for any of the dozens, no scores, of women that shared my bed and now filled my life. I wanted to look her straight in the face and tell her how badly she was aging and what a pity it was that men no longer found her attractive. I wanted to tell her how lucky I knew I was that it had worked out that she was not going to be the mother of my children after all, given her inability to remain dedicated to anything worthwhile. But I did not mouth any of those hurtful lies. I drove on in silence.

Competing with my bitterness were ominous thoughts about the situation she, and now by extension I, was facing. I did not have enough of the facts to make any realistic calculations at that point but on the basis of what I did know, I was mentally poring over the circumstance of the death of some man entirely unknown to me. For some reason, the image of a laboratory rat trying to find its way out of some vast serpentine maze passed through my mind.

As we approached a traffic light she said, “Make a left turn here.” I did so and continued on. It seemed to be getting warm in the car so I rolled my window down two inches or so. We continued on in silence for a little less than a mile. At last she sighed, and said, “I can’t believe this. It’s like a bad, bad dream. I just can’t believe it happened.”

“Life’s like that,” I said. “You think everything is going your way and that the sun rises and sets on your little fiefdom and Wham! Something comes along to let you know that you’re just an inconsequential and entirely dispensable bit player or stage hand in some cosmic tragicomedy you don’t even know the plot of.”

“It never should have happened,” she continued. “I was just trying to scare him.”

Her curt statements raised a few questions in my mind about the exact circumstances that had immediately preceded the shooting, but I did not ask them, half convinced as I was that my opportunity to examine the scene very shortly would be more edifying than trying to piece together the details from Emli’s description, which might send her into hysterics. I was vaguely, but only vaguely, concerned that our visitation to her ex-boyfriend’s house might nudge her into some type of catatonic state. I did not think that to be too likely; Emli is a strong, willful woman. But few woman, relatively, have committed homicide and revisiting the setting where one’s fatal handiwork is on display might break even the most callused or steady-nerved female. For that matter, I was not absolutely confident I was not myself going to be overwhelmed by what I was about to walk in on. Up to that point, I had knowingly been in the immediate presence of two dead bodies. The first had been that of a training jockey whose death I had witnessed when I was working as a summer field hand on an equestrian farm when I was seventeen. By the time I and a few other of the farm workers had run the 150 or so yards across the pasture to the side of the quarter mile training track where the jockey lay sprawled out on the ground after having flown head first into one of the infield fence posts, I was surprised to see that his skin was already beginning to discolor, fading into gray. The second was a motorcyclist I had seen late one afternoon at the heart of a mid-city traffic jam. He had been thrown from the bike and the top half of his body was embedded into a red Ford compact. Both of those experiences had shaken me up, not to the point of rendering me dysfunctional, but I was shaken up nonetheless. Those had been accidents. I could not predict how I was going to react to seeing the face of death on a man who had been sent to meet his Maker by someone I knew, someone I loved or once loved, someone I had to admit despite myself I still cared about, the same someone who would be standing next to me when that moment came.

A minute or so passed as we headed into an increasingly densely developed residential section of single family homes. “Turn right at the next cross street and go slow,” Emli said.

I made the turn and continued at a crawl. “Turn up the first street,” she said. Two hundred feet or so down I turned left – the only way I could – up a street with about nine or ten houses on either side and which ended in a cul-de-sac. “The fourth house up on the right,” Emli said.

The house, typical of the tract homes that had been mass built in the San Fernando Valley in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, was darkened. There was a pickup truck and a five-or-six-year-old Oldsmobile in the driveway. I pulled over to the curb and shut down the engine and the lights.

“Now listen,” I said. I pulled both pairs of gloves out of my pocket. “Put these on and don’t take them off until after we leave. Don’t slam the door when you get out. We don’t need to go waking up the neighbors.” I glanced around the neighborhood, up and down, craning my neck. Most of the homes were darkened, although I could see a television was on through some less-than-entirely-opaque drapes in a house that was on the opposite side of the street further toward the end of the cul-de-sac. A few of the others had porch lights on. Other than at the house where the television was on there was no indication that anyone else was awake or had taken notice of our arrival. “If someone does come along, act entirely naturally as if you and I have every right in the world to be here at this hour.” Then, thinking, I asked, “Is the front door locked?”

“Yeah, I locked it when I left,” she said, as she slid her slender hands into the slightly too-large gloves.

“You have a key?”

“Not with me. At my apartment.”

Her answer exasperated me, but only for a second.

“It’s okay,” she said. “There’s a sliding glass door in the back and it opens right up if you just jiggle the handle.”

“Well, let’s go then.”