A 245-page novel in 58 chapters.

At nine o’clock of the night in question I had just gotten home.

Home at that time was a house I had a long-term lease on on one of those side streets that dead ends into and nestles up against the foothills up Laurel Canyon. It was an older place and the guy I was renting it from was the son of the couple who actually owned it. The couple, who had to have been in their eighties, had moved away to one of those places, Arizona or New Mexico, that is supposed to offer a superior climate for the health of people who are sensitive to the smog and the other rigors of the fast paced life we are stuck with in Southern California. I never met them. They had a nice house, though, entirely furnished with things I would personally rank about two-and-a-half cuts above the furniture I had accumulated over the years. Most of my possessions, other than my books, a few of the nicer lithographs and paintings I own and my intricately carved Siamese jade and ivory chess set, were stored in the detached garage next to and slightly behind the house. The paintings and the lithographs, in their frames, were hung in the few available spots around the house where they fit without making the walls appear too cluttered, complementing in an iconoclastic way the framed paintings and drawings around the home that predated my arrival. My books had been added to ones already in their places in the wooden bookcases in the den and in the living room. My chess set, which other than some stocks and bonds ranks a close second to my car as the most valuable thing I own, was in the place I had designated for it on the low-lying coffee table in front of the divan, which sat opposite the fireplace and mantle.

It had not been a particularly hectic day, but one filled with enough engaging busywork to keep me in the office to just after eight. After going to court on behalf of two clients in the late morning and early afternoon, I was back at the firm’s office by four o’clock and I started in on researching and entirely finishing the drafts of two briefs for other cases, one of which had to be filed the following day. On the way home I had stopped by a supermarket, where I picked up a half-pound of bay scallops, some egg noodles and some fresh vegetables. I parked down on the street, as is my habit, and walked across the parkway, the sidewalk and up the relatively steep concrete stepway that is carved through the middle of the front yard up to the front porch.

Before I went in, I paused and bent down to turn the sprinklers on from the waterworks control panel that had been installed by the owners. Under the covered porch, I struggled in the darkness to make out the correct key on the key ring and fumbled with it in the lock, opening the door. I hit the plastic switch on the left side of the switch plate just inside the door, bathing myself and the entranceway in light. From there I made my way into the living room and then into the dining room and kitchen, where I set the shopping bag down on the counter.

The next five minutes or so I spent doing what a person typically does after arriving home from work and then I turned on the television, tuning into a local station that broadcasts the news at that hour. Washing my hands at the kitchen sink, I set about preparing my supper, boiling water for the noodles, sautéing the scallops in margarine and steaming the carrots, broccoli and cauliflower I had chopped up and mixed with Brussels sprouts. With everything cooking, I repaired to a spot midway in the dining room where I could see the television set. I watched a report about a freeway snarl-up precipitated by an ill-timed get-together of a semi-truck and a sports utility vehicle that touched off a 24-car pile-up that still had traffic backed up. A live video shot from an airborne telecam showed tow trucks still sorting out the mess in the darkness, with red flares marking the divisions for the two lanes that were inadequately allowing the traffic back-up to squeeze past the mishap. I went into the living room and over to the television to turn up the volume and then went back into the kitchen where over the stove I could tend to the final stages of the meal preparation. I heard an account of a brazen bank robbery attempt at a Bank of America branch out in the San Fernando Valley that resulted in the fatal shooting of one of the participants and the wounding of a police officer after a breakneck vehicular pursuit halfway across town. The other suspect, along with the loot from the robbery, remained at large while a door-to-door search of the residential section into which he had disappeared continued. The vehicle they had fled the scene of the crime in had turned out to be stolen. A man described as a six foot tall Latino or light skinned African-American wearing a red baseball hat and lugging a mail sack full of loot was still on the loose, the newscaster intoned, and he should be considered armed and dangerous.

With a fork I retrieved one of the scallops from the frying pan and, blowing on it to cool it, gingerly inserted it in my mouth. It was nearly done. I raked the scallops in the pan to scatter and turn them once more. I fished one of the egg noodles out of the kettle. It was nearly the desired tenderness. I put the frying pan lid back into place. The television volume boomed at the station commercial break. I walked out to the living room to turn it down. Back at the stove, I silently counted backward to zero from sixty and turned off each of the stove’s three burners. Retrieving a colander from the cupboard, I set it into the sink and then used pot holders to lift the kettle and empty its contents slowly into the colander. I squinted through the steam, set the kettle on the counter and lifted the colander to lightly toss its contents before dumping them back into kettle. I then added a couple of tablespoons of margarine to the noodles, mixing it up to melt and blend the condiment. I retrieved a plate from the cupboard and dished myself up a heaping plate of all three courses. From the tap, I unleashed a bristling stream of cool water and filled a glass.

Retreating to the living room, I half listened to the weather forecast while chowing down. I was half-ruminating about opening up a seafood restaurant when my focus returned to the news broadcast. Uninterested in the exhibition basketball scores and highlights, I reached for the remote control and began to switch channels. Seeing nothing that held my interest, I shut the television off.

Almost automatically, I set my still half-full plate aside on the coffee table and slid the chess set directly in front of me.

For the next two minutes or so I laid out the 22 move opening of a game I had played and won months before against a computer program. My win-to-loss ratio against that particular computerized chess system and chess-playing programs in general is not impressive. On this occasion, I had ventured forward with a king’s pawn opening and followed it up with immediate development of my queen, successfully stymieing an early counter threat to my queen, queen’s rook and king by the black queen’s knight with the development of my queen’s knight. Successful development of a gambit that entailed my queen, knight, and bishop in a foray across the board had led to black being necessitated to move its king up to the second row as a defensive ploy to protect its queen, taking away the possibility of a castling defense. From that point on I was able to force my advantage over black’s deteriorating position, going up by a pawn at move 26, a knight at move 28, another pawn at move 33, a rook at move 38, capturing the black queen at move 41 and achieving checkmate at move 49. I had by this point played this game out countless times and I knew the entire opening through the first 24 moves by heart. It was just at this point that the game board opened up and the offensive balance had begun its subtle shift in my favor. What I was intent on studying at that point was looking at the varied possibilities that existed for black’s defense to determine what mistake had been made against me, to see if I could engineer for black a way out from the relentless onslaught I as white had so clearheadedly hatched that one night months before.

Before I did so, however, I got up and went outside to adjust the sprinkler system, shutting the flow off to the cluster of sprinklers on the left side of the stepway and opening the valve to the opposite side. Back in the living room I picked up my plate, went into the kitchen and refilled it and returned to the divan. I studied the board and at last settled upon making a defensive cover of black’s most deeply advanced pawn with the king’s knight.

So continued the evening’s amusement, with me reconsidering, restrategizing and in the end recontorting the original clash between man and machine, in this case playing the match down to a stalemated draw after sixty moves. Back in the kitchen I half-filled the sink with hot sudsy water to do the dishes, scoured them with a plastic sponge, rinsed them and left them to air dry on a towel spread on the counter. I turned off the kitchen lights and went outside once more to shut off the sprinkler system completely. I locked the door behind me and deadbolted it, shut off the living room lights and headed upstairs to my bedroom.

A few minutes later when I laid down and tucked myself into bed, it was ten-thirty. For five minutes or so, as is my custom, I thrashed around trying to get comfortable, lying on my back, then my stomach, then one side, and then the other. I wadded up a handful of sheet and blanket and put that between my knees to keep them from prodding one another and keeping me up indefinitely. At last my neck muscle fully relaxed and that slow-paced, free-associative reverie that typically precedes slumber was upon me. Minutes, if not seconds, later I was out, a dead soldier, sleeping like a baby.

I cannot recollect the substance of my dreaming that night but do know that it was a calm dream, a comfortable one with plush imagery and sensation. I know this because I recall being very resistant when I was called upon to prematurely leave it. I know from experience that when I am in the midst of an unpleasant dream, some internal mechanism I have developed allows me to seize upon any external stimuli and interpret that as a call to awaken. Thus the ticking of a clock will resound as the chiming of Big Ben if, perchance, I find myself caught in a dreamscape involving torture, the imminent collapse of a railroad trestle while I am journeying by train, a prison cell or the like. The opposite is equally true. If my nocturnal excursion has delivered me into the middle of a lobster dinner, a massage or say, a longboard atop the crest of a big one in the midst of the International Surf Championships on the Kona Coast, I cling to sleep with the tenacity of a mother protecting her young and it would figuratively require a freight train running through the adjoining hallway to wake me.

So it was that night as I gradually became aware of an outer clamor, an unpleasant but seemingly distant interference with my internalized universe that I was content to ignore. Whatever it was, it did not seem constant, but rather to come and go intermittently, and it did not bring me fully to consciousness. Then the pounding seemed to intensify, which jostled me, but I was still three-quarters in the comfort zone of the cushy dream and laboring to stay there. At some point a closer and higher pitched sound joined the more distant rumble and night’s netherworld lost its grip on me. I lay there, listening. No sound. Then the rapping started again. And a second or two later, my doorbell. Then more knocks at the door.

I pulled myself up out of the bed and started out of the bedroom. I instinctively stopped, stepped back into the bedroom, threw open the closet and in the darkness felt along my hanging clothes and pulled out my bathrobe, which I identified by its distinctive terry cloth feel. I hastily draped it over me, tying it with its belt. The persistent rapping at the door began again, soon accompanied by bleats of the doorbell. I went out onto the landing at the top of the stairs and turned on the light, which threw a limited swath of illumination down into the living room. I descended into the living room and from there padded noiselessly into the entranceway. I put my hand on the light switch plate but did not hit either of the switches. As I stood there, the knocking resumed. I stood up on my tiptoes and gazed out into the black night. There was a form close in on the porch but I could not really make it out. I hit the switch on the right side of the plate, which illuminated the porch light. I looked again, pressing my eyes up close to the fanlight.

I did a double take. There on my porch stood a ghost.

Five-foot-two-inches and 110 pounds of living, breathing ghost. The physical form and being, the one soul on this entire planet that has haunted me more than all others combined. The brightness and proximity of the porch light was making her squint almost to the point where her eyes were closed. There was no mistaking her, though, and besides, I had seen her plenty of times with her eyes closed.

I unlocked the door and threw back the deadbolt with its resulting click. I deliberately inched the door open slowly just a few inches and then more widely. The interior threshold was two-and-a-half inches or so higher than the porch, so I had to look down sharply at her and she had to crane her neck to look up at me. Our gazes locked upon each other.

“Thank God!” she said in that same almost breathless way she always had as soon as she recognized me.

I did not say anything, but stood with one hand near the jamb and the other on the side of the door, drinking in her image, which nearly overwhelmed me, with four years’ worth of emotion welling up inside me. At that second I was seized by a prompting to simply slam the door shut and walk back through the living room and up the stairs and jump back into bed and go to sleep, preferably forever. I did not do that, though. Instead, I opened the door a little wider and pulled my left hand away from the jamb and with a sidelong motion with my palm tilted slightly up, beckoned her in.

She lightly brushed against me coming through the doorway and into the still unlighted entranceway. This was not without its affect upon me, but I did my best to ignore it. I swept the door closed as I turned on the entranceway light. I moved around her and walked into the living room, where I ignited the closest of the floor lamps. I walked over to the divan.

“Well, if it’s not the still beautiful but ever unreliable Emli Townsend,” I said with just the right touch of bitterness in my voice, “at –what time is it?” I looked at the clock on the mantle. “One-twenty a.m. in my living room.” I sat back into the divan. “Have a seat,” I said.

My words and the latent venom that draped over them seemed to have no impact on her, but then she walked over to a chair.

“I’m in a jam, Steve,” she said, “bad. I didn’t want to bother you, really. But you’re the only one that can help me. I got your address out of the phone book. It took me a while to find this place and then it seemed like no one was home. I’m really sorry I woke you up this late.” She rubbed the side of her right hand and sat down.

I rubbed the back of my neck. “There was a time,” I said, “when I would have liked nothing better than for you to wake me up at this hour. You’ve caught me a little off-guard. I’ve done my best not to think about you for a quite a while. At first, I couldn’t get you out of my mind. The last year or so, I almost forgot you ever existed.” I meant it even more meanly than it sounded.

She looked down and then lightly touched her fingertips together. She hesitated, as if she were choosing her words very carefully. “I don’t know if you remember,” she said. “You said once that if I ever needed help, you would come through for me.” There was almost a pleading in her voice. She looked very vulnerable, and very beautiful.

“I might have said something like that,” I said, suggesting I did not really remember. I remembered though. “Well, what is it? How can I help you?”

She looked down at her feet and then looked up at me. She licked her lips

“There’s a dead man… in the place where I used to live,” she said.

It did not scan at all, for a few seconds.

“Dead?” I finally said. “In your apartment?”

“No, where I was staying for a while.”

“Dead how?”

“I killed him.”

“You killed him? How?”

“With a gun. His gun. It was self-defense.”

“Then we’ll call the police.”

“But it’s more complicated than that.”

“Complicated how?”

“He was… We were… We were practically man and wife, for a time.”

“And he was threatening you?”

She did not respond but looked as if she was staring vacantly out into space.

A little louder I said, “Was he hurting you?”

“Yes. No. Not tonight. A few times. He’d twist my arm. He hit me once and loosened up my teeth.”

“So why did you shoot him tonight? You thought he might hit you again?”

“It was a stupid accident, just a stupid thing. I really didn’t mean to use the gun. Not that way. We had broken up two months ago. I couldn’t keep him away. He wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept saying he would commit suicide. Then it was he would break my nose and scar up my face so no other man would ever look at me again. He would call me up all the time early in the evening or late at night and not say anything, just a phantom call where I could hear somebody breathing on the other end and then there would be a click. I knew it was him. It couldn’t have been anyone else. He was following me around all the time. He saw me with this other guy once when we went out for dinner. It was really innocent… just dinner. But he came by my apartment the next day and told me he’d put the guy I went to dinner with in the hospital if he ever saw us together again. He had his car license number and said he knew where he lived.”

She took a long pause as if she were composing herself. She breathed deeply and then continued.

“I just told him to stop. He wouldn’t stop. He called again tonight. Another phantom call. I don’t know, I guess, I just wanted it to end. That’s when I got the idea. I drove over there, to his house. He let me in and we started to talk and I got him to admit he had been making all those calls. When I had the chance I went over to the cabinet on his entertainment center where I knew he kept his gun. I got it and pointed it at him. I told him it had all gone on long enough and that this was really the end. I was trying to impress him with how serious I was. I told him I was taking the gun with me so he wouldn’t hurt himself, or me or anyone else. I told him I meant it and if he tried to stop me, I’d use it on him. I told him tonight was the last time I ever wanted to see or hear from him again, that it was really over and nothing he could say or do was going to change that.”

She shuddered. “I didn’t mean to shoot him, Steve, I swear to God, I didn’t. I just meant to scare him. To show him how tough I could be.” The next sound she made is pretty hard to describe. It started as an anguished moan but changed to a wail and then ended as a sob. There were tears streaming down her face. I started to get up. Her voice, low and calm, but muttered as if through clenched teeth, stopped me.

“He just got angry. He belittled me and walked right to me as if I didn’t have the gun at all. I thought for a second it might not be loaded. He was going to take it away from me. I just… He…”

“Okay,” I said. “How many times did you shoot him?”

“Just once.”

“And you’re sure he’s dead?”

“He wasn’t breathing, Steve.”

“What time was this?”

“Oh, between nine and ten. Just after nine, I guess.”

“And where’s the gun?”

“I think I left it on the desk in the den.”

“Where’s this house?”

“Out in the valley.”

My mind was racing.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me get dressed.” I got up and headed up the stairs. In my room I switched on the lights and deliberately set about finding the darkest set of clothes I possessed – a black turtleneck long-sleeved shirt, a dark blue pair of socks, an unfaded pair of black denim jeans. I pulled off the bathrobe and flung it onto the bed. I pulled the dark clothes on and then searched along the floor of the back of the closet for an old pair of black tennis shoes I almost never wore. Having clothed and shod myself, I retrieved my black leather jacket and put that on. I went into the top drawer of my dresser and found my black wool watch cap, which I tucked into the jacket pocket. I went down the stairs and through the living room into the kitchen. I went past the stove to the far left drawer under the sink counter and dug through the hodgepodge of disparate items I kept there, retrieving two sets of gloves, one well worn protective thick leather pair and the other a soft cloth set I used for gardening. I put those into the jacket pocket opposite the one holding the watch cap.

In retrospect, it seems very remarkable to me how outwardly calm I was as I was taking all these deliberate steps which I knew were likely to have a profound effect on the rest of my life.

I went past the pantry and then unlocked the back door and walked out into the night across the strip of lawn over to the side door into the detached garage. In there, I went to the miscellaneous tools stacked against the wall and stepped over the lawnmower to gather a pick and a shovel. From the top of the workbench I grabbed a flashlight. I turned off the garage light, set the shovel and pick down on the grass momentarily, pressed in the locking pin on the side garage door before shutting the door behind me, picked up the shovel and pick and went back into the kitchen.

When I got out into the living room again Emli was standing near the south wall, gazing at one of the framed pictures.

“You got this one since we were together,” she said.

“It’s not mine,” I said. “It came with the house.”

I walked toward the front door, carrying the tools. “Let’s go,” I called over my shoulder.

As we were standing at the door and I was fishing around for the key to lock up behind us, I gave Emli a sidelong look. She wrinkled her nose. “Did you have fish for dinner?” she asked.

“Scallops,” I said.

As we were walking down the darkened stepway I asked, “You still have the same apartment?”

“Yes,” she said.

“How far is his house from your apartment?”

“Less than fifteen minutes on the freeway and into the valley at this hour.”

At the street, I opened my car’s trunk and dropped the shovel, pick and flashlight into it and shut the lid.

“Okay, now listen to me,” I said. I bent down to put my mouth close to her ear so I could lower my voice and still have her hear me. “I’ll meet you in front of your apartment and then we’ll drive to his house together in my car. It’s probably going to be important that no one sees you or your car over there again.”

I went around my car to the driver’s side, unlocked and opened the door and stepped in to slide behind the steering wheel. I thought I saw Emily walking toward her car parked down about a hundred feet behind mine. After I started the engine and let it idle to warm up, I looked up to see that she was standing out in the street right next to my car. I rolled down the window. Her hand touched my jacketed left forearm very lightly just above the wrist.

“I really appreciate this, Steve,” she said.

“We have to get moving,” I said. “We don’t have much time.”

I engaged the transmission and went forward and swung wide to pull up into my driveway and then back out and turn around. I caught Emli getting into her car with the sweep of my headlights as I swung back out onto the street. I went into reverse to back up and she started her engine and then drove up toward me and mimicked my turnaround in the driveway. She headed down the street and then out on Laurel Canyon ahead of me in her car, a late model mid-size Japanese job which was far different from the Ford Mustang she had when we were together before. I followed at a safe distance, able to see her form silhouetted at the driver’s wheel to the left between the glowing red frame thrown up by her car’s taillights. I settled into following that image before me on the route down Laurel Canyon Boulevard and then east out Sunset Boulevard. Traffic was sparse at that hour and following her was no problem.

We caught mostly green lights and it took no more than twenty minutes for us to drive to her apartment. Motoring along, I evaluated the circumstances as I knew them. There were, I concluded, too many unknowns for me to make a definite call. I had brought the shovel and pick along to address a certain contingency but at this point, I did not even know whether her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, was dead. She had said he wasn’t breathing but she might have been mistaken.

If he was alive, this was going to be a whole different can of worms than if he were dead. More than four hours had gone by since he had been wounded and it was going to prove difficult to explain why we had waited so long to seek medical care. Nevertheless, it occurred to me, the guy being alive would represent a whole lot less complication to Emli than if he indeed was dead. Guys that rough up and threaten their girlfriends have a pretty hard time masking that tendency and if the authorities had a chance to experience him up close and personal, she might be able to walk away from all of this.

If he was dead, and I figured he probably was, things were going to turn ugly quick. From what she had said about having driven over to his place intending to scare him and deliberately taking his gun, that would sound too much to a prosecutor like malice aforethought. Throw in the established motive of her anger at the victim and the fact that he had done nothing to threaten her or hurt her immediately prior to the shooting and it added up to First Degree murder. With the right legal representation she might be able to work a plea for manslaughter, but that would put her away for at least a dozen years. And she would no longer be pretty after doing a decade or more of hard time.

I thought over our doctoring options. Maybe the wound would support a finding of suicide, if it was to the head and the gun had been fired from close enough to have left powder burns. I had not asked Emli about that. I would better be able to assess that when I had a look at the scene. Maybe she had a letter from him threatening suicide. That could help.

At the thought of desperate letters addressed to Emli I was thrown into a reverie. I had been exactly where the poor bastard was four years before. I had written her a good dozen myself when she had thrown me over. And her account back at my house of how he had doggedly pursued her in an attempt to get her back had hit a resounding chord in me as well. The memories and emotion of four and five years past flooded over me as I drove, still a safe distance behind the woman who was the subject of my tortured thoughts.

It had been very good, my relationship with Emli, during the 16 months that it had lasted. I see that time now and guess I will always see it as an idyllic pastoral, the true highlight of my life.

It had started out simply enough. She was the secretary to one of my clients. He was the owner of a large studio downtown and he retained me to sue a photographer he had a partnership with who had outright absconded with about $400,000 worth of his equipment and, as near as we were able to determine, the negatives, prints and half tones for about 50,000 photographs that had been taken by other photographers under exclusive contract to my client. This was known because dozens of the photographs which my client had all of the rights to had started turning up in publications all over the country. Emli had been assigned to assist me in gathering documentation during discovery in the lead-up to the trial. We spent several hours a day for more than a week going over documents and files and everything she could locate relating to the partnership. She coordinated with the photographers to get their personal prints of the photographs that had been embezzled. I was practically working out of her office. The first thing that impressed me about her had been the efficiency and competence with which she handled all order of the tasks that were laid out before her. Early on, well before the sheer volume of the materials we were working with had begun to weigh us down, she had already devised a reference and filing system that over the course of the litigation proved invaluable. She was an incredibly quick study and I merely had to explain to her what I was looking for and she had a real knack for reading through volumes of the material to come up with the relevant and probative material I was looking for.

It would have been impossible for me not to have noted from the onset just how physically attractive she was. But somehow at first, I had been able to ignore that, as I am not the kind of guy who goes to pieces over a pretty girl. Besides, I was determined to keep everything on a professional basis while I sought to litigate the matter at hand on behalf of her employer. Within a very short while, however, my resistance had begun to erode. About two weeks after I had taken up the case we were in the studio’s executive office digging through files and ended up staying late. I went out to get Chinese food. We did not get much done in the way of bona fide work that night. Instead, we just sat and talked until about 9 o’clock. The matter had not yet moved to trial when I took her out to dinner for the first time one Friday night, our first proper date. It had gone from there. It should go without saying that I had fallen hopelessly and eternally in love with her. In the beginning I was filled with profound curiosity about her. I was absolutely obsessed with her and everything about her. I wanted to know everything about her – what her earliest memory was, what her parents were like, where she grew up, what kind of dolls she had, all about her best friends, her favorite teachers, where she went on vacation, where she went to college…..

The more I satisfied each level of curiosity, the more obsessed with her I became. I could listen to her for hours. Her voice had for me some type of hypnotic power, its timber and cadence like the elegant music from a faraway land that washed over me and slew the demons that disturbed my soul.

After she had my soul, she stole my body. For every man there must be, or should be, a woman who can unleash his manhood. For me, Emli was that woman.

After previous weekend trips to the Griffith Observatory, the Getty Museum, the Huntington Library and the Norton Simon Museum we drove late one Saturday morning up to Castaic Lake and retreated deep into the forest for a picnic she had packed. After lunch, she incited my passion beyond my ability to restrain it and when I expressed it her voice raced with the furious cadence of her own desire and we devoured each other on her red gingham table cloth.

For the next sixteen months there was hardly a day that we did not revel in the pulse of our being to glide as one across the universe, our senses locked fully engaged upon one another, my surging manhood enveloped by her warm and taut womanhood. At her bidding, I was transformed into a satyr and she gladly let me feast upon her flesh. I worshipped her body as the earthly Temple of Aphrodite.

She lived in a small upstairs apartment then. She gave me the key. I ended up living out of there, a snug neat little place closer to the courthouse than my apartment, three or four days a week. Only the walls stood witness to our displays of passion, encounters that gradually escalated from gentle touches to the full incitement of each other’s lust. I cannot conceive of any other woman being so responsive to my touch as she was and there was no portion of her body that she held off limits to me.

Following or between our hours-long sessions of lovemaking we would lie in one another’s grasp, our libidos temporarily discharged and, for me at least, all of my demons slain. In those brief passages of total peace, our unclothed bodies against each other, we became totally vulnerable to one another, confessing the darkest and deepest secrets of our existences, our dreams, desires, fears, and insecurities. I knew then, as I know now, I can never be as close to another living person as I was to Emli. I just cannot conceive of having with anyone else what I had with her. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

Eight months after our relationship began in earnest, Emli’s paternal grandmother, who lived in a very nice apartment at the southern periphery of the Los Feliz district, broke her hip in a fall. Emli at once moved in with her to care for her during her recovery. That development had all the potential for destroying, or at least obstructing, our relationship. It did not. We merely transitioned the site of our torrid encounters to my apartment. And the change in Emli’s circumstance provided me with the opportunity to move my intercourse with her into a whole other dimension. Prior to her accident, I had met Emli’s grandmother just once, having taken her out to dinner with her granddaughter one evening. During her convalescence I was, if not a frequent visitor to her apartment, a steady one. The second week after she was back from the hospital, I busied myself for an entire weekend building ramps at three spots around the apartment together with installing wall rails at a half dozen crucial spots to make the whole of the residence wheelchair accessible. I ducked into the place a good dozen times just to check on her, usually bringing her a sack full of almond, pistachio or macadamia nuts, which as far as I could tell, were her only weakness. On two occasions that I can clearly recollect, I was drawn into such long conversations with her that when we were away afterwards Emli protested that I seemed to be more interested in her grandmother than in her. While that was certainly not true, I had become very fond of the older woman. She was interesting to talk to in her own right, not to mention the insight she provided me on her granddaughter. And I could not help noticing certain quaint similarities in both women’s mannerisms and I remarked more than once to myself that in my golden years I could do a whole lot worse than retire to a nice little cottage in the country with someone just like Emli’s grandmother.

If anything, my relationship with Emli was intensifying. I was astonished at her intellectual depth and breadth. I read the books she had read and watched the movies she had seen. One of her interests was drawing and painting. I stood as a model for hours on end, clothed and unclothed, in her bedroom when she had her own apartment, in my living room, in my bedroom and in more than a few clearings deep in the woods while she rendered my likeness onto canvas or drawing paper. Practically overnight I became a dilettante art collector, frequenting art shows to pick up renderings, paintings, drawings and lithographs I would show off to her. I was always careful to get the name, studio location and phone number of the artists whose works I picked up. On occasion I drove her out to a few of those studios and I would break the ice by telling the artist that I had purchased a piece of his or her work at one art showing or another and then I would simply stand by while Emli would talk shop and technique with the artist.

Unbeknownst to Emli, on more than one of my visits to her grandmother during the period of her recovery I had succeeded in having the older woman show me the photo albums she kept. I scoured the photographs for the visual minutiae of her son’s family’s life and committed those tidbits to memory. Then later, when I was alone with Emli, I would make reference to what I had seen, asking about the balcony on the second story of the home she lived in when she was in grade school, or what the name of the skipperkee she had as childhood pet was, or the like. These things would always surprise her and she would say, “I don’t remember telling you about that! How did you know?”

To me it had become an indisputable fact of existence that Emli was my life’s mate. This was an outgrowth of my feeling, of course, but I saw and heard my passion reciprocated in her words and deeds. Her touch was amazing, but only the more so because of the words that accompanied it. She let me know that she craved and cherished me as much as I did her, and she inflated me to nearly heroic proportions in her verbal representation of me to others. At one point just before her grandmother’s mishap I was involved in a several-days-long trial in San Diego County Superior Court, necessitating that I stay at a downtown hotel there. Wednesday night, as I was returning after dinner, intent on going straight up to my room to call her, Emli greeted me in the lobby. “I hope you’re not mad,” she said. “I couldn’t stand being away from you another day. I had some comp time coming from overtime I’ve worked, so I took off Thursday and Friday.” She accompanied me to court both of the following days, sitting in the gallery, interested or at least feigning interest in my legal sparring with opposing counsel. We made a mini-vacation of that weekend, sojourning to Baja.

It was shortly after her grandmother’s recovery that our relationship took its final turn. By that point I had become obsessed with the prospect of merging my genes with hers. I began to talk of fulfilling that obsession, which I termed “my ultimate fantasy.” At first she seemed as pleased with the idea as was I. In retrospect, however, I believe that it was these too insistent overtures on my part which ultimately undid us. I was pressing, I see now, for a commitment Emli was not then prepared to make. I never formally proposed to her, but there was no mistaking my intent and the direction I was determined to go in. I openly mused about our children, how many we would have, what they would look like, their gender, what they would be when they grew up. I was so caught up in my own enthusiasm that I did not see, at least at the time, that the idea was somehow disturbing and frightening to her. And then one day, Emli unilaterally shattered my universe forever when out of the clear blue sky, over crumpets and morning tea at a coffee house around the block from my apartment, she informed me that we were through.

At that point of my recollection, I was brought into real time, as I turned off Sunset Boulevard and headed north on Vermont, still about five car lengths behind Emli. At the southernmost outskirts of the Los Feliz district she made a right turn off Vermont and we were on the street where Emli’s apartment was located, the same one she had moved into with her grandmother almost five years before. She pulled into the entranceway with the automatic gate that would take her down to where the parking structures were. I pulled over to the curb in front of the apartment complex and shut off the engine.

I opened the door and stepped out of the car. I went around the car, stepped up over the curb onto the sidewalk and trudged across the grass. The gate into the complex was locked. I made short work of jumping the fence and headed right along the walkway to the wide asphalt driveway where Emli had driven down. I met her coming out of the parking structure.

“Not much of a moon tonight,” I remarked. “That’s probably good.”

I turned and we walked out toward the entrance, Emli’s hard sole shoes taping out a light rhythm on the pavement. The gate was not locked from the inside. We went through it, across the grass and out to my car.

“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.”

We both opened the car doors simultaneously and we each cradled them back into place with barely a sound. Her shoes made a slight pattering as she walked across the sidewalk but that lasted only a second until we were walking across the front lawn. I pulled my gloves on as we went up toward the house. I followed her lead as we crossed over the driveway at the left side of the house. As we did so, a light mounted on the right side of the garage triggered by a motion detector threw the both of us into stark relief. As nonchalantly as I could, I followed her to the left side of the garage. She paused briefly at a side yard gate and pulled a wire that protruded through a hole that was drilled near the gate’s top to unlatch it. I pulled the gate back and we stepped into the side yard and beyond the cast of the light. I trod carefully, my eyes having to readjust to the darkness after their encounter with the security light. I would gauge the depth of the house on the left side as roughly 55 feet, which, including the attached garage, would be fairly typical of homes built during that era. The width of the side yard was about fifteen feet. As we came into the back yard I had to step around a rather large round ceramic planter that had some type of vegetation, flowers of some sort I could not clearly discern in that lighting. The grass beneath my feet felt firm and healthy and in the lighting appeared to be dark colored. There was a patio with a chaise lounge and a few scattered redwood chairs and a small redwood table. It occurred to me at that point that there was no dog, a factor that up until that point I had not even considered. That was good. A dog could have made this into a very complicated and even more dangerous undertaking. Emli’s shoes lightly tapped across the concrete of the patio. At the back of the house, about midway down its length, was a sliding glass door inside a sliding screen door. She slid the screen to the right with a sidelong arm motion. She gripped the glass door’s handle and did the same. It was not locked and immediately slid open along its track. I followed her in through a light but opaque curtain. I slid the door closed behind us.

My initial sensation coming into the place was the slight dustiness of the curtains, which momentarily tickled my nose but did not make me sneeze. I stood just inside the curtains, allowing my eyes to further adjust to the darkness inside. Even before Emli made her way over to the right wall to turn on a ceiling light, I could see we were in the dining room. The back of a single wooden chair, which was at one of the narrow sides of an oblong dining table, was about six or seven feet inside the sliding glass door. Emli hit the light switch and instantaneously illuminated the place. I immediately looked to see the body but from where I was standing, there was none in sight. I sized up everything I could in those fleeting seconds. I was still facing toward the front of the house with my back to the sliding glass door. There were four chairs around the dining table, made of the same wood, probably walnut, as the chairs. To the left was the kitchen, which was partially separated from the dining room by a bar about seven feet or so long. There were two bar stools in front of the bar on the dining room side. There was about five feet or so of space between the bar stools and the back of the nearest chair on the long side of the dining table. At the end of the bar was the unobstructed entrance into the kitchen. Through the entrance and above the bar I could see a double sink, a stove and oven, a counter, a microwave on the counter, cupboards and, along the wall opposite the far end of the bar, a refrigerator. The floor in the dining room was covered with a rug but I could see that at the entrance to the kitchen at the far end of the bar the rug ended and the kitchen had a tile floor. The dining room wall to my right was covered with wallpaper that featured a pattern of what looked like the dark brown or black outlines of wine glasses alternating with opened umbrellas against a tan background. From what I could see, Emli’s most recent ex-boyfriend was not quite as tidy of a housekeeper as I am, but still somewhat neater than your average bachelor, or so it appeared.

I sniffed the air. There was the slightly bitter tinge of cordite, but only very slight.

“Well, where is he?” I said.

“This way,” Emli said.

I followed her out of the dining room. To the right as we left it, that is as I faced the street, was a hallway which presumably led toward the house’s bedrooms. Just beyond the hall toward the front of the house were two rooms – a den to the right and the living room to the left, again as one faced the street. I watched my step in the unfamiliar surroundings and moved very slowly until Emli turned on a light from a switch plate next to the front door, which was recessed in a very small entranceway between the living room and den. As I came closer to the front of the house, the odor of cordite, still not overpowering, grew stronger. He was in the living room, sprawled out on his back next to a coffee table. His left arm was flat on the floor. His right arm from the shoulder to the elbow was on the floor, but the rest of it was bent upward at the elbow and the back of his hand was propped against a leg of the coffee table. I stepped closer and went down on one knee. His face was pulled into a gruesome, taut grimace. I removed my left glove and felt for a pulse at his left wrist. His skin was cold. There was no pulse that I could detect. I knew at that point that he was definitely dead, but I felt again at the side of his neck, where his skin was equally cold. There was no pulse there either.

All along, I had anticipated that the wound would be to the head. It was not. Rather, he had taken it in the chest at a point I estimated to be slightly to the left side of and at most no more than an inch lower than the breastbone. With my gloved hand I unbuttoned one of the buttons on his shirt and gingerly peeled it back. The entrance wound was not terribly large – about half the diameter of a dime – and there had been some bleeding but this did not appear to be too profuse. He was wearing a green and black woolen lumberjack’s long sleeve. The shirt appeared to have sopped up much of the blood that had likely hemorrhaged initially and there was a stain of now coagulating blood that had spread about the wound and down across his left side. Some of it had dripped on the oval throw rug that was placed beneath the coffee table and which covered the living room carpeting.

I gazed at his face. Both eyes were eerily open, the left more so as if the right eyelid was somehow heavier than the other. This gave the visual impression that he was gazing back at me in a skeptical fashion, as if I had just said something he could not quite believe. But for the grimace and the fact that his pallor had grown somewhat ashen he was, or had been, in all a fairly handsome chap in a rugged sort of way. He was not a pretty boy as much as he had that man’s man type of visage a la John Wayne or Kirk Douglas.

I gripped his arm again and pressed it hard between my fingers and then gently shook it. Rigor Mortis had yet to set in in any major way. That is, his arm was yet pliant and the hand pivoted at the wrist when I shook it.

I pulled the glove back on and stood up. I looked over at Emli. She was looking down at him, wide-eyed and incredulous. It appeared as if she was shaking. I took a deep breath. “Well, the scenario where we make it look like a suicide is out,” I said. “No one shoots himself in the chest.” I rubbed my forehead with a gloved hand. “Where’s the gun?”

“I put it over… there,” Emli said and pointed across to a desk in the den. I walked over to where it lay and picked it up. It was a .22 caliber semi-automatic feed. Not much stopping power, I adjudged. One bullet, as Emli said she had fired, would not be likely to instantly kill anyone, especially a bruiser like the nearly deceased, unless the shot was particularly well-placed. Police and popular lore are rife with stories of people who have sustained one or even more .22 caliber shots and continued on for several minutes as if having been shot was just something of an irritating or annoying nuisance. I pressed the safety and threw open the magazine contained in the handle. It was a nine-shot job. I counted seven in the magazine and looked in the chamber to see one more. Hollow points. That explained it.

Hollow points are a particularly insidious device of interpersonal mayhem. In flight from the barrel they travel pretty much like solid rounds but when they hit into something they behave quite differently. A solid round generally continues on in the trajectory it is on, plowing through whatever is in front of it until it either stops or passes all the way through. That can be bad, of course, depending on what it runs into on its way, but if there is nothing vital in the bullet’s path, assuming the victim can get treatment and does not bleed himself to death, such a wound is not necessarily fatal. Hollow points on the other hand, once they run into something of the consistency of flesh or muscle, begin to flatten and then tumble in an irregular rather than a straight course. That leads to a wider path of damage. And if a hollow point bullet chances to hit something more solid like bone, there is a likelihood that it will shatter. Those fragments do not merely come to rest either. They continue on in their separate tumbling courses, ricocheting around, multiplying by the number of fragments and different directions the likelihood that they will run into something vital.

Ultimately what had undone the ruggedly handsome but now no longer breathing heap of expired protoplasm on the floor in the adjoining room was the one hollow point that had entered his chest. I could not know precisely, but it had very probably hit a rib or the sternum and had fragmented. One or more of those fragments may have been deflected to another rib and in turn been fragmented. At any rate this collection of metal moving at an initial speed of somewhere around 2,100 feet per second would have continued in a variegated path inward through his body. Given the placement of the shot there were several critical organs or body parts that would have been likely to be nicked, scraped, lacerated, pierced, or outright pulverized, starting with his heart, and continuing on to his pulmonary artery, his aorta, his lungs or liver. That sort of trauma to his lungs or liver would not be likely to kill him, at least in the immediate term. But if his heart or aorta – the major arterial branch that takes the body’s supply of blood away from the heart – or the pulmonary artery – the vessel which conveys blood from the heart to the lungs – or, for that matter, the pulmonary vein – which returns the blood to the heart from the lungs – were to be sliced there would have been almost zero chance for him even if competent medical assistance had been immediately available. If any one or a combination of these crucial cogs in his circulatory system had been compromised, with every beat of his heart ounce after ounce and then pint after pint of his blood would have been dumped into his chest cavity and inside two minutes probably there would have been insufficient pressure for his vascular system to continue functioning. In all likelihood, the trauma he had sustained within the highly vulnerable thorax region would have sent him into immediate shock. He would have passed out at once.

Much less likely, but yet possible, was that one of the fragments could have ricocheted upward perhaps even as high as his neck to sever his spinal cord or into the base of his skull and to his medulla, the portion of his brain that controls muscular coordination and breathing. Or a fragment might have headed downward through his stomach and into his diaphragm, which served as the bellows that allowed him to inflate and deflate his lungs.

Any way you looked at it though, a single shot from the gun in my gloved hand had caused the fatality attested to by the corpse in the living room, no matter what the exact train of effect had been. I closed the magazine and set the gun back down on the desk.

“I take it the gun is registered to him?” I said.

Emli was positioned in the passage between the den and living room, looking down at the just departed. She half turned toward me. “I think so, but I can’t really say.” she said.

I walked around her and back into the living room. I again bent over the body. I carefully raised it with some effort up on its side using my left hand and, cautious not to smear my arm with any blood, reached down to the hip pocket and yanked out the wallet. As gently as I could I let the corpse settle back onto the oval rug. I stood up, opened the wallet and hampered somewhat by the gloves began thumbing through its contents. There were forty seven dollars in greenbacks in the billfold along with a California driver license, a health plan card, an Automobile Club card, a pipefitter’s union card and six credit cards all in the slightly variant names of Gregory Allen Williams, Gregory A. Williams, and Greg Williams. I studied the face on the driver license. In the photo he wore a beard and an almost devilish smile. Nevertheless I could recognize that he and the clean-shaven grimacing man lying at my feet were, or had been, one and the same. The address on the driver license corresponded with the street. And I noted that he was exactly one year and nine months younger than I was.

“Gregory Allen Williams,” I said.

I sized up Emli’s situation. She had shot the deceased, with his own gun, which may or may not have been registered to him. If she was going to approach the police, it would be foolish for her to do anything other than be entirely truthful. If she were to fabricate anything or be in any way economical with the facts she would most certainly eventually be tripped up by the investigators. Yet, telling all at this point would be tremendously problematic. At the very least she would be admitting to the negligent discharge of a firearm that resulted in Greg Williams’ death. Manslaughter. And even if she was entirely truthful in approaching the police, they might well conclude she was lying. How was she to justify not having called for paramedics immediately if it were truly an accident? Assuming we were to go to the police now, how would we explain away the four hours delay? Panic? My practice has been entirely in business and civil law and I have no experience whatsoever as a criminal lawyer, but I shuddered at what I knew an aggressive prosecutor could do with the facts of the case, arguing that she had come deliberately to Williams with the intention of seizing his gun to use against him. That sounded dangerously close to premeditation. Her citation of his threats and harassment would sound more like a motive to prosecutors than a plausible assertion of self-defense, given that Williams had been shot in his own living room by someone who by her own admission had traveled across town to confront him. And that was as good as it got. What if Williams had not registered the gun? Emli’s assertion that it was his gun might not be believed and a jury might be further convinced that she had actually brought the gun to the murder scene herself and that her account to the contrary was a ploy to downplay the seriousness of her action and muddle the premeditation issue.

“Where did you find the gun?” I asked, folding everything back up inside the wallet and setting it down on an end table.

“He always kept it in that drawer right there,” Emli said, pointing to the entertainment center, a large oaken hutch nearly five foot tall and about seven feet wide that housed a television, a cable box, a VCR, a CD player and speakers, set against the living room’s far wall. I went over to it and pulled open the drawer. I rummaged through its sparse contents with my gloved right hand – there were owner’s manuals for the VCR and the CD player, about three feet or so of bundled up coaxial cable, three VCR cassettes, a screwdriver, some assorted pieces of wrapped peppermint and butterscotch candies, a candle and some matches. There was no spare clip for the gun and no bullets, either loose or in a box. Nothing, in short, that would support the contention that the drawer was the place where Williams kept his gun. I shut the drawer and turned around.

I looked at Emli and she at me.

“This is perfectly awful,” she said.

“It’s pretty bad,” I replied.

She was looking back at me, with fright in her face. But there was something else in her look, something I had not seen for four years and which my soul had been longing for. Her senses were locked onto me in the way I had once been accustomed to. For the duration of our eyes being in contact I was at the center of her universe. She had everything in her life riding on me and I had that feeling that had coursed through me every day for sixteen months when I was four years younger and a hundred years more innocent that I was on some kind of sacred mission for her and that I could not let her down.

Through all of this, the direness of the situation never left me. Unless something – something very drastic – was done, some order of murder rap was going to be hung around her pretty little neck. I had done the best that I could to drive thoughts of her from my mind over the last few years with lesser and greater success but after all I had just seen I knew I could not bear knowing that she had been relegated to a prison cell somewhere, housed in an iron-barred and concrete cubicle among other women who were truly sociopaths and hardened by drug abuse, and lifetimes of prostitution and criminality. She would herself be hardened by being institutionalized and treated like chattle. Despite all she had done to me in abandoning and forsaking me, there had remained deep in me somewhere the concept of her as I had idealized her – the most perfect, the most splendid, the most refined, the most exquisite creature in the universe. I recognized at that second that maintaining that concept, even if it was to prove ultimately illusory for me, was inexpressibly precious. Whatever had to be done, I would do. The plan that had vaguely leapt into my mind when I was still in my bathrobe back in my living room less than an hour before and which I had instinctively begun to actuate when I collected the pick and shovel from my garage, was now beginning to crystallize in my mind. There were still a few rough details I needed to work out, but as a whole I knew what I was going to do.

I looked at the digital time display on the VCR. It was 2:17.

“Remember those kind of letters you used to write to me?” I asked.

Emli looked surprised. “Yes!” she said in her trademark breathless way.

“Did you write letters like that to Gr… this guy?” I had almost called him Greg

“Steve!”

“Just answer the question. Did you?”

“Well, not exactly like the ones I used to write you.”

“But you wrote him love letters?” I bent down and shoved the coffee table over toward the wall so that it was no longer on the braided rug.

“I wrote him some. Not many. He didn’t seem to appreciate them as much as you did.”

I craned myself down and pushed the coffee table to the side. I then took hold of both of his legs at the ankles and swung him around and pulled him so that he was aligned straight on one side of the oval rug. Some of his blood had trickled down onto the braided rug but it did not appear to be heavy enough to have seeped through. With care I reached into his right pants pocket and pulled out his ring of keys. I put them in my pocket.

“You said you were staying here for a while. Were you ever receiving mail here?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Your name isn’t on any of the utilities or anything like that?”

“No.”

Carefully, so as not to smear any of the blood on me or to allow it to run off of the rug onto the carpet, I slid my hands beneath the rug at spots slightly wider than shoulder width, gripped the rug firmly and rolled the body up into it like a hefty burrito.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to take care of Mr. Williams, here. While I’m out you need to go over this entire place very carefully. Don’t rifle anything but make as orderly of a search as you can and don’t leave it looking like anything has been disturbed. Find anything and everything you can that will link you to him – letters or photos or,” I paused, “any of the drawings or paintings you did of him. You probably have a pretty good idea of all the likely places to look. It goes without saying that you need to leave the gloves on.”

“There aren’t any paintings or drawings, Steve,” she said. “I gave all that up after you.”

I tried to not let that affect me.

“Where’s his linen closet?” I asked. “Where does he keep his sheets and towels?”

“Down here,” she said. She walked back toward the dining room and turned down the hallway and switched on a light. The first door on the right was open. I glanced in. It was a bathroom. Immediately after the bathroom on the same side were two sets of folding doors, one directly above the other. She opened the two top doors. There were two shelves inside in addition to the bottom partition above the lower cupboard that she had not opened. On the top of the partition were sheets and pillowcases. On the lower shelf were two stacks of folded bath towels and next to them hand towels and washcloths. I grabbed three of the bath towels and two of the washcloths and pawed with my glove into the sheets until I found what looked to be the largest one among them, a king-size top sheet. I stepped back from the closet, closed it up and went into the bathroom where I thoroughly wet the washcloths at the sink. I headed out back into the living room and to the entranceway, unlocked and opened the front door, stepping out onto the porch.

I started down the walkway but then remembered the motion sensor and stepped onto the grass four or five steps to the left and walked toward my car at that angle. By doing this, I passed out of the range of the motion detector and the light mounted on the corner of the roof atop the garage did not come on. At my car I opened my trunk and, aided by the light on the underside of the lid that automatically lit up when it was opened, saw what I had to rearrange, shoving the box of snow chains and emergency road kit into the far corners. I laid the shovel and pick down flat on the bottom and then spread the sheet out over the top of them, pushing it as far as it would go in all directions and into each of the four corners. I dropped the towels and the wet washcloths in the corners nearest the back of the car on either side. I then reached up and, fumbling through the thickness of the gloves, managed to unscrew the small light bulb that had allowed me to see what I was doing but which would also allow any passerby or nosy neighbor to see what I was going to next load into the trunk.

Leaving the trunk open, I turned around and as casually as I could, even though I could actually hear my heart pounding in my ears, looked across and then up and down the street to see if there was anybody about at that ungodly hour. The television still flickered behind the curtained window in the house on the other side of the street near the cul-de-sac. I could detect no other nocturnal activity. I turned around and, maintaining my casual air, strolled up the grass well to the right of the walkway and went back into the house.

Emli was in the den, looking through the top drawer of the desk. I walked over to the rolled up braided rug and its contents and inserted my right hand inside, gripping the bottom of one of the pants legs in my palm as tightly as I could. With the other hand I gripped the rug. Bending my legs at the knees and stooping low so as not to strain my back I tugged and pulled, lurching the load in several inch increments again and again repeatedly toward the front door. That effort did not really wind me, but it had not been easy.

I called to Emli and told her I needed her help. She dropped what she was doing and came out from the den. “I’m going to lift him up,” I said. “When I do, as soon as I do, you’re going to need to turn off the lights and open the door. Chop. Chop. Toot Suite.”

Now came the hard part. I bent down over the heap, which bundled as it was, presented a rather awkward package. I wrapped my arms around it and started to lift it, but I did not have the weight evenly balanced and I could feel the body slipping inside the rug. I dropped it. I straddled the roll and this time took it at where I better calculated was the fulcrum of the entire bulk. This was better but I still had to muscle it all up in a very unsteady, jerky motion that nearly wrenched my back and neck, not to mention the strain it put on me at the hips transferring the weight in front of me and then up over my shoulder into what to anyone looking on would have seemed a nearly comical rendition of a fireman’s carry.

Emli did as she was told, shutting down the lights and stepping across in front of me to open the door and then standing outside over to the side to let me pass. That was good because I did not want any blood to spill out onto the rug and the faster I made my exodus, the less chance there was of any spillage. I stepped out of the entranceway and over the threshold onto the porch and, staggering under the load, made my way onto the grass and headed toward the car. This was an exceedingly strenuous stretch. I’m just a tad under six feet and I weigh in at anywhere from 185 to 190 pounds depending on the calibration of the scale. Williams looked to be every bit as tall as I and he outweighed me by a good 20 pounds. The rug counted for another 25 pounds I would estimate. And Williams – at this point literally dead weight – was doing nothing to help me along. At one point my knees almost buckled but I managed somehow to keep from going down. As bad was the effect all of this was having on my neck, which was crimped and tweaked to accommodate the load resting in the nook it formed with my right shoulder. It seemed to take an eternity to cover the forty-five or so feet from the porch to where my car was parked. My steps were short, choppy ones that minimized the chance that I would stumble either on my own or over anything that happened to be in the way. I was breathing heavily by the time I arrived at the back of the Buick, where I shifted around and with a final heave, unburdened myself of the load right over the open trunk. The back of the car dipped on its shocks and the elongated bulk did not drop neatly into place. With a little bit of an effort I had to fold it sideways in one direction at the top and in the other direction at the opposite end to contort the form to fit underneath the lip of and crossways inside the trunk, which was something less than five feet wide. Eventually I nestled the whole package into place. I retrieved the flashlight and closed the lid down. Pointing the flashlight lens toward the ground, I turned the beam on, carefully examining the spot where I had walked across the sidewalk to see if there was any blood. There was none. I retraced in reverse the path I had just taken across the grass, seeing if I could see in the beam’s focus any blood that may have dripped. I failed to see any. Likewise, there was no splattering or drops on the porch. I switched off the flashlight and stepped inside at the door, closing it behind me. I found the switch plate and illuminated the entranceway. I scrutinized the carpet for any trace of blood. None that I could see. I went back into the living room and switched on a floor lamp in the corner. There was no blood beneath where the braided rug had lain or where I had dragged it. There was, however, the slightest indentation into the carpet of the form of the rug and each of its concentric oval layers.

I went over to the den, where Emli had resumed her exploration of the desk’s contents. “If he has a vacuum cleaner, go over the entire living room floor and see if you can remove the imprint of the rug left in the carpet,” I said. “Then put the table back into place. What’s the phone number here?”

Emli told me. “Write that down on a scrap of paper for me,” I said. She did so. I reached into my pocket for Williams’ keys. I handed them to her and took the scrap of paper in exchange. “If I’m not back here in two-and-a-half hours, use a rag to wipe every place you touched tonight the first time you were here. Do the same to the gun, with the safety on. Leave the gun in the drawer where you got it. Lock everything up and take his car back toward your apartment. Park it somewhere where it won’t get ticketed or towed and walk back to your place. Go to work just like usual. Leave here while it’s still dark. In the meantime, do everything I just told you. Turn on the air conditioning or the heater and open up the back door to air the place out. If he’s got some aerosol spray or air freshener, give the place a good dose of that but don’t overdo it and let it get aired out, too. Make sure you close everything down and turn everything off before you leave if I’m not back. If the phone rings, don’t answer it. If I call, I’ll stay on the line just long enough to give it two rings. Then I’ll hang up and call again immediately. That’s when you answer. I hope to be back before you leave, but if I’m not then get out of here before the sun comes up. I’ll get a hold of you later at work.”

I backed up, turned and started toward the door.

“Steve…” I heard her say.

I turned around as she was coming around from the side of the desk. She walked straight up to me so that the toes of her shoes were right up against mine. She lifted herself up on her tiptoes and at the same time reached with a gloved hand behind my head to pull me toward her. She kissed me warmly and fully on the lips. I stood there, frozen, not actively resistant but almost startled, with a flash of ecstasy that I did not give into running through me.

“Be careful,” she said in her breathless way.

“I will be,” I said and let myself out.

Before I got into the car I double-checked the trunk to make sure neither the rug nor anything else was protruding out from underneath the lid. I wanted to avoid being stopped by the police or the Highway Patrol on the journey I was about to embark on. It would have been pretty difficult to explain the cargo I was carrying. I got in the car and headed out of the neighborhood, getting back on Van Nuys Boulevard and heading north and following it past where it jogs at a forty-five degree angle northeast and continues to the Interstate 5 – the Golden State Freeway – which I took northbound, away from the Los Angeles megalopolis and toward the rugged California hinterlands. I knew exactly where I wanted to go, a remote spot I had passed a few times in my travels. It was out in the Mojave Desert toward Palmdale, on, or right off of, a dirt road well off the highway that was at most seldom traveled and most likely, by some very incurious people. The only question was whether I would be able to find it in the dark.

There was hardly any traffic on the freeway at that hour. I conscientiously drove right at the speed limit – 70 miles an hour – and wore my seatbelt and shoulder harness. Where the Golden State Freeway met the Antelope Valley Freeway, also known as Highway 14, I transitioned to the lesser traveled route that forks off east on the north side of the Angeles National Forest divide heading into the western end of the Mojave Desert. It was a dark night, vaguely starlit but with no moon. Nevertheless, I could still see that the freeway was now moving through a desert landscape that featured occasional yucca and Joshua trees and other sparse chaparral that ran right up to the edge of the freeway in some spots.

After a good stretch of travel through this portion of the desert, I exited at Escondito Canyon Road and drove east along it as it paralleled Highway 14 for a few miles. Then as Highway 14 angled away northeast, I continued out through Escondito Canyon in what by my night time reckoning seemed a due east direction. I followed the occasionally winding road and then turned off onto Hubbard Road, doing my best to remember how far along I would need to travel before I came upon the dirt road turnoff I was seeking. I found it about twenty minutes after I had exited the freeway, which I would estimate was sixteen or so miles well off the beaten track. All that way I encountered at that hour only two vehicles, which were headed west in the opposing lane. Except for a fast moving Corvette that passed me from behind shortly after I left the freeway, there was no traffic moving in the same direction I was. I almost missed the turnoff when I did come upon it, but I saw it, a dirt road heading out into indigenous chaparral. Given its contours and the darkness, I could only follow its serpentine direction at no more than 25 or thirty miles an hour. I had never actually traveled it before, but in my excursions out to that region on Highway 14 during skiing trips out to Wrightwood I had noted it as a mysterious back road to a remote location seemingly untraveled by none beyond the most adventurous of offroad enthusiasts, backwoodsmen or the hardiest of hermits, with the exception perhaps of Department of Forestry firefighters who might conceivably have reason to pass over it to reach a wildland fire far up the canyons. Somewhere along this unpaved road, a mile or so after the turnoff from Hubbard Road, I would take a short walk out into the desolate real estate and dig a shallow grave to put the unfortunate Mr. Williams to rest in.

Within the sweep of my headlights I looked constantly for the ideal spot, an absurd undertaking really because the dark in fact prevented me from having any realistic perspective on the lay of the land. Nevertheless, at one bend in the road, I could see that off to the left the floor of the desert dropped down into an arroyo sufficiently below the level of the road so that a passerby’s vantage at that point would prevent him from seeing any irregularity in the ground, such as the mound of a freshly dug, or the shallow of an older, grave. I brought the Buick to a halt, put it into park, shut off the lights and turned off the engine.

Through the open window I could hear the cacophonic but coordinated high-pitched crackle of cicadas in a not-too-distant bush answered by the odd chirping of some crickets. The smell of sage grew even stronger. I threw open the door and stepped out. The road was at a slight tilt and the gravity instantly shut the door beside me. I walked slightly in front of the car and stepped to the top of the embankment at the road’s left side to peer out over the edge and down. I shut my eyes and covered them with my hands to accelerate their adjustment to the dark. After fifteen seconds or so I opened them to focus out into the black again. The black had transitioned to a very dark gray. I could not discern sharp detail but saw that just forty feet or so distant was a spot that would suit my purpose. The fact that a few scattered sage bushes stood between the road and the spot further recommended it.

I went to the back of the Buick and opened the trunk. I had to struggle a bit to get the pick out because the weight of the bundle above it pinned it to the bottom of the trunk. I took it and the shovel and reshut the trunk lid. I walked to the left and front of the car up the embankment and over the side, down the slight incline and through the sage bushes at the periphery of the arroyo. Fifteen or so feet beyond those bushes was a patch of desert dogwood. Seven feet or so to the side of that was some more desert sage. I took off my jacket and threw it atop the sage bush. Between the bush and the dogwood I set about my work. First I tested the ground with the shovel. The first foot or so, the soil was relatively sandy but below that was clayier. I worked a pretty narrow patch of ground, no more than two-and-a-half feet, by roughly six feet. I had taken the leather gloves off during the drive, but I retrieved them from my pocket and put them on to prevent blistering. I worked rapidly, thrusting and casting with the shovel until the earth grew tough. I’d then hack like a ditch digging demon with the pick all along the bottom of the hole, softening the earth up before going to work with the spade again.

After the hole was about two feet deep, I was obliged to get down in it to continue my digging. This slowed me down somewhat as the closer I came to either end, the more abruptly I had to angle the shovel up to cast the dirt out of the hole. Both my lower and upper back were registering complaints at the continuation of the task before me, as were my arms and neck, but I put those thoughts away with the calculation that I would need to make the hole only slightly more than twice as deep as it already was – four-and-a-half feet or thereabouts – to safely stow the corpse.

My turtleneck was wet with perspiration, as was my hair. I continued to dig. I can’t say exactly how deep the hole had grown, but my mind had begun to wonder to the next step, which was how I would carry my 210-pound friend down the embankment and then across the sandy ground without either twisting an ankle or leaving telltale impressions from my footsteps that would lead right to the grave site. I had just hit upon the idea of simply rolling him down the embankment and to his final earthly resting place, when a sound I did not like intruded upon my thoughts. I looked over to see that coming down the winding dirt road from the direction of the foothills toward Hubbard Road and me were two headlights. Muttering a curse, I jumped up out of the hole.

For the first time since Emli had awakened me I felt panic. Pure 102-octane adrenaline-charged, heart palpitating panic. Up to this point everything had gone smoothly, or as smoothly as disposing of the body of a murder victim can be expected to go. Now everything – my loyalty to Emli, my quickly formed plan, my effort, the corpse in the trunk, the thick sage aroma of the gentle desert wind that was neither warm nor cool, the starlit night canopy above me, the headlights of the approaching vehicle – was closing in on me. I felt a taughtness in my chest and then, uncontrollably, I started to hyperventilate. After several seconds, this passed and I bent down to pick up the pick and shovel. I stepped rapidly out from around the sagebrush and toward the embankment. Under the influence of the adrenaline I fairly bounded up the embankment, my momentum when I reached the top almost taking me straight into the side of the Buick. I propped the tools against the side of the car.

My mind raced for some plausible explanation that I could give for my presence in this unlikely spot. None came to me. I looked at the dual light beams, trying to make out what sort of vehicle they emanated from. My eyes struggled at the task but failed. I listened to the sound of the engine. At this I heartened because I realized what I heard was not the easy purr of a well-maintained, modern engine like that of a late model vehicle such as one most likely to be driven by members of the sheriff’s department, which had jurisdiction in those parts. What I heard was an engine with a non-electronic ignition system and an exhaust system that was faulty. There was either a small hole in the muffler or the exhaust pipe was loosened up near the manifold. On top of that I could hear some form of rattling attending the whole unwelcome progression and I could discern from that that the shocks or springs were worn out.

It took longer for the vehicle to reach me than I anticipated. Finally it rounded a last bend in the dirt road and came up on me. It was a pick-up truck, an International, about 35 or 40 years old. Despite the fact that its lights were hitting me full on in the face and nearly blinding me, I could still tell that it was beat to hell, with what looked to be its original paint job fading, tarnished and peeling. I could see corrosion on the front bumper. There was a horizontal crack that ran nearly the entire breadth of the windshield.

I walked over to the right side of the road and up alongside the truck on the driver’s side. I peered into the cab. At the wheel sat what appeared to be one of the original Forty-niners, a guy in his late fifties who looked for all the world like a gold prospector from the middle of the Nineteenth Century who by some trick of fate had been placed behind the wheel of a pickup truck from the middle of the Twentieth Century. He grinned at me slightly, showing several missing teeth, which added to the old miner effect.

“What are ya?” he asked. “Stuck?” I would have sworn I heard a slight hillbilly twang.

“Nah. I’m okay,” I replied.

“Ya headed up to the springs?” He did not wait for me to answer. “Ya cain’t git thru. The rangers done locked up the gate.”

He stared out of the windshield before him then.

“Oh, I see. You been doin’ some diggin’.” He had spotted the pick and shovel.

“Yeah, well, I’m burying a dead dog,” I heard myself say, winging it.

“All the way up here?” He sounded skeptical.

I winged it again. “My two kids loved that dog,” I said. “It got out of our backyard and got hit by a car tonight. My wife wanted to make sure they didn’t see it, so I drove out here.”

“Ahh,” he said, cocking his head. “Well I gotta git past ya there. If ya’ll just back up to that wide spot back there, I kin git aroun’ ya.”

He did not have to tell me twice. I went back toward my car and lifted the shovel and pick and laid them up on the top of the embankment. I got into the car, started the engine, and without turning on the headlights, put it in reverse. I twisted my neck and trunk around, throwing my right arm back to drape over the seat and watched my backward progress while I steered with my left arm. I negotiated the Buick back almost a sixteenth of a mile to the wide spot and pulled over as close to the edge as I could so that the scrub, sage and wild manzanita bushes were brushing against the car’s right side. The Forty-niner squeezed the International past me and continued on toward Hubbard Road. I waited there a good minute, watching in my rearview mirror his one unburned-out taillight as he headed out the winding road.

I took advantage of the wide spot to turn the Buick around, having to make several backward cuts to the left followed by forward cuts to the right to get lined up. I then backed up the sixteenth of a mile to where the pick and shovel were. I shut down the engine and got out of the car.

The crickets and cicadas were again in full chorus as I walked around the Buick. My intention was to return to the hole and as quickly as I could take it to the required depth, and then roll Williams down the embankment and over to it and seal him in his unlined and unmarked tomb by heaping the mound of dirt I had unearthed over him. But before I had even picked up the digging implements, I was thinking better of that. The old prospector had unnerved me. He apparently lived up here someplace, probably in a primitive cabin he had built with his own hands. That meant he probably knew this dirt road pretty well. I could not overlook the possibility that he would be able to return right to that spot and locate my handiwork with a little bit of exploration. My story about the dog had been pretty thin and might have aroused his curiosity. He might even have noted the Buick’s license plate number. Of course it was just as probable or even more so that he would forget having encountered me. As intent as I was to push on and unburden myself of the albatross hidden in my trunk at once, I knew I could not risk it.

I mounted the embankment and stepped over the side. I went back down to the patch of sage brush next to the hole and retrieved my jacket. I turned around and headed straight back up to the road, this time having to struggle somewhat to reclimb out of the arroyo. I felt a slight chill in my sweat-drenched garments. I opened the trunk and placed the shovel and pick on top of the rug, making the closing of the lid difficult. I walked around the car, opened the door and tossed the jacket over onto the passenger side seat. I peeled off the gloves and threw them over onto the jacket. I got back into the car behind the wheel, fired her up, turned on the headlamps and with care headed back out toward Hubbard Road. I glanced down at the digital display on the dashboard. It was 4:12 a.m. Four minutes later I was back on Hubbard Road. Several minutes later I came up behind the old timer in the antique International pickup with one functioning taillight. I swung around him and looked over at him in profile whistling a tune as I went by. I looked back at him in the rearview, silently cursing and lamenting the inopportune timing of the crossing of our existences. Not even a minute later I turned back onto Escondito Canyon Road. I did not look back again after that. A few cars heading east passed me in the opposing lane and when I came up on Highway 14 a few minutes later, there was hardly any traffic on it at all. I went west, catching myself doing ten miles an hour above the speed limit and only a few minutes after I slowed back to 70, Highway 14 transitioned to the Golden State Freeway. On the Golden State there was considerably more traffic moving north and south than there had been when I had come up an-hour-and-a-half earlier. It was still heavily dark and at that hour the cars and trucks’ headlamps were blurry and streaky to my fatigued eyes. I entered the freeway south and eased into the traffic flow, topping my speed out at 68 miles per hour. I stayed in the number three lane for the most of the 27 mile drive back to San Fernando, occasionally weaving around a slower vehicle and letting anyone traveling faster than I was weave around me.

A collage of thought was running through my mind. I tried not to dwell on how I had just failed to execute on the mission out into the Mojave. I had wasted now more than two hours on an absurd traipse out into the desert and the corpus delecti was still very much in my possession – a ticking time bomb that could explode to absolutely ruin my life at any moment. I would just have to suspend for a while dealing with the thorny issue of disposing of the literal body of evidence and put my effort and energy into tying together several other loose ends that would need attention in a timely manner if our tracks – Emli’s and mine – were to be adequately covered.

An elaborate play had begun, I figured. The first act had taken place with me fully off stage, in Williams’ living room at about 9:00 or 9:30 or thereabouts. I had come in for Act Two, which had not been entirely completed. Ultimately, the audience being entertained by all of this was going to be the homicide division of LAPD. Whether Emli and I would get to leave the theater when the time came and go home with all of the other spectators depended on the outcomes of acts three, four and five. That was assuming Act Two came off as I wanted it scripted. My ideal for Act Two was something of a magic act – one in which Greg Williams, or what was left of him, would just disappear. Take a permanent powder. Vanish. Drop off the face of the earth. And no one would know why. It would be important that there be no conceivable connection in this disappearance to Emli, who, after all, was just two months ago Williams’ main squeeze. Los Angeles is a big city but all the same it occurred to me that it would not hurt to put as much distance as possible between Williams and Emli in a way that was documented and on the record so there would be no chance that she would be connected to the disappearance. That was one loose end.

Another was the timetable on the discovery of his disappearance. At some point the authorities would inevitably learn that Williams was no longer living the good life in San Fernando. That might be sooner or that might be later. The later the better, I figured. With the trail cold and growing colder it would be tough for even the most skillful investigator to piece together what had occurred. The sooner the detectives got to work, the greater the likelihood they would chance upon something indicative.

I was vaguely working out a game plan for dealing with the first loose end, by creating a paper trail that would place Williams in a faraway place he had never actually been and from where he would ostensibly have disappeared. As far as the second loose end – the timing of the realization of his disappearance – there was only so much we could do. In a month or so, either rent or a mortgage bill along with utility payments, credit card bills and the like would come due. Sometime after that, when delinquencies were registered, inquiries would be made. Well prior to that, he would be a no-show at work. His mailbox would be crammed full. Newspapers would litter his front yard. Maybe as early as within a few hours, someone – his employer if he worked for someone or his business partner if he had a business partner or one of his customers if he had customers – would note him missing. Depending on how reliable he had been in the past and how indispensable he was in his day-to-day function, a search for him might be underway as early as this afternoon. There was not much that could be done to affect all of this, except to make damn sure that everything otherwise seemed as normal as could be.

The sky, except for a few stars, was still dark as pitch when I exited Interstate 5 onto Van Nuys Boulevard. It could be seen, though, that the town was gradually waking up. Lights could be seen in the windows of scattered residences and in doughnut shops and a few restaurants. Traffic was sparse, but thicker than it had been more than two hours before. I turned off Van Nuys Boulevard onto the side street Emli had directed me down three hours earlier. I continued as before, made the proper turns and pulled up in front of the Williams residence.

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.

I did my best trying not to think about the complication the nosy paperboy had introduced into the equation during the eight or ten-minute drive through the southern portion of the valley back to the Hollywood Freeway. Whether a change in calculation was now in order, I could not definitively say at that point, but I recognized that there was very little, and probably nothing, that could be done about it. I resolved to carry out the plan I was still hatching with as much efficiency and dispatch as possible. Dispatch would be of particular moment, I recognized, as even the slightest delay could undo and unmask us. Not only would I need to make it seem that Williams had traveled that very day to a distant destination, but I would need to myself pull off a series of neat tricks, such as convincingly masquerading as Williams while making no noticeable deviation in my own schedule. In short, I would need to be in two places at once – in Los Angeles as myself and in the distant locale as Williams. It promised to be a long and intense day, and through it all I would need to function on the less than three hours of sleep I had gotten before Emli had awakened me.

The traffic on the freeway was still light but beginning to pick up at that hour and the sun was about to but had not yet begun its ascent above the horizon. Just as I exited the freeway to get onto Sunset and head east, though, the topmost rays were splaying over the tops of the buildings in the panorama before me, constricting my pupils and making it just that much harder to maintain my depth of field. I needed to go only about another mile east on Sunset before I turned north up Vermont Avenue and then not even a mile up I turned east down the street to Emli’s apartment building. I continued past it toward the small retail center a block-and-a-half or so further down. As I came up on it, I saw Williams’ Oldsmobile parked just where I had instructed Emli to park. She was sitting behind the wheel. I pulled up behind her and parked. I got out and walked over to the passenger side of the Cutlass. Emli saw me and undid the electronic door lock. I was pleased to see she was still wearing the gardening gloves. I opened the passenger’s side door with my still-gloved hand and got in.

“So far we’re doing alright,” I said. “But we’re not out of the woods yet. How are you feeling?”

“I’m alright,” she said.

“Tired?”

“Not too,” she said.

“You’ll be able to make it through work okay?”

“Yeah.”

“How ‘bout more than that?”

“Such as?”

“How long could you go after work? I mean without absolutely having to sleep?”

“Til’ midnight if need be,” she said.

“You’re sure? What if you had to do a lot of driving? More than 300 miles worth, alone? Would you fall asleep at the wheel?”

“I’d just drink a lot of coffee.”

“What’s the earliest you could get off work today?”

She thought for a moment. “Probably a little after two.”

“Would they make note of that?”

“No. I’d just say I have a dental appointment.”

I thought hard. “Okay,” I said. “Make those arrangements. How’s your car running?”

“Fine,” she said. “I just had the 10,000 mile warranty service.”

“Oil change and tune-up?”

“Yeah, they did that.”

“On your way to work, use one of your credit cards to get gas if your tank isn’t near full already,” I said. I arched my posterior off the seat and reached with my left hand to my hip pocket and pulled out Williams’ wallet. I took out a twenty dollar bill and reached it over to her. I put the wallet back into my pocket.

“I’m going to call you later at work and tell you where I want you to drive to. Once you’re on the road, don’t use any of your credit cards. If you need money get it before you leave town or use that to buy gasoline when you have to,” I said, indicating the twenty dollar bill. “I’m going to rendezvous with you wherever it is we’re going – I haven’t decided yet but I think Las Vegas – and we’ll drive back together late tonight. Maybe you should put a change of clothes in your car just in case. It’s necessary that we do this and keep it together and not get in an accident and get back to work just like usual again tomorrow morning. You understand me?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

I opened the door. “Give me the keys,” I said.

She pulled them from the ignition and handed them to me. I took them and continued my way up out of the car, stepping up onto the curb and then the parkway. I locked the door and shut it. Emli got out, too, retrieving the shopping bags from behind the seat. She locked and shut the door. I found the deadbolt key in my change pocket and slipped it onto the key ring and put the key ring into my pocket. I looked up and down the street to make sure the Olds was not in a no parking or tow-away zone. There were no signs to that effect. Emli had come around the car with the bags. I reached into the one and retrieved the brazier, which I compacted into a tight ball. I took that bag from her grasp and at the same time handed her the bra. “Anything else in these yours?” I asked.

She blushed but did not answer.

“Anything you want to keep for sentimental reasons? Otherwise I’ll take this and dispose of it. It might not be the best thing for you to have the pictures or whatever else lying around your place.”

“Whatever you think best,” she said.

I took the other bag from her and put both into my car.

“I have a court appearance this morning,” I said. “I’ll call you as soon as I can after getting out of court. You’re sure you can get off this afternoon?”

“It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Carry on just like it’s a normal day,” I said, “and I’ll talk to you later.”

I went around my car and climbed back in. I fired it up and, checking over my shoulder, pulled out into the street and continued down to turn into the retail center parking lot. I drove in far enough to pass the few cars parked in it and then drove across the bank of empty parking stalls to turn around and then waited at the second curb cut for a couple of cars to pass before turning back out onto the street to leave. I passed beyond Emli just as she was turning to walk up the walkway to the entrance gate to the apartment complex.