“Sometimes I feel I could use one,” she said. “Look who’s talking- you’re not much older.”

“Eight years older.”

“Whoa, grandpa, tighten the truss and pass the Geritol.”

The waitress came over and asked if we wanted dessert. Linda ordered strawberry shortcake. I chose chocolate ice cream. It tasted chalky and I pushed it aside.

“No good? Have some of this.”

Then she blushed again. From the intensity of her color, she might have offered me a bare breast. I remembered how she’d warded off compliments, pegged her as afraid of intimacy, distrustful- nursing some kind of wound. My turn at sidewalk analysis. But then again, why shouldn’t she be reticent? We barely knew each other.

I took some cake, less out of hunger than not wanting to reject her. She removed most of the whipped cream from her cake, ate a strawberry, and said, “You’re easy to talk to. How come you’re not married?”

“There’s a certain woman who could answer that for you,” I said.

She looked up. There was a crumb of cake on her lower lip. “Gee, I’m sorry.”

“No reason to apologize.”

“No, I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to pry… Well, yes, of course I did, didn’t I? That’s exactly what I was doing. Prying. I just didn’t realize I was prying into anything sore.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just about healed. We all have our sore spots.”

She didn’t take the bait. “Divorce is so rotten,” she said. “Common as brown sparrows, but rotten just the same.”

“No divorce,” I said. “We were never married, though we might as well have been.”

“How long were you together?”

“A little over five years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No reason for you to apologize for that either.”

I realized my tone was sharp- irritation at doing all the revealing.

Tension filled the space between us like an air balloon. We busied ourselves with dessert, let it deflate gradually.

When we were through, she insisted on separate checks and paid with cash. “Well, Dr. Alex Delaware,” she said, putting away her wallet, “it’s been edifying, but I’ve got to get home and attack some paper. Will you be coming by tomorrow?”

“Same time, same station.”

We stood. She took my hand in both of hers. That same soft, submissive touch, so at odds with the rest of her. Her eyes were soft coals, burning.

“I really want to thank you,” she said. “You’re a very nice man, and I know I’m not always the easiest person in the world to be around.”

“I’m not always Joe Mellow either.”

Face to face. Tight silence. I wanted to kiss her, contented myself with walking her to her car and watching the movement of her hips and legs as she got into it. As she drove off, I realized we’d talked more about ourselves than the sniping.

But alone, back in the Seville, thoughts of the sniping kept intruding. I picked up an evening final at a 7-Eleven near Barrington, drove to Westwood and north through the village, and examined the front page as I waited out a red light at Hilgard and Sunset.

Two photos- one of the storage shed, titled SNIPER’S LAIR; the other a head shot of Holly Lynn Burden- shared center top. To the right a 64-point headline shouted SNIPER FIRE BREAKS OUT AT SCHOOL. LATCH AIDE ENDS IT. CHILDREN ON PLAYGROUND FLEE IN PANIC. FEMALE SNIPER SLAIN BY COUNCILMAN’S STAFFER.

The head shot looked as if it had been taken from a high school yearbook: white collar over dark sweater, single strand of pearls, starched pose. Same face I’d seen on the photocopied driver’s license, but younger, some baby fat softening the edges. Longer hair, flipped at the shoulders. Dark-framed eyeglasses, that same sullen dullness behind them.

The light turned green. Someone honked. I put down the paper and joined the chrome-surge onto Sunset. Traffic was slow but insistent. When I got home I started reading, skimming the recap of the shooting, slowing down when I got to the bio of the shooter.

Holly Burden had lived all nineteen years of her life in the house on Jubilo Drive, sharing it with her father, Mahlon Burden, fifty-six, a “widower and self-employed technical consultant.” The contents of the father’s police interview hadn’t been made public and he’d declined to talk to the press, as had a brother, Howard Burden, thirty, of Encino.

Through “School Board records” the paper had found out about Holly attending Hale but didn’t quote Esme Ferguson or anyone else who remembered her.

The future sniper had gone on to attend a nearby public junior high, then Pacific Palisades High School, where she’d dropped out one semester short of a diploma.

Guidance counselors had trouble remembering her, but an adviser at the high school managed to locate grade transcripts showing her to have been a poor student with “no participation in extracurricular activities.” The few instructors who remembered her at all described her as quiet, unobtrusive. One English teacher recalled she’d had “motivational problems, wasn’t academically oriented or competitive,” but hadn’t participated in remedial programs. Not an alumna to brag about, but no one had picked up the slightest hint of serious mental disturbance or violence.

Neighbors “along the quiet, tree-lined street in this affluent West Side district” were a good deal more forthcoming. Speaking anonymously, they described the Burdens, père et fille, as “unfriendly, secretive”; “not involved in the community, they stuck to themselves.” Mahlon Burden was characterized as “some kind of inventor- some people think he’s eccentric”; Holly was termed “a weird girl who hung around the house all day, usually inside- she never got any sun, was white as a ghost.” “No one really knew what she did with herself- she was a dropout, didn’t go to school or do any kind of work.” “There were rumors she was sick. Maybe it was mental.”

The reporter used that maybe as a bridge to the next focus of the article: guesswork about the state of Holly Burden’s psyche proffered by the usual pack of experts willing to pontificate without benefit of data. Prominent among the guessers was “Dr. Lance L. Dobbs, clinical psychologist and Director of Cognitive-Spiritual Associates of West Los Angeles, an authority on the psychological impact of childhood stress, hired by the School Board to treat the young victims at the school.”

Dobbs termed the dead girl a “probable antisocial schizoidal personality or sociopath- it’s the kind of aberrant character that’s made, not born,” and went on to lambaste society for “not meeting the spiritual growth needs of its young people.” He described his treatment plan as a “comprehensive and systematic program of crisis intervention, including the use of bilingual therapists. We’ve already begun working with the victims and have made excellent progress. However, based on prior experience, we do predict severe reactions on the part of some youngsters. They will have to be treated more intensively.”

Never-never land.

The article ended with a profile of the hero of the day.

Darryl “Bud” Ahlward, forty-two, listed as Councilman Gordon Latch’s “chief administrative assistant.” More than just a bodyguard, unless that was Latch’s way of getting high-priced muscle on the city payroll. And muscle did seem to be what Ahlward was all about: former Marine drill instructor, commando, body-builder, martial arts expert. All of which fit the tight-lipped, macho posture I’d seen yesterday.

What didn’t fit was that kind of crypto-soldier working for someone of Latch’s political pedigree. Apparently, Latch had been asked about it before, explained it by citing a “mutual rapport between Bud and myself, especially vis-à-vis environmental issues.”

I put the paper aside.

A pebble-toss of whos, whats, hows.

No whys.

I called my service for messages. Routine stuff except for a request to phone Assemblyman Samuel Massengil’s office, accompanied by two numbers- one local, one with a 916 area code. Sacramento. Curious, I phoned the L.A. number, got a recorded message expressing Assemblyman Massengil’s eagerness to be of service to his constituents, followed by a list of other offices and numbers where many “municipal and county services” could be obtained, thus avoiding contact with Assemblyman Massengil.