“I’m glad.”

“Okay,” she said. “I just wanted to touch base. Glad you’re okay. Be well.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“You, too.”

“’Bye.”

“’Bye.”

Linda said nothing as we walked out to the car. I drove to Sunset, cruised past the 405 Freeway on-ramp, listening to Miles Davis. A few moments later, she turned down the radio and said, “Her?”

I nodded.

“You didn’t have to rush things for my benefit.”

“No sense in dragging it out.”

“Okay.”

I said, “It’s over, but we’re still dealing with some of the… friendship residue.”

“Sure. Makes sense.” A moment later: “She’s beautiful.”

“What do you mean?”

“I found a picture of her. This morning, in your library. Face down on one of the bookshelves.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t be mad,” she said, “I wasn’t snooping.”

“I’m not mad.”

“What happened is, I woke up early, thought I’d get something to read, and found it while I was looking through your books- at least I assume it’s her. Long curly hair, kind of rusty-colored? Really good figure? Beautiful wide dark eyes? The two of you standing in front of some kind of lake?”

The lagoon at U.C. Santa Cruz. I remembered the trip- the motel we’d stayed at. Rumpled sheets. Walks in the mountains…

“It’s an old picture,” I said. “I didn’t know I still had it.”

“Nothing wrong if you had kept it on purpose.”

“I’m not one for souvenirs.”

“I am,” she said. “I’ve still got pictures of Mondo in one of my scrapbooks. Before everything went bad. What does that say about me- psychologically?”

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “Off duty. No out-of-the-office interpretations.”

“You don’t have a proper office.”

“Need I say more?”

She smiled. “Anyway, she is beautiful.”

“She is. And it’s over.”

“You said that already.”

“Got in the habit of saying it,” I said. “Trying to convince myself. It eventually worked.”

“Would you hate me if I asked how and why?”

“How is, she went on a trial separation that stretched to something permanent. I fought it, tried to persuade her to come back. By the time she’d changed her mind, I’d changed mine. Why is, she felt I was smothering her. Overpowering her. She’d grown up with an overpowering father, needed to stretch her wings, try things out by herself, I’m not trying to make it sound corny or clichéd. There was validity to it.”

“And now she wants you back.”

“No. Like I said, it’s just the friendship residue.”

Linda didn’t answer.

We drove for a while.

“Smothering,” she said. “I don’t see you that way at all.”

“I’m not the same guy I was a year ago. The whole thing made me take a good look at myself.”

“Not that I’d like that myself,” she said. “Being smothered.”

“Somehow, I don’t see you as smotherable.”

“Oh?”

“You fought for your stripes a long time ago, Linda. No one’s going to take them away from you.”

“Think I’m pretty tough, do you?”

“In a good way. I think you can handle yourself.”

She put her hand on the back of my neck.

“Ooh, even tighter. Sorry for making you talk about it. What a Nosy Nancy I am.”

“Nosy Nancy?”

“It’s a regionalism.”

“From what region?”

“My apartment. There- I got you to smile. But this neck- it’s like hardwood.” She moved closer, began kneading. I felt her warmth and her strength, coming from those soft hands, the ones I’d thought passive when I first met her.

She said, “How’s that?”

“Fantastic. I’d trade dinner for about an hour of it.”

“Tell you what,” she said. “First we pig out on Mexican food, then we return to either your place or mine, I give you a real Texas massage, and then you can smother me. You just forget about all the ugliness and the complications and you smother me to your little heart’s content.”

It ended up being my place. We were in bed when the phone rang. Lying naked in the darkness, listening to Gershwin’s own rendition of Rhapsody in Blue, holding hands.

I said, “Jesus, what time is it?”

“Twenty after eleven.”

I picked up the receiver.

Milo said, “Hi.”

“What’s up?”

“From the nuance of irritation in your voice, might I infer that this is a bad time?”

I said, “You just keep getting better and better at the old detecting game.”

“Someone with you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Blondie, I hope?”

“None of your-”

“Good, it’s her I want to talk to. Put her on.”

Puzzled, I handed the receiver to Linda. “It’s Milo. For you.”

She said, “For me?” and took it. “Hello, Detective Sturgis, what is it?… Oh. You’re sure?… That’s great. How did you… Oh. That was lucky… You think so? Okay. Sounds interesting… I guess. If you really think so… Okay, I’ll be there. Thanks.”

She reached across me and hung up the phone. Her breasts grazed my lips. Reflexively, I nibbled. She pulled away and said, “Want to go for a ride?”

A street named Fiesta Drive. No fog tonight. In the moonlight, the magnolias looked like paper cutout trees.

The house was tidy-looking, no different from any of the others on the block. An Oldsmobile Cutlass was parked in the driveway; behind it, the low, black cigar of a Firebird Trans Am. On the Firebird’s rear bumper was a sticker with the call letters of a heavy-metal radio station and another that said LIFE IS A BEACH.

The front door smelled of fresh paint. The bell chimed out the first seven notes of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A worried looking, heavyset woman in her fifties opened the door on the fifth note. She had on moss-green slacks and a white blouse and was barefoot. Her round face was pale under a crown of baby-blue hair rollers. Her jawline had lost the battle with gravity.

Linda said, “I’m Dr. Overstreet.”

The woman trembled and said, “I’m… They’re… Won’t you come in. Please.”

We stepped into a living room identical in size and trim and layout to the one in the Burden house. This one was painted buttercup-yellow with contrasting white moldings and furnished with a skirted floral chintz sofa and matching chairs, a brown corduroy recliner, golden-maple end tables, and shiny white ceramic lamps. Prints of plein-air landscapes and still lifes favoring fruit and fish hung on the walls, along with a bronze Zodiac wheel and an old Christmas wreath. The fireplace had been bricked up and painted white. A model schooner fashioned of rough-edged copper sheeting and brass wire sat on the hearth.

A dark-complected man with sharp features sat on the recliner, but he wasn’t relaxed. He had thinning black hair, whitening at the temples, a drawn lantern-jawed face that sagged- orienting downward as surely as a dowsing rod. He wore a T-shirt and gray slacks under a plaid Pendleton robe, terry-cloth slippers on white, blue-veined feet. His arms rested on the sides of the recliner, the hands clenching and unclenching.

Milo stood across from him, to the left of the sofa. A boy of around sixteen or seventeen sat right below him. The boy was big, in a soft, bulky way, with thick, formless white arms extending from the rolled sleeves of a pea-green patch-pocketed T-shirt. Around his pudgy wrists were nailhead-studded leather bands. His black jeans were tucked into chain-heeled Wellington boots. A massive stainless-steel death’s-head ring dominated his left hand. His right hand shielded his face. What little I could see of his countenance was puffy, not yet fully formed, under dark hair cut close to the scalp. Fuzzy approximations of sideburns ran down cheeks speckled with pimples, and dipped an inch below his earlobes. He didn’t look up at our entrance, just continued to do what he’d obviously been doing for a while: crying.