‘This is something,’ Hardy said. Tom stood mutely behind him. ‘Are there rooms aft?’

Hardy ached to open a few drawers in the desks. Casually, he moved to the desk on the bed’s right and pulled at the top drawer. It appeared to have nothing useful – paper clips, pens, standard desk stuff. The drawer on top to the side contained what looked like sweat bands. Hardy reached in and felt around. Sweat-bands. ‘Nothing here,’ he said, lightly as he could, closing the drawer.

Then around the bed, hoping Tom would stay another minute. The rolltop was closed up, but the front drawer slid open. Same story – nothing. Hardy pulled the side top drawer. ‘I don’t know if we should…’ Tom said.

A quick glance down, the drawer open a couple of inches – inside, some maps, navigation stuff. He pushed it closed with his hip and turned around.

‘You’re right, good point.’ Mr Agreeable. ‘Let the police get a warrant.’ Hardy turned around and walked quickly back through the galley and stateroom, past the steps leading up to the deck, past another bathroom off the aft hallway, to the first guest bedroom – double bed, dresser, television, a floating Holiday Inn.

‘We really should go up,’ Tom said from the steps.

‘Okay,’ Hardy, casual but determined, browsed the route back along the opposite hallway, passing through the second room, which was mirrored from floor to ceiling and equipped with most of a complete Nautilus set, a stair-climber, more free weights. Owen Nash took his workouts seriously.

Up on the deck, Tom took a minute to carefully lock the cabin door. Hardy asked, ‘How’s a boat like this sail?’

Tom locked the door, double-checked it. ‘Well, it’s not a hot rod. It’s really for deep water.’

‘Could one man handle her?’

They were walking back up the pontoon to the office, Tom leading. ‘Oh sure. The sail’s are on power if you need it. Mr Nash went out alone a lot. Over to the Farallons and back. It’s harder in a smaller boat, but he liked it.’

‘What’s at the Farallons?’ He asked about the small rock islands twenty miles off San Francisco’s coast.

‘I don’t know,’ Tom said. ‘They say that’s where the great whites breed – you know, the sharks. Maybe he was into them.’

Bad pun, Hardy thought.

They were at the Purple Yet Wah, out in the Avenues on Clement. Moses McGuire was sucking on a crab claw. ‘Black bean sauce,’ he said. ‘I believe with black bean sauce on Dungeness crab we have reached the apex of modern civilization.’

Frannie was glaring at Hardy, who was looking down at his plate.

‘I hate it when you guys fight,’ Moses said. ‘Here I am talking about cultural issues, without which we would all soon be savages and -’

‘Why don’t you tell your friend Dismas that we had an understanding about telephones and being late.’ She stood up and threw down her napkin. ‘Excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom.’

Hardy picked up his chopsticks. ‘I think I’ve already said I was sorry four times, now five. I’m sorry. Six. Sorry sorry sorry sorry.’ Hardy put down his chopsticks. ‘Ten.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Moses said. ‘She thought you were dead.’

‘She always thinks I’m dead, or going to die.’

‘There is some justification there.’

‘There is no justification at all. I have not come close to dying. Being late doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily died.’

Moses rubbed his crab claw around in the sauce. ‘It did for Eddie.’ He held up his hand, stopping Hardy’s response. ‘Uh uh uh. Here’s an area where we could increase our sensitivity.’

‘Moses…’

‘You could have called. Phones are nearly ubiquitous in our society.’ McGuire was the majority owner in the Shamrock Bar, but he also had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley.

‘You, too, huh?’

‘She’s my sister. I’m allowed to be on her side from time to time.’

‘I was working on a case. I’m a lawyer now, remember. I wasn’t out running around with loose women. I wasn’t narrowly avoiding death. I was working.’

‘You had an appointment with me and Frannie. A simple one-minute phone call and all would have been well.’

‘Okay, all right, next time I’ll call. Big deal.’

‘Frannie’s worried it’s going to start happening all the time. As you say, you’re a lawyer now. Well, that’s the way lawyers are.’

‘Lawyers aren’t any one way…’

Moses stabbed the last pot sticker and popped it into his mouth. ‘Excuse the generalization, but yes they are. Frannie wants you to be a daddy, not to work all the time. That’s why the job looked so good, remember. Regular hours, interesting work. I can hear your words in my memory even as we speak.’

‘How late was I?’

Moses chewed. ‘One hour and forty-five minutes, which is plenty of time to work up a good head of worry. It’s not Frannie’s fault she worries. She loves you, Diz. She’s carrying your baby. It’s pretty natural, don’t you think?’

‘Well, I love her too.’

‘I am sure you do.’

‘Well…?’

‘Well,’ Moses repeated. ‘There you are.’

Their white frame house was bracketed by two apartment buildings. Back in the mid-‘80s, Hardy had been offered a sinful amount of money to sell to a developer so that a third five-story anonymous unit could rise where now his sixty-foot-deep green lawn was bisected by a stone walkway, a low picket fence, and a doll house with a small front porch and a bay window.

Before their marriage they had talked about moving -starting over with a place they could equally call their own. The problem was that although the house had been Hardy’s for a decade, Frannie already loved it. One of Hardy’s first actions after the wedding was to transfer half the title to Frannie’s name – they didn’t have a prenuptial agreement. Frannie’s quarter-million-dollar insurance policy was both of theirs; Hardy figured the house put them on relatively equal footing.

Street parking was often a problem. With no garage, driveway, or back alley, you either got your spot by six o’clock or you had to walk. Now, at ten-fifteen, they couldn’t find a space within three blocks. It was a mild, still night with no fog, and they strolled east on Clement, under the trees of Lincoln Park, back toward their house. Frannie leaned into her husband, her arm around his waist.

‘Pinch me,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Hardy tightened his arm across her shoulders.

‘Would you have thought this?’

‘I guess so. It’s why I thought we ought to be married. But still…’

She stopped. Hardy took the cue and leaned over and kissed her. ‘What is it?’ Frannie asked.

‘Nothing. A little shiver. How often do you notice when everything is perfect? It’s a little scary. I used to believe that’s when things were most likely to go wrong.’

‘I think that’s why I was so upset tonight. I’m just getting so I can accept that all this is happening, that it’s not some dream I’m going to wake up from.’ She looked up into Hardy’s face and pulled herself close against him. ‘I don’t want to wake up from this,’ she said. ‘I want this to keep going on.’

‘It’s going to, Frannie. I’m not going to let anything get in the way of this, promise.’

Frannie nudged him with her hip. ‘Let’s get home.’

They paid the sitter, looked in on the slumbering baby. Hardy fed his fish while Frannie got ready for bed. In his office, his answering machine had calls from Jane and from Pico Morales, both of whom he could call in the morning.

He could hear the shower running in their bathroom. He picked up his telephone and hit the numbers he’d memorized earlier that night – May Shinn’s. The phone rang four times, then picked up.

‘Just leave a number, please, and I’ll get right back to you.’ That was the whole message. No trace of a Japanese accent. A deep, cultured voice. Hardy hung up after the beep.

His desk was cleared. The green-shaded banker’s lamp threw a soft pool of light around the room. The dried blowfish pouted on the mantel of the office fireplace. Absently, Hardy crossed from the desk to the mantel, straightened out the pipe rack – unused for over a year -and grabbed three darts from the bull’s-eye of the dart-board, where he’d left them. Back at the line near his desk, he began throwing.