I'm in a rustic A-frame on a little road off Woodrow Wilson Drive above Hollywood. The only other house is a cantilevered job to my east. A stuntman I know lives there with his girlfriend and their two little boys. Sometimes during the day they come out on their deck and we'll see each other and wave. The boys call my place the teepee house. I like that, too.

When I bought the house four years ago I tore off the deck railing and rebuilt it so the center section was detachable. I detached it now, and sat on the edge of the deck with my feet hanging down, eggplant in my lap, and nothing between me and Out There. The chill air felt good. After a while the cat came out and stared at me. "Okay," I said. I poured some more of the Wheat beer on the deck. He blinked, then lapped at it.

When the eggplant was gone I called the answering machine at my office. There were three messages from Ellen Lang and one from Janet Simon. Ellen Lang sounded scared in the first two and teary in the third. Janet Simon sounded like Janet Simon. I called Ellen Lang. Janet Simon answered. It works like that sometimes.

"Mort came back and tore up the house. Could you come over here?"

"Is she okay?"

"He was gone when she got here. I made her call the police but now she's saying she won't let them in the house."

"Want me to pistol-whip her?"

"Don't you ever let up?"

Apparently not. It took me eighteen minutes to push the Corvette down the valley side of Laurel, up onto the freeway, and over to Encino. Ellen Lang lived in the flat part above Ventura Boulevard in what's called a sprawling California Tudor by realtors and Encino Baroque by people with taste. Janet Simons pale blue Mustang was on the street in front of the house. I pulled into the drive behind a Subaru wagon, cut the engine, and went up to the door. It opened before I could knock. Ellen Lang was pinched and thin behind her glasses, more so than this morning. She said, "I called you. I called and called and you weren't there. I came to you so the police wouldn't get involved and now they are."

Janet said, "Oh, for God's sake, Ellen."

I had one of those dull aches you get behind the eyes when your beer drinking is interrupted.

Ellen Lang said, "Well, it's Mort's house, isn't it? He can do what he wants here, can't he? Can't we call the police back and tell them it was a mistake?"

I followed them like that into the living room.

Every large piece of furniture had been turned over and the bottom cloth ripped away. Books had been pulled off the shelves and cabinets thrown open. The back was off the television. A palm had been worked out of its heavy brass pot, scattering dirt over the beige carpet. The Zenith console stereo was turned on its face and about two hundred record albums spilled out on the floor. One of those large ceramic greyhounds you see in department stores was cracked open on the hearth, its head intact but lying on the carpet upside down. It looked asleep.

Some mistake.

"How long ago did you call?" I said to Ellen Lang.

Janet Simon answered. "About forty-five minutes. She told them it wasn't an emergency."

"If you had they'd have been here forty minutes ago. As it is, they've called it out to a radio car. They'll be here any time."

Ellen Lang crossed her arms in the keep-me-warm posture and began nibbling the side of her mouth. Every light in the house was on, as if Janet or Ellen had gone through, making a point of driving out as much darkness as possible. There was a little night-light behind a wingback chair beside the fireplace. Even it glowed.

"He leave a note?" I said.

She shook her head.

"Take any clothes for the boy?"

Shook her head again.

"Take anything else?"

She squinted and did something funny with her mouth, blowing air out the corners while keeping the lips together. "I checked my things. I checked the silver. The Neil Diamond records are still here. Mort loves Neil Diamond."

"This is A-plus help you're giving me, Mrs. Lang."

She looked at me like I was fading out and tough to see. "Mort isn't a thief. If he took anything of his, that isn't thievery, is it? He paid for it, didn't he? He paid for all this and that gives him some rights, doesn't it?" She said that to Janet Simon.

Janet Simon reached a cigarette out of a little blue purse, tamped it, fired up, and pulled enough smoke into her chest to fill the Goodyear blimp. "When are you going to wake up?" she said.

I left them to it and went down the hall. There was a door on the left, closed, with the sounds of running water. "That's the bathroom," Janet Simon called. "The girls are in there." The girls' bedroom was just past the bath but on the right. It was pink and white and had twin canopy beds and probably used to be quite nice. Now, the mattresses were half on and half off and one of the box springs had been turned upside down. There was a dresser and a chest, but all the drawers were out and the clothes were scattered on the floor. Bruce Springsteen was on the closet door, which spoke highly for at least one of the girls. Clothes hung neatly on the crossbar even though the closet floor had been trashed. Just outside the closet, there were two three-ring binders and two stacks of schoolbooks. The binders and the dust covers on the books were covered with doodles and designs and words. Cindy loves Frank. B.T. + C.L. Robby Robby Robby, I want you for my hobby. BOOK YOU. I found a folded piece of three-hole paper in Cindy Lang's geography book with a message written on it in pencil. The message was ELAM FREID BITES THE BIG ONE!!!!! I wondered if Elam Freid knew that. I wondered how much he'd pay to find out.

I went to the boy's room next. It was smaller than the girls', with a single bed and a dresser and a big oak chest. The chest was turned over and the dresser was on its side and the mattress and box springs leaned drunkenly against the wall. I had wanted to go over the boy's room. I had wanted to read his diary and sift through his comics and peek under his mattress. I had wanted to go through the wads of paper in his trash and page through his notebooks and study the drawings that he made and pinned to the wall. A week before they left, maybe Mort had said something to the boy and the boy had left a clue. All of that was gone. There was only a big mess here that made me hope the boy wouldn't suddenly come through the front door, run back here, and see it.

The master bedroom was at the back of the house looking out on the pool through some nice French doors. It smelled of Anaīs Anaīs. I pulled the bolts at the top of each French door and ran my fingers along the stiles. They hadn't been jimmied. There was a kingsize platform bed, a dresser, a chest, and a desk, and all of it was torn up pretty much like the others. They had one of those sliding wall closets with the mirrored hanging doors. The left half was Ellen and the right Mort. Boxes and shoe bags and a Minolta camera case and a larger box that said Bekins had been tossed out to the center of the room. Mort had some nice pants and some nice shirts and half a dozen pair of Bally shoes. There was a tan Nino Cerruti shirt I liked a lot hanging beside three dark gray Sy Devore suit bags and two from Carroll's in Westwood. A lot of clothes to leave behind, but maybe Mort traveled light.

A collection of family pictures hung over the bed. The lads. Mort and the kids. Ellen. Mort and Ellen. Mort didn't seem to be playing favorites. The nicest had Mort in the pool with the younger girl on his shoulders and Perry and the older girl in his arms. Nothing looked wrong in those pictures. Mort didn't look crazy. Ellen didn't look small. Nothing ever looks wrong in the pictures. Everything always goes wrong when the cameras turned away.

The bathroom door was still closed, the water was still running, Janet Simon was still smoking, Ellen Lang was still standing with her arms crossed, cold. I went into the kitchen. Every cupboard had been emptied, every bag of sugar and rice and flour and box of cereal spilled. The grill had been pulled off the bottom of the refrigerator and the stove had been dragged away from the wall, scarring the vinyl with ragged furrows. I found a bottle of Extra Strength Bayer aspirin in a mound of Corn Chex, ate three, then went back out into the living room.