He laughed and pointed toward the back and started leading the way to where she knew he kept his office in a wood-paneled den off the pool.

"You look good, Cassie. Real good. Like the short hair. Is that sort of a butch thing left over from High Desert? What was it I heard they call the lamb choppers up there, the High Dee Hoes?"

He glanced back at her and winked.

"You look good, too, Leo. Still the same."

He looked back again and they exchanged smiles. It had been years since Cassie had seen him but Leo had barely changed. Maybe a little less hair but still deeply tanned and trim. She assumed he must still be following his regimen of yoga and then morning lap swimming to stay in shape.

In the living room they had to step around a couch that was oddly placed at an angle facing the corner of the room rather than the fireplace. This caused Cassie to look about and she noticed all of the furnishings of the room were positioned strangely, as if the fireplace – the obvious center of the room – were not there.

"Remind me to get your interior designer's number before I leave," she said. "What style is this – postmodern break-in?"

"Hey, I know. I just had the place feng-shuied and this is the best I can do with it. For now."

"Feng what?"

"Feng shui. The Chinese art of harmonic placement. Feng shui."

"Oh."

She thought she remembered reading about feng shui. Something about it being the latest cottage industry in L.A. among the cosmically enlightened.

"This place is doomed," Leo was saying. "Bad vibes in all directions. I feel like Dick Van Dyke – comin' in the door and tripping over the furniture. I should just get out of here. But I've been here so long and I have the pool right here and everything. I don't know what I'm gonna do."

They came to the office. Leo's desk was at one end, next to the row of sliding glass doors that looked out on the pool. Lined along the opposite wall were dozens of cases of champagne. Seeing the stacks of boxes gave Cassie pause. In the past, the Leo Renfro she knew and had worked for would never have stolen property in his own home. He was a middleman who set capers into motion and arranged for the fencing of the merchandise afterward but he almost never came into physical proximity with it unless it was cash. Seeing the champagne right in his office made Cassie question what she was doing there. Maybe things had changed with Leo since Max. She stood in the doorway to the office as if afraid to enter.

Leo went behind his desk and looked back at her. He didn't sit down.

"What's the matter?"

She gestured toward the lineup of boxes completely covering one wall. There must be fifty cases, she guessed.

"Leo, you never kept the swag in your own house. It's not only dangerous but stupid. You – "

"Relax, would you? It's all totally legit. I bought it – ordered it through the distributor. It's an investment."

"In what?"

"The future. You watch. The millennium celebration is gonna liquidate all stores of champagne. Around the whole fucking world. What's left will sky-rocket in value and I'll be sitting pretty. Every goddamn restaurant in town will be coming to me. You should see my garage. I'm hoarding five hundred cases of this stuff. Six thousand bottles. I double my wholesale price and take home a couple hundred K minimum. You want to buy in on it? I've got investors."

She came into the room and looked out through the doors at the glimmering surface of the pool. It was lighted from beneath the surface and glowed like blue neon in the night.

"I can't afford it."

She could see the automatic vacuum slowly moving across the bottom, the water tube trailing behind it and the debris bag rising, undulating in the water like a ghost.

She could hear the background hiss of the nearby freeway. It was the same at her house in Hollywood. She wondered for a moment if it was a coincidence that they both had places so close to the freeway. Or was it something about thieves. They needed to know the escape route was close.

"You'll be able to buy in after we do this thing here," Leo said. "Come on, sit down."

He sat down and opened the middle desk drawer. He took out a pair of half-cut reading glasses and put them on. There was a manila file waiting on the desk. Leo was all business. He could just as well have been preparing to go over a tax return with a client as the details of a hot prowl burglary. He actually had studied accounting at UCLA until he realized he wanted to manage money that was his, not somebody else's.

Cassie came over and sat down in the padded leather chair at the desk opposite Leo. She looked up at a string of red coins that was hanging from the ceiling directly over the desk. Leo caught her stare and waved up at the coins.

"That's the cure. The remedy."

"Cure for what?"

"For the feng shui. They're I-Ching coins. They make up for the lack of harmony. That's why I have them hanging right here. Where I do my work is the most important spot in the house."

He gestured to his desk and the open file.

"Leo, you were always paranoid but I think you're finally wigging out."

"No. I believe it. And it works. Another thing is the stars. I consult the stars now before making a plan."

"You're not instilling confidence in me. You mean you're asking some astrologer for a blessing on your moves? Leo, don't you – "

"I don't ask or tell anybody anything. I do it on my own. See?"

He turned and pointed to a row of books held between bookends on the credenza behind him. They all had titles that appeared to be taken from astrological circumstances. One title was Calendar of Voids and another book was called Investing in the Stars.

"Leo, you used to just quote your Jewish grandfather who said things like 'Never pick up a penny that is heads down.' What about him?"

"I still believe in him. I believe in it all. The important thing is to believe. Not to hope, but to believe. There is a difference. I believe in these things and so that helps me do what I have to do and accomplish what it is I want to accomplish."

Cassie thought it was a philosophy that could have come from nowhere else but California.

"That's the beauty of it," Leo was saying. "I'm covered from all directions. It's good to have any edge you can get, Cass. Max used to say that, remember?"

Cassie nodded somberly.

"I remember."

A long pause of uneasy silence and sad memories went by. Cassie looked out at the pool. She remembered swimming with Max one night after they thought Leo was asleep. Then the pool light came on and they were naked.

She finally looked back at Leo.

He had opened the file on the desk. There was a quarter-inch-thick stack of hundred-dollar bills in the file along with a page of neatly printed but indecipherable notes torn from a yellow legal pad. One of Leo's precautions. He always kept notes in a coded language that only he knew. He was studying the notes on the yellow paper.

"Now, where do I begin?" he said to himself.

"How about with the reason you said I won't like this one."

Leo leaned back in his chair and studied her for a long moment.

"Well," Cassie finally said, "are you going to tell me or is it written in the stars somewhere for me to read?"

He ignored the jab.

"This is the deal. It's in Las Vegas, which I already warned you about. It's a lot of cash, I am told. But it's a contract job and – "

"With who?"

"Some people. That's all you need to know. Everybody has a part. Nobody knows everybody else. Not even me. We got a guy watching the mark right now and he's just a voice on the phone that tells me things. I have no idea who he is. He knows me by phone but he doesn't know about you. See? It's safest that way. Different players hold different pieces of the same puzzle. Only nobody sees the whole puzzle, just the piece they hold."