I was staring into my coffee cup, thinking about Buddhists and Karl Marx and remembering what it was like to live with a guy who ate one meal a day and how I never wanted to do anything with my life except live with Gabe on the beach strip and how that dream was gone forever and maybe I was the one who had destroyed it by sleeping with Mel Holiday, when Hayashida mentioned his name. “What?” I said, looking up.

“Mel Holiday.” Hayashida drained his coffee cup. “Talk to him. He’s been working hard on Gabe’s case. You need somebody to lean on. Maybe protect you.”

“Protect me? From what? From who?”

“We’re dealing with a murder and two suicides. Or maybe two murders and one suicide. Anyway, somebody was involved, somewhere.”

“Which suicide are you questioning?”

Hayashida stood up and looked around at everything except the donuts. “I don’t know.”

22.

That Buddhist I mentioned? He was a photographer. He did weddings, parties, bar mitzvahs, portraits, anything people would pay him to aim a camera at. On sunny days, he would make a point of going outside just before sunset. He was waiting for the magic hour. That’s what he called the time when the sun was about to go down. In summer, the magic hour lasted, he explained, a full sixty minutes. In the winter, you were lucky to catch ten minutes of it.

The magic hour, he said, was when more light reflected on you from the sky than from the sun. It was indirect light, and it was flattering to everything. It was the best light in which to take photographs, and also the best light to study and appreciate the world around us. “It’s soft light, full light. Rich light. Look at trees during the magic hour,” he would say. “They are more majestic, more alive than in the hard light of noon. And look at people in the magic hour. They are more beautiful, more open, more accessible.”

At first, I was impressed with his artist’s eye. I saw what he meant. I understood his meaning. But his raving about the way the world is lit just before sunset became something of a rant by the tenth time he repeated it. Which is when I told him I agreed entirely, and what I really wanted to see in the light of the magic hour or the light of a candle wasn’t another bowl of tofu and bean sprouts, but a greasy cheeseburger I could call my own, and that this particular romance was over.

After Hayashida went back to Central, I left Tim Hortons in the magic hour. The world didn’t look any more attractive or accessible than it had an hour earlier.

I HAD LEARNED that Glynnis Dalgetty had killed a man, probably on Mike Pilato’s orders. I wanted to ask her about it. I wanted to know what it was like to watch bullets enter a man’s body and see him writhe on the floor until, I guess, she shot him in the head. Twice. What did the gun feel like in her hand? What was she thinking while she killed him? The colour of the Mercedes-Benz she’d get? Leftovers in the refrigerator? But I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with Gabe’s death.

I had also learned a little about Mike Pilato. I wanted to learn more.

The street where White Star Hardware Distributors was located had been deserted barely an hour earlier. Now the plumbing van was gone, and in the early moments of the magic hour it had become a combination playground, village square, and movie set. Teenage boys raced their skateboards along the pavement and up over the curbs. Girls their age in halter tops and shorts exchanged earbuds for their iPods or other music devices, closing their eyes, raising their clenched fists, and dancing on the spot to music only they heard and, I suspected, only they could tolerate. Two older women, their heads wrapped in bandanas, stood speaking and gesturing to each other while two men their age, who I assumed were their husbands, watched the procession on the other side of the street, the side where White Star Hardware Distributors was located and where Mike Pilato was.

Pilato still wore the black and gold shirt and black trousers. He walked with two men, Pilato doing the talking while the men kept pace with him and listened, nodding and sometimes gesturing with their hands to communicate expressions I interpreted as agreement, surprise, or anger. They were accompanied by four younger men, two about twenty feet ahead and two a similar distance behind. All four appeared to have purchased their clothes from the same tailor: open-necked shirts with wide collars, dark trousers, and black pointed-toe shoes. They also appeared to buy their sunglasses from the same place: dark Ray-Bans that hid their eyes completely. The three with hair seemed to patronize the same barber, a man who appreciated thick, dark hair and did his best to enhance it. The fourth man’s head was shaved, the better to reveal a tattoo on his skull. The tattoo was an arrow pointing forward to a word above his forehead that I couldn’t read.

The seven men—Mike and his two partners, plus the four men who reminded me of outriders in old movies about cattle drives—were performing some kind of choreography. Whenever Mike and his friends stopped while Mike said something obviously important, the outriders halted as well. When Mike began walking again, the younger men matched their pace, their heads swivelling constantly from side to side.

When I slowed the car, lowered the window and called out to Mike, all seven men stopped walking and glared at me. I felt as though I had been asked to identify myself at a border crossing and had used the name Mrs. Osama bin Laden.

Instead of speaking to me, Mike looked at the two outriders ahead of him and nodded.

The man with the arrow on his head walked quickly into the street ahead of my car. His partner, I sensed, was behind me. I suppose, if I had pressed the accelerator to the floor, I could have run down Arrowhead, but I assumed this would be a suicidal act. Arrowhead walked to the open window on my side of the car and spoke without looking at me. “Keep moving,” he said.

I said I wanted to speak to Mike Pilato for a moment.

“You can’t,” he said. “Just get the hell out of here.”

“Why won’t he talk to me? He’s right over—”

“Drive away.”

“Okay, he’s busy, I can see that—”

“Drive away. Now.”

“Will you give him a message?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t see why—” I began. This time it wasn’t Arrowhead who prevented me from finishing my sentence. This time I stopped talking because something struck the back of the Honda with the force of a gunshot. I twisted in my seat to look behind me. Arrowhead’s partner had hair on his head, a misaligned nose on his face, and a small sledgehammer in his hand. Where the heck had he gotten a sledgehammer? It hardly mattered, because he swung it again, and the Honda lurched forward from the blow.

Before pressing the accelerator to the floor, I looked across at Mike Pilato, who raised one hand, palm out, and someone barked a short flurry of Italian words as the Honda, like a horse who had just been slapped in the ass, sped away from White Star Hardware Distributors.

“I HAVE TWO DENTS IN MY CAR that you could hide grapefruit in.”

The hand holding the last of my brandy in a glass from the kitchen was shaking. The hand holding the telephone was not, so Mel’s voice remained loud, clear, and comforting in my ear.

“I’ll talk to him. I’ll talk to Pilato, tell him he’s gone over the line.”

“How can those guys do that? How can they just walk out on the street and start smashing somebody’s car with a sledgehammer?”

“They went too far. So did you.”

“Mel, it’s a public street, damn it!”

“Not when Mike Pilato is having a meeting on it.”

“Meeting? He’s walking with two greaseballs—”