“That’s a strange question.”

I blew smoke at the glass. “A conversation starter. We’ve already slept together and I don’t even know your middle name.”

“Victor.”

“Lester Victor?”

“Not very musical, is it?”

“No, it isn’t.” I sipped my mineral water. “Well?”

“Recently? Or a long time ago?”

“How recently?”

He glanced down at the tablecloth. The restaurant was turning to the east now, our windows facing out over south San Francisco, so Lester’s face was shadowed. “It’s pretty big.”

“How big?”

“Big enough not another soul knows about it. Can you handle that?”

“You mean can you trust me?”

“I already trust you, Kathy. Do you want it in your lap?”

“Do I have to keep it there?”

Lester smiled. “I guess not.” He looked once around the restaurant then leaned forward and said in a low voice: “I planted evidence.”

“You did?”

He nodded, slowly, like he was trying to see how I felt about this.

“Not our schoolteacher boy in blue.” I felt an almost electrical current in my arms and face.

Lester smiled again, a little sadly, though.

“Well?”

“There was this guy out near the reservoir, this little runt who used to beat up his wife like it was a pastime. He was an engineer or something, a teetotaler, but he’d go off the deep end and take a belt or a piece of garden hose to her. We never found out what exactly. The neighbors would call us, and my partner and I would show up on a hot night, talk ourselves in, and there’d be these bloody welts on her arms and legs, but they’d both stand there together, sometimes arm in arm like it was nobody’s business. I’d take her off to the side and ask if she was staying quiet out of fear of him, but she just looked at me with these big wet eyes like she didn’t know what I was talking about. This was before the domestic violence law, Kathy, when we couldn’t bring the batterer in unless the victim filed a complaint.”

“You think she liked it?”

“My partner thought so; I didn’t. Anyway, at least once a week we’d get called out there and after a while I couldn’t stand the sight of them, especially him. Bastard had the longest, skinniest neck you ever saw.”

I let out a laugh, and Lester did too.

“We had something on him, though—he had a prior conviction for possession of your old habit, and I didn’t agree with my partner, I thought she was scared to death. So on one of those hot tedious nights, I excused myself to go to the john, where I stuffed two eight balls in their closet behind a stack of towels.”

“No way.” I felt a tickle rise in my throat.

He raised a finger to his lips. “My ex-partner doesn’t even know about this.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“A recovered Lincoln the day before.”

“So what happened?”

“We didn’t have a warrant, so when I got home that night I put in an anonymous call to the department, then slept like a baby. They both got picked up, but because of his prior he got some time. A few months later I drove by the house to check on her, but the new residents said she’d moved.” He shook his head. “She was scared to death of him.”

“Shit, Lester, you just do what you want to do, don’t you?” I slipped my shoes off under the table. My right sole pulsed but didn’t hurt much.

He smiled carefully and sipped his mineral water.

“But what if you were wrong? What if she did like it?”

He sat back a little, cocking his head at me. “You really believe that?”

“Maybe.”

“Would you like that?” His voice was sincere, naked, and it was hard not to play with him a bit.

“No, but I’ve known some real sickos.”

“But how much better are they going to get if we allow them to live like that?” There was that tightness in his face again and I didn’t know if it was covering something hard or soft. The piano player was singing an upbeat Sinatra tune, and a busboy brought us warm rolls in a linen-covered basket. I broke one in two.

“So how come you need to wear this cape and mask, Les?”

“That’s a good question.” Lester sliced into a roll and buttered it. Our waiter showed up just then and asked if we’d picked out an appetizer. I thought he was doing a nice job trying to get the final bill as high as possible for himself, but we decided to skip the appetizer and ended up ordering two of the night’s specials instead, the chicken Provençale for me, swordfish with lemon caper sauce for Lester. He started to hand the wine menu back unopened, but before the young waiter disappeared I told him to bring us a decent Napa Valley chardonnay.

“What’re you up to?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “I ordered it for you. I know you want some. So, what’s the illegal thing you did a long time ago?”

He looked at me a second. “I’m still stuck on your other question.”

“Okay, answer that one.”

Lester smiled at me, all the tightness in his face gone, nothing but the gentleness now. The piano player was singing an old jazz tune. Les touched the tines of his salad fork and started to talk about his boyhood in a town called Chula Vista on the Mexican border, and I should’ve been taking in every word but I was thinking of the chardonnay I’d ordered; I was thinking how it really was true I’d never had any problems with alcohol until I’d started doing lines, snorting those long white snakes straight to my head. Then the waiter was at our table with an ice bucket. Lester paused and tasted the sample splash in his glass. He said it was fine, but when the waiter started to pour, Lester touched his arm and told him thanks, but we’d prefer to serve ourselves. The waiter left and Lester filled his own glass, glancing at me before he wedged the bottle back into the ice bucket.

“What was I rattling on about?”

“Chula Vista.”

“My brother Martin and I. We were the only anglos in the whole school and just about every day we’d get taunted into a fight with somebody about something.”

“That’s why you plant evidence?”

“Planted. I only did it once.” He tried to smile, but it wouldn’t finish itself on his face. “What’s wrong? Do you think I did a horrible thing?”

“No, I think you did a good thing actually. I’m sorry, Les. Tell you the truth, the wine’s distracting me.”

“I’ll send it back.”

“No.” I rested my fingers over his. “See, whenever I think of my sobriety I don’t think of wine, I think of cocaine. That’s what I’m proud of staying away from. My husband—my ex-husband, whatever you want to call him—he was a bad drinker, and I haven’t ever said this before but I think I just let him sweep me up into his recovery program, you know? Whenever I needed to go to RR it wasn’t because I wanted a glass of wine, it was because I had to do a mile of coke.”

Lester was giving me that long-eyed look again, squeezing my hand back as I spoke. “Don’t you mean AA?”

“No, RR. Rational Recovery. Your Higher Power is your ability to reason. It’s all a crock of shit really, but—I don’t know.” I let go of him and looked out the window. We were facing west now and I was looking out across the northern edge of the city, over all the buildings and piers to the orange sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge and the ocean on the other side of it, the sky a band of red and purple. The restaurant had gotten more crowded and I could hear behind me the low din of people talking and laughing through their meals, the tink of silverware on porcelain, the piano player finishing the jazz number and going right into something else. But I kept my eyes on the ocean while the restaurant continued its slow turn away from it, then I heard Lester pouring something into my wineglass and I turned to see him holding the bottle of chardonnay.

“You’re a grown woman, Kathy. Maybe you threw the baby out with the bathwater.”

“But what if the baby was a demon?”

“Then you toss it out for good and don’t look back.”