'Well, I had to stay,' said Buddy. 'I'm Mrs O'Raffety's attorney. I handle things for her.'

'Oh, yes, of course.'

'You have your swim, Mr Samson. The water's kept at eighty degrees. Mrs O'Raffety has to swim on account of her bad back, but she can't abide cold water.' He stared through the window to watch her swimming. There was a fixed expression on his face that could have been concern for her.

'And who is Mr O'Raffety?' I said.

'Who is Mr O'Raffety?' Buddy was puzzled by my question.

'Yes. Who is Mr O'Raffety? What does he do for a living?'

Buddy's face relaxed. 'Oh, I get you,' he said. 'What does he do for a living. Well, Shaun O'Raffety was Mrs O'Raffety's hairdresser: L.A…a fancy place on Rodeo Drive.' Buddy rubbed his face. 'Way back before my time, of course. It didn't last long. She gave him the money to buy a bar in Boston. She hasn't seen him in ten years but sometimes I have to go and get him out of trouble.'

'Trouble?'

'Money trouble. Women trouble. Tax return trouble. Bookies or fist-fights in the bar so that the cops get mad. Never anything bad. Old Shaun is an Irishman. No real harm in him. He just can't choose carefully enough: not his clients, his friends or his women.'

'Except in the case of Mrs O'Raffety,' I said.

For a moment I thought Buddy was going to take offence, but he contained himself and said, 'Yeah. Except in the case of Mrs O'Raffety.' The smile was noticeably absent.

'Since you're Mrs O'Raffety's attorney, Buddy, perhaps you could explain why I've been brought here.'

He looked at me as if trying to help, trying to guess the answer. 'Socializing isn't my bag,' said Buddy. He was silent for a few moments, as if regretting telling me about his employer and mother-in-law. Then he said, 'Mrs O'Raffety has a social secretary to handle the invites: weekend guests and cocktails and dinner parties and suchlike.'

'But just between the two of us, Buddy, I've never even heard of Mrs O'Raffety.'

'Then maybe you are here to visit one of Mrs O'Raffety's permanent guests. Do you know Mr Rensselaer? He lives in the house with the big bougainvillaea.'

'Bret Rensselaer?'

'That's correct.'

'He's dead.'

'No sir.'

Everyone knew Bret was dead. If Frank Harrington said he was dead; he was dead. Frank was always right about things like that. Bret died of gunshot wounds resulting from a gun-battle in Berlin nearly three years ago. I was only a couple of yards away. I saw him fall; I heard him scream. 'Bret Rensselaer,' I said carefully. 'About sixty years old. Blond hair. Tall. Thin.'

'You've got him. White hair now but that's him all right. He's been sick. Real bad. An auto accident somewhere in Europe. Mrs O'Raffety brought him here. She had that guest house remodelled and fixed up a beautiful room with equipment where he could do his special exercises and stuff. He could hardly walk when he first arrived. One or other of the therapy nurses comes up here every day, even Sunday.' He looked at the expression on my face. 'You knew him in Europe, maybe?'

'I knew him very well,' I said.

'Isn't that something.' Buddy Breukink nodded. 'Yeah, he's some kind of distant relation to Mrs O'Raffety. Old Cy Rensselaer – the famous one they named the automobile for – was Mrs O'Rafferty's grandfather.'

'I see.' So Bret Rensselaer really was still alive and they'd brought me all this way to see him. Why?

We ate lunch very late. Mrs Helena O'Raffety didn't eat much. Perhaps she'd had lots of other lunches earlier in the day. But she kept her salad scared, moving it around the huge pink plate like a cop harassing a drunk.

'I'm a European,' she said. She'd been explaining that she was, at heart, quite unlike her native Californian friends and acquaintances. 'When I was very young I always said that one day I'd buy a little apartment in Berlin, but when I got there, it seemed such a sad place. And so dirty. Everything I wore got sooty. So I never got around to it.' She sighed and this time speared a segment of peeled tomato and ate it.

'It gets cold in Berlin,' I told her. I looked at the sun glittering on the blue water of the pool beside us and the brightly coloured tropical flowers. I smelled the wild sage, breathed the clean air off the ocean and watched the hawks slowly circling high above us. We were a long way from Berlin.

'Is that right?' she said exhibiting only mild interest. 'I've only been twice; both times in the fall. I always take vacations in the fall. It stays warm and the resorts are not so crowded.' As if to offset the simplicity of her blue cotton beach dress she wore lots of jewellery: a gold chain necklace, half a dozen rings and a gold watch with diamonds around the face. Now she touched the rings on her fingers, twisting them as if they were uncomfortable, or perhaps to make sure they were all still there.

From the garage at the back there was the sudden sound of the Wrangler being started and gunned impatiently. I'd got used to Buddy Breukink's manner by now and I recognized his touch. Varoom, varoom, varoom, went the engine. Mrs O'Raffety looked up to the sky with a pained expression. It wouldn't require an overdeveloped imagination to see suppressed rage in just about everything that Buddy did.

'They quarrelled about the education of my little grandson Peter.' No need for her to say who she was talking about. 'Buddy has his own ideas but my daughter wants him brought up in the Jewish faith.' She drank some iced tea.

I was fully occupied with the elaborate 'lobster salad' that had been put before me. Every salad vegetable I'd ever heard of- from Shütaki mushrooms to lotus root – made a decorative jardiniere for half a dozen baby lobster tails in rich mayonnaise. On a separate pink plate there was a hot baked potato heaped with sour cream and garnished with small pieces of crispy bacon. Salads in California are not designed for weight-loss. I looked up from my plate. Mrs O'Raffety was looking at me quizzically. She waited until I nodded.

'It's solely a question of the female line,' she explained, prodding at a radish that rolled over and escaped. 'My mother was a Jew, so I am a Jew. Therefore my daughter is a Jew and so her son is a Jew. Buddy just can't seem to understand that.'

'Perhaps,' I ventured, 'it's difficult to reconcile with a mother-in-law named O'Raffety.'

She looked at me with a stern expression I'd noticed when she was swimming. Her eyes were glacial blue. 'Maybe it is,' she conceded. 'Maybe it is. Mind you, I'm not strict. We don't eat kosher. You can't with Mexican kitchen staff.'

'And where is your little grandson now?'

'In Florida. Last week Buddy was taking lunch with a private detective. I'm frightened he's got some plan to take the child away somewhere.'

'Kidnap him?'

'Buddy gets emotional.'

'But he's a lawyer.'

'Even lawyers get emotional,' she said, dismissing the subject without entirely condemning such emotion. As the sound of Buddy's jeep receded she went back to the subject of being European. 'I was born in Berlin,' she told me. 'I have relatives in Berlin. Maybe one day I'll seek them out. But then I ask myself: who needs more relatives.' She toyed with a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and a gold lighter, as if trying to resist temptation.

'You came to America as a child?'

She nodded. 'But lost the language. A few years back I started taking German lessons, but I just couldn't seem to get the hang of it. All those bothersome verbs…' She laughed. 'More wine?'

'Thank you.'

She plucked the bottle from the bucket. 'A friend of mine – not far from here – makes it. His Chablis is excellent, the rose is good – wonderful colour – but the red doesn't quite come off so I keep to the French reds.' She poured the remainder of the wine into my glass. She called all white wines Chablis; everyone in California seemed to do that.