"Don't get dramatic," Toby said. "I know it's terrible, but I've been here, old buddy. I've been with Saffron since we dropped Amber off. What do you want from me, blood?"
"No. We've got enough of that right here."
"She's really dead?" His voice finally sounded a little thinner. The fear was beginning to float to the surface, and he couldn't keep it down, not even with his actor's training. "She didn't just OD?"
"Sure she did," I said. "She OD'd on her own fists. Just before she broke all her own fingers." I realized I'd turned to stare at Amber again, and I tore my gaze away from her, swiveling my whole body to the left. I tried to focus on the wall in front of me. On it someone had written in pencil THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT THE GARDEN OF EDEN IS BETWEEN A WOMAN'S LEGS. THE BAD NEWS IS THAT YOU CAN'T GET IN.
Toby breathed heavily once or twice. "Jesus. So what do you want me to say?"
"Right now, nothing. Not to anyone."
"But you're not going to mention my name to the cops."
"Maybe you can explain to me how I'm supposed to do that. Especially since everyone working here saw you leave with Amber."
"Nobody saw me. Nobody except Tiny, and he won't say nothing," he insisted, his grammar slipping a notch. "Hell, Simeon, I'm more than an hour from there, even the way I drive. You want to talk to Saffron again? She'll tell you, we've been here all night."
"I'll talk to her later," I said. "Now I've got to call the cops." The prospect was not an exhilarating one, but part of me was still capable of doing mathematics, and the math came out more or less in Toby's favor. One hour, I thought. One to two hours ago, Amber had been alive, or whatever imitation of alive Amber had been doing.
"Toby," I said, "you'd better treat Saffron like a queen. She's the only thing between you and no more fan club, as far as I can see. Not to mention jail. You know how popular you'd be in jail, Toby? You know what a little delicacy you'd be in prison? You'd have to tie the soap to your wrist so you wouldn't drop it."
"I'm treating her fine," Toby said a little shakily. "Saffron." I heard him snap his fingers. "Saffron. Any complaints?"
An electronic version of a contented murmur insinuated itself into my ear. Saffron didn't sound too torn up about Amber.
"Okay," I said. "You're out of it, at least for the moment. I'm going to hang up and call the cops now. But Toby, this is important. If I'm not going to mention you tonight, you've got to promise me. You're not going anywhere tomorrow, you're not going to take Saffron home, you're not going to go to the bathroom alone, you're not going to do anything by yourself before you call me. Otherwise, you're on your own. You're under house arrest, understand?"
"I'm a suspect," he said dully.
"You're the suspect," I said. "Sleep on that." He was talking, but I hung up.
My arm ached as if the receiver had weighed fifty pounds. I put one hand on the sticky surface of the bar to steady myself and then turned around.
"Nana," I said, "do you trust your buddy Saffron?"
"It depends," she said in a low voice, "on whether I can see her or not."
"Well, great. That's just great."
The phone started to ring. "Toby knows this number?" She nodded. It rang again.
"Well, shit," I said, "let him sweat."
Nana's lower lip was trembling. "Poor baby," she said. "Poor little junked-out baby. She had so much bad luck."
"Whatever it's worth, that's over now." The phone kept ringing.
An enormous tear rolled down Nana's cheek. Another followed. She didn't bother to wipe them away. Her hands were still behind her. The tears dropped from her chin and left long dark tracks down the front of her blouse. She lowered her head. "That bastard," she said. "And you're going to protect him."
"Nana." She sniffled, childlike, but she didn't respond. "Come here. Come here, please."
She looked at me, but she still didn't move. The phone finally shut up, and I went to her, stepping wide around the stage with Amber on it. I put my arms around her. "I don't think he killed her," I said. "I could be wrong, but I don't think so. The cops will be here soon. They're going to ask a lot of questions. I'm not going to mention Toby, and I don't want you to, either."
She had nestled into my arms, her hot, moist forehead pressed hard against the front of my shirt. She was trembling uncontrollably. When I mentioned Toby's name, though, she pulled away quickly and gazed up at me with accusing eyes. Then she lowered her head and spat on the floor at my feet.
"Listen," I said again. She shook her head sharply. Then she made a convulsive movement, trying to shake my hands from her shoulders. She took a step sideways, edging along the wall to get away from me. I slapped her arms, and she looked up at me.
"I'll get him," I said, meaning it. "Whoever it is, I'll get him. Even if it's Toby. Especially if it's Toby. I promise you by whatever you swear by, I'll get him. And if I have to, I'll kill him."
My heart was pounding. I counted its beats for lack of anything else to do as she stood rigidly in front of me, her eyes fixed on the floor, her feelings a continent away. Then a long breath fled out of her, an impossibly long, serpentine kite of a breath. It seemed to empty her completely, leaving her small and frail in its passing. The trembling slowed and then stopped. My hands, wrapped around her thin shoulders, felt the fineness, the almost birdlike hollowness, of her bones.
She looked back up at me. "You really promise?" she asked in the smallest voice I'd ever heard from a human being. She swallowed again. "You'll kill him?"
"I swear."
She blinked twice, quickly, and two more tears tracked their shiny ways down her cheeks. "Then call the cops," she said. "Call them." She shook an arm free to wipe the wetness away in a rough gesture. "They won't do anything." She sounded fierce. "They won't give a shit. She was only a nude dancer, anyway."
She looked around the club and then back at me. "This place," she said between her teeth. "How I hate this place."
"Hate it all you want," I said. "Just watch what you say to the cops." I went to the phone and dialed 911.
II
7
Three a.m. had said hello and good-bye by the time we were grudgingly allowed to leave. We'd forked over our names, addresses, driver's licenses, and telephone numbers, and we'd had an illuminating opportunity to watch L.A.'s finest at work, measuring, photographing, fingerprinting, and gossiping to their hearts' content. In the midst of all the abstract quantifying, Amber's death seemed like an incidental backdrop to the flurry of efficient, purposeful activity. Unless you looked at her face. I tried not to look at her face.
Once the responding officers had decided we weren't Public Enemies Numbers One and Two, they'd identified themselves as Officers Strick and Losey and started to treat us with a passable semblance of common courtesy. Nevertheless, when we were allowed to leave, Losey had followed us out and ostentatiously made a note of Alice's license plate number.
I'd wanted to avoid the kinds of questions they would have asked if they had known what my job was, so I'd put my license inside my sock before they arrived. Nevertheless, I'd screwed up early on, volunteering that the body had been warm when we found it and that Amber couldn't have been dead long.
"Yeah?" Strick had said suspiciously. "And what are your qualifications?"
Nana had jumped in before I could even work up a stammer, saying that she'd touched Amber when we came in and that she knew all about loss of body heat. Then she'd told an appalling story about having come home one day when she was eleven and found the dangling body of her father, who had hanged himself in the kitchen. At first, she'd said, she thought he was just doing another one of his magic tricks. He always did magic tricks. She'd sat on the floor for a few minutes, waiting for the payoff. Finally she had cut him down and he'd still been warm. The Texas medical examiner, she'd said, bursting into tears, had told her all about body temperature. Strick and Losey had patted her ineffectually on the shoulder, big hulking men who had no idea what to say.