'I don't have to tell anybody any fuckin' thing.' He walked around Harper toward the door.

'You know better than that,' Anna said, talking to his back. 'Sometimes you do have to tell; you know they can squeeze you. If you don't help us, the cops'll be here in ten minutes. So help: please.'

'You won't be able to stay here if you don't,' Harper said. 'Your ass'll be back in Fort Smith.'

'Please,' Anna said.

Catwell got to the door before he stopped. He faced the door, unmoving, for a full ten seconds, then finally turned, and said to Anna, 'So you used to, like, party down with Jason and Sean.'

Anna, confused by the tone of his voice, said, 'What?'

Harper asked, 'Sean? MacAllister?'

Catwell shifted his gaze to Harper: 'You know him?'

'Yeah, I saw him last night,' Harper said. To Anna, he said, 'The late Sean MacAllister.'

Anna was closing in on Catwell. 'When you said I partied down with them, what'd you mean?'

Catwell's eyes slid away, and he made a 'you know' bob of his head: 'You know.'

'No, I don't; but I've a bad feeling about what you think.'

'Well, maybe it's not true,' Catwell said.

'That I was sleeping with them?'

'Yeah, I guess.'

'Where'd you hear that?'

'Listen, if it's not true.'

'I don't care about that, 'cause for one thing, they're both dead.'

'Sean?' Now Catwell was scared. 'They killed Sean, too?'

'Yes.' Anna nodded. 'Same guy, but with a knife. Now where'd you hear I was sleeping with them?'

'Uh, you came to a party one night, off Sunset? To get Jason, but he was really wrecked? So you left without him?'

She remembered: 'At BJ's. Upstairs.'

'Yeah.'

'What's BJ's?' Harper asked.

'Club,' Anna said. To Catwell: 'So what'd they tell you?'

'That, uh, you know.'

'What?'

'Slept with them. At, uh, the same time. like in a pile.'

'Ah, jeez,' Anna said. 'They told everybody that?'

'Sure. I mean, like it wasn't any big secret.'

'I didn't even knowMacAllister,' Anna said.

'He and Jason had an apartment together, over by BJ's, down the hill from there,' Catwell said.

Anna looked at Harper and walked in a circle around the parking lot, ran her hand back through her hair: 'Jeez.'

'What?'

She looked at him: 'He's not trying to kill me. I'm perfectly safe,' she said.

'Say that again.'

'I'm not in troubleyou'rein trouble,' Anna said.

'What're you.'

'He's not gonna kill me. He's gonna kill you, Jake. Somebody already said it. Pam? I think Pam didhe's killing the guys he sees around me. Ah, God: he only shot Creek because Creek was with me. If we'd seen it.'

'Huh.' Harper thought it over. 'Like he's eliminating the competition.'

'Yeah. So I've got no problem.'

Now Harper shook his head: 'Don't think that. If he gets to you. I don't think you'd enjoy the date.' And to Catwell: 'Who else was at that party? High-school kids?'

'I don't know. People coming and going. Street kids, for sure. I don't think they were in high school no more. But I was loaded, man. I can barely remember. but I remember the story about Anna.'

'Good memory,' Anna said.

Catwell said, 'No, man. I mean, it was like a hotstorywhat you guys done. They said they were gonna send it in to Penthouse.'

'Aw, man, that damn Jason,' Anna said. 'Uh, you didn't tell anybody you'd been sleeping with me?'

'No. Jesus.'

'So give us a name, Bob,' said Anna.

He was weakening. 'Goddammit, if I do, you can't tell anyone.'

'We're not interested in you,' Harper said. 'We just need a name. The guy who sold to Jason.'

'Tarpatkin,' Catwell said softly. 'He works out of the Philadelphia Grill on Westwood. He's a Russian, he'd be there by now, probably. Later, for sure.'

'Does he sell wizards?'

'What? Wizards?'

Harper described them and Catwell shook his head: 'Tarpatkin's been around a while. He only sells to people he knows and he only sells coke, heroin and high-priced hash. He doesn't fuck around with that other shit.'

They got a description: Tarpatkin was tall, gaunt, pale, with long frizzy black hair and a goatee. 'He looks like the devil,' Catwell said. 'And Jesus, please don't let him find out who you talked to.'

'Got time to swing by the hospital again,' Anna said, looking at her watch. 'He says the guy's at the grill all night.'

'All right.' Harper had a remote key entry for the car, unlocked her door from twenty feet, then opened it for her, touched her back as she got in. Almost courtly, she thought. Old-fashioned. Not unpleasant. 'Sorry about that sleeping-around thing. bunch of kids bullshitting. Nobody pays any attention to it.'

'Somebody did,' Anna said. 'Still: I'm a little shocked.'

'So we've got to check this BJ's place. Our guy must be hanging out there, if he heard that story.'

'Yeah, but that doesn't get going until late.'

'So we look up this Tarpatkin first,' Harper said. 'I'm looking forward to that.'

In the car, headed back, she asked casually, 'What kind of women do you go out with? Lawyers? Golfers? Country-clubbers?'

He thought for a long moment, guided the car through a knot of curb cruisers, and said, finally, 'I don't go out much anymore.'

She looked at him curiously. 'You don't seem shy.'

'I'm not. I'm just. tired. I mostly want to work, play golf and mess around at my house. I used to go over to see Jacob a couple of times a week. Maybe we'd go out to eat.'

'You're gonna miss him.'

'I can't even believe he's gone,' Harper said, hunching down over the steering wheel, holding on with both hands.

'So maybe I'm being nosy.'

He grinned. 'Maybe you are.'

'Well. That's what I do,' she said.

Then she shut up, because sooner or later, she thought, he'd have a little more to say. He wasn't glib. He wasn't exactly taciturn, but he didn't have much of a line of bullshit.

And after a while he said, 'Going out with women. is just a lot of trouble. Most of them you meet, you know nothing's going to happenbut you've got to spend a few hours with them anyway, being nice. I guess I'm too busy for that. When it's obvious that nothing's going to happen, I'd like to say, "Well, that's that. I'll get you a cab and we can all go home".'

Anna pretended to be horrified: 'Have you ever done that?'

'Of course not. I'm too polite.'

'I'd think you've got a lot of women coming around. You look okay, you've got a lot of hair, guys like you make some money.'

'You'd be surprised how many women don't care about money,' he said. But then he shrugged and added, 'But, yeah. There were quite a few women around for a while. Now I'm getting a reputation as a nasty old curmudgeon, so it's not quite as intense as when I was. on the market.'

'No girlfriends at all?'

'Not right nownot for a while, really. I'd like to.'

He stopped. 'What?' she pressed. 'Like to what?'

'We don't know each other well enough,' he said, 'for me to tell you what I'd like to do.'

A parking place appeared a half-block from the hospital's emergency entrance; Harper dove into it, chortling, fed the meter. But as they started down toward the hospital, a man in a suit in the dimly lit glassed-in entry half-turned toward them, saw them and then suddenly and hurriedly turned back to the hospital doors and disappeared inside.

'Did you see that?' Anna said.

'Yeah.' Harper broke into a trot, Anna running beside him. 'Somebody who doesn't want to talk to us. You know him?'

'Couldn't see his face,' she said.

'White hair,' Harper said. They were moving fast now, hit the doors to the entry, burst into the reception area. No white-haired men. A guard was looking at them, quizzically. Harper hurried toward him, Anna a half-step behind.

'A white-haired guy just came through here,' Harper said. 'Did you see where he went?'