I said, 'Joe likes you. Joe would probably fly down and have a talk with him.'

The smile flickered again and, for just a moment, Lucy laughed. The tension was easing. 'Perhaps it will come to that.' The laugh and the smile faded then, and she said, 'When he found out that Ben and I were going to stay here, with you, instead of a hotel, he became abusive. He criticized my judgment and told me that I was setting a bad example for Ben and demanded that I leave Ben with him.'

I said, 'Luce?'

She looked at me.

I opened my mouth but did not speak. My mouth felt dry and there was a kind of faraway ringing and my fingers and legs suddenly went cold. There are those times when intellect fails us. There are those moments when the modern man fades to a shadow and something from the brain stem reasserts itself, and in that moment the joking is gone and we frighten ourselves with our dark potential. I said, quite normally, quite conversationally, 'What do you mean, abusive? Did he touch you?'

She shook her head, and then she placed both palms on my chest. 'Oh, no. No, Elvis. And if he had I promise you fully that I would've had him arrested so fast he would've had whiplash.'

I nodded again, but now the nods weren't funny. My fingers and legs began to tingle with returning blood.

She said, 'I thought it was past, but it isn't. That's why Darlene called. He's been phoning the office and leaving messages on my machine at home, and then I got upset even more that I had let him get me upset in the first place. Do you see?'

My breathing had evened out and the ringing was gone. I nodded. 'He pushed your buttons.'

'Yes.'

'He exerted a kind of power over you that you thought was behind you.'

She said, 'I'm so sorry you thought it was you, or that you had something to do with this. Oh, sweetie, it wasn't you at all. It was me.'

'It's okay, Luce. It's really okay.'

She rubbed my chest again and stared up at me because there was more. 'Everything is complicated because I haven't been happy at the firm or with where I am in my life, and I don't know what I'm going to do about it.'

I looked at her, and my heart began to thud.

'It started before I met you. It started even before Richard moved back.'

I looked at her some more, and the night air was suddenly sparkling with a kind of expectant electricity.

'I don't know if I want to stay at the firm. I don't even know if I want to stay in Baton Rouge.' She shook her head, glancing past me at Ben, glancing out at the warm house lights in the canyon. She finally looked back at me. 'Do you know what I'm saying?'

'Would you consider coming out here?' My heart was thudding so loudly I wondered if the people across the canyon could hear it.

'I don't know.' She took a deep breath and rubbed my chest again. 'I guess I just needed to tell you that I don't know.' She tried to make a joke. 'Damn, and I thought I was too young for menopause.'

I nodded.

'I'm feeling kind of stupid right now. It just seemed important to tell you.'

I touched her lips. I kissed her, with the center of my heart. 'I love you, Lucille. Rotten ex-husband or no. Longdistance relationship or no. Do you know that?'

Her eyes grew wet again, and she ran her hand along the line of my shoulder. She touched my tie. 'You look so nice.'

I smiled.

'You went to so much trouble with the champagne and caviar.'

I said, 'Would you like to go eat? We still have time.' They would hold the reservation. I was sure I could talk them into holding the reservation.

She took a breath, then let it out and carefully looked up at me. 'What I would like to do is stay home with my two guys. What I would like is to order a pizza and drink your wonderful champagne and play Clue.'

I grinned. 'You want to play Clue?'

She was suddenly very serious. 'I just want to be with you, Elvis. I just want to relax and enjoy being here. Do you know?'

I kissed her fingers. 'I know.'

I took off my jacket and tie, and we ordered Domino's pizza. We made a large Italian salad with pepperocinis and garbanzo beans and fresh garlic while we waited for the pie. When the pizza came, we drank the Dom Perignon and ate the pizza between bites of Beluga caviar mixed with capers and minced onion, and played Clue until very late that night. There was a smile on Lucy's face that did not leave, and made the room feel light and warm and explosive with energy. Ben laughed so hard that he blew soda through his nose.

It was as if the other presence was no longer with us, as if by exposing the other it vanished the way a shadow will when exposed to light.

We played until very late, and when Ben went to bed, Lucy and I finished the last of the champagne, and then she followed me upstairs into a night filled with warmth and love and laughter.

CHAPTER 28

The next morning I left the house as the eastern sky bloomed with the onrushing sun and drove to Lucas Worley's condominium on a one-way street just off Gretna Green Way in Brentwood. Gretna Green is a connecting street between Sunset Boulevard and San Vicente, lined with apartment houses and condominium complexes and some very nice single-family homes, but in the dim time just before sunrise the traffic was sparse and the neighborhood still. It was a wonderful time of the day for lurking.

Worley's condo was set between the street and a service alley in a lush green setting. They were nice condos, large and airy and stylishly ideal for former on-the-rise young attorneys turned dope dealers. I slow-cruised the street first, then turned down the alley and idled past the rear. Each condominium had a double carport at its back protected by an overhead wrought-iron door, and Worley's was filled with a gunmetal blue Porsche 911 sporting a vanity plate. The vanity plate read EZLIVN. Guess the loss of his day job hadn't inhibited his lifestyle.

When I reached the end of the alley, Joe Pike and Ray Depente materialized out of the murk and drifted silently to my car. Ray was wearing a black suit over a white shirt with a thin black bow tie. I said, 'When did you go Muslim?'

Ray looked at himself and smiled. 'Joe said you wanted scary. You tell me anything a white boy's more scared of than a Muslim with a hardon?'

Ray Depente was an inch taller than Joe, but slimmer, with mocha skin and gray-flecked hair and the ramrod-straight bearing of a career Marine, which he had been. For the better part of twenty-two years Ray Depente had taught unarmed combat at Camp Pendleton, in Oceanside, California, before retiring to open a karate school in South Central Los Angeles. Now, he taught children the art of selfrespect for ten cents a lesson, and instructed Hollywood actors how to look tough on screen for five hundred dollars an hour. The one paid for the other.

Ray extended his hand and we shook as he said, 'Haven't seen you in a while, my friend. Better get your butt down to my place before you get out of shape.'

'Too many tough guys down there, Ray. Some actor might beat me up.'

Ray smiled wider. 'Way I hear things been going for you, I guess it could happen.' The smile fell away. 'We got a plan for Mr Dope Dealer, or are we just gonna stand around in the dark waitin' to be discovered?' The eastern sky was cooling from pink to violet to blue. Traffic was picking up out on Gretna, and we could hear garbage trucks and cars pulling out of driveways as people left for work. Pretty soon housekeepers would be trudging past to their day work.

Joe tilted his head toward the Porsche. 'Worley's been inside since eight-thirty last night.'

'Is he alone?'

'Yes.'

I said, 'He's got to leave sooner or later. When he leaves we'll go in the house and find his stash. We find the stash, we'll have some leverage.'