“Promise,” I said.

She laughed. “Boy, you really got me into a fix. When you called I thought you wanted to volunteer so I spoke to the director on your behalf, set up an appointment for you in a half hour. Now I've got to call and tell her.”

“I'd still like to talk to her.”

“And I can't stop you, can I?”

“I'm not the enemy, Holly.”

She looked down on me. “Hold on.”

She walked to the back of the restaurant, veered right, and disappeared. Jake finished with the beans and concentrated on glaring at me, til Holly came back.

“She's not happy, but she'll see you very briefly. Marge Showalsky. But don't expect to learn much about Hope.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And sorry.”

“Forget it,” she said. “I'm sure you're not the enemy. Robin's too smart for that.”

14

The stretch of Olympic that housed the Women's Health Center was one of those clumsy L.A. mixes: factories, junkyards, storage barns, a trendy prep school pretending it was somewhere else by erecting a border of potted ficus.

The clinic was a single story of charmless brown brick next to a parking lot rimmed with iron posts and heavy chains. The front door was locked. I rang the bell and gave my name. A moment later I was clicked in.

Three women sat in the waiting room and none of them looked up. At the rear were swinging wooden doors with small windows. The walls were covered with posters on AIDS awareness, breast examination, nutrition, support groups for trauma. A TV in the corner was tuned to the Discovery Channel. Animals chasing each other.

One door opened and a heavy, bespectacled woman around sixty held it ajar and stuck her head out. She had short, gray, curly hair and a round, pink face that wasn't jolly. Her eyeglasses were steel-rimmed and square. She wore a dark green sweater, blue jeans, and sneakers.

“Dr. Delaware? I'm Marge,” she boomed. “I'm tied up, gimme a minute.”

As the door closed, the women in the waiting room looked up.

Closest to me was a black girl around eighteen, with huge, wounded eyes, meticulous cornrows, and tightly clenched lips. She wore the uniform of a fast-food outlet and clutched a Danielle Steel paperback in both hands. Across from her were what looked to be a mother and daughter: both blond, daughter fifteen or sixteen, Mom an old forty, with black roots, pouchy eyes, sunken body and spirit.

Maybe Daughter had something to do with that. She looked me straight in the eye and winked, then licked her lips.

She had an unusually narrow face, off-center nose, low-set ears, and a slightly webbed neck. Her hair color looked natural except for the hot-pink highlights at the tips. She wore it long and teased huge and flipped back. Her Daisy Duke cutoffs barely covered her skinny haunches, and a black halter top exposed spaghetti arms, a flat, white midriff, and minimal shoulders. Three earrings in one ear, four in the other. An iron nose ring, the skin around the puncture still inflamed. High black boots reached midway up her calves. Black hoop earrings were the size of drink coasters.

She winked again. Gleefully furtive crossing of legs. Her mother saw it and rattled her magazine. The girl gave a wide, naughty smile. Her teeth were blunt pegs. One hand finger-waved. Foreshortened thumbs.

It added up to some kind of genetic misalignment. Maybe nothing with an official name. What used to be called syndromy back in my intern days.

Her legs shifted again. A hard nudge from her mother made her sit still and pout and look down at the floor.

The black girl had watched the whole thing. Now she returned to her book, one hand rubbing her abdomen, as if it ached.

The door opened again. Marge Showalsky motioned me in and led me down a hall of examining rooms.

“Lucky for you it's a quiet day.”

Her office was large but dim with moisture stains on the ceiling. Random furnishings and bookshelves that didn't look earthquake-safe. Half-open blinds gave a striped view of the asphalt lot.

She settled behind a desk not much wider than her shoulders. Two folding chairs. I took one.

“Used to be an electronics factory. Transistors or something. Thought we'd never get rid of the metal smell.”

Two posters hung on the wall behind her: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at a cafe table, under the legend GIRLTALK. A Georgia O'Keeffe skull-in-the-desert print.

“So you work for the police. Doing what?”

I told her, keeping it general.

She righted her glasses and gave a bearish grin. “You give good bullshit. Best I've had this week. Well, I can't tell you much either. The women who come here have very little left except their privacy.”

“The only person I'm interested in is Hope Devane.”

She smiled again. “You think I don't know who you are. You're the shrink who works with Sturgis. Anyway, in answer to your anticipated questions: Yes, we do terminations when we can find a doctor to perform them. No, I won't tell you which doctors do them. And, finally, Hope Devane wasn't involved with us much, so I'm sure her murder had nothing to do with us.”

“Not involved much,” I said. “As opposed to Dr. Cruvic.”

Her laugh could have corroded metal. She opened a drawer, pulled out a rough-textured briar pipe, rubbed the mouthpiece. “Mike Cruvic is an M.D. with excellent credentials willing to make a regular commitment to women in need. Want to guess how many other Hippocratic types are standing in line to do that? This place is run from month to month. Mostly it's nurses on their off-hours. A machine answers our phone and we try to listen for emergencies. Maybe next month we'll get voice mail: “If you are dying, press one.' ”

She put the pipe in her mouth, bit down so hard the bowl tilted upward.

“Money crunch,” I said.

“Strangulation time.” She raised a fist. “Few years ago we had government grants, staff on payroll, a damn good immunization-and-screening program. Then the government started discussing health-care reform, morons came out from Washington asking us about accountability, and things got weird.”

Yanking out the pipe, she pointed it like a periscope. “So, what's it like working with Milo Sturgis? Only reason I agreed to meet with you was to ask.”

“You know him?”

“By reputation. You, too- the straight shrink who hangs around with him. He's legendary.”

“In the gay community?”

“No, at the L.A. Country Club. What do you think?” Her eyes twinkled. “You know, some people think you're in the closet. That if you were really a good shrink you'd realize you're in love with him.”

I smiled.

“Hey, we got Mona Lisa.” She smiled back around the pipestem, looking, oddly enough, like Teddy Roosevelt. “So tell me, how come he never gets involved?”

“In what?”

“Sexual politics. Putting his image to constructive use.”

“You'd have to ask him that.”

“Ho, ho, I've touched a nerve- well, he should. Gay cop, breaking down barriers, the way he went up against the department, what was it, five years ago? Broke that lieutenant's jaw because he called him a fag.” She put the pipe back in, chewed with satisfaction. “At certain bars people still talk about that.”

“Interesting twist,” I said.

“You know different?”

“He broke the lieutenant's jaw because the lieutenant endangered his life.”

“Well,” she said, “I guess that's a reason, too- so why no social conscience? He never answers calls from fund-raisers or march organizers, never joins anything. Same with that doctor boyfriend. Studs like that, they could do some good.”

“Maybe he feels he already is.”

She looked me up and down. “Are you bisexual?”

“No.”

“So what's the connection?”

“We're friends.”

“Just friends, huh?” She laughed.