He glanced across at Courtenay again, saw she was leaning into Warren, whispering something. The frame on the wall froze on Maxine’s perfect body midair in a dive into the water. Without any music it was eerie. Gradually, he became aware of the sound of the projector.

Then someone flicked the room lights on and suddenly there was applause. Courtenay was next to him, hugging him, pulling him over next to Warren. Bryan took a bow. Ray found himself applauding.

Courtenay Moran was nearly six feet tall. She wore her blonde hair cropped to within an inch of her scalp all over except at the nape of her neck, where a longer strand was held in a ponytail by a hot pink ribbon.

“It just seems pretty soon to be partying after his wife’s death, is what I mean,” Hardy was saying.

He watched her blow some smoke toward the ceiling. They stood on the landing at the top of the stairway outside the open front door to Ray’s duplex. Hardy held a can of beer and leaned against the doorpost. In the living room, where they’d watched the movie, people were still mingling, binding into little groups, then quickly splitting off. He didn’t know what this kind of schmoozing was called, or what its purpose was, where the longest you talked to anybody was forty seconds, but it wasn’t getting him anywhere, so he’d walked up to Courtenay in the kitchen because she was beautiful and because he’d seen her talking to Ray.

She wore a leather flight jacket that made her broad shoulders seem broader. Her eyes were surrounded with a very dark blue-black makeup that seemed to set them more deeply into her milk-white face. Hardy thought that in a photograph, Courtenay’s face might appear jutting, bony. But here now, the bones were in the right places.

“Who’s partying?” she asked. “You call this partying?”

Hardy looked back into the living room. A record was playing a heavy Latin beat and some dancing had started. “It’s not exactly a wake,” he said. Several of the dancers appeared to him to be trying to copulate with their clothes on.

“That’s just the Lambada,” Courtenay said. “It’s harmless.”

Hardy tipped up his beer. Sometimes hunches could be a waste of time, and it was beginning to look as though this whole trip to Ray Weir’s would turn out to be one of them.

He stared at the dancers another minute. “Looks like foreplay,” he said.

“Depends on how good you are.” She smiled, looking right in his eyes.

He pulled the door closed, leaving them alone on the landing, the music thumping low and insistent. Courtenay stepped up to Hardy and kissed him, her hand behind his neck. She was just his height, and the angle felt strange, but it was a good kiss that he didn’t fight as much as he might have thought he should if he’d thought about it. She stepped back.

“I just wanted to do that,” she said.

“Okay. Worse things have happened to me.”

“Want to try it again?”

She wasn’t really coming on to him. Well, maybe a little. But he flashed on Frannie, from there to Jane, and then to the Lambada going on through the door, and he realized that it simply wasn’t him. “I think it would be better if we didn’t,” he said.

“All right,” she said. She took a final drag on her cigarette, dropped and stepped on it. “I always guess wrong,” she said.

It was the pro forma San Francisco woman’s first reaction to rejection, Hardy knew-the assumption that the man was gay.

“For the record,” he said, “my sexual preference is more or less as it appears.”

She looked straight across at him, her height still a little disconcerting. Her face softened. “You’re married.”

“Involved.”

“And you’re faithful?”

That stung a little, but Hardy let it go.

“As long as they don’t find out,” she said, “what’s the problem? I don’t tell Warren. He’d leave me and there goes not only him but my career, and I do love him. But love and sex-don’t confuse ’em or you’ll screw them both up.”

A few days before, Hardy could have said he didn’t confuse them, they went together. Maybe they still did with him, but he had some figuring out to do. “I’m here about Maxine and Ray.”

“Are you with the police?”

“No.”

“Were you involved with Maxine?”

This time Hardy laughed. “Not how you might interpret it, but it was with Rusty Ingraham.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“Why do you ask it like that? Is it so unlikely?”

Courtenay looked Hardy up and down. “Uh huh. Very.”

Hardy thought on that a minute. “He’s dead.”

“What?” Clearly shocked.

Hardy told her about it. He let some silence hang. Then, “The wrong guy might be getting blamed. And I could be mixed up in that.”

“A friend of yours?”

“Not exactly. The police have this guy in custody. He’d threatened to kill me, too.” Hardy told her why, but also said he no longer had anything to do with the police or the law.

“So what’s the problem if he’s in jail?”

Hardy lifted his beer can to his lips, found it empty and sat down on the steps. Courtenay sat next to him. “I guess I want to be sure I believe it. I saw the guy today and got the feeling he didn’t know what I was talking about.” He paused. “He didn’t know Maxine was there.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because if the guy they got didn’t do it, somebody killed a friend of mine and nobody’s looking for him.”

“Or her.”

Hardy picked up his empty can again, shook it, found it empty. He looked far up at her. “You want to tell me about Ray?”

She dug out another cigarette and lit it up. “What’s to tell?”

“If he’s the jealous type, for example.”

She blew smoke at the ceiling. “It broke his heart, I’ll say that.”

“Maxine and Rusty?”

She nodded. “He couldn’t put it anywhere. Like, it’s gotta be over or not, right? I mean, Maxine’s practically living with this new guy, she’s moved out, what does Ray think? But he couldn’t accept it. You see that shrine to her in there? All those pictures-I think every damn composite she ever had done-and even after she’s dead?” She huddled into herself. “It’s kind of freaky, isn’t it?”

Hardy didn’t know if that was freaky or not. What he wanted to know was whether Ray had ever said he was going to do anything about it. Go get her back. Like that.

Courtenay shook her head. “He had to acknowledge it first, and he wouldn’t do that.” She blew out smoke, remembering. “Every day, he’d come by while Warren and I were editing. Always started out in control, how’s the film going, blah blah, and then he’d see some shots of Maxine and get stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“Like talk to her as if she were there. Argue with her, try to talk her into coming back, ask her on dates. Weird. So finally it just got too much. I mean, we’re trying to get a film cut here and it’s pretty intense, and Ray comes in-I don’t know, last week sometime-and Warren just cuts loose on him. Tells him to get the fuck out until he gets it settled. Go see her, figure out what’s happening and deal with it.” She stubbed out the butt on the landing.

“So then?”

“So he left, and next thing you know Maxine is dead.”

“Killed with Ray’s gun.”

She turned her eyes on him. “Is that true?”

“He says he’d given it to her when she moved out-for protection.”

She seemed to be wrestling with something. “Well, I don’t know about that… And the police haven’t arrested him?”

“They think they have a better suspect. I told you.”

She took that in. “Wow. He must be a good one.”

“A black guy on parole who’d threatened to kill Rusty, and whose fingerprints were at Rusty’s place.”

She digested that. “Yeah, that’s pretty good all right. I didn’t think Rusty could kill Maxine. Warren thinks he did but I just… I don’t know…”

“Let’s go see if we can find out,” Hardy said.

It reminded Hardy of college, sitting on the floor after midnight. Van Morrison was playing softly on the stereo. The Lambada people had gone home. Now it was just Courtenay and Warren, him and Ray. The other three were smoking marijuana, which Hardy hadn’t seen much of in recent years. He told them he had a lung condition.