“You look very sharp,” Freddie said, his Romanian accent more pronounced. He wore a tuxedo. He was very dark, with black hair and eyes. The kind of guy with a heavy brow and thick fur on his hands.

“Your housekeeper said you were in New York.”

Freddie took a sip of his cocktail and said, “She was wrong.”

“I got ditched when you stepped off the Harvard,” Roscoe said. “I pulled my Pierce off the ship and waited for you to load your bags.”

“I don’t like to wait. Do you mind, Roscoe? People are staring.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

Freddie turned back to the bar. Roscoe touched his shoulder.

“Don’t be a stupid man,” Freddie said and raised his eyebrows. “The papers?”

Freddie ordered another drink, a cocktail served in a champagne glass with a cherry. “The soldiers made this up during the war,” Freddie said. “Call it a French 75. Like the big guns. How ’bout a drink? We drink and we forget, okay?”

“How ’bout I shove that champagne glass up your ass?”

“Why not a Coke bottle?”

Roscoe gripped Freddie by the front of his tuxedo shirt and twisted him into his face. He ground his teeth so hard, he could hear them grind and pop deep into his jaw.

“I only wanted to ask you a question,” Roscoe said. He could feel a barman or a doorman or someone’s hands on his arm. “Just a question.”

Freddie looked at him. The champagne cocktail had rolled from his fingers onto the bar, the thin glass breaking into shards. Freddie stared at him and breathed, a little smile on his lips.

“Why’d you bring her there? Why Virginia? You knew, didn’t you?” Freddie’s smile widened.

“You goddamn son of a bitch.”

SAM AND DAISY stayed up that night, finding an Owl drugstore downtown just like the one at the bottom of the Flood Building. Daisy ordered eggs. Sam ordered toast. They both had coffee and cigarettes, which was a fine thing to Sam at four a.m. when you were too tired to sleep.

“What’s it all about, Sam?” she asked.

“A good shot of rye and a warm bed.”

“You don’t let anyone get in there, do you?”

“In where?”

She moved her knuckles over to his forehead and lightly knocked. “What about you, sister?”

She sipped her coffee, elbows on the lunch counter, watching the fat man at the grill burning up a steak, bacon, and some home fries. Outside, a streetcar zipped past, littering electric sparks in the leftover night.

“You got a man?”

“Nope.”

“Family?”

“Back east.”

“Did you see the set of balls on that lion?”

“I did,” she said. “That one’s got it all figured out.”

“So why you working for the G?”

“What if I told you H. F. LaPeer killed the man I loved?”

“I’d tell you to peddle your story to the pictures.”

Daisy drank more coffee. The fat cook laid down a plate of ham and eggs and she didn’t touch it. Sam placed a pack of Fatimas on the counter.

“That’s not true, is it?” Sam asked. “About your man?”

Daisy shrugged. She reached for his cigarettes and lit up. The smoke was in her eyes and she fanned it away.

“Why do you gals paint your lips in the center?”

“The Kewpie doll effect,” she said, pursing her lips and closing her eyes.

She opened them and parted her lips and smiled at Sam. He turned back to his plate and grabbed a slice of dry toast.

“You don’t give a damn about Prohibition, do you?” he asked.

“I didn’t make the law.”

“But it bothers you that some places are off the books? Like the Cocoanut Grove?”

She shrugged again, looking good every time she shrugged, and took a bite of eggs. Her soft light blond hair tucked behind her ears and a slouch hat tucked over her head. Sam reached out and traced the edge of her jaw with his middle finger and she cut her eyes at him but kept eating, and he kept his eyes on her until she met his gaze.

Her eyes flicked back to the window and Sam glanced over his shoulder, watching a very dark, very compact man in a black suit staring in the window. He turned back to her and removed his fingers and hand and caught his smoldering cigarette in the ashtray. He looked back to the window and saw the dark man again.

Sam left his toast and laid down some coin and walked out the door. Daisy followed, and soon they were on the street, catching the back of the man and his dark hat and long coat, a coat too warm for Los Angeles. Sam was not shadowing him but calling out to the man’s back, which slumped as his legs pumped fast around the corner. He heard the start of a machine and Sam called out to Daisy to retrieve the Hupmobile.

He saw the car turn and pass him with a lot of speed, and he caught the dark man’s profile again, all so familiar from somewhere, some town, some old report.

“You could’ve said something back there,” Daisy said.

“I know him.”

“Who is he?”

“I’m not sure.”

“So why do we care?”

“It wasn’t his face,” Sam said. “It’s because he ran.”

The road led a quarter mile up the mountain into more cleared roads, more gravel and half-finished houses and open lots. Sam jumped out of the machine and searched the landscape, with his.32 in hand, for shadows and movement, finding only the gentle flickering of eucalyptus leaves and the burning smell of a big ancient oak on a smoldering pile. He rounded a large stack of brick and timber and made his way into a house without a roof, the ceiling big and black and pockmarked with bright stars, seeming not as real as those at the Cocoanut Grove.

He listened for feet and heard none.

A flash of headlights crossed over the open mountain ground and Daisy skidded to a stop and hopped out of the little automobile. She followed Sam on foot up a hill and into the elbow of an embankment. There were poured foundations and clearing machines. Fat, gnarled trees had been left naked in the cleared land and they looked prehistoric and skeletal in the moonlight.

They heard an engine crank and saw headlight beams flash from the back of a hill, and then the car was up and over the hill and coming straight for them. Sam pulled Daisy into him and around the back of a brick pile, and the car left dust and smoke and taillights as it disappeared over the lip of the mountain and down into the curving roads leading back to the city.

Daisy ran to the Hupmobile and circled back for Sam, soon catching the glow of taillights appearing and disappearing around curves and more straightaways, and then she headed west down a fire road, the bounce of the car nearly throwing Sam from his seat. Daisy smiled, grinning with her big white teeth, and leaned forward into the wheel, mashing the accelerator for all it was worth, skidding and spinning down through the dust and gravel, the beams catching the fender of the machine they followed. She drove through a tunnel of tree branches and across more cleared land, up the mountain and down again, and looping back on another fire road, coming out this time into a narrow entrance where the road just stopped.

There were giant earthmoving machines with large bucket scoops and heavy tracks as wide as a car. The car they followed had stopped cold at the mountain wall but then doubled back and idled.

The earth around them carved out like a huge bowl.

Sam told Daisy to switch off the lights and the two piled out of the car, moving for the rear and glancing around corners, waiting for the dark man to make his next move.

A few seconds later, the man fired. It was a big goddamn gun, something like a.44 that a man could feel hard into his elbow and shoulder and which could deafen an ear a bit, too.

Sam responded with a couple shots from the.32 that sounded tinny and small but clacked and echoed in the big earthen bowl. They squatted down behind a rear tire, and the man fired again, Sam and Daisy both covering their heads, the solid blam, blam, blam from the.44 like a drum all around them.