"He was everything I ever wanted."

The phrase was like a password. Her eyes were bright and her face had a mild flush to it. The tip of her tongue trembled on her lower lip. A lot of he's had been everything she ever wanted. I wasn't even sure she knew who this he was as she spoke.

"Jesus Christ," Hawk said behind me.

Without turning I nodded yes.

"So Lonnie looked into it and found out you were right. His wife was fooling around, but not with Christopholous. Who was she balling, Hawk?"

"Craig Sampson," Hawk said behind me.

"Bingo," I said.

"So Lonnie send one of the kids up," Hawk said, "and had him sloped."

"Just as he launched into a chorus of' Lucky in Love,"

" I said.

"Lonnie must have liked the symbolism."

"Better than Sampson did," Hawk said.

The room was quiet. The three of us stood looking at Jocelyn.

Outside there was no more daylight. In the darkened room only Jocelyn's face was lit by the bedside lamp. I looked at it for a long time. Pretty in a blurred sort of way, not leading-lady looks, someone to play the maid, maybe, the gangster's girlfriend. Not very old, not very smart. Innocuous, mostly empty, an idle face upon whose blank facade life had etched no hint of experience. She had noticed nothing tangible. She had lived a life of cliched fixations.

If she felt anything about the way things had worked out, she didn't feel it very deeply. Even her obsessions seemed shallow… She heaved a slow sigh.

"You know what's so tragic?" she said.

"After all I've done, all I've been through, I'm still alone."

I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say. I just looked at her vapid, empty, uncomprehending face, bottomless in its self absorption a monster's face.

"Get your stuff together," I said to Jocelyn.

"We're going."

She seemed to shake herself from a reverie for a moment, and stared at all of us in the dark room as if she hadn't known we were there. Everything she did seemed done in front of a camera. Vinnie went to the closet and took out her suitcase and opened it on the bed for her. He pointed at it. She made a pulling-herself-together shrug as she stood up and began to gather her things.

"You got a thought on who pounded Lonnie?" Hawk said. In the darkness he was an invisible presence still leaning motionless on the wall.

"Yeah."

"And you don't like it much."

"No."

"Not too many choices left," Hawk said.

"Not many," I said.

"So we be going up to Port City again," Hawk said.

"Yeah."

"What we going to do with Norma Desmond?" Hawk said.

"We'll bring her along. Maybe she'll be useful."

"Sure," Hawk said.

"There a first time for everything."

CHAPTER 50

I was in the Port City Police Station, in DeSpain's office with the door closed. DeSpain looked red-eyed and raw sitting behind his desk. He tipped his head forward and began to rub the back of his neck with his left hand.

"I found Jocelyn Colby," I said.

He stopped rubbing but kept his head tipped forward.

"She all right?" he said. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he had brought it up from a dark place.

"She's not hurt," I said.

"Good."

We sat silently for a time. DeSpain still looking down, his left hand motionless on the back of his neck. There was light from the squad room drifting in through the pebble glass door to DeSpain's office. And the green-shaded banker's lamp was lit on his desk. So the room wasn't dark. But it was shadowy, and felt like offices do at night, even a cop office.

"She faked the kidnapping," I said after a while.

DeSpain thought about that for a moment, then he looked up slowly, his left hand still on the back of his neck, the thick fingers digging into the muscles at the base of his neck.

"Oh, shit," he said.

"Exactly," I said.

I reached into my inside pocket and took out the envelope that Healy had given me containing DeSpain's file. I tossed it on the desk between us. DeSpain looked down at it, at the Department of Public Safety return address. He picked it up, slowly, and took his hand away from the back of his neck, slowly, and opened the envelope, slowly, and took out the file, and unfolded it, and read it, slowly. We were in no hurry, DeSpain and I. Port City was eternal and there was no reason to rush. DeSpain looked carefully at the photocopy of his record with the state police, at the copy of the sexual harassment complaint filed by Victor Quagliosi, Esq. on behalf of Jocelyn Colby, which was attached. He read, though he probably could recite it, his letter of resignation, also attached.

When he was through, he evened the papers out, folded them carefully back the way they had been, and put them in their envelope. He slid the envelope back across the desk toward me. I took it and put it back in my pocket. DeSpain leaned back in his swivel chair and folded his arms and looked straight at me.

"So?"

"You want to talk about Jocelyn?" I said.

"What's to say?"

"She's crazy," I said.

"Yeah," DeSpain said and his voice still seemed to rumble up from a place far down.

"She is."

I didn't say anything. DeSpain looked at me. There were deep grooves running from the wings of his nose to the corners of his mouth. I could hear his breath going in and out, slowly. He unfolded his arms, and rested his chin on his left hand, the elbow on the chair arm, the thumb beneath the chin, the knuckle of the forefinger pressed against his upper lip. He puffed his cheeks and blew small puffs of air past his loosely closed lips.

It made a small popping sound.

"She was crazy when I met her," DeSpain said.

"Only I didn't know it. She doesn't seem crazy, you know."

"I know."

"I was married," DeSpain said.

"Grown kids. Wife drank a little, liked a few belts before supper, got out of hand sometimes at parties, but we got along. Then this little broad comes in with a stalker story and I'm working investigations and I catch it."

DeSpain shook his head. In the shadowy room his eyes seemed simply dark recesses, buried beneath his forehead.

"And.. Jesus Christ. She feels my muscle, she wants to see my gun, she wants to know if I killed somebody, and what was it like, and would I take care of her, and she leaned her little tits on me and looked up at me, and I never had anything like it happen to me in my life. Second night on the case we're in bed and she's a volcano. The old lady did it in her flannel night gown, you know?

With her eyes shut tight."

"What about the stalker?" I said.

"The case was bullshit," DeSpain said.

"Guy wasn't stalking her.

She made a pass at him and he turned her down and she made it up.

"That didn't warn you?" I said.

"If she shot me in the belly it wouldn't have warned me," DeSpain said.

"I couldn't get enough of her."

"So you ditched the wife."

"Yeah. Don't even know where she is now. What happened to her. Kids won't talk to me."

He paused for a moment and leaned back. He pressed his hands together and looked at them as if they were new, and then began to rub them slowly together, leaning back as he spoke, so that all I could see of him now was the hands rubbing slowly together in the lamplight.