“I’ll take your word for it.”

Royale told me how he was originally from Florida. He’d had a few minor scrapes with the law growing up, he said, and was grateful to Carlisle for having taken a chance on him. He told me how much he missed his girlfriend, a dental hygienist named Laura who lived with her widowed father in Los Angeles. They saw each other on weekends, taking turns driving across the desert.

“They’re real tight, Laura and her dad; she doesn’t want to be too far away from him,” Lamont said, glancing over his shoulder as he changed lanes. “I’d move to LA, but then I’d have to quit working for Mr. Carlisle. I just can’t see doing that. Best job I ever had.”

“Stuck between the rock and hard place.”

“Exactly.”

He asked me how long Savannah and I had been married.

Long enough to know better, I said.

We stopped at a red light. A van pulled up in the next lane over, hauling a rolling billboard — a toll-free number and the words, “Fresh Hot Girls Delivered To Your Door In 20 Minutes or Less!!!” superimposed over the picture of a huge naked breast.

“I feel terrible for Savannah. She’s such a class act,” Royale said. “I hope they catch whoever killed Mr. Echevarria. I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I’m sure he was a real good guy.”

“I’m sorry, did you say something?” I said, distracted by the giant breast.

“You don’t really think Miles Zambelli had anything to do with it, do you?” Royale said.

“I think that low-wing airplanes are easier to taxi in a crosswind than high-wing planes. I think that the national championship in college football should be decided in single-elimination tournament play, like basketball. I also happen to think my landlady makes the best brisket this side of the Wailing Wall. Beyond that, I don’t know what I really think anymore.”

“I just don’t think Miles is capable of murder,” Royale said.

“You push somebody hard enough,” I said, “they’re capable of anything.”

Traffic on Interstate 15 was stop-and-go from Baker south to Victorville as a legion of Southern Californians, their weekend debaucheries in Sin City come to an end, inched their way down Cajon Pass and into the eastern fringes of the Los Angeles Basin. Driving would’ve taken seven hours given all the congestion. I made it back to Rancho Bonita via air in a little more than two.

Leonardo da Vinci is purported to have said that once a person has tasted flight, “You will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.” Old Leo nailed it — at least on days when the vagaries of Mother Nature aren’t factored into the mix, as was the case that afternoon. The weather had improved radically in time for my flight back to Rancho Bonita. No clouds. No turbulence. So silky was the air that it felt like the Duck was fixed in time and place, dangling there on some invisible thread while the earth glided silently by beneath us. I tried to think profound thoughts. Like how privileged I was to be unshackled from the wingless masses two miles below me, and how grateful I should’ve felt simply to be alive on such a glorious day. But all I could think about was how that little weenie, Miles Zambelli, had slept with my ex-wife. Which didn’t even begin to compare with the venom I harbored for Echevarria. Even now, after all the years, I despised him for having stolen Savannah. I hated myself even more for my inability to let go of it. We’d been brothers-in-arms. Spilled blood together. Gotten stinking blind-eyed drunk together. The Buddha believed that to understand everything was to forgive everything. I had a long way to go, I realized, before I could forgive Arlo Echevarria for anything, let alone everything. But I told myself that I would try harder. To find who killed him would be a big first step. Given our shared history, I suppose I owed him that much.

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, Joshua Approach, turn right thirty degrees for traffic, Boeing 737, four miles southbound, descending out of 11,000 feet into Burbank. Caution wake turbulence.”

“Four Charlie Lima is coming right thirty degrees, looking for traffic.”

The jetliner was approaching from above and to my right. I tipped my starboard wing, nudged the right rudder pedal and eased into a standard rate turn. My new course would take me well behind the jet. The trick would be to avoid flying through the vortexes of violent air corkscrewing down and away from his wingtips — invisible mini-tornadoes that could easily flip the Duck like a flapjack and definitely ruin my day. I turned another twenty degrees and widened the angle between us until our opposing paths were roughly parallel. By the time I turned back on my original heading, we’d be far behind him.

The 737 passed off my left wingtip at a distance of less than two miles. I could see an Eskimo’s face painted on the vertical stabilizer. Alaska Airlines. I wondered how many Eskimos were on board. My guess was zero.

I checked the answering machine in my office at the airport after landing. There were no messages. Not that I expected any. OK, that’s a lie. I had hoped that maybe Savannah would’ve called to offer a truce. But I suppose she could have just as easily called me on my cell phone. She hadn’t done that, either.

Kiddiot was asleep in the oak tree when I got home. I told him that I’d missed him and encouraged him to come down and share some quality time. He raised his head, yawned, and went back to sleep. My punishment for having abandoned him.

“He wouldn’t touch his food,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, dragging a trash bag out her back door. “I’m telling you, that is one persnickety cat.”

I took the bag from her despite her insistence that she was perfectly capable of taking out her own garbage and deposited it in a can out in the alley.

“By the way, somebody else came by looking for you,” she said when I walked back into the yard through the gate. “Not the hunky bill collector, either.”

“Who was it?”

“I didn’t ask. But I’ll tell you one thing: whoever he was, he was no fan of yours. Some piece of work, this schmuck. He wanted to know where you were. Tells me he’s your friend. So I say to him, ‘If you’re his friend, you must know where he is. You don’t gotta ask me.’ Then he gives me this look, like Paul Muni in Scarface, you know, the original, before the remake, the one with — what the blazes is his name?”

“Al Pacino?”

“Al Pacino — always screaming! Every movie like a human steam whistle, this man. OK, Mr. Top of Your Lungs, we know your vocal cords work. What else did you get for Hanukkah? Paul Muni never had to raise his voice. Not once. Now, there was an actor. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: his name wasn’t Muni. It was Meier — Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund. And I don’t have to tell you what kind of name that is. That’s right. Paul Muni was Hebrew! Lauren Bacall, too, and Kirk Douglas. And William Shatner! Not to mention Mr. Spock.”

“Not to change the subject, Mrs. Schmulowitz, but could we please go back to the schmuck who came to see me?”

“The schmuck. Right. So anyway, again he asks me, ‘Where is he?’ Meaning you. So I tell him, ‘Listen, buster brown, if you don’t get off my porch in the next five seconds, I’m calling the cops.’ He gives me that look again, like I’m supposed to be afraid, then turns around and leaves. A real shtik fleish mit tzvei eigen, that one.”

The man she described was dusky, five-foot-ten, maybe taller, 180 pounds or so.

“Built like a wide receiver,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said.

He wore sunglasses, blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt, untucked, and a yellow ball cap with the logo of a cow on it.

“You sure it was a cow?”