“This is the case that Jake is working on.” It was not a question.

I answered, “He’s a police lieutenant. I think he keeps tabs on a lot of cases.”

Lisa sighed.

I waited for her to say more, but to my relief she actually let it go. I smiled at her. “Thanks, by the way. You were great with her.”

She preened a little. “I was, wasn’t I?”

We finished lunch and I split for the bookstore so Natalie could have the rest of the day off.

“The cat was in here again,” she informed me accusingly, as I glanced through the morning’s receipts.

“Was he? Did you recommend Lilian Jackson Braun? She should be right up his alley.” I glanced up. “No pun intended.”

She was not amused. Glaring at me, she said, “I cannot believe how hard-hearted you are.”

“Believe it,” I said. I checked my watch. “Aren’t you supposed to be meeting Warren in twenty minutes?”

She went.

I spent the rest of the afternoon refreshing my knowledge of what booksellers actually did -- sleuthing turned out not to be part of the job description -- and trying to decide if it was worth calling Jake over anything I’d discovered talking to Nina Hawthorne.

Since I’d already decided I wasn’t going to pursue the investigation, it shouldn’t have been much of a decision, but reading the biography on Paul Kane the night before had unwillingly revived my interest in the case.

Or maybe I was just grasping for something -- anything -- to take my mind off my own problems.

Guy had not called. I wondered just how much support from his friends Peter Verlane required? But I knew -- or at least, I thought I knew -- that Guy’s withdrawal probably had more to do with me than Verlane.

Luckily the afternoon was busy, and I hadn’t time to brood. By the time I pulled the ornate security gate closed and locked the front door, I was beat. I’d have liked nothing more than to get takeout from someplace and watch one of my favorite flicks from my collection of pirate movies, but I remembered that Partners in Crime was meeting that night.

I went back downstairs and assembled the chairs in a circle, set up the coffee machine, and hunted up extra red pencils. I finished off the orange-pineapple juice while I glanced through the newspaper.

Porter Jones’s murder was already off the front page, which probably said more about his noncelebrity status than the effort LAPD was making to solve the case. There didn’t appear to be much headway in the investigation since Jake and I had last spoken on Friday night.

Friday night. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

* * * * *

Detective Paul Chan, Jake’s former partner in homicide investigation, was the first of the Partners in Crime group to arrive.

Chan was middle-aged and putting on weight. He smelled of cigarettes as he set down a couple of packages of Oreo cookies on the counter, and I deduced his latest effort to quit smoking had crashed and burned.

“I’m thinking of self-publishing,” he informed me.

Two packages of Oreos? What was Chan thinking? Golden Oreos did not count as a second selection. I could hear the womenfolk bitching now. And he hadn’t brought any cream or milk. I’d have to supply that again -- along with the sugar and paper plates and cups and napkins. Did these people think I was made of money?

I said, “Ah. Did you hear back from --?”

“I’ve heard back from everyone in New York publishing,” he said. “What it gets down to is nobody’s interested in a book about what real police work is like.”

Well, no. Because it was apparently dull as ditchwater. At least the way Chan wrote it. I said, “Well, self-publishing is one option. Or you could try rewriting --”

But he was already on another track. “I saw Jake the other day.” His brown eyes met mine. “He said he’d talked to you.”

I didn’t quite understand his intent expression. “Yeah,” I said vaguely.

“He said you were on the scene when that Laurel Canyon homicide went down.”

“I’m lucky that way,” I said.

“So are you two square again?”

I halted, mid-ripping open the cookies, and stared at him. “Well, he’s pretty square,” I said. “I’m just a rectangular guy.” With latent triangular tendencies.

Chan said painstakingly, “I mean…are you two okay again?” Adding quickly and uncomfortably, “Friends?”

For an instant I didn’t have an answer. My mind was totally blown by the news that Jake had apparently confided -- no, that couldn’t be right. Jake had apparently been bothered enough by our falling-out that he’d let Chan see it. And Chan must have deduced…or Jake must have said…

Chan must have noticed and maybe drawn some weird conclusion.

Because…

Because anything else was…not even in the realm of possibility, right?

So why was I standing there feeling sort of warm and…utterly idiotic? Because Jake had apparently been sorry enough to lose my friendship that he’d let his partner know? Pathetic was what this was.

But I said gruffly, “Yeah, we’re okay.”

“That’s good,” Chan said, more uncomfortable by the minute. “So what do you think of Alonzo?”

“I think he’s a freaking moron.”

“He’s not a moron,” Chan said soberly. “He’s a little rough around the edges, but he’s got good instincts.”

“I don’t know about that. He was sizing me up for a pair of bracelets not too long ago. I may still be high on his hit parade for all I know.”

Chan said easily, “He probably just sensed you were hiding something.”

I stared at him, but he didn’t seem to realize what he’d just admitted to knowing.

“Anyway,” he said, flipping through the copies of his story, “Jake’s staying involved on this one. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

I said slowly, “Do you think Jake would try to influence the outcome of an investigation to protect a friend?”

Chan stared at me. “You mean if the friend was guilty?”

“I’m just talking theoretical.”

“You know better than that,” he said scornfully, and went back to sorting through his papers.

I wanted to ask him if he had any ideas about the case, but Jean and Ted Finch arrived at that moment.

Jean was jubilant. “We did it! We’ve got an agent!” she crowed, waving a copy of an e-mail.

“We haven’t signed yet,” Ted corrected quickly, “but we’ve got an offer for representation.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

Jean and Ted had been writing and rewriting their ghastly first novel Murder, He Mimed for as long as I’d been hosting the group. There were many things I loathed about Murder, He Mimed, but my number one objection was that their main character, a gay gossip columnist by the name of Avery Oxford, bore an unsettling resemblance to me.

I seemed to be the only person who saw it, though. The one time I’d suggested it to the group, everyone had burst out laughing. The fact that Avery was thirty-two, had black hair, blue eyes, a cop friend by the name of Jack O’Reilly, and a penchant for getting involved in murder investigations was apparently just a coincidence. For four years I’d lived in dread of the Finches finishing that damn book, and now not only had they finished it, they’d apparently tracked down the only literary agent on the planet demented enough to want to represent it.

Jean -- reading my response correctly -- glowered at me. “No, we are not kidding. It’s a wonderful book, and now that we have an agent, I know we’ll sell it to one of the big publishers!”

Ted beamed at her fondly. “What we’re really hoping,” he admitted, “is that maybe we’ll have the same luck as you, Adrien, and someone will option our book for the movies!”