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him all evening and suddenly she was like a skinny cat coming to get her ears scratched, was the way Dex put it. He said it put his back up right away.
    “Can I buy you a drink?” Dex said as affably as he could.
    “Don’t need you to buy me a drink.” When she spoke, Dex remembered the used sound of her voice. He suspected the harsh caress of ten thousand cigarettes. “The drinks is free, and they’re right over there.” She used the filtered king-size in her hand as a pointer.
    “Still,” he said, moving toward the bar. “What’s your pleasure?”
    “Scotch soft,” she said, not arguing. Dex is a bit of a looker himself, and not afraid to know it. There aren’t a lot of women, no matter what age, who wouldn’t like to sit across a bar from him.
    “So Rhoda, you having fun tonight?” Dex said, willing to make conversation.
    “It’s all right,” Rhoda said, looking up at him over the rim of her glass. Dex said he felt like a bug under a microscope, theway she looked at him. He said he could feel something inside himself squirm.
    He chatted with her for a while. He didn’t have anything else to do and he stood there, drink in hand, and felt her gently nudging him around until he was facing in the other direction. He was aware of it because he’d positioned himself in such a way that he had the front door in sight at all times. A habit with him. He liked to see who was coming and going. And now he did not. Now he faced the rear of the bungalow and he could see the two closed doors. The operation was so subtle that Dex felt another man might not have noticed these machinations at all. But he
is
a detective. And he was on a job.
    These are the things he told me and, of course, by the time he did, he had reason to figure he’d been right. I believed him, too. It’s been my experience that men who spent time in the trenches and came back to tell about it have a way of seeing things that others can’t. Maybe that’s how these few survived.
    Dex couldn’t remember the things Rhoda said, only that none of the words were important. What
was
important: the way her eyes pushed toward one of the closed bedroom doors every so often. The way she seemed aware of her surroundings: like that skinny stray cat. She didn’t look around, but Dex had the feeling that she was aware of everything that was going on.
    After a while—and it couldn’t have been very long, perhaps only a few minutes after he’d gone in—Wyndham came out of the room looking as though he needed a shower. He did not, Dex told me carefully, appear disheveled or in any way frightened or excited. He went back to the bar, then back to the phone, and Dex thought no more about the incident. Until later.
    Dex had a sense that, once Wyndham had rejoined the party, his date was finished with him. She stayed and chatted a bit longer but after a while, over Dex’s weak protestations that he’d get it, she made as though to get herself another drink,then faded back into the party. Dex watched her go without regret.
    He went back to observing. Dex enjoys watching people and this was a good place for it. There was a wide spectrum of people in attendance. To Dex, they seemed to represent all walks, from men in sober business suits to women in next to nothing at all. It seemed to him that, throughout the evening, he’d caught glimpses of studio heads, actors, agents and others from all branches of the entertainment industry and perhaps even representatives from local government, but it was hard to be sure about a thing like that. Men like that don’t wear signs.
    As far as Dex could see, there was a single thing that connected the group: almost to a one, they wore their entitlement and privilege like a badge. They were beautiful and affluent and careless and well fed. In the confines of these rooms it was possible to believe in a world where the county borders were not patrolled by Los Angeles policemen to keep transients out. It was possible not to think