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I don’t gamble,” the sawdust man said.
    “You probably shouldn’t, Ted,” the white-haired man said.
    The sawdust man could have said, “Well, at least my boat isn’t made out of plastic, ” but he didn’t. He just filed it away. And took a sip of his free beer.
    “And there was the guy in the gas station in Barstow,” a fourth man said, to bring it back around. “The gas station guy also verified the time line. Tell him about that.”
    “I believe you just did, Ev,” the pink coat man said and traded a look with the white-haired man.
    “What was his lawyer like?” Jimmy said.
    “Harry Turner,” the white-haired man said.
    Jimmy waited.
    “You don’t know Harry Turner?”
    “He’s too young,” the pink coat man said.
    “I’ve heard of him,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t think he—”
    “He didn’t. ” It was the white-haired man. “Harry Turner was behind the scenes. But everybody who knew anything knew Harry Turner was running Jack’s defense. Well, Jack was running it but he had sense enough to know to go to Harry. But up front was . . . The guy at the table in the courtroom was . . . What was his name?”
    “Upland. Or Overland,” the sawdust man said.
    “Harry Turner never lost a case,” the pink coat man said.
    “Still hasn’t,” the white-haired man said with a harsh little laugh.
    “He’s retired now,” one of them said.
    “Yeah, retired, ” the white-haired man said.
    A silence rose up. They all knew something that Jimmy didn’t know. Maybe someone would say it out loud.
    “Up church, ” one of the women said. None of the wives had said anything until now, just sipped their G&Ts and traded looks while the men talked.
    The men nodded. Up church.
    And then things got too quiet again.
    “None of you thought Jack Kantke did it,” Jimmy said.
    “Not then,” the pink coat man said. “Nobody could believe it.”
    “And now?”
    There was a long moment.
    “Well, there’s a system, isn’t there?” the white-haired man said.
    The woman in the poppy-colored dress took her sunglasses off. She smiled at Jimmy, a smile not connected to anything in the scene but which now made it about her. Her hair still had life to it and whoever had done the work around her eyes had The Touch. She knew what he was thinking and enjoyed it.
    “So,” Jimmy said, with a look that included all three women, “any of you in The Jolly Girls?”
    On the microfiche at the newspaper library there was a sidebar on Elaine Kantke and her best friends. More importantly, a picture. Four vivacious, frisky babes at the selfsame Yacht Club bar, four of them on four stools, their hips stuck out.
    That was what they called themselves, “The Jolly Girls.”
    The woman in the poppy dress was quick and apparently spoke for all of them.
    “No.”

    Jimmy stood looking down into the water beside a black-bottom pool in a spectacular backyard in Palos Verdes, a bluff overlooking the battered green Pacific.
    “You’re early,” a voice behind him said.
    Jimmy turned.
    Vivian Goreck approached with a professional smile. She was another striking woman in her fifties. She didn’t offer her hand, was from a time just before that. She wore a print dress, bright, tropical.
    “You’re the same color as the wall behind you,” Jimmy said.
    “All part of the plan,” she said brightly. “Like a spider. Did you look inside?”
    “Nope,” Jimmy said.
    She stepped back slightly and put a new smile on her face and he went where she wanted him to go.
    The house was empty, high ceilings, blond floors, a lot of glass, Moderne. A man had lived here, alone, Jimmy could tell that right away. If a woman had lived here anything more than overnight she would have found something to take away at least some of the edge, to get the willful solitariness out of the air. A woman who cared about you, if you wanted her, alone was enough to do it.
    There was an open kitchen with a pair of chrome sinks sunk in granite. Jimmy turned on the