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a way he would not have expected. He’d realized that he was looking forward to seeing Warren at his house instead of at his office.
    He found the street he was looking for, North Dromedary Road, but then strayed off it, not in any hurry, wanting to just drive for a while, to look at the surroundings, the city’s wealthiest neighborhood. The desert was still a vivid presence there, pink sand between the spacious two- or three-acre lots—vivid, but tamed. There were palm trees, paloverde trees, brilliant red bougainvillea draped over walls the color of mud. It was quiet, no other cars out. Trails led up to the boulder formations at the foot of Camelback Mountain, but no one was out walking on them. He finally got back on North Dromedary Road and began following its switchbacks up the mountainside, the road steeper and steeper, until he was almost unable to move any farther. Piles of crushed rock blocked the way in places, and slopes of crushed rock spilled off the edge, over the sheer, hundred-yard drop down the mountainside. He saw a gated driveway and wondered if that was the turnoff he was looking for, East Grandview Lane, Warren’s street. He put the parking brake on and got out of the car and took a closer look but could see nothing except extended driveway through the bronze grillwork.
    He sat in the car for a moment, frustrated. If he went farther up, there was no guarantee he would be able to turn back around—his car was a large Pontiac sedan—and eventually he decided he might have missed the turn, and so he began the difficult task of backing his way down, using the side mirror to keep the edge of the road in sight. It turned out that he had passed East Grandview Lane on his way up the mountainside. East Grandview Lane was smoothly paved. He could see what he guessed was Warren’s house beyond a curve in the road lined with perfectly spaced date palms. 4958 East Grandview Lane. He parked the car and took his briefcase and walked around the bougainvillea-covered wall to the low pale green rotunda where the front door was. Thin white columns held up the roof, whose greenness turned out to be the verdigris of weathered copper. He did not use words like verdigris. He did not look at the house, with its graceful, botany-inspired details, and think of Frank Lloyd Wright. It struck him as an unusually pleasant, understated house, a kind of ideal house he had never seen or thought of or imagined before.
    “You must be Ed Lazar,” a woman said, answering the doorbell. She was attractive, tanned, thin, her blond hair held loosely in a clip. Behind her, two black Dobermans were barking and pawing the carpeted floor. “Boys, stop it,” she said, twisting toward them, a cigarette cocked at a perfect right angle to her hip. “Down.” She looked at him again with a flat grin, a thin bar of flawless white teeth. “I’m Barbara Warren.”
    Inside, the front room was like an observation deck, its curved walls and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a protected sense of distance from the view outside, all of Phoenix stretched out beyond the palm-lined mountainside. There was the secretive hush of wealth—artwork, Navajo rugs, dark wooden furniture—everything kept clean and ordered by someone else, there for your enjoyment, there for you to use or just to look at. She showed him back into a den with a wall made of bare slate-colored rock—the actual side of Camelback Mountain—and then into a sunroom with opened windows, their iron frames painted brown. There were terra-cotta pots filled with geraniums, gardenias, jasmine. At the back of the room was a white bar shaped like a teardrop, where Barbara Warren poured him a Scotch, took his briefcase and jacket, and then showed him outside.
    Warren was sitting at a glass table by the pool beneath an umbrella, reading a paperback novel and fingering a tall blue glass beaded with condensation. The table was covered with newspapers—the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix