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Gazette, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times —an ashtray, cigarettes, a yellow pad and pen. He wore a clean white robe and espadrilles. His damp hair was slicked back after a swim in the pool. With his deep tan, the robe hanging open as he backed up his chair and stood to say hello, the impression he gave was of a man who had been everywhere and had laid out every aspect of his current life with a deliberate sense of what the options were.
    “I heard you saw Dave Rich today,” he said.
    “I met with Dave this morning.”
    “He has a good accent. Everyone loves him for that accent.”
    “He was telling me about Lee Ackerman. Your old friend, or your old nemesis. I still don’t understand the story.”
    Warren put his hand on Ed’s shoulder and led him to the glass table. “Let’s talk,” he said. “I want to talk to you about this because I think you’ll understand it from a business angle. You know the language—I don’t think most people understand the language very well. Very few do anyway. It’s boring, it doesn’t make sense to them.”
    The weather was bright and warm, and the pale water in the pool shimmered—blurry, blue lattices forming and unfolding on the surface. Ed put his Scotch down on the table, rolled up his sleeves, sat down in the shade of the umbrella. Warren lit a cigarette. They talked for almost two hours. Barbara came out periodically to freshen their drinks and would sometimes lean for a while on Warren’s chair and listen to what he was saying, silent, thoughtful. At one point, there was a clamor inside when the children came home from school. The Dobermans got out, racing around and then into the pool until Warren clapped his hands and they panted and bobbed around the glass table, shaking water from their gleaming backs. One of Warren’s daughters came to take the dogs back inside, a pretty, blond girl who said hello and did a stiff pretend curtsy, laughing, the formal gesture some sort of joke between her and her father. When she went back inside, Warren reclined further in his chair.
    “Lee Ackerman had no sense of timing,” he said. “He bought my shares at a bad time. It’s not a beauty pageant, it’s business, but everything I’ve done here is legal.”
    Ed looked out at the pool, then up and across the mountainside, the houses hanging like small fortresses out of the rock, the blue sky above them. He had finished a second and then a third Scotch. “I don’t see how anyone stays in the land business for very long,” he said. “I don’t like the way the financing works. To me, it seems like it gets very close to a Ponzi scheme sometimes.”
    “Eighteen months,” Warren said. “I like to build up a company for about eighteen months and then I like to sell it to someone else. After that, you really need someone who can manage money, someone who knows how to structure a company’s finances. I like making money, but I’m not an accountant.”
    Ed smiled. “You’re not an accountant. What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “You know what it means.”
    “No, I don’t,” Ed said, not smiling anymore.
    “I guess it means that I don’t know how you can stand doing taxes every year for some of the people you must have to work for. That’s what it means. You don’t seem like the type.”
    “It’s not so bad.”
    “It’s steady work. I understand that. Maybe I’m too much the other extreme. That’s what used to get me into trouble.”
    It had all come out in their conversation—Warren’s wayward past, the stories from a dozen years ago, twenty years ago, from when he was, for lack of a better term, a grifter. He had raised money for a concert for the blind, but the concert had never happened. He had found backers for a Broadway musical that also had never happened, though he had produced a script and a title— The Happiest Days —and billed Lucille Ball and June Allyson as the stars and hired a famous publicist, Chick Farmer, to promote it in