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was still standing. There was no fire, no hazy smoke blotting out a blood-red sun, no siege tower breaching the front wall. It was dark and cool and pleasant, the way it gets at twilight just as the sun settles beneath the horizon. Hatcher sat in the same light blue Titan Securities Thunderbird and watched me pull into the drive and park. He came over. He didn’t look too worried.
    I said, “Everything all right?”
    “She phone you about the call?”
    “Seemed pretty upset.”
    “Yeah. Well.” He hacked up something thick and phlegmy and spit it at the bushes. Sinus.
    I said, “You don’t act like anything out of the ordinary has happened.”
    He patted his jacket below his left arm. “Anything out of the ordinary comes around here, I’ll give it some of this.”
    “Wow,” I said. “I’m surprised she bothered to call me with you out here.”
    Hatcher snorted and went back to the T-bird. “You’ll see. You’re around here enough, you’ll see.”
    The voice of experience.
    I walked over to the front door, rang the bell twice, and waited. In a little bit, Sheila Warren’s voice came from behind the door. “Who’s there?”
    “Elvis Cole.”
    The locks were thrown and the door opened. She was wearing a silver satin nightgown that looked like it had been poured over her body and silver high-heeled sandals. Her eyes were pink and puffy and her mascara had run and been wiped away and not fixed. She was holding a handkerchief with dark blue smudges on it. The mascara. She said, “Thank God it’s you. We’ve been terrified.”
    I shrugged toward the front gate. “Not much is going to get past Wyatt Earp.”
    “He could’ve been clubbed.”
    Some things you can’t argue. I went in past her, watched her lock the door, then followed her back through the house. She walked with a slight lean to the right as if the floor wasn’t quite level, and she cut too short through the doorways, brushing her inside shoulder. “Who’s home?” I said.
    “Just myself and Mimi. Mimi’s in the back.”
    She led me to the den. The bar was in the den.
    “Tell me about the call.”
    “I thought it was Tammy. Tammy’s my girlfriend. We play tennis, we go to movies, like that. But it was a man.” There was a capless bottle of Bombay gin and a short heavy glass with a couple of melting ice cubes in it sitting on the bar. She picked up the glass andfinished what was left, and said, “Would you like something to drink?”
    “You got a Falstaff?” I walked over to the big French doors that open out to the rear, and looked behind the drapes. Each door was locked and secure.
    “What’s that?” she said.
    “This beer they brew in Tumwater, Washington.”
    “All we have are Japanese beers.” Her voice took on an edge when she said it.
    “That’ll be fine.”
    She went behind the bar, put more ice in her glass, and glugged in some of the gin. That brought the Bombay down about to the halfway point. The bottle cap was sitting in an ashtray at the end of the bar. A strip of bright clean Bonded paper was lying beside it. The Bombay had been full when she’d started. She disappeared down behind the bar for a little bit, then stood up with a bottle of Asahi. There was a tight smile on her face and a smear of mascara on her left cheek like a bruise. “Did I tell you that I find you quite attractive?”
    “It was the first thing you said to me.”
    “Well, I do.”
    “Everyone says I look like John Cassavetes.”
    “Do they?”
    “I think I look like Joe Isuzu.”
    She cocked her hips and her head and rested her drink along her jawline, posing. She still hadn’t given me the beer. “I think you look like Joe Theismann,” she said. “Do you know who Joe Theismann is?”
    “Sure. Used to quarterback for the Redskins.”
    She gave me a giggle. “No, you silly. Joe Theismann is married to Cathy Lee Crosby.”
    “Oh. That Joe Theismann.”
    She opened the Asahi, put a paper coaster that said New Asia Hotels on the