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was, walking along the sidewalk in that way he did, in a hurry, off”—she let out that faint laugh again—“off to see someone, no doubt.”
    “When was this?”
    “Let me think.” She thought. “Friday, last week.”
    “Before you came to see me, then.”
    “Of course.”
    “You’re sure it was him?”
    “Oh, yes, I’m sure.”
    “You didn’t try to talk to him?”
    “He was gone before I could think what to do. I suppose I could have told the driver to turn the taxi around, but the street was crowded—you know what San Francisco is like—and I didn’t think there’d be much hope of catching him. Besides, I was sort of numb and felt paralyzed.”
    “From the shock?”
    “No, the surprise. Nothing Nico did could ever shock me, really.”
    “Even coming back from the dead?”
    “Even coming back from the dead.”
    At a distance, across the greensward, a horseman appeared, going at a fast clip. He raced along for a little way, then slowed up and disappeared under the trees. “That was Dick,” she said, “riding Spitfire, his favorite.”
    “How many horses has he got?”
    “I don’t really know. Quite a few. They keep him occupied.” I glanced at her and saw her mouth tighten at the corner. “He does his best, you know,” she said, in a tone of weary candor. “It’s not easy, being married to money, though of course everyone thinks otherwise.”
    “ Did he know about you and Peterson?” I asked.
    “I told you, I can’t say. Dick keeps things to himself. I hardly ever know what he’s thinking, what he’s aware of.”
    We had reached the trees. The path veered off to the left, but instead of following it, Clare took me by the elbow and led me forward, into the copse, I guess you’d call it; it took a spot like Langrishe Lodge to get me trawling through my vocabulary for the right words for things. The ground underfoot was dry and dusty. Above us the trees made a parched, muttering sound—thinking of their native land, I supposed, where the air, it’s said, is ever damp and the rain falls with the lightness of something being remembered.
    “Tell me about you and Peterson,” I said.
    She was watching the uneven ground, stepping over it with care.
    “There’s so little to tell,” she said. “The fact is, I’d almost forgotten him. I mean, I’d almost stopped remembering him, or missing him. There wasn’t very much between us when he was alive—when we were together, that is.”
    “Where did you meet?”
    “I told you—the Cahuilla Club. Then I saw him again, a few weeks later, in Acapulco. That was when”—again that faint rush of blood to her cheeks—“well, you know.”
    I didn’t know, but I could guess. “Why Acapulco?”
    “Why not? It’s one of those places one goes to. Nico’s kind of place.”
    “Not yours?”
    She shrugged. “Few places are my kind of place, Mr. Marlowe. I bore easily.”
    “Still, one goes there.” I tried to keep the sourness out of my voice but didn’t succeed.
    “You mustn’t despise me, you know,” she said, trying to make it sound playful.
    For a moment I felt slightly woozy, like you do when you’re young and a girl says something that makes you think she’s interested in you. I pictured her down there in Mexico, on the beach, in a one-piece bathing suit, reclining in a deck chair under an umbrella with a book, and Peterson walking by and stopping, pretending to be surprised to see her, and offering to fetch her something tall and cool from the fellow in the sombrero selling drinks from a shack under the palms up behind the beach. And at that moment, as we stepped out on the far side of the trees, as if my thoughts had conjured it, there was the ocean, with long, lazy waves rolling in, and the sandpipers scurrying, and a smokestack off on the horizon trailing behind it a motionless plume of white vapor. Clare Cavendish sighed and, seeming hardly aware that she was doing it, linked her arm in mine. “Oh, Lord,” she said,