"Sorry," I say. "Didn't know you had company."

"I don't have company. Not exactly."

She waves me in and signals me to keep my voice low. The small living room is lit as brightly as a TV studio, which evidently it is. She directs me to a corner and whispers, "I'll just be a sec."

Janet slips on the sunglasses and runs a hand through her hair. Then she steps into the lights and, cocking one hip, squares to face a video camera no larger than a pencil sharpener. The camera is centered on a coffee table next to a personal computer. Lines of words appear in staggered bursts on the screen, but I'm not close enough to read them.

Janet bends over the keyboard and punches out a message to her cybervisitor. Straightening, she announces, "Larry, you're still under arrest, so don't try anything funny. Call me back in twenty."

Once more she taps the keyboard and the screen goes black. Then she steps around the aluminum tripod racks on which the hot photo lights are mounted and jerks the plug from the wall. She swipes the shades off her face and tosses them on the coffee table.

"Wanna Bud?" she asks me.

"Sure."

"Or something stronger?"

"Whatever you're drinking is fine."

We move to the kitchen, where the temperature is at least fifteen degrees cooler. Janet hands me her last beer and pops opens a cola for herself.

"See, it's Meter Maid-Cam," she says. "You know about this stuff? You on the Net? How it happened, I was sorta between jobs and this girlfriend a mine, about my age, tells me I can make real good money just by... well, she strips, you know, all the way down to her birthday suit. Myself, I stop with my undies. Anyhow, my girlfriend helped set it all up, got me my own Web site and 900 number and so forth. Her deal is Convent-Cam, she and three other girls dress up as Dominican nuns. You mighta read about 'em in Salon." Janet tilts the Coke for a long drink.

"The meter maid theme is good," I say supportively.

Janet nods. "It was my idea. Because most guys got a thing for lady cops. Don't you?"

"I try not to sleep with authority figures."

"I bet you could." Janet's tone is clinical, not suggestive. "Anyhow, you probably think it's pretty sleazy, the whole setup."

"I think it's none of my business."

"Four bucks a minute, Jack, that's what these gomers pay me to give 'em a 'parking ticket.'"

"In your bra and panties."

"Yeah, but still... "

"It's good money," I agree.

"This guy Larry"-Janet, cutting her eyes toward the living room-"he likes me to write him up for double-parking his timber rig in front of a massage parlor. That's his secret fantasy, I guess. He's calling all the way from Fairbanks, Alaska. Now, ask me do I care if he's whacking off in Fairbanks, Alaska, while he's staring at me in my underpanties on his PC? Not really, Jack. For four bucks a minute he can tie his cock in a knot and clobber a moose with it, far as I'm concerned."

"Don't give him any ideas."

Janet laughs. "I try not to think about what's going on at the other end, but half these guys, they do a play-by-play. I guess they learn to type with one hand or somethin'. Hey, you're not drinkin' that beer."

"I went to your brother's funeral today," I say.

"Oh." Janet adjusts the toy holster and sits down on a stool at the counter. "I couldn't pull myself together. I got dressed up all in black and gassed the car but I couldn't make the damn thing drive to the church."

"I understand, believe me. You want a review?"

"Just tell me Cleo didn't sing."

"I'm afraid she did."

Janet groans and slaps her hands to her cheeks.

"Not that 'Me' song!"

"It's probably best you weren't there."

"Jimmy woulda puked. Don't tell me any more, 'kay?" Janet looks up at the wall clock.

I say, "The reason I stopped by-"

This is the ball game. Without Jimmy's sister I'm done. I'll never get the newspaper to go after the story.

"-it's about the autopsy," I say. "Are you going to pursue it? Do you want to?"

"How? I don't have enough to take to the cops." Janet shakes her head. "Anyways, I wouldn't know where to start."

"I do."

Her smile is grateful but sad. "You know, I haven't slept a night since he died. I can't believe it happened the way they said it did. Fact, I can't believe a word that greedy no-talent twat says."

"Think she murdered him?"

"Well, somethin's not right," Janet says quietly. "I honestly don't know. You're the reporter, what do you think?"

"Did your brother have any money?"

"Any money left, you mean. Sure he did. Even in the bad old days Jimmy was pretty sharp-whatever he blew on dope, he'd make sure to send the same amount to Smith Barney. For a junkie my brother was very disciplined. That's how come he could afford a place in the islands."

"Speaking of which, you wanna go?"

"Right." Janet, with a sarcastic sniff.

In the living room, the computer clicks to life and beeps out a greeting.

"Shit," she mutters. "My lonely lumberjack."

"The Bahamas. You and me," I say. "We'll talk to the cops who investigated Jimmy's drowning."

"You serious?"

Behind her, the PC keeps beeping entreatingly.

"Jack, I can't afford a trip to the islands."

"Neither can I," I say lightly, "but young Race Maggad easily can."

"Who's that? "Janet asks.

"Please go with me. It won't cost you a dime. The newspaper will pay for everything." I'm not trying to sound important so much as convince myself that I can pull this off. For obvious reasons, the obituary beat doesn't come with an expense account.

"How about it?" I ask Janet Thrush.

"Damn, you are serious."

After the fifth beep, she rises to attend to her caller.

"Please," I say. "If I go alone, they'll just blow me off. They've never even heard of my newspaper in Nassau. But you're his sister, they've got to talk to you."

"Doesn't mean they gotta tell the truth."

"Sometimes you can learn more from a lie. Think about it, and call me later."

"Might be late. After Larry I've got Doctor Dennis logging on from Ann Arbor and then there's Postal Paul from Salt Lake. My very first Mormon."

"I'll be up," I say.

As I'm backing the car out of the driveway, the camera lights flare on in Janet Thrush's living room. The drapes are lined so there's nothing to see but a hot white glow around the margins of the windows. From inside the house, though, I hear the beat of some jazzy music, accompaniment to the dance of the modern meter maid.

My mother knows when my father died but she won't tell.

"What does it matter? Gone is gone," my mother says.

I'd like to know when my father died in order to avoid dying at the same age, which is my deepest fear. My mother disapproves of this obsession and therefore refuses to provide useful clues about Jack Tagger Sr., who stomped out the door when I was only three and never returned.

"How did he die?" I've asked her many times.

"Not of a heredity disease, I can assure you," she usually says. "So stop this ridiculous fretting."

My mother kept only one photograph in which my father appears. He is tall and sandy-haired and bare-chested and, to my eye, radiantly healthy. In the picture he has a tanned arm slung around my mother's shoulders. They are squinting into the afternoon sunlight-this was on a beach in Clearwater, where my parents lived at the time. I am in the photograph, too, sleeping soundly in a stroller to my father's right.

Once I asked my mother what my father did for a living, and she replied, "Not much. That was the problem." In the photo I would guess his age to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. That means if he were alive today he'd be at least sixty-eight and possibly as old as seventy-three. But he's not alive-on this point my mother wouldn't lie.

After Jack Sr. skipped out, our lives moved briskly along. My mother worked long hours as a legal secretary but she always made time for me, and a social life. Although she seriously dated several men, she didn't remarry until after I'd finished high school. I went off to college, fell into the newspaper business and never thought much about my father until many years later, when I got demoted to the obituary beat at the Union-Register. It was then I started worrying unhealthily about mortality; my own, in particular. So I phoned my mother in Naples (where she and my stepfather retired for the golfing opportunities) and asked if my father was still alive.

"No," she said evenly.

"When did he die?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Just curious," I told her.

"I'm not sure when it was exactly, Jack."

"Mom, please. Think."

"It's not important. Gone is gone."

"How did it happen? Was it something congenital?"

"For heaven's sake, don't you think I'd tell you if it was," my mother said. "Now let's drop the subject, please. It happened a long time ago."

"But, Mom-"

"Jack!"

A long time ago. That clinched it. When my mother says "a long time ago," she means at least twenty years-which by my calculations would have made my father no older than fifty-three when he died, and possibly as young as... well, that's the gut-gnawing, ball-clenching question.

Was he thirty-five? Forty? Forty-six?

One time I came out and asked my mother: "Was he older or younger than I am when he died?"

"Don't be morbid," she scolded.

"Come on, Mom. Older or younger than me?"

Younger is what I wanted to hear her say, because that meant I was out of the woods. I'd skated through the year of doom.

"What difference does it make, Jack? When God calls us, we go. Obviously your father got the call."

"He was in his forties, wasn't he? He was exactly my age and you're afraid to tell me!"

"This job isn't good for you, Jack. Maybe you should try something lighter, like a dining-out column?"

Not knowing the specifics of my father's death keeps me up some nights. Whenever I speak to my mother I find myself prying a little more, which explains why she doesn't call so often.

"Just tell me," I asked her recently, "was it natural causes?"

"Of course," she replied soothingly. "Death is always natural."

It was a monologue I'd heard before.

"If a man falls off a twenty-story building," my mother said, "it's only natural he should die. Same thing if he lies down on the railroad tracks in front of a speeding train. Or a bolt of lightning strikes him on the thirteenth fairway-"

"Okay, I get your point."

"The heart seizes up, the lungs puddle, the brain shuts down. End of story."

"Sheer poetry, Mom. May I borrow that for your eulogy?"

Tonight, waiting for Janet Thrush to call, I impulsively decide to try again. My mother picks up on the first ring.