"We're having a party in that apartment," he says, waving his handkerchief at the door. "You know?" He looks at me levelly. "Maybe you'd like to join us."

"No, no." I back myself nearly to the mailboxes, my elbow hitting one metal box hard.

"Sorry," he says evenly, with a shrug. "I thought you were ... someone else."

"Someone else?"

"Never mind." He shakes his head. "I got it wrong."

He offers a tilted head and a grin, and then I watch as he opens the door, disappearing inside.

It is at this moment that I realize I am smoking so deeply my throat feels raw, thick with tar. By the time I get to my car, I have finished the cigarette and feel my stomach turn. There is this sense that the closer I come the more things slip away.

I sit in front of the wheel for maybe fifteen minutes, trying to explain things to myself. Edie. Joe Avalon. Alice. What kind of sticky web connects these three? I drive around the block a half dozen times. Then I park back in the lot and get out of the car again, not sure what I am going to do.

I find myself approaching Apartment 5 again with a sick feeling in my stomach I decide to walk behind the building into the wide alley. Overcome by the mingling smells of ripe garbage and heavy jasmine, I put my hand over my nose. There is a white apartment number painted on each overflowing trash can, and I quickly locate Number 5. There is one small window facing the alley. I walk over to it, conscious of every small tap and scuffle my shoes make. I peer in between the shutter slats, seemingly drunk on my own sense of invisibility. I can't see much, but I can see this.

I can see Edie, her whipped cream hair piled high on top of her head, sitting on the edge of a bathtub wearing a half-slip and stockings. Her hands cover her face, but I know it is her.

At first I think she has a scarf tied jauntily around her upper arm.

And then, feeling foolish, I realize.

This, of course, is what could bring together a vulnerable Pasadena housewife and a Los Angeles shark. If nothing else, this. If there's a way to describe it, it's like the world, once sealed so tight and exact, has fallen open-no, been cracked open, and inside, inside ...

I am ready to tell him, to tell Bill. To tell him at least what I have seen, if not the lengths I've gone to see it.

Even if I don't know what the clues point to, the clues themselves are troubling enough. Joe Avalon in his home, his bedroom. Edie Beauvais. G.o.d, does Charlie know? Shouldn't Charlie know? I tell myself it is Bill's job to string clues like this together. I can, as tenderly as possible, give him the clues, and he can see what they add up to. As hard as it will be for him to hear, I have to tell.

That night, Alice suggests an evening out at a dark-walled Latin dance club.

At first, I decline her invitation. But, knowing how hard it is to get Bill alone anymore and knowing Alice will be the one dancing while Bill will mostly sit and watch, nursing one watery drink for the entire evening, I decide to go.

As I sit there with him in the curved booth, however, I am frozen. How do I say these things to him? I try to imagine how he would tell me.

"Sis," he says, head turned, hand lightly on my forearm. I can't look into those eyes. I look down instead at the slightly dented knuckles on his cop hands. When he was on the beat, they'd often be grated raw across the joints from rough arrests, from holding men down while his partner cuffed them, from climbing fire escapes and breaking up bar fights and dragging drunks through cracked doorways.

His hands are smoother now but still studded with small, healed-over tears, flecks of white from old scars, old stories mapped onto him, some stories he won't tell even me.

His hand rests on my arm. "Sis."

"Yes." I manage a sidelong glance at his sharp, focused eyes.

"How are things?"

"Fine, Bill."

'You like this Standish guy, huh?" The familiar strain to sound casual. Even after all these months, Bill still turns away, teeth clenched, when he sees Mike with his hand on me.

"He's fine. That's all. You know." This is what we do.

He shrugs a little, softening. "Well, Alice says he's okay, so."

"She should know," I say. I have to do it now. Now.

As if on cue, Alice flits by on the dance floor, bottle green dress throbbing, a man with a pencil-thin mustache leading, but just barely.

"Doesn't that bother you?" I say. "Her dancing with other men?"

"No, I like it," he blurts out, eyes fixed on her until she slips out of sight. "I mean, she enjoys it," he quickly adds with a shy smile. "I'm no match. I can't keep up with her."

His eyes tracing her, sparking with energy. No I like it. This is my wife. Look at her. Christ would you look.

Is there no end to the devotion? What dark corners would it furrow around and where would it end? What are its limits?

"You know what Charlie said to me," Bill says. "He said, Billy, you couldn't have dreamed up a wife like that."

"Yes, Bill." I steal another look, and I see he's glowing. He's nearly red-faced with-what is it? Pride.

"She's very special, Bill," I add. A sharp pain, my own nails into the heel of my own hand. What am I waiting for?

"I remember, on our honeymoon ..."

He can't possibly- "Sis, she was so beautiful it hurt to look. On the beach, hand over her eyes, looking out on the water and talking gentle and low, dizzy from the sun, talking about how I'd changed everything for her."

'You did." I nod.

"I must be going soft from that last drink," he apologizes with a grin, tapping his fingers lightly on my arm.

"No, I know." I'm ready. I am.

Lost in his own thoughts, he turns his face away from me suddenly. Then, "Lora, I do know she's not like the other girls. Like Margie, Kathleen ... I know she's not like them. But..."

He knows. He knows she's something foreign. Something not us. He tilts his head thoughtfully. "She's been knocked around a little. And I've seen, from the job, what that can do. I know what that can do to a girl. Even the best girls."

He looks at me, his face lit by the candle on the table. His eyes darken a little. I see it.

Then, decisively, he thrums two fingers on the table. "But it hasn't done it to her. She fought it off. And, really, isn't that something?"

He smiles, waiting for me. For my rea.s.surance.

"Bill." I can't bear it. I put my other hand on his. "I want-" Then, just as he is about to lean toward me, to hear what I am saying, he spots Alice again on the dance floor.

I can see his eyes catch, lock. I can see a change sweep hard over his face.

She is looking at him. She's dancing with some man, any man, and looking at my brother. Her eyes like black flowers. She places one white hand across her collarbone, her mouth blood red. It's so open, so bare, I can't look.

How could she know? But she does. She knows and she's watching, waiting, marking time, seeing what I will do. And then Bill...

He is rapt. He is mesmerized.

It's like this: she's on the dance floor, eyes tunneling into him, and then she's in front of him, right next to me, crushed satin skirt skimming my own legs as she presses toward him, leans down with that great gash of a mouth, and with one long finger under his upright, always upright chin, she kisses him with her whole charged little body. So close I can feel my brother shudder.

And then, before he-or I-can take a breath, she has disappeared back onto the swarming dance floor.

One hand on my stomach, I feel strangely sick.

This is when I realize there are some things you can't tell.

This is when I realize: He wouldn't tell me at all. He'd just make it go away.

I know what I have to do.

That night, desperate to forget for a while, I call Mike. I don't tell him about anything that has happened, especially not about seeing Edie Beauvais. But something in my voice, he hears something in my voice that makes him know he should say: "Tonight I'm taking you out of this burg."

When I get in his car, he smiles. "Hey, kid. We're going to the Magic Lamp." And before I know it we are on Route 66, and we keep going and we pa.s.s the Derby and the Magic Lamp and suddenly we are deep in the desert.

Light breaking up in the clouds as dusk gives over, and we're driving and we're driving and it seems we'll never get anywhere, but with my hands resting in the creamy folds of my dress and with the sound of Mike faintly tapping fingers on the leather steering wheel as the music burns off us both, as the radio sounds not tinny but like a movie score streaming over us, like in a movie, like a movie where they're driving and the red dusk envelops them in gorgeously fake rear screen projection, the car jumping not like real cars but like movie cars, carrying you away with the lush romanticism of the night, the sharp jaw-line of the leading man, the soft curls of the ingenue who has all the promise of turning siren or vamp by the night's end.

It is that evening that he tells me, after rounds and rounds of drinks in a far-off roadhouse, leaning over and whispering into my ear, the thing he couldn't bring himself to tell me before. I know, even as my own head is swirling, that he will regret telling me this. Even Mike Standish sometimes slips. But he does tell me. And the whole ride home, I feel sick with it.

He tells me this: Time was, a few months back, he couldn't believe what he'd gotten himself into. Yes, he'd had a few jaunty turns on his mattress with costume girl Alice Steele, he'd admit it. But who'd have guessed a year or so later she'd ask him to take out the schoolteacher sister of her new cop husband?

Truth was, he'd done it as a favor, but he'd never liked Alice all that much. She spooked him with her heavy eyes and the strange stories he'd heard.

He remembers seeing her once in a colored nightclub on Central Avenue. He knew why he was there. A fast detour, giving a darkmeat-loving matinee idol a guided tour of the city's murkier regions. But Alice, she was in the middle of everything, her stark white face looming out from a crowd of colored jazz musicians and one slick-faced white man puffing hard on reefer. She wore a low-cut velvet dress hanging by two long strings off her shoulders, and her mouth was like one gorgeous scar across her face. He remembers thinking she looked as though she might slide out of that dress and slither across the floor, and caught by the image, he found himself inexplicably terrified. Then, feeling embarra.s.sed and foolish, he recovered. He waved over at her, he sent her a drink.

She stared at him with eyes like bullet holes, stared at him like she'd never seen him before, and he felt his blood pulsing, the vein in his neck singing. She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.

Two hours later he had talked her into the alley and he'd had her for the fourth and last time since he'd met her, and hands so hard on her white thighs that he thought his fingers might meet right through her, he knew he could never see her again.

He did, but never like that.

The next time he saw her she was married to a cop and wore a scratchy wool suit and sensible pumps.

And her new sister was set out for him like fresh meat.

I avoid Bill all week, unable to face him. It is not until the following Sunday that I drive over to his house for a twice-postponed dinner. My chest surges as I walk in and see him sitting on the sofa with his head in his hands.

"What is it? Is Alice-"

At that moment, Alice walks into the room with a brandy. She hands it to Bill, placing her hand gently on my back.

"Did he tell you?" Alice gives me a heavy stare.

"Tell me what?" I sit down beside him and touch his arm.

"Edie Beauvais. She's dead."

"What?" I feel my voice shake. I saw her just over a week ago.

Even if she didn't see me. Bill raises his head, face flushed, and looks at me. "She killed herself with pills. Can you believe it?"

"No," I say. "I can't."

"The miscarriage and everything." Alice sighs. "I think she felt everything had turned bad for her."

"It can't be," Bill says. "Poor Charlie."

I try to figure it, try to figure this into what I saw. I want to watch Alice closely, to see what she might know. Does she know all that I do, or much more? Does she know how far Edie Beauvais had gone? Had she watched her go?

But all I can focus on is Bill's wrecked face.

"We'll go see him, Bill. We'll bring him dinner. Be with him," I say, thinking of how much Bill relies on Charlie, his only real friend. And, ever since Bill married Alice, there has been that special closeness between them, both always watching their lovely, baffling wives from the sidelines, perpetually bemused and lovestruck. Always, I realize now with a wince, always so many steps behind.

"He's gone," Alice says. "He left the, hospital and got in his car, and Bill hasn't been able to reach him."

"I was at the morgue with him," Bill mumbles, clenching the table edge with his hands, almost wringing it. "He didn't really seem to react at all. And then suddenly he bolted out of there. I tried to follow him, but he just took off. I don't know where he could be."

Sitting beside him, I place my hand on his back. He grabs my fingers, tugging at them. We sit that way for several minutes. I wonder if Bill is thinking what I am: that there might be some lesson one should draw from this, from what happened to his friend. About the price one might pay for a love so crushing and for a woman so filled with secrets.

It reminds me of a conversation I witnessed between Bill and Alice right after Edie's miscarriage. Bill had talked about how these women, they were so delicate, like those flowers that look too heavy for their stems to support, that seem to defy their very structures.

"I'd say you men are the fragile ones," Alice had replied. "Too soft for this world." When she said it, I thought she was teasing, but I could tell Bill was affected, that he found the remark surprising, penetrating. Even if he couldn't quite put his finger on why.

The look in Bill's eyes had been: She knows things. Things I can't begin to know.

As I remember it now, with my hand on Bill's shoulder, I lift my eyes to see Alice standing there, her face a hieroglyphic.

"Is Alice there, honey?"

I know it is Lois on the phone, but it is Lois even more slowed down than usual, her voice dragging by its hind legs, barely making it from her lips to my ears.

"She'll be back around eight. She's gone downtown to buy some fabric-in Chinatown, I think." I had stopped by hoping to see Bill, to console him. But he was gone, too, working late again.

"Oh, G.o.d ... for real? Is she going to be home soon?"

"Not until about eight," I repeat. "Is everything all right, Lois?"

"Don't even ask ... that creep. That son of a b.i.t.c.h. I can't even believe ... Can you ... So she's downtown, huh? She's... I'm in Culver City, I think. I don't even know."