'It isn't just the Fulwider Building you own, is it?' I swallowed, trying to get rid of a large blockage in my throat that had no intention of going anywhere. 'You own everything.'

But Landry was shaking his head. 'Not everything. Just Los Angeles and a few surrounding areas. This version of Los Angeles, that is, complete with the occasional continuity glitch or made-up addition.'

'Bull,' I said, but I whispered the word.

'See the picture on the wall to the left of the door, Clyde?'

I glanced at it, but hardly had to; it was Washington crossing the Delaware, and it had been there since . . . well, since Hector was a pup.

Landry had taken his plastic Buck Rogers steno machine back onto his lap, and was bending over it.

'Don't do that!' I shouted, and tried to reach for him. I couldn't do it. My arms had no strength, it seemed, and I could summon no resolve. I felt lethargic, drained, as if I had lost about three pints of blood and was losing more all the time.

He rattled the keys again. Turned the machine toward me so I could read the words in the window. They read: On the wall to the left of the door leading out to Candy-Land, Our Revered Leader hangs . . . but always slightly askew. That's my way of keeping him in perspective.

I looked back at the picture. George Washington was gone, replaced by a photo of Franklin Roosevelt. F.D.R. had a grin on his face and his cigarette holder jutting upward at that angle his supporters think of as jaunty and his detractors as arrogant. The picture was hanging slightly askew.

'I don't need the laptop to do it,' he said. He sounded a little embarra.s.sed, as if I'd accused him of something. 'I can do it just by concentrating - as you saw when the numbers disappeared from your blotter - but the laptop helps. Because I'm used to writing things down, I suppose. And then editing them. In a way, editing and rewriting are the most fascinating parts of the job, because that's where the final changes - usually small but often crucial - take place and the picture really comes into focus.'

I looked back at Landry, and when I spoke, my voice was dead. 'You made me up, didn't you?'

He nodded, looking strangely ashamed, as if what he had done was something dirty.

'When?' I uttered a strange, croaky little laugh. 'Or is that the right question?'

'I don't know if it is or isn't,' he said, 'and I imagine any writer would tell you about the same. It didn't happen all at once - that much I'm sure of. It's been an ongoing process. You first showed up in Scarlet Town, but I wrote that back in 1977 and you've changed a lot since then.'

1977, I thought. A Buck Rogers year for sure. I didn't want to believe this was happening, wanted to believe it was all a dream. Oddly enough, it was the smell of his cologne that kept me from being able to do that - that familiar smell I'd never smelled in my life. How could I have? It was Aramis, a brand as unfamiliar to me as Toshiba.

But he was going on.

'You've grown a lot more complex and interesting. You were pretty one-dimensional to start with.' He cleared his throat and smiled down at his hands for a moment. 'What a p.i.s.ser for me.'

He winced a little at the anger in my voice, but made himself look up again, just the same. 'Your last book was How Like a Fallen Angel. I started that one in 1990, but it took until 1993 to finish. I've had some problems in the interim. My life has been . . . interesting.' He gave the word an ugly, bitter twist. 'Writers don't do their best work during interesting times, Clyde. Take my word for it.'

I glanced at the baggy way his hobo clothes hung on him and decided he might have a point there. 'Maybe that's why you screwed up in such a big way on this one,' I said. 'That stuff about the lottery and the forty thousand dollars was pure guff - they pay off in pesos south of the border.'

'I knew that,' he said mildly. 'I'm not saying I don't goof up from time to time - I may be a kind of G.o.d in this world, or to this world, but in my own I'm perfectly human - but when I do goof up, you and your fellow characters never know it, Clyde, because my mistakes and continuity lapses are part of your truth. No, Peoria was lying. I knew it, and I wanted you to know it.'

'Why?'

He shrugged, again looking uneasy and a little ashamed. 'To prepare you for my coming a little, I suppose. That's what all of it was for, starting with the Demmicks. I didn't want to scare you any more than I had to.'

Any private eye worth his salt has a pretty good idea when the person in the client's chair is lying and when he's telling the truth; knowing when the client is telling the truth but purposely leaving gaps is a rarer talent, and I doubt if even the geniuses among us can tap it all the time. Maybe I was only tapping it now because my brainwaves and Landry's were marching in lock-step, but I was tapping it. There was stuff he wasn't telling me. The question was whether or not I should call him on it.

What stopped me was a sudden, horrible intuition that came waltzing out of nowhere, like a ghost oozing out of the wall of a haunted house. It had to do with the Demmicks. The reason they'd been so quiet last night was because dead people don't engage in marital spats - it's one of those rules, like the one that says c.r.a.p rolls downhill, that you can pretty much count on through thick and thin. From almost the first moment I'd met him, I'd sensed there was a violent temper under George's urbane top layer, and that there might be a sharp-clawed b.i.t.c.h lurking in the shadows behind Gloria Demmick's pretty face and daffy demeanor. They were just a little too Cole Porter to be true, if you see what I mean. And now I was somehow sure that George had finally snapped and killed his wife . . . probably their yappy Welsh Corgi, as well. Gloria might be sitting propped up in the bathroom corner between the shower and the toilet right now, her face black, her eyes bulging like old dull marbles, her tongue protruding between her blue lips. The dog was lying with its head in her lap and a wire coathanger twisted around its neck, its shrill bark stilled forever. And George? Dead on the bed with Gloria's bottle of Veronals - now empty - standing beside him on the night-table. No more parties, no more jitterbugging at Al Arif, no more frothy upper-cla.s.s murder cases in Palm Desert or Beverly Glen. They were cooling off now, drawing flies, growing pale under their fashionable poolside tans.

George and Gloria Demmick, who had died inside this man's machine. Who had died inside this man's head.

'You did one lousy job of not scaring me,' I said, and immediately wondered if it would have been possible for him to do a good one. Ask yourself this: how do you get a person ready to meet G.o.d? I'll bet even Moses got a little hot under the robe when he saw that bush start to glow, and I'm nothing but a shamus who works for forty a day plus expenses.

'How Like a Fallen Angel was the Mavis Weld story. The name, Mavis Weld, is from a novel called The Little Sister By Raymond Chandler.' He looked at me with a kind of troubled uncertainty that had some small whiff of guilt in it. 'It's an hommage.' He said the first syllable so it rhymed with Rome.

'Bully for you,' I said, 'but the guy's name rings no bells.'

'Of course not. In your world - which is my version of L.A., of course - Chandler never existed. Nevertheless, I've used all sorts of names from his books in mine. The Fulwider Building is where Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe, had his office. Vernon Klein . . . Peoria Smith . . . and Clyde Umney, of course. That was the name of the lawyer in Playback.'

'And you call those things hommages?'

'That's right.'

'If you say so, but it sounds like a fancy word for plain old copying to me.' But it made me feel funny, knowing that my name had been made up by a man I'd never heard of in a world I'd never dreamed of.

Landry had the good grace to flush, but his eyes didn't drop.

'All right; perhaps I did do a little pilfering. Certainly I adopted Chandler's style for my own, but I'm hardly the first; Ross Macdonald did the same thing in the fifties and sixties, Robert Parker did it in the seventies and eighties, and the critics decked them with laurel leaves for it. Besides, Chandler learned from Hammett and Hemingway, not to mention pulp-writers like - '

I held up my hand. 'Let's skip the lit cla.s.s and get down to the bottom line. This is crazy, but - ' My eyes drifted to the picture of Roosevelt, from there they went to the eerily blank blotter, and from there they went back to the haggard face on the other side of the desk. ' - but let's say I believe it. What are you doing here? What did you come for?'

Except I already knew. I detect for a living, but the answer to that one came from my heart, not my head.

'I came for you.'

'For me.'

'Sorry, yes. I'm afraid you'll have to start thinking of your life in a new way, Clyde. As . . . well . . . a pair of shoes, let's say. You're stepping out and I'm stepping in. And once I've got the laces tied, I'm going to walk away.'

Of course. Of course he was. And I suddenly knew what I had to do . . . the only thing I could do.

Get rid of him.

I let a big smile spread across my face. A tell-me-more smile. At the same time I coiled my legs under me, getting them ready to launch me across the desk at him. Only one of us could leave this office, that much was clear. I intended to be the one.

'Oh, really?' I said. 'How fascinating. And what happens to me, Sammy? What happens to the shoeless private eye? What happens to Clyde - '

Umney, the last word was supposed to be my last name, the last word this interloping, invading thief would ever hear in his life. The minute it was out of my mouth I intended to leap. The trouble was, that telepathy business seemed to work both ways. I saw an expression of alarm dawn in his eyes, and then they slipped shut and his mouth tightened with concentration. He didn't bother with the Buck Rogers machine; I suppose he knew there was no time for it.

' "His revelations. .h.i.t me like some kind of debilitating drug," ' he said, speaking in the low but carrying tone of one who recites rather than simply speaking. ' "All the strength went out of my muscles, my legs felt like a couple of strands of al dente spaghetti, and all I could do was flop back in my chair and look at him." '

I flopped back in my chair, my legs uncoiling beneath me, unable to do anything but look at him.

'Not very good,' he said apologetically, 'but rapid composition has never been a strong point of mine.'

'You b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' I rasped weakly. 'You son of a b.i.t.c.h.'

'Yes,' he agreed. 'I suppose I am.'

'Why are you doing this? Why are you stealing my life?'

His eyes flickered with anger at that. 'Your life? You know better than that, Clyde, even if you don't want to admit it. It isn't your life at all. I made you up, starting on one rainy day in January of 1977 and continuing right up to the present time. I gave you your life, and it's mine to take away.'

'Very n.o.ble,' I sneered, 'but if G.o.d came down here right now and started yanking your life apart like bad st.i.tches in a scarf, you might find it a little easier to appreciate my point of view.'

'All right,' he said, 'I suppose you've got a point. But why argue it? Arguing with one's self is like playing solitaire chess - a fair game results in a stalemate every time. Let's just say I'm doing it because I can.'

I felt a little calmer, all of a sudden. I had been down this street before. When they got the drop on you, you had to get them talking and keep them talking. It had worked with Mavis Weld and it would work here. They said stuff like Well, I suppose it won't hurt you to know now or What harm can it do?

Mavis's version had been downright elegant: I want you to know, Umney - I want you to take the truth to h.e.l.l with you. You can pa.s.s it on to the devil over cake and coffee. It really didn't matter what they said, but if they were talking, they weren't shooting.

Always keep em talking, that was the thing. Keep em talking and just hope the cavalry would show up from somewhere.

'The question is, why do you want to?' I asked. 'It's hardly the usual thing, is it? I mean, aren't you writer types usually content to cash the checks when they come, and go about your business?'

'You're trying to keep me talking, Clyde. Aren't you?'

That hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut, but playing it down to the last card was the only choice I had. I grinned and shrugged. 'Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I really do want to know.' And there was no lie in that.

He looked unsure for a moment longer, bent over and touched the keys inside that strange plastic case (I felt cramps in my legs and gut and chest as he stroked them), then straightened up again.

'I suppose it won't hurt you to know now,' he said finally. 'After all, what harm can it do?'

'Not a bit.'

'You're a clever boy, Clyde,' he said, 'and you're perfectly right - writers very rarely plunge all the way into the worlds they've created, and when they do I think they end up doing it strictly in their heads, while their bodies vegetate in some mental asylum. Most of us are content simply to be tourists in the country of our imaginations. Certainly that was the case with me. I'm not a fast writer - composition has always been torture for me, I think I told you that - but I managed five Clyde Umney books in ten years, each more successful than the last. In 1983 I left my job as regional manager for a big insurance company and started to write full-time. I had a wife I loved, a little boy that kicked the sun out of bed every morning and put it to bed every night - that's how it seemed to me, anyway - and I didn't think life could get any better.'

He shifted in the overstuffed client's chair, moved his hand, and I saw the cigarette burn Ardis McGill had put in the over-stuffed arm was also gone. He voiced a bitterly cold laugh.

'And I was right,' he said. 'It couldn't get any better, but it could get a whole h.e.l.l of a lot worse. And did. About three months after I started How Like a Fallen Angel, Danny - our little boy - fell out of a swing in the park and bashed his head. Cold-conked himself, in your parlance.'

A brief smile, every bit as cold and bitter as the laugh had been, crossed his face. It came and went at the speed of grief.

'He bled a lot - you've seen enough head-wounds in your time to know how they are - and it scared the c.r.a.p out of Linda, but the doctors were good and it did turn out to be only a concussion; they got him stabilized and gave him a pint of blood to make up for what he'd lost. Maybe they didn't have to - and that haunts me - but they did. The real problem wasn't with his head, you see; it was with that pint of blood. It was infected with AIDS.'

'Come again?'

'It's something you can thank your G.o.d you don't know about,' Landry said. 'It doesn't exist in your time, Clyde. It won't show up until the mid-seventies. Like Aramis cologne.'

'What does it do?'

'Eats away at your immune system until the whole thing collapses like the wonderful one-hoss shay. Then every bug circling around out there, from cancer to chicken pox, rushes in and has a party.'

'Good Christ!'

His smile came and went like a cramp. 'If you say so. AIDS is primarily a s.e.xually transmitted disease, but every now and then it pops up in the blood supply. I suppose you could say my kid won big in a very unlucky version of la lotera.'

'I'm sorry,' I said, and although I was scared to death of this thin man with the tired face, I meant it. Losing a kid to something like that . . . what could be worse? Probably something, yeah - there's always something - but you'd have to sit down and think about it, wouldn't you?

'Thanks,' he said. 'Thanks, Clyde. It went fast for him, at least. He fell out of the swing in May. The first purple blotches - Kaposi's sarcoma - showed up in time for his birthday in September. He died on March 18, 1991. And maybe he didn't suffer as much as some of them do, but he suffered. Oh yes, he suffered.'

I didn't have the slightest idea what Kaposi's sarcoma was, either, and decided I didn't want to ask. I knew more than I wanted to already.

'You can maybe understand why it slowed me down a little on your book,' he said. 'Can't you, Clyde?'

I nodded.

'I pushed on, though. Mostly because I think make-believe is a great healer. Maybe I have to believe that. I tried to get on with my life, too, but things kept going wrong with it - it was as if How Like a Fallen Angel was some kind of weird bad-luck charm that had turned me into Job. My wife went into a deep depression following Danny's death, and I was so concerned with her that I hardly noticed the red patches that had started breaking out on my legs and stomach and chest. And the itching. I knew it wasn't AIDS, and at first that was all I was concerned with. But as time went on and things got worse . . . have you ever had shingles, Clyde?'

Then he laughed and clapped the heel of his hand to his forehead in a what-a-dunce-I-am gesture before I could shake my head.

'Of course you haven't - you've never had more than a hangover. Shingles, my shamus friend, is a funny name for a terrible, chronic ailment. There's some pretty good medicine available to help alleviate the symptoms in my version of Los Angeles, but it wasn't helping me much; by the end of 1991 I was in agony. Part of it was general depression over what had happened to Danny, of course, but most of it was the agony and the itching. That would make an interesting book t.i.tle about a tortured writer, don't you think? The Agony and the Itching, or, Thomas Hardy Faces p.u.b.erty.' He voiced a harsh, distracted little laugh.

'Whatever you say, Sam.'

'I say it was a season in h.e.l.l. Of course it's easy to make light of it now, but by Thanksgiving of that year it was no joke - I was getting three hours of sleep a night, tops, and I had days when it felt like my skin was trying to crawl right off my body and run away like The Gingerbread Man. And I suppose that's why I didn't see how bad it was getting with Linda.'

I didn't know, couldn't know . . . but I did. 'She killed herself.'

He nodded. 'In March of 1992, on the anniversary of Daniel's death. Over two years ago now.'

A single tear tracked down his wrinkled, prematurely aged cheek, and I had an idea that he had gotten old in one h.e.l.l of a hurry. It was sort of awful, realizing I had been made by such a bush-league version of G.o.d, but it also explained a lot. My shortcomings, mainly.

'That's enough,' he said in a voice which was blurred with anger as well as tears. 'Get to the point, you'd say. In my time we say cut to the chase, but it comes to the same. I finished the book. On the day I discovered Linda dead in bed - the way the police are going to find Gloria Demmick later today, Clyde - I had finished one hundred and ninety pages of ma.n.u.script. I was up to the part where you fish Mavis's brother out of Lake Tahoe. I came home from the funeral three days later, fired up the word-processor, and got started right in on page one-ninety-one. Does that shock you?'

'No,' I said. I thought about asking him what a word-processor might be, then decided I didn't have to. The thing in his lap was a word-processor, of course. Had to be.

'You're in a decided minority,' Landry said. 'It shocked what few friends I had left, shocked them plenty. Linda's relatives thought I had all the emotion of a warthog. I didn't have the energy to explain that I was trying to save myself. Frog them, as Peoria would say. I grabbed my book the way a drowning man would grab a life-ring. I grabbed you, Clyde. My case of the shingles was still bad, and that slowed me down - to some extent it kept me out, or I might have gotten here sooner - but it didn't stop me. I started getting a little better - physically, at least - right around the time I finished the book. But when I had finished, I fell into what I suppose must have been my own state of depression. I went through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt such a feeling of regret . . . of loss . . . ' He looked directly at me and said, 'Does any of this make any sense to you?'

'It makes sense,' I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way.

'There were lots of pills left in the house,' he said. 'Linda and I were like the Demmicks in a lot of ways, Clyde - we really did believe in living better chemically, and a couple of times I came very close to taking a couple of double handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn't in terms of suicide, but in terms of wanting to catch up to Linda and Danny. To catch up while there was still time.'

I nodded. It was what I'd thought about Ardis McGill when, three days after we'd said toodle-oo to each other in Blondie's, I'd found her in that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the center of her forehead. Except it had been Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had accomplished the deed with a kind of flexible bullet to the brain. Of course it had been. In my world Sam Landry, this tired-looking man in the hobo's pants, was responsible for everything. The idea should have seemed crazy, and it did . . . but it was getting saner all the time.

I found I had just energy enough to swivel my chair and look out my window. What I saw somehow did not surprise me in the least: Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen solid. Cars, buses, pedestrians, all stopped dead in their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world out there, and why not? Its creator could not be bothered with animating much of it, at least for the time being; he was still caught in the whirlpool of his own pain and grief. h.e.l.l, I was lucky to still be breathing myself.

'So what happened?' I asked. 'How did you get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do you mind?'

'No, I don't mind. I can't give you a very good answer, though, because I don't exactly know. All I know for sure is that every time I thought of the pills, I thought of you. What I thought specifically was, "Clyde Umney would never do this, and he'd sneer at anyone who did. He'd call it the coward's way out." '

I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible ailment in the face - Vernon's cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man's son - I might make an exception, but take the pipe just because you were depressed? That was for pansies.

'Then I thought, "But that's Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a figment of your imagination." That idea wouldn't live, though. It's the dumbbells of the world - politicians and lawyers, for the most part - who sneer at imagination, and think a thing isn't real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or feel it or f.u.c.k it. They think that way because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I knew better. h.e.l.l, I ought to - my imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or so.

'At the same time, I knew I couldn't go on living in what I used to think of as `the real world,' by which I suppose we all mean `the only world.' That's when I started to realize there was only one place left where I could go and feel welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here - Los Angeles, in 1930-something. And the person was you.'

I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn't turn around.

Partly because I was afraid to.