NINE.

BY AN ALLEY I ARRIVED AT THE BACK OF HUTCH Hutchison's house. A gate beside the garage opened to a walkway that led to a brick patio.

Glazed terra-cotta urns and bowls held red and purple cyclamens, but the bleach of fog and the stain of night left the blooms as colorless as barnacle sh.e.l.ls.

On a gla.s.s-topped wrought-iron table, I put down my wallet and the one I had taken off the agitated man with the flashlight.

Toe to heel, I pried off my sand-caked sneakers. I stripped off my socks and then my blue jeans, which were crusted with enough sand to fill a large hourgla.s.s. With a garden hose, I washed my feet.

Mrs. Nicely came three days a week to clean, as well as to do the laundry and ironing. Her surname suited her even better than my first name suited me, and I did not want to cause her extra work.

The back door was locked. Among the cyclamens in the nearest bowl, in a Ziploc pill bag, Hutch kept a spare key. After retrieving the two wallets, I let myself into the house.

Fragrant with the cinnamony aroma of chocolate-pumpkin cookies that I had baked earlier in the afternoon, brightened only by the golden glow of string lights hidden in the recessed toe kick of the cabinets, the kitchen waited warm and welcoming.

I am no theologian. I would not be surprised, however, if Heaven proved to be a cozy kitchen, where delicious treats appeared in the oven and in the refrigerator whenever you wanted them, and where the cupboards were full of good books.

After blotting my wet feet on the small rug, I s.n.a.t.c.hed a cookie from the plate that stood on the center island, and I headed for the door to the downstairs hall.

I intended to go upstairs with the stealth of a Ninja a.s.sa.s.sin, quickly shower, dress my head wound if it didn't need st.i.tches, and put on fresh clothes.

When I was halfway across the kitchen, the swinging door opened. Hutch switched on the overhead lights, stork-walked into the room, and said, "I just saw a tsunami many hundreds of feet high."

"Really?" I asked. "Just now?"

"It was in a movie."

"That's a relief, sir."

"Uncommonly beautiful."

"Really?"

"Not the wave, the woman."

"Woman, sir?"

"Tea Leoni. She was in the movie."

He stilted to the island and took a cookie from the plate.

"Son, did you know there's an asteroid on a collision course with the earth?"

"It's always something," I said.

"If a large asteroid strikes land"-he took a bite of the cookie-"millions could die."

"Makes you wish the world was nothing but an ocean."

"Ah, but if it lands in the ocean, you get a tsunami perhaps a thousand feet high. Millions dead that way, too."

I said, "Rock and a hard place."

Smiling, nodding, he said, "Absolutely wonderful."

"Millions dead, sir?"

"What? No, of course not. The cookie. Quite wonderful."

"Thank you, sir." I raised the wrong hand to my mouth and almost bit into the two wallets.

He said, "Soberingly profound."

"It's just a cookie, sir," I said, and took a bite of mine.

"The possibility all of humanity could be exterminated in a single cataclysmic event."

"That would put a lot of search-and-rescue dogs out of work."

He lifted his chin, creased his brow, and drew his n.o.ble face into the expression of a man always focused on tomorrow. "I was a scientist once."

"What field of science, sir?"

"Contagious disease."

Hutch put down his half-eaten cookie, fished a bottle of Purell from a pocket, and squeezed a large dollop of the glistening gel into the cupped palm of his left hand.

"A terrible new strain of pneumonic plague would have wiped out civilization if not for me, Walter Pidgeon, and Marilyn Monroe."

"I haven't seen that one, sir."

"She was marvelous as an unwitting pneumonic-plague carrier."

His gaze refocused from the future of science and mankind to the glob of germ-killing goop on his palm.

"She certainly had the lungs for the role," he said.

Vigorously, he rubbed his long-fingered hands together, and the sanitizing gel made squishy sounds.

"Well," I said, "I was headed up to my room."

"Did you have a nice walk?"

"Yes, sir. Very nice."

"A 'const.i.tutional' we used to call them."

"That was before my time."

"That was before everyone's everyone's time. My G.o.d, I am old." time. My G.o.d, I am old."

"Not that old, sir."

"Compared to a redwood tree, I suppose not."

I hesitated to leave the kitchen, out of concern that when I started to move, he would notice that I was without shoes and pants.

"Mr. Hutchison-"

"Call me Hutch. Everyone calls me Hutch."

"Yes, sir. If anyone comes around this evening looking for me, tell them I came back from my walk very agitated, packed my things, and split."

The gel had evaporated; his hands were germ-free. He picked up his half-eaten cookie.

With dismay, he said, "You're leaving, son?"

"No, sir. That's just what you tell them."

"Will they be officers of the law?"

"No. One might be a big guy with a chin beard."

"Sounds like a role for George Kennedy."

"Is he still alive, sir?"

"Why not? I am. He was wonderfully menacing in Mirage Mirage with Gregory Peck." with Gregory Peck."

"If not the chin beard, then maybe a redheaded guy who will or will not have bad teeth. Whoever-tell him I quit without notice, you're angry with me."

"I don't think I could be angry with you, son."

"Of course you can. You're an actor."

His eyes twinkled. He swallowed some cookie. With his teeth just shy of a clench, he said, "You ungrateful little s.h.i.t."

"That's the spirit, sir."

"You took five hundred in cash out of my dresser drawer, you thieving little b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Good. That's good."

"I treat you like a son, I love love you like a son, and now I see I'm lucky you didn't slit my throat while I slept, you despicable little worm." you like a son, and now I see I'm lucky you didn't slit my throat while I slept, you despicable little worm."

"Don't ham it up, sir. Keep it real."

Hutch looked stricken. "Hammy? Was it really?"

"Maybe that's too strong a word."

"I haven't been before a camera in half a century."

"You weren't over the top," I a.s.sured him. "It was just too...fulsome. That's the word."

"Fulsome. In other words, less is more."

"Yes, sir. You're angry, see, but not furious. You're a little bitter. But it's tempered with regret."

Brooding on my direction, he nodded slowly. "Maybe I had a son I lost in the war, and you reminded me of him."

"All right."

"His name was Jamie, he was full of charm, courage, wit. You seemed so like him at first, a young man who rose above the base temptations of this world...but you were just a leech."

I frowned. "Gee, Mr. Hutchison, a leech..."

"A parasite, just looking for a score."

"Well, okay, if that works for you."

"Jamie lost in the war. My precious Corrina dead of cancer." His voice grew increasingly forlorn, gradually diminishing to a whisper. "So alone for so long, and you...you saw just how to take advantage of my vulnerability. You even stole Corrina's jewelry, which I've kept for thirty years."

"Are you going to tell them all this, sir?"

"No, no. It's just my motivation."

He snared a plate from a cabinet and put two cookies on it.

"Jamie's father and Corrina's husband is not the type of old man to turn to booze in his melancholy. He turns to the cookies...which is the only sweet thing he has left from the month that you cynically exploited him."

I winced. "I'm beginning to feel really bad about myself."

"Do you think I should put on a cardigan? There's something about an old man huddled in a tattered cardigan that can be just wonderfully pathetic."

"Do you have a tattered cardigan?"

"I have a cardigan, and I could tatter it in a minute."

I studied him as he stood there with the plate of cookies and a big grin.

"Look pathetic for me," I said.

His grin faded. His lips trembled but then pressed together as if he struggled to contain strong emotion.

He turned his gaze down to the cookies on the plate. When he looked up again, his eyes glistened with unshed tears.