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but he’s as conservative as they come, a regular Milquetoast. That’s why I need him. To him, a man’s reputation is number one. To me, it’s about number twenty. As far as I’m concerned, a man who makes no mistakes has got to be sitting on his hands. I’ve made a few in my time, more than a few, but I’ll take the responsibility for them and no one else. And I’ll tell you this much. All this, all I’ve built,” and he made a circling gesture with his paw as though he meant to include not just the house but half of California, “is so much dirt. That’s all it is, dirt. That’s what it’s worth to me now. The man who could give me back my wife and daughter could have it all on a platter.”
    He looked over his shoulder at a big formal oil portrait of what I took to be Nancy and Karen. I looked with him. The earnest way he studied it would have made you think it was the Mona Lisa at least, which it wasn’t. Oh it was them all right, you could see the resemblance, the mother sitting, Karen, age circa ten, standing alongside her, but like most of those high society art jobs it had about as much life as a couple of slabs of plastic meat in a butcher’s counter.
    â€œBut I guess the only one who could do that,” he said softly, laughing a little, “is the Good Lord, and my connections in that direction aren’t any too good.”
    It was corny and it got a lot cornier. Like all the rich and powerful his talk was full of “philosophy,” and to hear him you’d have thought all he’d really wanted out of life was to live with his wife and daughter in a little thatched cottage by some stream where the fishing was good and electricity non-essential. He gave me his own version of Nancy and Karen, how the one was the model of womanhood and the other was going to be, how the last time he’d talked to her, which was only a week before she’d … but all of it flat too, like the portrait.
    But then the meat-and-potatoes came back into his voice.
    â€œI’m gonna find out what happened to her,” he said.
    Not “I want to” or “I want you to” but “I’m gonna .”
    â€œI don’t believe in accidents,” he went on. “You just don’t fall out a window. And whatever anyone tells me, she didn’t jump. I know that.”
    I wanted to ask him how, but he didn’t need any help from me.
    â€œI know it in my heart,” he said. “She was her mother’s daughter … and mine. There’s no suicide in the family. Hell, Nancy lived her whole life like she was going to last till ninety, and that was as true the day she died as the day I met her.
    â€œAnd my brother Alan,” he said. “You’ve heard of my brother Alan?”
    No, I hadn’t.
    â€œKilled in Korea,” he said, and I felt my stomach going tight. “But he died a hero’s death. They gave him the Silver Star.
    â€œAnyway,” he went on, “Karie is … was … the same way. Sure she had her bad times, crises, when the world was coming to an end, but she was a battler. She was never one to lie down and say that’s it.
    â€œSure,” he said, combing his hand through his hair, “I didn’t see as much of her as I should have, wanted to. She was down here at the University, and since Nancy died … well, I guess I’ve spent most of my time in town. You know how it is. But we always could talk to each other, there was none of that father-daughter Freudian crap between us. I was proud as hell of her. She had a million friends. They were always over here, she had the run of the house, no questions asked. I …”
    He paused and stared out the window.
    The thirty-footer had disappeared.
    â€œYou mean you think she was pushed ?” I asked, like they do on TV.
    He seemed hardly to have heard me. He looked down at his hands.
    â€œI don’t