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poignancy in his words, perhaps not wholly unconscious. He seemed to realize as we talked that the possibilities of his life were being cut off.
    “Do you know Laurel’s parents—Mr. and Mrs. Jack Lennox?”
    “I know them. Her father’s picture was on the front page of the
Times
this morning.”
    “I saw it. Would she go home to them, or to her grandmother Sylvia?”
    “I don’t know what she’d do. I spent the last couple of years trying to understand Laurel, but I never could predict which way she’d jump.”
    “Captain and Mrs. Somerville, in Bel-Air—is Laurel close to them?”
    “They’re her aunt and uncle. I guess she was close to them at one time, but not lately. I’m not the best source on this. I don’t really
know
the family. But there’s been quite a lot of pulling and hauling in the family since the old man changed his domestic arrangements. It caused Laurel a lot of grief.”
    “Why?”
    “She couldn’t stand trouble, any kind of trouble. It always tore her up to hear people fighting or arguing. She couldn’t even stand an ordinary disagreement in the home.”
    “Did you have a lot of disagreements?”
    “No. I wouldn’t say that.”
    A woman with a prescription in her hand came up to the counter beside me. She had on high black boots and a yellow wig. Russo seemed relieved to see her. He took the prescription and started back into his booth.
    “So long,” I said.
    He came back and leaned toward me, trying to make private what he had to say: “If you do see Laurel, tell her—ask her to come home. No conditions. I just want her home. Tell her I said that.”
    The phone in his cubicle started to ring. He picked up the receiver and listened and shook his head.
    “I can’t come there, you know that. And I don’t want them coming here. This job is all I’ve got. Wait a minute.”
    Russo came back to me, looking quite pale and shaken. “Laurel’s father and mother are at my house. I can’t leave here, and I don’t want them coming to the store. Anyway, I can’t talk to those people. You’d be doing me a big favor, Mr. Archer, if you’d go and talk to them for me. You were the one who saw her last. It isn’t far from here. And I’ll be glad to pay you for your trouble, whatever you think is fair.”
    “All right. I’ll take a hundred dollars from you.”
    His face lengthened. “Just for talking to them?”
    “I expect to do more than that. A hundred is what I charge for a day’s work.”
    “I don’t have that much on me.” He looked in his wallet. “I can give you fifty now.”
    “All right. I’ll trust you for the rest.”
    The woman in the yellow wig said, “Do I get my prescription filled, or are you two going to go on talking all night?”
    Russo said he was very sorry. He gave me a quick emphatic nod and returned to the phone.
    I went out to my car, feeling slightly more legitimate now that I had Laurel’s husband as a client. For a man of his apparent background, who had probably made his way into the professional class by way of pharmacy school, the transfer of money, even under pressure, was proof of real concern.
    I asked myself as I drove across Westwood where my concern for his wife originated. The answer wasn’t clear. She seemed to be one of those people to whom you attached your floating fears, your unexamined sorrows.
    Her eyes appeared to be watching me out of the darkness like the ghost of a woman who had already died. Or the ghost of a bird.

chapter
5
    It was a declining middle-class block. The flat-roofed stucco houses had been built in the twenties, and faced each other across the street like concrete strong points in a forgotten battlefield. Tom Russo’s house was distinguished from the others by the new black Cadillac standing in front of it.
    A big man got out of the driver’s seat. “Are you Archer?”
    I said I was.
    “I’m Jack Lennox, Laurel’s father.”
    “I recognized you.”
    “Oh? Have we met before?”
    “I saw your