When Amanda sees me approaching she turns away as if I’m not there. She looks around the party, she blinks, she doesn’t say anything, but when I intimately push myself into her group it becomes awkward for her to ignore me and then I say “Hey” and her smile is there and then it isn’t. She seems upset that I’m standing next to her, that I’ve even approached her, and I realize that after being so flirtatious in the lounge at JFK she now doesn’t want to speak to me but I just stand there, hoping she’ll say something back and behind Amanda a girl is dancing by herself to an old Altered Images song, the tattoo of a phone number inked along her arm.

“Yeah?” Amanda says. “Hi.” Then she turns back to the two guys.

“We met in New York,” I say. “At JFK. I think you texted me a couple of times since you’ve been in L.A. but we haven’t spoken in like four weeks. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she says, and then there’s an awkward silence and the two guys introduce themselves and names are exchanged and one of them recognizes me and says “Oh, cool” and then turns his attention on me but I’m focusing on Amanda.

“Yeah, it’s been around a month,” I say, staring at her. “You doing okay?”

“I’m fine, I said,” and then, “But I think maybe you’ve made a mistake.”

“Aren’t you up for a role in The Listeners?”

A photographer snaps a shot of us standing together and it’s either this or the question I asked that becomes Amanda’s cue to leave. “I have to go now.”

I start trailing after her. “Hey, wait a minute.”

“I can’t talk right now,” she says.

“Hey, I said wait a minute—”

She’s backed against a wall that leads to the exit. The conversation is on the verge of becoming an argument. “You’re being rude,” she says.

“I haven’t done anything,” I say. “Why am I making you so uncomfortable?”

For one flashing second her eyes go wild and then she relents.

“Please don’t talk to me, okay?” She tries to smile. “I don’t even know you,” she says. “I don’t even know who you are.”

It’s raining lightly when I leave the party and I forget where the BMW is and then I finally find it parked against a curb a few blocks away on Washington Boulevard and as I’m about to pull out a blue Jeep rushes by and slows to a stop at the light behind me on the corner. I make a U-turn and pull up behind the Jeep and my hair is wet and my hands are shaking and I can’t see who’s inside the car and it starts to rain harder as I follow the Jeep up Robertson toward West Hollywood and through the windshield wipers the streets seem emptier because of the rain and on the CD Meghan Reynolds burned for me last summer Bat for Lashes is singing “What’s a Girl to Do?” and lightning illuminates a turquoise mural on a freeway underpass and then the Jeep makes a right on Beverly and I keep checking the rearview mirror to see if someone’s following me but I can’t tell and then I force myself to stop weeping and turn off the stereo concentrating only on the blue Jeep as it makes a left onto Fairfax, and then I’m sobering up completely as the Jeep turns right onto Fountain and then a sharp right onto Orange Grove and a left about half a block up from Santa Monica Boulevard into the driveway adjacent to Rain’s apartment. And then Amanda Flew gets out of the blue Jeep.

I cruise by the apartment and turn in to a driveway down the street and park illegally, letting the engine run, and I don’t know what to do—every logical thought has become eclipsed—but I manage to get out of the BMW and move across the front lawn toward the building and it keeps raining but I don’t care, and Rain’s apartment is on the ground floor of the two-story complex and all the lights in the apartment are on and Rain’s pacing the living room, on the phone, smoking a cigarette, and I stand away from the window out of the light and Rain’s wearing a robe and her face is swollen and wiped clear of makeup and the beauty of it is momentarily blurred and despite the panic infusing the apartment candles have still been lit and I can’t hear anything except for a door slamming and then Rain clicks off the phone and Amanda walks in and I can’t hear what they’re saying to each other even when Rain starts shouting at her. Amanda says something that makes Rain stop shouting and she listens to Amanda and then both girls suddenly become hysterical and when Amanda reaches out, clutching at her, Rain slaps Amanda across the face. Amanda tries to slap Rain back but then she falls into Rain’s arms and they hold each other for a long time until Amanda sinks to her knees. Rain leaves her there and hurriedly packs a gym bag that’s sitting on the couch and Amanda, frantic, crawls toward Rain and tries to stop her. Rain throws the gym bag at Amanda, and Amanda clutches at it, weeping. And when I realize that Amanda Flew is Rain’s roommate I have to look away.

Two silent flashes behind me briefly illuminate the side of the building and when I turn around that’s when I notice a black Mercedes double-parked on Orange Grove, the flashes coming from the open window on the passenger side, and then the window rolls up. A vague realization: someone was taking pictures of me standing in front of Rain and Amanda’s apartment. Shaking, I ignore the car and slowly move away from the apartment and walk down the street to the idling BMW. I get in. I pull away from the curb. I roll up Orange Grove past the Mercedes, which then starts following me as I pull up to Fountain and make a left. So does the black car. I gun the BMW forward but in the rearview mirror the Mercedes keeps up, veering in and out of lanes. I floor the accelerator in order to make the light and swerve onto La Cienega. The Mercedes makes the light too, its tires screeching against the wet asphalt. I stop at the light on Holloway, the high beams of the black car pressing against the BMW, and then take a right on Santa Monica, trying to act casual, as if I’m suddenly unaware of the Mercedes. But it follows me back to the Doheny Plaza and when I valet the BMW I pretend not to see the Mercedes as it cruises around the corner onto Norma Place, slowing as I turn and walk into the lobby, and I only hear it speed away.

In the condo, shaking and wet, holding a glass of vodka with both hands in the darkness of the balcony, storms sweeping over the city, I’m watching the black Mercedes cruise back and forth on Elevado and then I get a text from a blocked number—Hey gringo, you can’t hide—accompanied by a winking smiley face, and that night I dream about the boy, the same dream that Rain had but now the boy, beautiful and shirtless, has moved from the kitchen into the living room and I keep asking him, “Who are you?” and for some reason he’s gesturing at me, the muscles in his arms and chest straining, and as he moves closer I can see the tattoo of a dragon on his forearm and there’s blood in the boy’s hair and when I stumble into the guest bathroom in the middle of the night, scattering a few of Rain’s things that line the sink, I turn on the lights, and in the mirror above the counter, written in something red, are two words: DISAPPEAR HERE.

Another awards party, this one at Spago, and though there’s always the risk of seeing someone you don’t want to I’m beyond caring and since Rain isn’t coming over until tomorrow I find myself standing in the main dining room accidentally stuck in a conversation with Muriel and Kim who don’t ask me why I wasn’t at the party for Alana at Blair’s and after a photographer takes a picture of the three of us they move away, and it’s okay that Trent and Blair are in the courtyard because neither one of them will talk to me since there are too many people at the party tonight. Daniel Carter keeps smiling impatiently at me and though I don’t want Daniel to come over, Meghan Reynolds doesn’t seem to be around and there’s nothing to do but stand still and Daniel and I are both wearing James Perse T-shirts and expensive one-button blazers and he asks about The Listeners and I tell him that I liked his movie, that I was at the premiere in December, and then we’re talking about how big the new Friday the 13th opened and discussing how a particular special effect was accomplished while Daniel keeps craning his neck, raising his eyebrows at someone across the room and smiling.

“Looks like you got some sun there,” Daniel says, gesturing at my reddened face.

“Yeah,” I say. “You know me: I get burned easily.”

“You’ve been in New York, right?” Daniel asks. “How long are you here? I heard you were back at Doheny.”

“I don’t know how long I’m back,” I say. “New York seems … over.”

“And this place is … ?” Daniel asks, waiting for me to complete the sentence.

“Happening.” I shrug. “I’m a different person now.” I put on a fake smile.

“Please don’t tell me you’re thinking of moving back,” he says. “Fuck, if I could get out of here … ”

And then Meghan comes up to us and leans slightly into Daniel and says “Hi, Clay” and if I weren’t drunk I wouldn’t have been able to stand being here and I had forgotten how Meghan looks close-up and it shocks me like it always did and I have to pretend nothing’s wrong. Meghan gazes at me indifferently and my fake smile is a rebuke that lets her know I’m glad she’s come to terms with all the things she’d done to me, and near the end of everything I had begged her to run away from this place and we were sitting at a sushi bar on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City and it was summer and I remember seeing a child actor who had been famous once and was now considered old at thirty-three, sitting at the far end of the sushi bar while Meghan kept hinting that it was over between us. Now, in Spago, I have no idea what Meghan has told Daniel about me even though she has a role in his next movie. She mentions she’d seen me at a screening I wasn’t at, and I suddenly remember pacing outside the ER at Cedars-Sinai apologizing to her on the Fourth of July.

“Hey,” Daniel says, “I’d like to talk to you about an idea.” He mentions a script I wrote called Adrenaline that the studio had put into turnaround.

“Cool,” I say. I’m holding a glass that’s empty except for ice and limes, the remnants of a margarita.

“You’re so thin,” Daniel murmurs before he walks away with Meghan.

Rain has called twice and left a text and I’ve ignored them but when I see Daniel whispering something into Meghan’s ear as they leave Spago I return Rain’s call and she doesn’t pick up.

Dr. Woolf leaves a message on my landline canceling tomorrow’s session and telling me that he can’t see me as a patient anymore but that he’ll refer me to someone else and the next morning I drive to the building on Sawtelle and park on the fourth floor of the garage and wait for his noon session to be over because that’s when he takes his lunch break and I’m listening to a song with the lyric So leave everything you know and carry only what you fear … over and over again and I’m nodding to myself while smoking cigarettes and making a list of all the things I’m not going to ask Rain about and deciding I’ll accept all the false explanations she’s going to give me and how that’s the only plan, and then I’m remembering the person who warned me about how the world has to be a place where no one is interested in your questions and that if you’re alone nothing bad can happen to you.

In the stillness of the garage Dr. Woolf unlocks a silver Porsche. I get out of my car and walk toward him and call out his name. He pretends not to hear me at first and then he’s startled when he turns around. He’s annoyed when he sees who it is, but then his face relaxes almost as if he’d been expecting this.

“Why can’t you see me anymore?” I ask.

“Look, I’m just not able to help you—”

“But why?” I keep nearing him. “I don’t get it.”

“Have you been drinking?” he asks, pulling a cell phone out of his pocket like it’s a warning of some kind.

“No, I haven’t been drinking,” I mutter.

“There’s a very good guy in West Hollywood who I’ll refer you to.”

“I don’t give a shit,” I say. “I don’t want a fucking referral.”

“Clay, calm down—”

“Why the fuck are you dropping me as a patient?”

“Hey, Clay, between us … ” He pauses, makes a pained gesture, and his voice softens. “Denise Tazzarek.” He lets the name hang there in the shadows of the garage. “I’m not able to help you with … that.”

I stand there for a second, wavering. “Wait, who’s Denise Tazzarek?”

“The person you’ve been seeing,” he says. “The one you talked about in the last session.”

“What about her?”

He looks at me as if I shouldn’t be confused.

“The girl you’re talking about is a woman named Denise Tazzarek,” he says, lowering his voice. “I know who she is.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know who this is and I’m not getting involved with her,” he says. “I’ve had two patients involved with her and it’s becoming a conflict of interest.” He pauses. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“And you think this is … the same girl?”

“Yes,” he says. “It’s the same girl. Her real name is Denise Tazzarek,” he says. “This girl you were talking about, Rain Turner? She’s Denise Tazzarek.”

I’m bracing myself again, insanely alert. “What do you know about her that … I don’t know?”

“I told you in our last session: just stay away from her,” he says, moving back to the Porsche. “That’s all you really need to know.”

I move closer to him. “So you know Rip Millar?”

“Clay—” He swings into the driver’s seat.

“And Julian Wells?”

“I have to go—”

“What about Kelly Montrose?”

Dr. Woolf puts the key in the ignition but stops suddenly at the mention of that name. Turning back to me he looks up and says, “Kelly Montrose was a patient of mine.” And then he closes the door and drives away.

The valet at the Doheny Plaza opens the door of the BMW for me and as I get out he says someone’s waiting in the lobby and that’s when I see Julian’s Audi, streaked with mud and rain, parked in front of the building. Walking toward the lobby I almost turn around and get back into the BMW but a wave of anger makes a decision for me. Julian’s wearing Ray-Bans and sitting in a chair casually checking his phone but I can still see the slightly swollen left eye and the split lip, and the faint black and purple bruises on his tan neck and the bandaged wrist. I don’t say anything as I walk past him. I just make a gesture for him to get up and follow me. The doorman behind the desk glances at Julian worriedly and then at me before I say, “It’s okay.” Julian walks with me to the elevator and we don’t say anything as he follows behind me down the hallway on the fifteenth floor and the only sound is when he clears his throat as I unlock the door and we step inside the apartment.

Julian carefully sits down on the sectional and he’s stylishly dressed and seems okay despite what happened to him and he looks like he’s making an attempt at keeping it together but he grimaces slightly when he places his foot on the ottoman and when he takes off the sunglasses with the hand whose wrist is bandaged the extent of the bruising is revealed.

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he says. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Who did that to you?”

“I don’t know,” Julian says, and then searching for an answer says something that sounds more like a suggestion. “Some Mexican kids.” And then: “I’m not here to talk about that.”

“Why are you here?”

“I know that you know about Rain,” he says. “You didn’t need to leave that message the other night. I think everyone knows what’s going on.”

“Jesus, Julian, what the fuck are you doing?” I ask in a hushed voice.

“It probably seems more complicated to you than it really is.”

“That’s because you made it more complicated.”

He sighs, staring out the sliding glass doors at the afternoon light dimming over the city. “Can I have a glass of water?”

“It isn’t complicated for me.”

“Well, I guess I’m sorry, but it isn’t all about you, Clay.”

“What does that even mean?” I say, standing over him. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means that there’s a larger world out there and it’s not all about you.”

“You’re fucking crazy,” I mutter. “You’re all fucking crazy.”

“It is what it is, Clay.”

“Shut up,” I mutter, pacing the floor, lighting a cigarette. “What is this bullshit—it is what it is?”

“I’m not sure why you’re so pissed,” Julian says. “You got what you wanted.”

“And did you get what you wanted?” I gesture at the bruises. “Did Rip do this to you?”

“I told you,” Julian says, “it was these Mexican kids.” And then he asks again for some water.

When I bring Julian a bottle of Fiji, he nods thanks and says after taking a careful sip, “I don’t talk to Rip anymore.”

“Why not?” I ask. “Oh, wait, let me guess.”

Julian shrugs and winces as he leans over and places the small plastic bottle on the ottoman. “It wasn’t so much about me.”

“Well, then what do you think it was about if it wasn’t about you?”

“Rip snapped when Rain was with Kelly—”

“What does snapped mean?” I ask, cutting him off. “So your girlfriend was fucking Rip and then she’s fucking Kelly? And you’re still with her?”

“Clay, it’s more complicated than—”

“Why is Kelly Montrose dead, Julian?” I ask, standing over him, my hand holding the cigarette shaking. “What happened to Kelly? Why is he dead?”

Julian looks at me and realizes something. Still staring at me he debates whether to say anything. “Look, don’t try and connect it all.”

“Why not?”

“This isn’t a script,” Julian says. “It’s not going to add up. Not everything’s going to come together in the third act.”

“What was Rip’s connection to Kelly?”

“At first it was about Kelly investing in a club and they had a … falling-out.”

“Over Rain?”

Julian shrugs. “That was part of it, I guess.”

I try again: “I just want to know what I’m involved with. Just tell me.”

“What you’re involved with?” Julian seems surprised. “You’re not involved in any of it. Maybe it feels like you are but you’re not.”

“Amanda Flew is Rain’s roommate, right?”

“Yeah, she is,” Julian says, confused. “Didn’t you know that?”

“She drives a blue Jeep, right?” I say. “Why has she been following me?”

“She left town. Mandy’s not here anymore,” Julian says. “I don’t know why she was following you.” Pause. “Are you sure it was her?”

“And both of them were with Rip?” I ask. “Both Rain and Amanda had been with Rip?”

He sighs. “When Rain and I took a break Rip started hitting on her … and then, when she met Kelly, well, Rip started hanging out with Mandy,” Julian says. “And that didn’t last, and then he tried to get back with Rain but … that wasn’t going to work.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s … difficult.” He pauses. “Or don’t you know that by now?”

I lean into Julian, my voice lowered. “There are people staking out this apartment, Julian. There are cars on Elevado watching this place at night. There are people breaking in and going through my stuff. I get texts warning me about shit and I don’t even know what shit they’re warning me about but I think they’re all connected to … ” And suddenly I can’t say it: your girlfriend. All I can say is “Don’t lie to me. I know you’re still together.”

Julian slowly offers a small and noncommittal shrug. “Well, if you stop seeing her maybe the rest will stop.” He considers something else. “If you don’t want to see her anymore and you don’t want to help her, then maybe all of that stuff will stop.” He reaches for the water again. “Maybe this wasn’t thought out enough. Maybe there were too many … I don’t know … variables … that I didn’t know about.”

A long silence before I say, “You’re leaving something out.”

“What am I leaving out?” He seems genuinely curious.

“One of the variables.”

“Which one?” He almost seems afraid to ask this.

“I like her.”

Julian sighs and starts to sit up. “Clay—”

“And I don’t really care what other shit is going down.”

“Do you really like her, Clay?” Julian asks sadly. “Or do you like something else?”

“What does that mean, Julian?”

“You’ve been through this before,” he says, carefully choosing his words. “You know what this town is like. What did you expect? You barely know her. She’s an actress.”

“I’m listening to you? You’re running an escort service and I’m listening to you?”

Julian sighs again. “I was just doing favors. It was small time. Come off it. Don’t be so naïve.”

“You’re pimping your girlfriend out and you’re telling me shit like that?”

“Okay, look, I can see where you’re at. I can see where this is all going. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” He gets up and leans on the back of the sectional for support. “I should have known that you’d react this way. I thought you would have found it, I don’t know, fun … that, y’know, you’d get something out of it and, well, she’d get something out of it and you wouldn’t take it so seriously.”

“That’s why you were so interested in the movie, isn’t it?” I say. “Because you wanted me to give your girlfriend a part?”

“Well, yeah.” Julian pauses. “We thought it might work. But if you’re not going to see her anymore we’ll just call it quits.”

“That might have to be adjusted.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I’m seeing her tonight,” I say.

“I know you are,” Julian says. “Because you’re still going to help her, right?”

The last time Rain sees Amanda Flew is on the Sunday following the night when I stood outside of the apartment on Orange Grove and, according to Rain, Amanda spends that night in her room and everything is “fine,” though because of what I saw that night, I know everything was not “fine,” and that something had happened that was pushing Amanda out of town. Amanda is supposed to leave the next day to stay with Mike and Kyle in Palm Springs and just “chill” for a couple of weeks but because she sleeps late and is scattered by the reasons she has to leave L.A. she doesn’t get out of the apartment on Orange Grove until after dark. Rain never wanted Amanda—a girl she has now described to me as “too trusting”—to make this drive alone, and definitely not at night, and definitely not with twenty thousand dollars in cash in one of the gym bags she’s carrying, but Amanda insists to the point where she’s soon threatening not to go at all, so Rain and the two guys in Palm Springs tell Amanda that the only way this will work is if Amanda makes contact with them every ten minutes whether it’s with Rain or with Mike and Kyle at the house in the desert, and Amanda agrees and leaves Orange Grove at 8:45 and doesn’t call Rain until she’s passing through downtown L.A. at 9:15. After this initial call things seem to fall apart fairly quickly.

From about 9:30 until 10:00 Amanda doesn’t answer her phone. A call is made to the house in Palm Springs around 10:15 and Amanda sounds calm and tells Mike and Kyle that she’s going to be later than she thought, that she’s meeting someone at a coffee shop in Riverside but it’s cool, and not to tell Rain. Apparently, neither Rain nor Mike nor Kyle thinks this is cool and Mike immediately starts driving to the coffee shop in Riverside. The next call to Kyle is at eleven and Amanda says she’s not in Riverside anymore but has driven to Temecula. Kyle calls Mike and warns him that she’s not in Riverside, and Amanda doesn’t answer any of Rain’s calls or texts—This is totally fucked, one of them reads, you’re going to die—and an argument ensues about calling 911 and then is quickly dropped, and according to a waitress Mike talks to at the coffee shop in Riverside, Amanda had met two men at the entrance of the coffee shop and Amanda even kissed one of them on the cheek, though the waitress couldn’t get a clear view of the one Amanda had kissed. The last call is made an hour later and Amanda is explaining to Kyle that she’ll see him tomorrow, even after Kyle has warned her that Mike’s leaving Riverside and on his way to Temecula. At this point someone takes the phone from Amanda and listens as Kyle starts shouting for Amanda to tell him exactly where she is, and Kyle can hear Amanda in the background whining, “Come on, stop it, give me back the phone, come on.”

“Who is this? Hello?” Kyle shouts before the line goes dead.

Amanda never made it to Palm Springs the next morning and when it’s confirmed to Rain that Amanda never showed up the following afternoon this is taken for some reason as a bad sign and not something someone who has been described to me as “crazy” and “really messed up” and who Rain slapped across the face in the apartment on Orange Grove and who had read my palm in an airport lounge and who had an affair with Rip Millar, who was, in fact, a member of his “pussy posse,” would be prone to do. The first ominous news comes in early this evening: Mike and Kyle find Amanda’s blue Jeep in a parking lot off Interstate 10 outside of Indio. All of her bags are gone, including the one with the twenty thousand dollars in cash.

I’m listening patiently as Rain tries to give me a version of the story that’s been edited carefully enough that I don’t have to ask any questions and she says she shouldn’t be telling me this at all but the need is apparently overwhelming even though she has erased the real fear of it as she tries to keep it together with Patrón and a joint and assuring herself that Amanda will show up eventually. I keep telling Rain that maybe there was a mystery Amanda needed to solve. I tell Rain that maybe Amanda wanted the answer to something. The other thing that soothes Rain, besides the tequila and the dope and the Xanax I’ve given her, is the callback for The Listeners that I arranged for next week.

“What does Julian think?” I ask when she’s been silent too long. “About Amanda?”

She can’t answer that question because Julian’s name can’t be mentioned between us anymore. I finish the drink I’m holding.

“Well, maybe Rip’s involved in this,” I say, imitating a child investigating a crime. “Isn’t Rip fucking her too? He must be very worried as well.”

Rain just shrugs, ignoring me. “Maybe.”

“Maybe he’s worried or maybe he’s fucking her or maybe he’s involved in this?”

She says nothing, just stares out the window of my office, slumped on the chair while I sit behind my desk watching her.

“If you think her disappearance is connected to Rip shouldn’t you go to the police?” I ask, my voice idle and detached.

Rain turns and looks at me like I’m insane.

“You don’t care, do you?” she asks.

“You never told me what happened between you and Kelly Montrose.”

“It was nothing. Whatever anyone told you, it’s not true.” She turns back to the drink and finishes it. “Nothing ever happened between me and Kelly.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, swiveling slowly back and forth in my chair, planning how this scene will play out. “You must have promised him something.”

“Not everyone’s like you.”

I don’t say anything.

“Maybe Kelly wanted something to happen,” she finally admits. “Maybe that’s why he made the call for me. I don’t know.”

“And maybe that explains why Rip got so angry,” I say, trying to remain calm, trying to rein in my excitement. “Maybe he felt Kelly was about to make a move on you … ”

“Rip Millar is just … very fucked up.”

“Maybe that’s why the two of you got along so well.”

“Are you seriously talking to me like this?”

“You knew something that day,” I tell her. “You knew that something had happened to Kelly. The day before you left for San Diego with that piece of shit. Kelly hadn’t been found yet, but you knew that Rip had done something—”

“Fuck off,” she screams.

“I don’t really care anymore,” I finally say, moving toward her, stroking her neck.

“You really don’t care, do you?”

“I didn’t know her, Rain.”

“But you know me.”

“No. I don’t.”

I lean in to kiss her face.

She turns away. “I don’t want to,” she mutters.

“Then get out of here,” I say. “I don’t care if you ever come back here.”

“Amanda’s missing and you’re—”

“I said I don’t care.” I take her hand. I start pulling her toward the bedroom. “Come on.”

“Just let it go, Clay.” Her eyes are closed and she’s grimacing.

“If you’re not going to do this, then you should leave.”

“And if I leave, what will happen?”

“I’ll make a call to Mark. I’ll make another call to Jon. I’ll call Jason.” I pause. “And I’ll cancel everything.”

She immediately moves into me and says she’s sorry and then she’s guiding me toward the bedroom and this is the way I always wanted the scene to play out and then it does and it has to because it doesn’t really work for me unless it happens like this.

“You should be more compassionate,” she says later, in the darkness of the bedroom.

“Why?” I ask. “Why should I be more compassionate?”

“You’re a Pisces.”

I pause, letting the statement hang there while it defines where I’ve ended up.

“How do you know that?”

“Amanda told me,” she says quietly.

I don’t say anything, even though it’s hard to leave that statement alone.

“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” she asks, and it sounds like an echo. I know what it is but pretend that I don’t.

At the Getty there’s a dinner thrown by two DreamWorks executives for a curator of a new exhibit and I go alone and I’m in a better mood, just floating through it all, looking good, a little buzzed, and I’m standing on the terrace gazing out over the blackest sky and asking myself, What would Mara say? And on the tram ride up the hill I was in the same car as Trent and Blair and I was listening to Alana share her frustrations about a plastic surgeon and I nodded while watching the traffic speeding by on the 405 below us and from where I’m standing now nothing is visible in the darkened canyons until the lights of the hushed city fan out of that darkness and I keep checking my phone for messages and I’m almost done with my second martini when a boy in a catering uniform tells me that dinner will be served in fifteen minutes and then that boy is replaced by Blair.

“I hope you’re not driving tonight,” she says.

“Hey, I had a bad feeling when I showed up but I’m happy now.”

“You look like you’re in a good mood.”

“I am.”

“When I saw you at Spago the other night I didn’t think you could possibly be happy.”

“Well, I am now.”

She pauses. “I don’t think I want to know why.”

I finish the martini and place the glass on a ledge and then smile harmlessly at her, and I’m lightly swaying and Blair’s looking at the shimmering sea curving toward us and it’s miles and miles away.

“I thought of ignoring you but then decided not to,” she says, moving closer to me.

“Now I feel pressured but I’m glad you’re talking to me.” I turn back to the view of the city. “Why didn’t you talk to me for so long? What was that about?”

“I was thinking about my own safety.”

“Why are you talking to me now?”

“You don’t scare me anymore.”

“So you’ve become an optimist.”

“I kept thinking I could change you,” she says. “All those years.”

“But would that have been who you really wanted?” I stop and think it through. “Or would that have been who I really wanted to be?”

“What you really want to be doesn’t exist, Clay.”

“Why are you laughing when you say that?”

“I wanted to know if you’d talked to Julian,” she asks. “Or did you do what I asked you to and just leave it alone?”

“You mean follow your instructions?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“Yeah, I saw him a couple of times and now I guess he’s left town for a little while.” I pause, then go for it: “Rain told me she doesn’t know where he is.”

At the mention of her name, Blair says, “You all have a very interesting relationship.”

“It’s just complicated,” I offer casually. “Like it always is.”

“She gets around, doesn’t she?” Blair asks. “First Julian, then Rip, then Kelly and then you … ” She pauses. “I wonder who’s next.”

I don’t say anything.

“I’m not judging.” She moves closer to me. “But Rain knows where Julian is. I mean, if I know where Julian is, then of course she knows.”

“What is the source of your information?” I stop. “Oh, right. Your husband reps her.”

“Not really. There’s really nothing to rep.” She pauses. “I think you know this, too.”

“So where is Julian?” I ask.

“Why do you want to know where he is?” she asks. “Are you still friends?”

“Well, we used to be friends,” I say. “But, I guess … well, no, now we’re not. It happens.” I pause, then I can’t help it. I ask again, “Where is he? How do you know where he is?”

“Just stay out of it,” Blair answers softly. “All you need to do is stay out of it.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll only make it worse.”

I let her kiss me on the lips but there are statues watching us, and lights from the fountains, and behind us the moon is reflected in the horizon of the sea.

“I hear stories about you,” Blair says. “I don’t want to believe them.”

I open the door to the apartment. The lights are off and there’s a white rectangle floating low above the couch: a phone glowing in the darkness, illuminating Rip’s face. Too drunk to panic I reach for the wall and the room slowly fills with a dim light. Rip waits for me to say something, lounging on the couch as if this is where he’s always belonged, an open bottle of tequila in the background. Finally he mentions something about an awards show he was at and, almost as an afterthought, asks me where I’ve been.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. “How did you get in?”

“I have some friends in the building,” Rip says, explaining something supposedly very simple. “Let’s take a ride.”

“Why?”

“Because your apartment probably isn’t”—he squints up at me—“secure.”

In the limousine Rip shows me e-mails that were received at Rain’s allamericangirlUSA account. There are four of them and I read each one of them on Rip’s iPhone in the limo as we cruise along a deserted Mulholland, an old Warren Zevon song hovering in the air-conditioned darkness. At first I’m not even sure what I’m looking at but in the third e-mail I’ve supposedly written that I will kill that fucker—a reference to Rain’s “boyfriend” Julian—and the e-mails become maps that need to be redesigned in order to be properly followed, but they’re accurate on certain points and have a secret and purposeful strategy to them, though other details about Rain and me don’t track, things that have nothing to do with us: the references to kabbalah, comments about a musical number on a recent awards show that I’ve never seen, Hugh Jackman singing an ironic version of “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” my interest in the signs of the zodiac—all of them mistakes in the specifics of our relationship. I keep rereading this e-mail and wondering who wrote these things—clues that are supposed to be followed, an idea that is supposed to lead somewhere—until I realize: It doesn’t matter, everything leads to me, I called this upon myself.

“Read the next one, please.” Rip reaches over and skips to the next e-mail as casually as if he’s flipping through a brochure. “Interesting reference about you and the missing bitch roommate.”

In the fourth e-mail I supposedly wrote and I’ll do to Julian what I’ve already done to Amanda Flew.

“How did you get these?” I ask, my hands clasped around the iPhone.

“Please” is all Rip says.

“I didn’t write these, Rip.”

“Maybe you did,” Rip says. “Maybe you didn’t.” He pauses. “Maybe she did. But it’s been verified that they were all sent from one of your e-mail accounts.”

I keep skimming from one e-mail and then back to another.

“I’ll kill that fucker,” Rip murmurs. “Doesn’t sound like you, but who knows? … I mean, you can be a cold dude sometimes, but … these are actually rather heartfelt and sad.” He reads from one of them: “But this time there was an explosion and my feelings as a man cannot be adjusted … ” He starts laughing.

“Why are you showing these to me?” I ask. “I didn’t write them.”

“Because they could potentially incriminate you.”

I back away from Rip, unable to mask my loathing. “What movie do you think you’re in?”

“Maybe one of the crappy ones you’ve written,” Rip says, not laughing anymore. “Well, then, who wrote them, Clay?” he asks in a forced and playful voice as if he already knew the answer.

“Maybe she wrote them to herself,” I mutter in the darkness.

“Or maybe … somebody else wrote them,” Rip says. “Maybe somebody who doesn’t like you?” I don’t say anything.

“Barry warned you about her, huh?” Rip asks.

“Barry?” I murmur, staring into the iPhone. “What?”

“Woolf,” Rip says. “Your life coach.” He pauses. “The one on Sawtelle.” He turns to me. “He warned you about her.” He pauses again. “And you didn’t listen.”

“What if I told you I don’t care one way or another?”

“Well, then I’d be very worried for you.”

“I didn’t write these things.”

Rip’s not listening. “Haven’t you gotten enough out of her?”

“How did you get these, anyway?”

“I mean, I feel for your … predicament,” Rip says, ignoring the question. “I mean, I really do.”

“What’s my predicament, Rip?”

“You’re too smart to get too involved,” Rip says slowly, figuring things out for himself, “so there must be something else that gets you off … You’re not stupid enough to fall for these cunts, and yet your pain is real … I mean everybody knows that you really lost it over Meghan Reynolds … That’s not a secret, by the way.” Rip grins and then his voice grows questioning. “But there’s something that’s not tracking … You’re getting off and yet what’s the problem?” He turns to me again in the darkness as the limo glides onto Beverly Glen. “Could it be that you actually get off on the fact that because of how you’ve set things up they’ll never love you back? And could it be that”—he pauses, thinking this through—“that you’re so much crazier than any of us ever really knew?”

“Yeah, that’s it, Rip.” I sigh, but I’m shaking. “That’s probably it.”

“Someone doesn’t like you back and never will,” Rip says. “At least not in the way you want them to and yet you can still momentarily control them because of the things they want from you. It’s quite a system you’ve set up and maintained.” He pauses. “Romance.” He sighs. “Interesting.”

I keep staring at the iPhone even though I don’t want to anymore.

“I guess the consolation is that she’s not going to be beautiful forever,” he says. “But I’d like to be with her before that happens.”

“What are you saying?” I’m asking, the fear pushing forward. “What does any of this mean?”

“It means so many things, Clay.”

“I want to get out of here,” I say. “I want you to drop me off.”

Rip says, “It means she’ll never love you.” A pause. “It means that everything’s an illusion.” And then Rip touches my arm. “She’s setting you up, cabron.”

I offer the phone back to Rip.

“I told you already I don’t view you as a threat,” Rip says. “You can keep doing whatever you want with her. I don’t care because you’re not really in the way.” He considers something. “Not yet.”

Rip takes the phone from me and pockets it.

“But Julian … she likes him.” Rip pauses. “She’s just using you. Maybe that’s what gets you off. I don’t know. Will she get what she wants? Probably not. I don’t know. I don’t care. But Julian? For some reason that I can’t fathom she really likes him. All you’re doing is prolonging the situation. You’re keeping this in play and she’s following your lead because she thinks she’s going to be in your movie. And because of this it’s moving her closer to Julian.” He pauses again. “You don’t even realize how afraid you should be, do you?”

Before he drops me off Rip says, “Julian’s disappeared.” The limousine idles in the driveway of the Doheny Plaza. On the way down Beverly Glen and all across Sunset, Rip texted people back while “The Boys of Summer” kept repeating itself on the stereo. “He’s not at his place in Westwood. We don’t know where he is.”

“Maybe he went to find Amanda,” I say, staring out the tinted window at the empty valet stand.

“Shouldn’t that be Rain’s job?” Rip asks, unfazed. “Oh, I forgot. She has an audition this week, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” I say. “She does.”

“She doesn’t seem very worried about her roommate,” Rip says. “At least not as much as being in your little movie.”

“How worried should she be, Rip?” I ask. “Where’s Amanda?” And then I breathe in before asking, “Do you know?” I stop again. “I mean, you were with her, too. After Rain left you for Kelly? I guess that’s when it happened.”

“Women aren’t very bright,” Rip says. “Studies have been done.”

I can’t see his face. I can only hear his voice, which is, I realize, how I want it.

“What was that about?” I ask. “Revenge? You thought Rain would care that you were fucking her roommate?”

“He’s hiding,” Rip says, ignoring me.

“Jesus, why don’t you let it go?”

“He’s hiding.” Rip pauses. “I thought maybe you’d know where he is. I thought maybe you’d tell me.”

“I don’t give a shit where he is.”

“Why don’t you ask around and then get back to me?”

“Who do you think would know this?” I ask. “Why don’t you just talk to Rain?”

He sighs.

“Did you have him beaten up?” I ask. “Was that just a taste of what happens next if he doesn’t leave her?”

“You have no imagination,” Rip says. “You’re actually very by-the-numbers.”

Rip leans over and pushes a disc into the CD player. He sits back. Panting sounds, the wind and the sounds of sex, someone whispering as he has an orgasm, and then it’s my voice and I suddenly connect images to the sounds: the bedroom in 1508 in the building looming above us, the view from the balcony, the ghost of a dead boy wandering lost through the space. And then Rain’s voice joins mine over the speakers in the back of the limo.

“Turn it off,” I whisper. “Just turn it off.”

“There’s nothing of any use,” Rip says, leaning over, ejecting the disc. “That’s it.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Oh, the common questions you ask.”

“I’m not involved with any of this.”

“Who knows why people do the things they do?” Rip leans back against the seat, not listening to me. “I can’t explain Julian. I don’t know why he does the things he does.”

I reach for the door handle.

“You discover new things as you go along,” Rip says. “You discover things about yourself that you never thought were possible.”

I turn back to him. “Why don’t you just move on? Let him have her and just move on?”

“I can’t do that,” he says. “No. I just can’t do that.”

“Why can’t you do that?”

“Because he’s compromising the structure of things,” Rip says, enunciating each word. “And it’s affecting my life.”

I’m about to get out of the limousine.

“Don’t worry. I won’t come around anymore,” Rip says. “I’m through with you. It’ll play out like it’s supposed to play out.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I just wanted to warn you,” he says. “You’ve been officially implicated.”

“Don’t make contact with me ever—”

“I think you want him gone as much as I do,” Rip says before I slam the door shut.

Later that night I dream of the boy again—the worried smile, the eyes wet with tears, the pretty face that looks almost plastic, the photo of Blair and me from 1984 he clutches in one hand, the kitchen knife he’s holding in the other as he’s floating in the hallway outside the bedroom door, “China Girl” echoing throughout the condo—and then I can’t help myself: I rise up from the bed, and I open the door, and I move toward the boy, and when I hit him, the knife falls to the floor. And when I wake up the next morning there’s a bruise on my hand from when I hit the boy in my dream.

Rain arrives wearing sweats and no makeup and she’s trying to keep it together with the audition set for tomorrow and she didn’t want to come over but I told her I would cancel it if she didn’t and she’s been fasting so we don’t go out to dinner and when I first touch her she says let’s wait and then I make another threat and the panic is cooled only by breaking the seal off a bottle of Patrón and then I just keep fucking her on the floor in the office, in the bedroom, the lights burning brightly throughout the condo, the Fray blaring from the stereo, and even though I thought she was numb from the tequila she keeps crying and that makes me harder. “You feel this?” I’m asking her. “You feel this inside you?” I keep asking, the fear vibrating all around her, and it’s freezing in 1508 and when I ask her if she’s cold she says it doesn’t matter. And tonight, for maybe the first time, I’m smiling at the black Mercedes that keeps cruising along Elevado, every now and then slowing down so that whoever is behind the tinted windows can look up through the palm trees to the apartment on the fifteenth floor. “I’m just helping you,” I tell her soothingly, trying to calm her down, and then she’s slurring her words. “Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?” she asks. “Why can’t you just be chill about this?” she asks when I start touching her again, murmuring how much I love it like this. “Why can’t you accept this for what it is?” she asks. She pulls a towel over her body that I just as quickly pull off.

“What is it?” I whisper. I feed her another shot of tequila.

“It’s just a movie that you’re writing.” She’s crying openly now as she says this.

“But we’re both writing this movie together, baby.”

“No we’re not,” she cries, her face an anguished mask.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m only acting in it.”

And when I finally notice the red message light flashing on her cell phone on the nightstand I ask, one hand on her breast, the other one lightly gripping her throat, “Where is he?”

Trent Burroughs calls me and tells me to meet him in Santa Monica after a lunch he’s having with a client at Michael’s. On the Santa Monica pier Trent’s wearing a suit and sitting on a bench at the entrance and when he sees me approaching he looks up from his phone and takes off his sunglasses and just stares at me warily. Trent mentions he finished lunch earlier than he’d planned with a skittish actor he manages, successfully persuading him to take a role in a movie for myriad reasons that would be beneficial to everybody.

“I’m actually surprised you came,” Trent says.

“Why couldn’t I meet you at the restaurant?” I ask.

“Because I don’t really want to be seen with you,” he says. “It would validate something that I wouldn’t want validated, I guess.”

I start walking with him along the boardwalk. He puts his sunglasses back on.

“I suppose I’m more sensitive about things than I thought,” he says.

“I got your client an audition today,” I say, in a good mood because of how Rain responded to me last night.

“Yeah,” Trent says. “You did.”

I pause. “Isn’t that what you wanted to see me about?”

Trent thinks about it before saying, “In a way.”

The empty Ferris wheel looms over us as we pass by barely visible in the haze, just a dim circle, and except for a few Mexican fishermen no one’s around. Holiday decorations are still up and a dead Christmas tree wrapped in a garland leans against the peeling wall of the arcade and the faint smell of churros floats toward us from a brightly colored cart and it’s hard to concentrate on Trent because the only sounds are the distant surf and the squalling of low-flying gulls, the psychic calling out to us, the calliope playing a Doors song.

“This isn’t about Blair?” I suddenly ask.

Trent looks over at me as if he’s shocked I would ask that. “No. Not at all. This has nothing to do with Blair.”

I keep moving with him down the boardwalk toward the end of the pier, waiting for him to say something.

“I want to make this quick,” Trent finally says, checking his watch. “I’ve got to be back in Beverly Hills by three.”

I shrug and put my hands in the pockets of the hoodie I’m wearing, one of them forming a fist around my phone.

“I guess you’re going to stop this with Rain Turner, right?” Trent asks. “I mean, the audition’s this afternoon, right? And then it’ll be over?”

“Stop … what, Trent?” I ask innocently.

“Whatever it is you do with these girls.” He quickly makes a face, then tries to relax. “This, I don’t know, this little game you play.”

“What are you talking about, Trent?” I ask, sounding as casual and amused as possible.

“Promise them things, sleep with them, buy them things and then you can only get them so far and when you can’t get them the things that you really promised … ” Trent stops walking and takes off his sunglasses and looks at me, mystified. “Do I really need to say this?”

“It’s just a very interesting theory.”

Trent stares at me before he continues walking, and then he stops again.

“It’s interesting that you—what? Abandon them? Try to screw things up for them once they figure it all out?”

Something in me snaps. “I think Meghan Reynolds is doing okay,” I say. “I think she benefited from using me.”

“You don’t really need to work, do you?” Trent asks. He sounds genuinely interested. “You’ve got family money, right?”

I don’t say anything.

“I mean, you can’t afford to live like you do just off screenwriting,” Trent says. “I mean, right?”

I shrug. “I do okay.” I shrug again.

“I know Rain Turner doesn’t have a shot at that role.” Trent keeps walking and then he puts his sunglasses back on as if it’s the only thing that will calm him down. “I talked to Mark. I talked to Jon. You can keep fucking with her as long as you want, I guess—”

“Trent, you know what? I just realized this is none of your business.”

“Well, it has, unfortunately, become my business.”

“Really?” I ask, trying to sound neutral. “How’s that?”

We’re both suddenly distracted by a drunken man in a bathing suit who’s gesturing at something invisible in the air at the end of the pier, sunburned, bearded. Trent takes off his sunglasses again and for some reason he doesn’t know where to look and he’s more agitated than he was before and the land has disappeared behind us and there’s no sound coming from the distant shore, which is now completely hidden by haze, and we’re out over the water now and two Asian girls pulling tufts of cotton candy off a stick are the only other people wandering by.

“It’s much more complicated than you know.” Trent says this in a strained voice as he keeps looking around, and I just want him to stop but I also don’t want him to look at me. “It’s just … bigger than you think. All you need to do is, is, is remove yourself,” he stammers before regaining his composure. “You don’t need to know anything else.”

“Remove myself from what, exactly?” I ask. “Remove myself from her?”

Trent pauses a moment, and then decides to tell me something. “Kelly Montrose was a close friend of mine.” He lets the statement hang there.

It hangs there long enough for me to ask, “What does Kelly have to do with why I’m here?”

“Rain was with him,” Trent says. “I mean, when he disappeared. They were together.”

“With him?”

“Well, he was paying for it, I guess … ”

“I thought she had stopped doing that,” I say. “I thought she met Rip and that she had stopped doing that.”

“She knows things,” Trent says. “And so does Julian.”

“What things?”

“About what happened to Kelly.”

I stare at Trent stone-faced but the fear begins swirling around us softly and it causes me to notice a young blond guy in cargo shorts and a windbreaker leaning against a railing on the pier, purposefully not looking at us, and I realize he could not be more obvious if he were holding a hundred balloons. Invisible gulls keep squalling in the hazy sky above him, and the blond guy suddenly seems familiar but I can’t place him.

“I’m not saying she’s innocent,” Trent’s saying. “She’s not. But she doesn’t need someone like you to make things worse for her.”

I turn back to Trent. “But Rip Millar is okay?”

For some reason this question forces Trent to shut up and figure out another tactic.

We start walking again. We pass a Mexican restaurant that overlooks the sea. We’re near the end of the pier.

“What did you get out of taking Rain on as a client?” I ask. “I’m curious. Why did you take on a girl you knew was never going to make it?”

Trent keeps matching my steps, and his expression momentarily relaxes. “Well, it made my wife happy to help Julian out before she realized … ” Trent pauses, thinks things through, and continues. “I mean, I knew about Julian. Blair and I didn’t talk about it but it wasn’t a secret between us.” Trent squints and then puts his sunglasses back on. “If I have any problems they’re not with Rain Turner. And they’re not with Blair.”

“But you have a problem with Julian?”

“Well, I knew that Blair had loaned him a lot of money—well, seventy grand, but for him that’s a lot of money.” Trent moves alongside me toward the end of the pier, seemingly unaware of the guy who’s following us and I keep looking back at. I notice he’s holding a camera. “And I knew she really liked him.” Trent pauses. “But I also knew that in the end nothing was going to happen with him.”

“And what about me?”

“See, there you go again, Clay,” Trent says. “It’s not about you.”

“Trent—”

“It comes down to this,” he continues, cutting me off. “Blair loaned Julian a large sum of money. Julian decided to go to Rip to borrow some cash to pay Blair back. Why? I don’t know.” Trent pauses. “And that’s how Rip met Miss Turner. And, um, the rest is, well, what it is.” He pauses again. “Do I need to say anything more? Do you get it?”

I look over at the blond guy again. He’s supposed to be in costume, he’s supposed to be camouflaged but he’s not: it’s almost as if he wants us to notice him. He keeps moving down the pier, twenty, maybe thirty yards behind us.

“Rip told me he was going to divorce his wife,” I say. “What would they have done then? I mean, if Kelly hadn’t shown up? How much longer could they have played this game with Rip if he actually went through with the divorce?”

“No. It was safe,” Trent says dismissively. “The divorce would’ve been too expensive for Rip. They both knew that.”

“But then your friend Kelly got in the way,” I say.

“That might have been a problem,” Trent says, nodding his head.

“The problem being what?”

“Whatever happened between Rip Millar and Kelly Montrose … ” Trent stops, figuring out how to phrase it differently. “Kelly knew a lot of people. It’s not like Rip Millar was the only person who had issues with him.”

My iPhone starts vibrating in the pocket of the hoodie, its sound muffled.

“Actually”—Trent stares at me—“you and Rip have much more in common than you might think.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I say. “I didn’t have anything to do with Kelly’s death.”

“Clay—”

“And I don’t know how but I think Rip did.” I stop walking. “And you knew something at the Christmas party, didn’t you? You knew Rip had done something to Kelly. You knew Rain had left him for Kelly and you knew Rip liked her—”

Trent cuts me off. “Yeah? Well, I guess we all have our little theories.”

“Theory?” I ask. “It’s a theory that you knew he was probably dead that night?”

The haze obliterates everything: you can’t see the Pacific or the pier behind us, the Mexican restaurant is barely visible at the end of the pier and nothing else at all. The pier falls away into the sea and beyond that is just a sheet of haze blocking out the entire sky so there’s no horizon and Trent leans against the railing studying me, still intent on pitching the narrative he wants me to respond to, but I can barely pay attention.

“Why do you keep looking at that restaurant?” Trent suddenly asks. “You thirsty for a margarita or something?”

Trent doesn’t realize I’m not looking at the restaurant. The young blond guy in the windbreaker is somewhere around us but I can’t see him.

“Why is Kelly Montrose dead?” I say, almost murmuring to myself instead of directing this at Trent. “What happened to Amanda Flew?”

Trent isn’t cool enough to hide the desperation that quickly flashes across his face. “It’s not just about Kelly and it’s not just about Amanda.” Trent breathes in and looks around. “You don’t understand … This … thing … it has … a scope, Clay … ” Trent stops. “It has a scope … There are other people involved and it’s—”

“Can’t you just answer my question?”

“But you’re asking for an answer where there isn’t just one.”

The iPhone in my pocket starts vibrating again.

“You smell like alcohol,” he mutters, turning away. “I heard rumors but Christ.”

I clasp my fist around the iPhone as if that will make it stop.

“Look, she’s not going to get that part,” Trent says. “Okay? You understand?”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“Anything could happen, I suppose,” Trent says. “But I don’t think that’s one of them.”

“Well, then she won’t get the part and then it’ll be over,” I say. “And then she’ll go off with someone else. She’ll move on.”

“No she won’t. Because you’ll offer her another one,” Trent says quickly. “You’ll just prolong it. Like you usually do. And like the others, it’ll take her a while to understand.” Trent stops. “And then, as usual, it’ll take even longer for you to understand and—”

“Why are you here, Trent?” I ask, unable to contain the stress that’s whispering around us. “What? You’re here on Julian’s behalf? You want Rain to be with Julian? You want them to live happily ever after?”

“No, no, you’re not paying attention. You don’t get it,” Trent says, shaking his head. “Just stop all contact with her. Starting this afternoon. Don’t see her anymore. Don’t return her calls. She’ll come back to you but don’t let her—”

“What if I say go fuck yourself?”

“That would be very stupid.”

“Unless you tell me why I should stay away, I don’t think what you want is going to happen.”

Trent stares at me, and then he tells me something that I know he doesn’t want to.

“If she can make Rip Millar happy for a couple more months then everything will calm down.” Trent stops and looks into my face. “Do you get it, now? Do I need to explain this any further? Julian’s really not the obstacle right now. You are. Julian’s already tried to talk her out of being with you. But, in this case, you’re the only one she’s going to listen to.”

“Why me?”

“Because she thinks you’re the only one who can do something for her,” Trent says, and then shakes his head again. “You’re the only one who cares enough.” He pauses. “Because she thinks that you’re her only chance.”

I force myself to laugh but it’s just a gesture to overcome the fear. When I reach into my pocket for the iPhone three consecutive texts read: why are u with him? Why Are You With Him??? WHY ARE YOU WITH HIM???

I’m not listening to anything Trent says until I hear “As of now, you’ve officially made yourself a target” because this reminds me of what Rip Millar told me in the back of the limousine a few nights ago. “What?” I look up from the phone and then glance fearfully down the boardwalk at the guy in the windbreaker, who has appeared again, pretending to stare dreamily into the hazy distance.

“Someone could be setting you up,” Trent says.

“Being set up for what?”

Trent notices something as I light a cigarette.

“Your hand is shaking,” he says. “You can’t smoke here.”

“I don’t think anyone’s around to enforce that.”

On the roof of the Mexican restaurant someone is scanning the pier with a pair of binoculars. And then I realize that the guy who’s been following us is taking more pictures, his camera aimed at the ocean even though the haze makes these pictures almost impossible, unless instead he’s taking pictures of two guys leaning against the railing at the end of the Santa Monica pier, one of them smoking a cigarette, the other one backed away from him in frustration. The windbreaker guy crosses the pier again as if he’s looking for a better angle and I don’t say anything to Trent because he hasn’t noticed the guy and the empty roller-coaster cars glide slowly down their tracks, slipping in and out of the haze, and someone faintly sings you’re still the one from a radio inside a surf shop and on the beach a surfer shuffles through the sand near the water’s edge, a towel wrapped around his head like a turban.

“You know she came on to Mark,” Trent says. “Or did you know that?”

I keep looking at the phone.

WHAT IS HE TELLING YOU?!?

“She tried to fuck him,” Trent says. “He wasn’t interested. He laughed about it. It was the night after the audition and she sent him pictures of herself. She told him he could fuck her if he wanted to.”

I look back at the roof of the restaurant and then I squint at the blond guy with the camera, now disappearing into the haze.

“He said she was too old for him—”

“Are you trying to make me angry?”

Trent moves into another tactic. “Daniel Carter’s interested in doing Adrenaline. He wants to make it his next movie. We could make that happen.” Trent looks at me hopefully. “Would that mollify you?”

“What are you doing, Trent? Why are you here?” I mutter. “If you’re not going to talk straight to me then I’m leaving.”

“Just walk away. Just leave her alone. I’m just asking you to walk away from her and leave it alone.” Trent pauses. “You don’t need to know why. You’re not going to get any answers. I doubt it would matter to you if you had them anyway.”

“I don’t give a shit about what you want.” I pause. “What I want to know is what happens if I go to the police? What if I lay out a scenario and I think it’s a pretty goddamn plausible one about Rip Millar and what happened to Kelly Montrose and what if I go to the police and—”

“No, you won’t do that,” Trent says tiredly, turning away from me. “You won’t do that, Clay.”

“Why are you so sure about that?” I toss the cigarette, half smoked, onto the pier and grind it out with my shoe.

“That girl you beat up?” Trent says. “The actress. The one from Pasadena?”

I immediately start walking away from Trent.

“The one that your scumbag lawyer paid off? Two years ago?”

Trent keeps following me.

“She’s willing to talk,” Trent says, keeping up. “Did you know she was pregnant at the time of the assault? Did you know that she lost the baby?”

Amanda Flew’s body is never found but a video of what appears to be her last hours is posted on the Net in a clip and you have to pretend you’re not watching it in order to get through it. Amanda is in a motel room nude and incoherent and being shot up by men wearing ski masks. She has a seizure and two of the enormous men hold her down while her body thrashes on the newspapers taped to the floor, and then tools are removed from what looks like a beer cooler. The men take turns urinating on her and they keep slapping her face to keep her awake. And then the seizures become more intense and during one of them an eyeball is dislodged, bulging from its socket, and then a semierect cock is pushed in and out of her slack mouth, and then it’s removed once blood starts running down her face, and it’s at about this point in the roughly ten minutes of footage that you finally see it: when the drugs start wearing off and Amanda realizes what’s going to happen to her and she stares into the camera lucidly for one long moment, her panicked expression becoming something else. And then the thing that makes me shut it off happens: you realize this isn’t just about Amanda. I can’t help thinking that it’s happening because of me.

I avoid everything. Everything goes quiet once the video is posted and yet no one concedes that the video is real. There are actual arguments about its authenticity. People think these are outtakes from a horror movie Amanda shot the year before and not even the makers of the horror movie can stop this new narrative from taking shape. I order two bottles of gin from Gil Turner’s and once they’re delivered I make plans to leave for Vegas and reserve a suite at the Mandalay Bay but then cancel it even though I’ve already packed two bags, and the moon rises over the city and for the first time in what seems like years there are no cars on Elevado Street tonight, and in a warm bath I think about calling a girl who I know would come over but then I’m just lying in bed with the Bose headphones, drinking from the second bottle of gin, and then I’m dreaming about the dead boy again and now he’s standing in the bedroom, moving softly toward the bed, whispering for me to come join him in his endless sleep, and in the dream the palm trees are taller and bending in the wind outside the sliding glass wall of 1508 and when I see the bruises on his face from where I struck the boy in the previous dream the phone starts ringing, waking me up, but not before the boy whispers Save me …

What did Rip tell you?”

It’s Julian and I’m just waking up and it’s late afternoon, the sky dimming into dusk. “What?” I clear my throat, and ask it again. “What?”

“I know you saw him,” he says. “I know he’s looking for me. What did he want?”

I barely manage to sit up. “I think … in terms of … what’s going on—”

Julian stops me automatically. “There’s nothing that’s going to connect him to that.” The following silence confirms that we both know what he’s referencing: Amanda.

“What are you doing?” I ask. “Where are you?”

“We’re leaving tonight,” Julian says, downplaying the urgency in his voice.

“Who’s leaving?”

“Me and Rain,” Julian says. “We’re leaving tonight.”

“Julian,” I start and then try and figure out what I want to say to him but I’m on the verge of tears and nothing comes out and I keep clutching the sheets bundled around me and they’re damp with sweat and for the first time it’s real: she’s actually leaving with him and not me.

“What?” he asks impatiently. “What is it?”

“I need to see you,” I say. “Come over. I want to help you.”

“What?” he asks, annoyed. “Why? Help me with what?”

“Rip wants to make a deal,” I say. “He wants this whole thing over with.”

There’s a pause. “And what do you have to do with this?”

“I know everything,” I say. “I’m going to make it happen.” I pause before saying, “I’ll pay him back.” Finally, though I can barely swallow I say, “I’m going to make this end.”

Julian sends a text two hours later from somewhere close to the Doheny Plaza. Are you alone? And then: Is it safe to come over? I’ve sobered up as much as I can when I text back: Yes. When I call Rain there’s no answer and because Rain doesn’t pick up I dial another number and Rip takes my call.

Someone’s been following me,” Julian says, brushing past me into the condo. “I took a cab. I’m going to need a ride. You’re going to have to drive me back to Westwood.” He turns and notices that I’m wearing a robe. He notices the glass of gin I’m holding. He looks at me. “Are you okay? Are you capable of that?”

“Where’s Rain?” I ask. “I mean, how is she?”

“Don’t bother.” Julian walks to the window wall and looks down, craning his neck as if scanning for someone.

“I hear, um, the audition went well—”

“Stop it,” he says, turning around.

“She has a shot at the part—”

“It’s over, Clay,” he says. “That’s over. Just don’t.”

“That’s not true, Julian. Hey—”

“I want to know why you’ve been hanging out with Rip.”

“He, um, wants to talk to you,” I say. “He just wants to talk to you now that I’ve agreed to pay him—”

“No, he doesn’t,” Julian cuts me off.

“Yeah, he really does … now that … ” I’m trying not to stammer. “Don’t you get it? I’m paying him back.”

Julian’s stance changes: he takes a step toward me, then stops. “How did you know about that?” he says. “The money, I mean. Who told you?”

“Trent did,” I say. “It was Trent.”

“Fuck.” Julian turns away again and starts pacing the length of the living room.

I try to come up with something else.

“Hey, I just talked to Rip,” I say. “And he said it was cool and … I think he just wants to talk.”

“He wants Rain,” Julian says. “That’s what he really wants. And that’s not going to happen.”

“He gets it,” I say. “He just wants to talk to you about … something. He just wants to, I don’t know, clear things up.” I’m struggling to keep my voice steady. “He wants reassurance … ” I clear my throat and then calmly say: “He thinks you know something that connects him to Kelly.”

Julian stares at me and says after a beat, “That’s not true.”

“He knows that people think he wanted Kelly out of the way,” I’m saying.

“That’s just a dumb rumor,” Julian says, but his voice has changed and something in the room shifts. “Rip doesn’t really give a fuck about me.”

“Julian,” I say, slowly moving toward him, “he had you beaten up.”

“How do you know that?”

I swallow. “Because Rip told me.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, Julian,” I say, nodding as I move closer to him. “It was Rip. Rip did that to you … ”

“No he didn’t.” Julian waves me off. “That was something else. That wasn’t Rip. You’re making that up.”

“Look,” I say, “all I know is that part of the condition on taking the money is that he wants to see you. Tonight. Before you guys leave.” I pause. “Otherwise there’s no deal.”

“Why the fuck does he want to see me when I know he’s pissed off? Why doesn’t he just take the money?” Julian asks this almost pleadingly. “Don’t you think I should probably stay the fuck away from him? Jesus, Clay.”

“Because once I told him I’d pay him back—” I start.

“Why are you doing this?” Julian looks at me and then almost automatically realizes why.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’d do it for her,” I say softly, pulling out my iPhone, and then trying to calm him down: “What’s he going to do to you? I’ll be there. I’ll be with you.”

I find Rip’s contact info and send him a blank e-mail.

Julian looks at me. He’s changing his mind about something. “You’ve become friends with him? A month ago you told me he was a freak.”

The only thing I can do is counter with: “Why did you go to Rip when you needed the money to pay back Blair?”

“I didn’t go to Rip,” Julian says. “Rip came to me. Because of Rain he came to me and offered to help me out in exchange for … ” Julian pauses. “I was trying to figure out another way to pay back Blair, but when Rip came to me it just seemed easier … But I didn’t go to Rip. He came to me. I didn’t go to him.”

“Wait, Julian. Hold on.”

“What are you doing?”

I’m looking at the response I just received. Is he with you now?

I text back: Give me the address.

I wait, pretending to read something on the screen.

“Clay,” Julian asks, walking toward me. “What are you doing?”

And then: You’ll bring him here?

An address in Los Feliz appears on the screen barely a second after I text back: yes.

Julian calls Rain and I only hear his side of the conversation. It lasts a minute as he tries to calm her down. “We don’t know it was him,” Julian says. “Hey, chill out … We don’t know if he took the money.” He pauses while pacing the room. “Clay said—” and then he has to stop. “Calm down,” he says, almost stunned by the ferocity of the voice coming over the phone. “If you’re so worried then confirm it with Rip,” he says softly. “Make sure it’s happening.” Finally Julian looks over at me and says, “No, you don’t need to talk to him” and that’s my cue to nod. “He’s helping us out,” Julian says. Once Julian hangs up, my phone immediately starts vibrating in the pocket of the robe I’m wearing and it’s Rain and I ignore it.

Julian stands in the bedroom doorway, drinking a bottle of water, watching as I get dressed. I’m pulling on jeans, a T-shirt, a black hoodie. I’m debating whether to give him another chance.

“Rip loaned you the money to pay Blair back?” I ask. “And then what happened?”

“He only loaned part of it,” Julian says. “But this has nothing to do with the money. Rip’s just using that as an excuse. It’s not about the money.” He sounds almost scornful.

“You lied to me when you told me you hadn’t talked to Blair,” I say. “You lied when you said you hadn’t talked to her since June and I believed you.”

“I know. It was awkward. I felt bad about that. I’m sorry.”

I move to the bathroom. I try to brush my hair. My hand is shaking so hard I can’t hold the brush.

“I didn’t mean to fuck with you,” he says.

“I just want to know one thing,” I say. “It keeps bothering me.”

“What is it?”

“Why did you set me up with Rain if—”

Julian cuts me off as if he knows the rest of the question. “You’ve been around a long time. You know how this town works. You’ve been through it before.” And then his voice softens. “I just didn’t know how fucked up you got over Meghan Reynolds until it was too late.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that but what I can’t understand is that if you knew Rip was so crazy about Rain why did you … ” I stand in front of Julian, my arms at my sides, but I can’t look at him until I force myself to. “Why did you put me in danger?” I ask. “You pushed her onto me even after you knew how Rip felt? You pushed her onto me even though you thought he maybe had something to do with Kelly?”

“Clay, I never thought that he had anything to do with Kelly,” Julian says. “Those were just rumors that—”

“You wanted me to help her and I tried, Julian, but now I realize you didn’t care whether I got hurt or not.”

This moves something in Julian and his face tightens and his voice begins to rise. “Look, it’s really cool you’re trying to help me out here, but why do you keep thinking Rip was involved with Kelly’s death? Do you know something? Do you have any proof? Or are you just making shit up like you always do?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Stop it,” he says and suddenly he’s a different person. “You’ve done this so many times before, Clay. I mean, come on, dude, it’s a joke. Yeah, you tell people shit, but have you ever really gotten anybody anything?” he asks sincerely. “I mean, you promise shit and maybe you get them closer but, dude, you’re lying all the time—”

“Julian, come on, don’t—”

“And what I found out is that you really won’t do anything for anybody,” he says. “Except for yourself.” The gentle way he says this forces me to finally turn away. “This, like, delusional fantasy you have of yourself is … ” He pauses. “Come on, dude, it’s a joke.” He pauses again. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

I force myself to grin in order to lighten the moment and not scare him away.

“Why are you smiling?” he asks.

“It must be a pretty good act,” I say. “This … fantasy I have of myself.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you bought into it,” I say.

“I never thought you’d actually fall for her.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Because Blair told me how cold you could be.”

Can you drive?” Julian asks as the elevator heads down to the garage. “Or do you want me to?”

“No, I can drive,” I say. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Julian says. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Let him have her,” I whisper.

“We’re leaving tonight,” he says.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m not telling you.”

Driving along Sunset I keep checking the rearview mirror and Julian sits in the passenger seat texting someone, probably Rain, and I keep turning on the radio and then turning it off but he doesn’t notice, and then we’re crossing Highland and the Eurythmics song fades into a voice from the radio talking about the aftershocks from an earthquake earlier, something that I slept through, and I have to roll down all the windows and pull the car over three times in order to steady myself because I keep hearing sirens all around us and my eyes are fixed on the rearview mirror because two black Escalades are following us and the last time I pull over, in front of the Cinerama Dome, Julian finally asks, “What’s wrong? Why do you keep stopping?” and where Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood intersect I smile at him coolly as if this is all going to be okay, because in the condo I felt like I was sinking into a rage but now, turning onto Hillhurst, I’m feeling better.

Outside a building past Franklin that’s surrounded by eucalyptus trees Julian gets out of the BMW, and starts walking toward the entrance just as I receive a text that says don’t get out of the car, and when Julian realizes I’m still sitting in the driver’s seat he turns around and our eyes lock. A black Escalade pulls up behind the BMW and flashes its headlights over us. Julian leans into the opened passenger window.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Julian asks, and then he’s squinting at the headlights through the back windshield before they go dark and then he looks at me and I’m just staring blankly at him.

Behind Julian three young Mexican guys are climbing out of the car into the circle of light from a lamppost.

Julian notices them, only mildly annoyed, and then turns back to me.

“Clay?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

The moment I say this Julian grabs the door I’ve already locked and for one moment he leans far enough into the car so that he’s close enough to touch my face, but the men pull him back and then he disappears so quickly it’s as if he was never here at all.

On Fountain my phone rings and I pull over somewhere after passing Highland. When I answer the phone I notice that my seat is soaked with urine and it’s a call from a blocked number, but I know who it is.

“Did anybody see you bring him here?” Rip asks.

“Rip—”

“No one saw you, right?” Rip asks. “No one saw you bring him here, right?”

“Where am I, Rip?”

The silence is a grin. The silence seals something.

“Good. You can go now.”

Rain falls into my arms screaming.

“You drove him there,” she screams. “You drove him there?”

I push her against a wall and kick the door closed with my foot.

“Why do you hate me so much?” she screams.

“Rain, sshhh, it’s okay—”

“What are you doing?” she screams before I muffle her face with my hand.

And then I push her to the floor and pull off her jeans.

You missed so many hints about me,” I whisper to her as she lies drugged in the bedroom.

“I didn’t … miss them,” she says, her face bruising, her lips wet with tequila.

“It’s what this place has done to you,” I whisper, brushing her hair off her forehead. “It’s okay … I understand … ”

“This place didn’t do anything to me.” She covers her face with her hands, a useless gesture.

She starts crying again, and this time she can’t stop.

“Are you going to be sick again, baby?” I hold a damp washcloth against her tan skin as she slips in and out of consciousness. I watch as her hand slowly balls into a fist. I grab her wrist before she can strike me. I push it back down until it relaxes. “Don’t hit me again,” I say. “It won’t matter because I’ll just hit you right back,” I say. “Do you want that?” I ask.

She shuts her eyes tightly and shakes her head back and forth, tears pouring down her face.

“You tried to hurt me,” I say, stroking her face.

“You did that to yourself,” she moans.

“I want to be with you,” I’m saying.

“That’s never going to happen,” she says, turning her face away from me.

“Please stop crying.”

“That was never going to be part of it.”

“Why not?” I ask. I press two fingers on both sides of her mouth and force her lips into a smile.

“Because you’re just the writer.”

I went to Palm Springs as if nothing had happened. On Highway 111 in the cold desert a massive rainbow appeared, its arc intact, shimmering in the afternoon sky. The girl and boy I bought were in their late teens and the negotiations had gone smoothly and an offer was made and then accepted. The girl and boy were distant. In order to do the things I had paid for they had already checked out before they arrived for the weekend. The girl was impossibly beautiful—the Bible Belt, Memphis—and the boy was from Australia and had modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch and they had come to L.A. to make it but it wasn’t happening for them yet. They admitted using fake names. I told them to express themselves only in gestures—I didn’t want to hear their voices. I told them to walk around naked and I didn’t care how absurd or deranged I seemed. The desert was freezing beneath the dark mountains looming over the town and the palm trees lining the street around the house caged the white sky. I watched geckos dart through the rock garden while the girl and boy sat naked in front of the giant flat-screen TV in the living room watching a remake of The Hills Have Eyes.

The ranch house was in the movie colony and had walls that were cream-colored and mirrored and pillars that lined the pool shaped like a baby-grand piano and raked gravel blanketed the yard and small planes flew above it in the dry air before landing at the airport nearby. At night the moon would hang over the silver-rimmed desert and the streets were empty and the girl and the boy would get stoned by the fire pit and sometimes dogs could be heard barking over the wind thrashing the palm trees as I pounded into the girl and the house was infested with crickets and the boy’s mouth was warm but I didn’t really feel anything until I hit him, always panting, my eyes gazing at the steam rising from the pool at dawn.

Complaints had been made because the girl had become frightened of “the situation.” The manager of the girl and the boy wanted to speak to me at one point and I renegotiated the price and then handed the cell phone back to the boy and he spoke briefly into it before handing the phone back to me. Everything was confirmed. And then the boy took turns fucking me and then the girl and my fingers kept jamming into him, spurring the boy on, and the human skull in the plastic bag was a prop watching us from the nightstand in the bedroom and sometimes I made the girl kiss the skull and her eyes were in a trance and she gazed at me as if I didn’t exist and then I’d tell the boy to beat the girl and I watched as he threw her to the floor and then I told him to do it again.

One night the girl tried to escape from the house and the boy and I chased her down the street with flashlights and then onto another street where he tackled her just before dawn. We dragged the girl quickly back inside the house and she was tied up and put in what I had told them to refer to as the kennel, which was her bedroom. “Say thank you,” I told the girl when I brought out a plate of cupcakes laced with laxative and made the girl and boy eat them because it was their reward. Smeared with shit, I was pushing my fist into the girl and her lips were clinging tightly around my wrist and she seemed to be trying to make sense of me while I stared back at her flatly, my arm sticking out of her, my fist clenching and unclenching in her cunt, and then her mouth opened with shock and she started shrieking until the boy lowered his cock into her mouth, gagging her, and the sound of crickets kept playing over the scene.

The sky looked scoured, remarkable, a cylinder of light formed at the base of the mountains, rising upward. At the end of the weekend the girl admitted to me that she had become a believer as we sat in the shade of the towering hills—“the crossing place” is what the girl called them, and when I asked her what she meant she said, “This is where the devil lives,” and she was pointing at the mountains with a trembling hand but she was smiling now as the boy kept diving into the pool and the welts glistened on his tan back from where I had beaten him. The devil was calling out to her but it didn’t scare the girl anymore because she wanted to talk to him now, and in the house was a copy of the book that had been written about us over twenty years ago and its neon cover glared from where it rested on the glass coffee table until it was found floating in the pool in the house in the movie colony beneath the towering mountains, water bloated, the sound of crickets everywhere, and then the camera tracks across the desert until we start fading out on the yellowing sky.

When I did a search for the name of the dead boy a link moved me to a Web site he had created before his death called the Doheny Project. A thousand pictures detailed the renovation of unit 1508 in the Doheny Plaza and then abruptly stopped. There were pictures of the boy as well, headshots of him blond and tan and flexing—he had wanted to be an actor—and there was the fake smile, the pleading eyes, the mirage of it all. The boy had posted pictures of himself in the club he was at the night he died, high and shirtless surrounded with boys who looked like him and this was before he went to sleep and never woke up, and in one of the shots I could see that he had the same tattoo that Rain had seen when she dreamed about him—a dragon, blurred, on his wrist. And the search led me to an audition reel and in one of the auditions the boy reads the part of Jim in Concealed, the movie I wrote. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you, Jimmy?” someone playing a girl named Claire reads off camera. “Unconditional love,” the boy says, the character of Jimmy turning away in mock shame, but the boy was reading the line wrong, giving it the wrong emphases, smirking when he should have been totally serious, turning it into a punch line when it was never supposed to be a joke.

When Laurie calls from New York I tell her she has a week to move out of the apartment below Union Square. “Why?” she asks. “I’m subletting it,” I tell her. “But why?” she asks. “Because I’m staying in L.A.,” I tell her. “But I don’t understand why,” she says again, and then I tell her, “Everything I do is for a reason.”

At a fund-raising concert at Disney Hall that has something to do with the environment I talk to Mark during the intermission and where I ask him about Rain Turner’s audition for The Listeners. Mark tells me that Rain was never going to get the role of Martina but she’s actually being considered for a much smaller role as the older sister—basically, one scene where she’s topless—and that they’re going to see her again next week. We’re standing at the bar when I tell him, “Don’t, okay? Just don’t.” Mark looks at me, a little surprised, and then there’s a little smile. “Okay, I get it.” At the reception afterward at Patina I run into Daniel Carter, who says he’s very serious about making Adrenaline his next film after he finishes shooting the movie Meghan Reynolds is costarring in. Daniel is also thinking of using Rain Turner in the movie Meghan Reynolds is costarring in—Trent Burroughs made a call, said it would be a favor, whatever, it’s three lines. I tell Daniel to do a favor for me and not to put Rain in the movie and that Rain’s more trouble than she’s worth and Daniel seems shocked but I mistake this for amusement.

“I heard you were with her,” Daniel says.

“No,” I say. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

“What happened?” he asks, as if he already knows, as if he’s waiting to see if I’ll keep it secret.

“She’s just a whore,” I say, shrugging jovially. “The usual.”

“Yeah?” Daniel asks, smiling. “I heard you like whores.”

“In fact I’m writing a script about her,” I say. “It’s called The Little Slut.”

Daniel looks at the ground before glancing up at me again, an attempt to hide his embarrassment. I knock back the rest of my drink.

“Anyway, she’s with Rip Millar now,” Daniel says. “Maybe he’ll help her out.”

“I don’t get it,” I say. “How could Rip help her?”

“You didn’t know?” Daniel asks.

“Know what?”

“Rip left his wife,” Daniel says. “Rip wants to make movies now.”

Julian’s body is found almost a week after he disappeared, or was kidnapped, depending on which script you want to follow. Earlier that week three young Mexican men connected to a drug cartel were found shot to death in the desert, not far from where Amanda Flew was last seen. They were decapitated and their hands were missing and they had at one point during the last week been in possession of a black Audi that was found outside of Palm Desert, torched.

Someone filmed me with a digital camera in the American Airlines first-class lounge at JFK when I was sitting at a table with Amanda Flew last December. A disk is mailed to me in a manila envelope with no return address. The scene comes back to me: Amanda reading my palm in the Admiral’s Club, the empty glasses on the table, both of us laughing suggestively, leaning into each other, and though the lighting and sound quality are bad and you can’t hear what we’re saying it’s obvious I’m flirting hard. Sitting in my office watching this play on the screen of my monitor I realize this is where everything started. Rain picked Amanda up from LAX in the blue Jeep on that night in December and then they followed me back to Doheny because Amanda had told Rain she met the guy Julian had been telling her about. I heard you met a friend of mine, Rip told me outside the W Hotel last December at the premiere of Daniel Carter’s movie. Yeah, I heard you really hit it off … When the footage ends a series of doctored pictures fade in and out of one another: Amanda and me holding hands in line at Pink’s, wheeling a cart out of the Trader Joe’s in West Hollywood, at Amoeba, standing in the lobby of the ArcLight. All of the pictures are faked but I get it—this is a warning of some kind. And right when I’m about to eject the disk Rip calls me, as if he’s timed it, as if he knows what I’m looking at, and he tells me another video will be arriving soon and that I need to watch that one as well.

“What is it?” I ask. I keep staring at the photos fading in and out: Amanda and me buying star maps on Benedict Canyon, the two of us standing in front of the Capitol Records Building like we were tourists, at an outside table on the patio at the Ivy having lunch.

“Just something somebody sent to me,” Rip says. “I think you should see it.”

“Why?” I’m staring at a photo of Amanda and me in the black BMW in the parking lot of the In-N-Out in Sherman Oaks.

“It’s persuasive,” Rip says, and then he tells me that the licenses for the club he wants to open in Hollywood have finally been approved, and that I should stop telling people not to put Rain in their movies.

The new disk arrives that afternoon. I remove the disk of Amanda Flew and me at JFK and put the new disk into the computer but I turn it off almost immediately once I see what it is: Julian tied to a chair, naked.

After I drink enough gin to calm down I stand at my desk in the office. They had drawn lines with a black marker all over his body—the “nonlethal entry wounds” as the Los Angeles County coroner’s office was quoted in the Los Angeles Times article about the torture-murder of Julian Wells. These are the stab wounds that will allow Julian to live long enough to understand that he will slowly bleed to death. There are more than a hundred of them drawn all over his chest and torso and legs as well as his back and neck and the head which has been freshly shaved, and when I’m able to look back at the screen one of the hooded figures standing over Julian whispers something to another hooded figure but the second I pause the disk I get a text from a blocked number that asks What are you waiting for? About twenty minutes into the disk I mistake static for the clouds of flies swarming around the room below the flickering fluorescent lights and crawling over Julian’s abdomen which has been painted dark red, and when Julian starts screaming, weeping for his dead mother, the video goes black. When it resumes Julian’s making muffled sounds and that’s when I realize they’ve cut out his tongue and that’s why his chin is slathered with blood, and then within a minute he’s blinded. In the final moments of the disk the sound track is of the threatening message I left on Julian’s phone two weeks ago and accompanied by my drunken voice the hooded figures start punching him randomly with the knives, chunks of flesh spattering the floor, and it seems to go on forever until the cement block is raised over his head.

At the Hollywood Forever Cemetery I recognize very few of the people who show up for the memorial and they’re mostly just figures from the past who I don’t know anymore and I wasn’t even going to go but I had finished two projects in the last couple days that I had been ignoring, one was a remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth and the other was a script about the reformation of a young Nazi, and the last scene I wrote was when a boy in a castle is being shown a row of fresh corpses by a madman in a uniform who keeps asking the boy if he knows any of the dead and the boy keeps answering no but he’s lying, and I was staring at the bottle of Hendrick’s that sat on my desk while on the TV in my office Amanda Flew’s mother was being interviewed on CNN, after she had filed a complaint about the release of the video but she was told that privacy rights don’t extend to the dead even though Amanda’s body hasn’t been found, and there was a montage of Amanda’s brief career with “Girls on Film” playing on the sound track as the piece segues into the dangers of the drug wars across the border, and I was trying to make a decision that seemed daunting either way and for a moment I thought about checking out.

I arrive late just as the memorial concludes, and I’m standing in the back of the room scanning the small crowd as Julian’s father walks by and doesn’t recognize me. Rain isn’t here and neither is Rip, who for whatever reason I thought would be, and Trent didn’t show up but Blair’s here with Alana and I duck out before she sees me, and then I’m walking past the Buddhist cemetery where the dead are guarded by mirror-lined stupas and peacocks roam the graves and I’m staring up at the Paramount water tower, through the bristling palm trees, and I’m wearing a Brioni suit that had once fit but is now too loose and I keep thinking I see figures lurking behind the headstones but I tell myself it’s just my imagination, taking my sunglasses off, squeezing my eyes shut. The cemetery pushes up to the back walls of the Paramount lot and you could find meaning in that or be neutral about it in the same way you could find something ironic about the endless rows of the dead lined up beneath the palm trees with their fronds blooming against a sparkling blue sky or choose not to, and I’m looking at the sky thinking it’s the wrong time of day for a memorial, but the day, the sunlight, chases the ghosts away and isn’t that the point? They show movies here during the summer, I remember, studying the giant white wall of the mausoleum where the movies are projected.

“How are you?”

Blair is standing over me. I’m sitting on a bench next to a tree but there’s no shade and the sun is burning.

“I’m okay,” I say in a hopeful voice.

She doesn’t take her sunglasses off. She’s wearing a black dress that accentuates her thinness.

From where I’m sitting I watch the dispersing crowd, their cars pulling out onto Santa Monica Boulevard, and farther away there’s a bulldozer digging a fresh grave.

“I guess I’m worried,” I say. “A little.”

“Why?” she asks, sounding concerned, like someone trying to comfort a child. “About what?”

“I’ve been questioned twice,” I say. “I had to hire a new lawyer.” I pause. “They think I’m involved.”

Blair doesn’t say anything.

“They say there were witnesses who saw me with him the night of his disappearance and … ” I look away from her and don’t mention that the only person I could imagine this to be true of now that I’m sure the three Mexicans are dead is the doorman at the Doheny Plaza but when the doorman was interviewed he couldn’t remember anything and there were no records because I’d told him before Julian arrived that I was expecting a delivery and to just send up whoever stopped by, and all I’ve done is deny everything and tell everyone that I might have seen Julian earlier that week but the fact remains I don’t have an alibi for the night I drove him to the corner of Finley and Commonwealth and I know Rip Millar and Rain both know this. “Which means … well, I don’t know what it means,” I murmur, and then try to smile. “A lot of things, I guess.” The Hollywood sign blares from the hills and a helicopter flies low over the cemetery and a small group dressed in black is wandering through the headstones. I’ve only been here for fifteen minutes.

“Well,” Blair starts haltingly, “if you didn’t do anything, why are you worried?”

“They think I might have been part of … a plan,” I say casually. “I actually heard the word ‘conspiracy’ used.”

“What can they prove?” she asks softly.

“They have a tape someone thinks is incriminating … this … this drunken rant I made at Julian one night and … ” I stop. “Well, I was sleeping with his girlfriend so … ” I look up at her and then away. “I think I know who’s involved and I think they’re going to get away with it … but no one knows where I was.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Blair says.

“Why shouldn’t I worry?” I ask.

“Because I’ll tell them you were with me.”

I look up at her again.

“I’ll tell them you were with me that night,” she says. “I’ll tell them we spent the entire night together. Trent was away with the girls. I was alone.”

“Why would you do that?” This is a question you ask when you don’t know what else to say.

“Because … ” she starts, then stops. “I guess I want something in return.” She pauses. “From you.”

“Yeah?” I say, squinting up at her, the muffled sounds of traffic on Gower somewhere in the distance behind me.

She holds out a hand. I wait a beat before reaching out to take it but once I stand up I let it go. She’s a witch, someone whispers into my ear. Who is she? I ask. She’s a witch, the voice says. Like all of them.

Blair takes my hand again.

I think I realize what she wants but it’s not until I see Blair’s car that it finally announces itself clearly. It’s a black Mercedes with tinted windows not unlike the one that had followed me across Fountain or the one that cruised by the Doheny Plaza all those nights or the one that tailed the blue Jeep whenever it was parked on Elevado or the one that followed me in the rain to an apartment on Orange Grove. And in the distance the same blond guy I saw at the Santa Monica pier with Trent and at the bar in Dan Tana’s and crossing the bridge at the Hotel Bel-Air, and talking to Rain outside Bristol Farms one morning last December is leaning against the hood of the car and stops shading his eyes with his hand when he sees me staring at him. I thought he was maybe looking at the graves but then I realize he’s watching us. He turns away when Blair nods at him. I keep staring at the car while I feel Blair’s fingers lightly stroking my face. Just go where she says, the voice sighs. But she’s a witch, I whisper back, still staring at the car. And her hand is a claw …

“Your face,” she says.

“What about it?”

“You don’t look like anything has happened to you,” she whispers. “And you’re so pale.”

There are many things Blair doesn’t get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that only she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away—I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.

1985–2010