was finishing two months with the company, but I had eighteen years on the SFPD before that. Collins had been with the company for twenty-three years, adjustment and investigation. Gilsa was pulling a twenty-year detectives' pension from the City of Los Angeles and had twenty more with the company. I remember the way we walked out onto the street that evening, secure in all we had seen and learned; believing that there was no lie we had not heard, no hunger or malice or misery or outrage we had not witnessed; slyly swaggering; certain that we were beyond surprise.

     I had a date at seven, enough time to buy a bottle of wine and drive up Russian Hill. Carole was her name. She did in-house training for a brokerage company. First time I met her, two months before, she had told me that she was on final approach for a vice-presidency. She had already bought a condo flat with a view of Coit Tower.

     She poured my wine and took dinner out of deli boxes; dilled chicken, arugala salad, couscous. Spritzy jazz on the stereo. In the living room, on a second bottle of wine, she hooked one leg of her suede slacks over the arm of a chrome rocker, took the knot out of her hair and let it fall down the back of the chair.

     “God what a week,” she said, and she told Coit Tower all about it.

     When she was finished, she slid the last of the wine down her throat. She got up.

     “Give me about ten,” she said. Minutes, she meant.

     She went to the bedroom. I waited. The walls and ceilings were stark white, the floors ersatz oak parquet. The furnishings ran in the vein of Italian leather, dhurry rugs, butcher-block tables. I think two or three songs came and went on the stereo; that kind of music, it's hard to tell. I stood, started down the hall, went back and turned off the amp and took the wineglasses to the sink.