“I’m just here on a day pass,” Jimmy said. “I know Joel.”
They both took sips of their drinks. She was about to say something when he said, “So, how many languages do you speak?”
“Three or four,” she said.
“English, French, Spanish, German . . .”
“English, French, Italian, German, a little Japanese. And I read Russian.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, “but do you know what you call that little thing on the tip of a shoelace, where it’s wrapped?”
“In English?” she said.
She was at least as good at this as he was. He smiled, waited.
“Yeah, English.”
“Aglet,” she said.
He touched his finger to the indentation below his nose, over the lip.
“OK, what’s this called, the little dent?”
“The philtrum.”
“And the little thing that hangs down at the back of your throat?”
“The uvula.”
“This is kind of exciting,” Jimmy said. “I had no idea.”
She touched the lower part of the opening into her ear, above the lobe. It was as pretty and as perfect, at least tonight, in this light, as the rest of her.
“The intertragic notch,” he answered. And then, “Why do they call it that?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
He offered his hand. “I’m Jimmy Miles.”
“I know,” she said.
But then, before the next line, before he found out how she knew who he was, there were two gunshots. There was a beat and then a third shot, all from an adjacent room, too loud for the house, wrong for the scene. Everyone jumped, a few people screamed, but unconvincingly. Others laughed.
And they all moved off to investigate.
Jimmy stayed at the bar. Jean followed the others.
She looked back at him. There was a moment and then he followed her.
In the blond-paneled study there were floor to ceiling books—leather-bound, color-coded, looted from some Old Money family or bankrupt junior college—club chairs and ottomans, green shade lights and ashtrays big as hubcaps, for the cigars. Joel Kinser liked to tell people it was his favorite room in the house. The body on the floor had an effective bloody chest wound, still spreading. She was a woman in her twenties, brown hair, tight low jeans, black Gap shoes, one of those skimpy, navel-baring tees the kids called “a wife beater.” If she was breathing it was very shallow. Here was another actor thinking this would do her some good. Her eyes were closed. She was cute dead.
Jimmy and Jean stepped in at the back of the crowd.
The man in the guayabera plopped down in the wingback chair directly over the body. He was an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.
“Don’t touch anything, Ben,” a woman said.
“I wouldn’t think of it, Deborah,” JPL Ben said.
Joel was up front playing host. He stepped up onto the first rung of the library ladder.
“Well? Anyone?”
“She looks dead,” the TV comic said. They all laughed like it was the funniest thing.
“I talked to her,” a young man said. He was tall, red-haired, still in his teens. He wore corduroy shorts down over his knees, Birkenstocks with white socks, a T-shirt with a word on it that made no sense. He had a squat brown bottle of Bohemia by the throat, propped against his leg.
“What did she say?” the woman asked.
The young man hesitated.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” someone else said.
“What happened to the third shot?” Deborah said. “Give us something to start with, Joel.”
Kinser was enjoying himself more than he should have been. “I will tell you this,” he said. “She’s a screenwriter.”
“What’s her name?”
“Rosie Scenario,” the red-headed teenager said, very dry.
Ben bounded up out of the wingback chair. He had already made a discovery behind the couch, was just waiting to reveal it.
“So this would be her agent . . .”
The amateur sleuths gathered around the half-hidden second body, a young Latino in khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt, new running shoes on his feet, stage blood on his temple.
The gore was threatening to drip onto the off-white carpet. Joel lifted the lifeless head and put an Architectural Digest under it.
“What’s in his hand?” one of the women said.
Someone opened the dead fingers. A computer disk.
“Datum! ” Ben said.
The air was mock electric.
Joel stepped up another rung. “OK, listen, everyone, tonight we have with us a professional investigator, my friend, Jimmy Miles.”
Everyone turned to look, but Jimmy was gone.
The cue ball struck the five ball, which clipped the eight, sending it into the side pocket.
“I meant to do that,” Jimmy said.
Jean had stepped in. It was the game room. They were alone. He retrieved the eight ball