“God, I’ve been waiting up for you, hoping you’d call,” she said from her hotel room. “What’s happening?”

“It’s Lawrence,” I said. “Someone tried to kill him in his apartment. I found him. He’s pretty bad. I don’t know whether he’s going to make it.”

Sarah waited a moment, and said, “Tell me everything.”

I gave her the basics, that Lawrence’s attacker was unknown, that it might or might not be related to the smash-and-grab at Brentwood’s, that I had a major story to write first thing in the morning.

“Do you want me to come home?” she asked. “I can bail on this thing. I don’t have to stay. We won’t be learning anything. It’ll all be bullshit, the way these things always are.”

“No, no, it’s okay, there’s not much you could do if you came back.”

“I could be with you,” she said.

I felt a lump develop in my throat. God, it had been a long night.

“Really,” I said. “I’m okay.”

“And the kids? Is everything okay there?” Sarah asked.

“Sure,” I lied, thinking about Trevor’s surveillance of Angie, my surveillance of Trevor and Angie, Angie’s mysterious visit to Trixie’s, Paul’s drinking binge.

“Everything’s fine.”

Chapter 20

20

I was tired enough to have slept for a week, yet I mostly tossed and turned during what was left of that night. I had a few things on my mind. There was my daughter, who was making secret visits to my dominatrix friend while being stalked all over town by a possibly unstable admirer. There was my son, who, at the age of sixteen, was getting into the booze, a behavior that put him in the company of most sixteen-year-old boys, and evidently my daughter’s stalker was supplying him with the stuff. My new friend lay in the hospital after a near-fatal stabbing. I had impulsively spent $8,900 that we didn’t have on a car that started only when it felt like it, plus another small fortune on a new wardrobe. And there was the fact that I was lying to my wife about just how serious things might be on the home front because it would involve disclosing that I was violating the privacy of a member of my own family.

At least I had those new clothes to wear.

By seven, I was sitting at the kitchen table, that morning’s Metropolitan spread out on the table before me, reaching for my coffee and reading the headlines without registering them.

Paul showed up first, since he had to be at high school before Angie had to be at her first class at the university. He looked tired and bleary-eyed.

“Sit down,” I said.

“Just let me grab some juice,” he said.

“Sit down,” I said, using my Angry Father Voice.