At seven, we cleaned the house on Benedict, picked up the dog, locked up, and drove over to West Hollywood. The key was where Rick had said it would be, placed on the ground precisely at the middle of the palm's corrugated trunk. The rest of the yard was desert-pale and composed, drought-tolerant plants spread expertly around the tiny space. The walls were higher and topped with ragged stone.

Inside, the place was different, too: whitewashed hardwood floors, big leather chairs, glass tables, gray fabric walls. The guest room was pine. An old iron bed was freshly made and turned down. A single white rose rested on the pillow and a bar of Swiss chocolate was on a dish on the nightstand.

“How sweet,” said Robin, picking up the flower and twirling it. She looked around. “This is like a great little inn.”

Sheets of newspaper were spread on the floor next to the bed. On them were a white ceramic bowl filled with water, a plastic-wrapped hunk of cheddar cheese, and a shirt cardboard lettered in fountain pen, in Rick's perfect, surgeon's hand: POOCH'S CORNER.

The dog went straight for the cheese—nosing it and having trouble with the concept of see-through plastic. I unwrapped it and fed it to him in bits.

We let him explore the yard for a while, then went back inside. “Every time I come here, they've done something else,” Robin said.

“They? I don't think so, Rob.”

“True. You know, sometimes I have trouble imagining Milo living here.”

“I bet he loves it. Refuge from all the ugliness, someone else to worry about the details for a change.”

“You're probably right—we can all use a refuge, can't we?”

At eight, she drove me to LAX. The place had been rebuilt a few years ago, for the Olympics, and was a lot more manageable, but incoming arteries were still clogged and we waited to enter the departure lanes.

The whole city had been freshened up for the games, more energy and creativity mustered during one summer than the brain-dead mayor and the piss-and-moan city council had come up with in two decades. Now they were back to their old apathy-and-sleaze routine, and the city was rotting wherever the rich didn't live.

Robin pulled up to the curb. The dog couldn't enter the terminal, so we said our good-byes right there, and feeling lost and edgy, I entered the building.

The main hall was a painfully bright temple of transition. People looked either bone weary or jumpy. Security clearance was slow because the western-garbed man in front of me kept setting off the metal detector. Finally, someone figured out it was due to the metal shanks in his snakeskin boots, and we started moving again.