As she spoke, Keegan again felt an irrational pang of jealousy for a dead man. “A pair of star-crossed lovers,” he said. But what he was feeling, listening to her speak, wasn’t mere envy. Keegan felt displaced in some intangible but significant way. What if he, Keegan, were just a bit player—a Simon Catling—in Eve’s real story? What if he were just an unbilled player with a single line in some grander, tragic story he’d been blind to? Doesn’t every guard and footman think of himself as Romeo?

“We started seeing one another,” Eve went on. “In secret, of course. Or at least where we wouldn’t run into my late grandfather’s cronies. But it was hard. Even in Dog Patch or Hunter’s Point, we turned heads. We spent most of our time at a restaurant in Fillmore, down among the jazz clubs. Merrill knew the owner, and we could have dinner and drinks there without it being a fuss.”

Secret love and hidden trysts. Keegan was all too familiar with that sad plotline—he’d watched it play out too many times through his telephoto lens.

“Merrill got hired by a woman to sort out a warehouse in North Beach,” Eve went on. “Her husband had been killed, and she wanted Merrill to go through his belongings. It would keep him busy for weeks, and she offered to pay him well.” She pressed her hand to Keegan’s shirt. “Whatever was in the warehouse, Merrill got sucked in. He thought he’d found something, but he couldn’t be sure. Something to do with the Hesse family after the war.” She glanced up at him. “I remember because I had a German tutor with that name.”

It was the name—Hesse—that stirred something in Keegan. Some old story he’d filed. It had been just after the war, he seemed to remember. In ’47, he’d guess. American officers billeted in a German castle had dug up the family treasures. It was a screwball-comedy heist, doomed from its half-assed inception—Preston Sturges meets Public Enemy. Or was all that the plot of a TV movie he’d seen? Keegan ransacked his aching head. Most of the story had come over the wire, he seemed to remember. But hadn’t he made a few phone calls to a friend at the Chicago Trib for some local color?

The memory was there, a vague outline in the darkness, just out of reach, like an elusive word on the tip of his tongue. But, hell, 1947 was the year of the Black Dahlia and Bugsy Siegel. There was so much happening right here in LA, who could spare column space for some European royals’ petty woes?