Keegan had been in a funk an entire week now. It started last Monday morning when he heard, over KNX, that Marilyn Monroe had died. He’d been sitting in the chair at The Owl Barber Shop when the announcement was made, and the news hit him like a sucker punch. He looked down at the silvery clippings gathering on the lap of the barber’s cape and felt something like a swelling in his throat. He hadn’t particularly liked the woman—in truth, he’d only seen two or three of her movies—but he’d glimpsed her once, or so he thought, getting out of a black Fleetwood in the alley behind the Formosa Café. He’d been waiting in a line of cars to turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard when she caught his eye. She wore beige slacks and a black turtleneck. He caught sight of her face, then, with the turn of her head, that platinum sweep of hair. She disappeared inside, followed by an older man in a pinstripe suit, and the door had closed behind them. That perfect face. Just the briefest glimpse of it. Keegan didn’t tell a soul, but he’d felt oddly buoyant the rest of that day.

The news that Marilyn was gone—and, a day or two later, that she’d likely taken her own life—was a trapdoor he’d fallen through. He wasn’t stupid. He knew, on some level, that it was his own mother he was grieving; she’d died the Tuesday before, and it had taken him a while to get clear of the numb, mechanical days leading up to her funeral—days full of phone calls and visits and countless small decisions about what the old woman would have wanted. The grief had hit him late, he supposed, in the form of a movie star and a bottle of Nembutal—like the sonic boom that rattled the windowpanes after the jet was already out of sight.

Keegan dried his face on a dish towel and went to his mother’s wall phone by the refrigerator—his phone now, he reminded himself. He dialed the number of his office downtown. While the phone rang, he pulled a chair from the kitchen table and dropped into it, taking the weight off his knees. Mrs. Dodd, his secretary, had kept the office open all last week while Keegan crisscrossed the city, running down all his mother’s lapses and loose ends. Shit. He still hadn’t ordered a headstone.

The phone rang six times before Mrs. Dodd picked up.

“Any point in coming in today?” Keegan asked.

“You don’t sound so good, boss,” Mrs. Dodd informed him in that nasally Queens accent she had somehow picked up from her husband. “You hanging in there?”