Keegan studied the smiling face looking up at him. Moore still had the lean look and the penetrating eyes of the young beat cop Keegan had championed in The Times all those years ago. The pressures of the job hadn’t fattened him up or whitened his hair like they might do lesser men. Moore had always been smart and relentless; that’s why he’d made such good copy, and now Keegan tried to sort out in his mind what Moore’s presence in Ormsby’s garden might mean.

“Well, if it isn’t Jimmy Keegan in the flesh,” Moore called up, grinning.

Keegan forced a smile. “Louis Moore,” he said. “Long time no see. It was nice while it lasted.”

“What are you doing in this neighborhood?” Moore asked. “Don’t tell me you’ve started cleaning pools for a living.” He walked along Ormsby’s wall towards the back gate, looking at Keegan over his shoulder. “Or is my wife looking to divorce me?” He pulled the gate open and slipped through to the gravel drive.

Keegan tried to keep his voice glib and steady. “I always said she could find a better man in any passing Red Car,” he said. “Sadly, she hasn’t come around to my point of view.”

Moore closed the chain-link gate behind him and strolled easily up the road towards the cottage, his hands dug deep in the pockets of his light gray summer suit. His clothes were expensive-looking, impeccably tailored. He might have stepped out of the Brooks Brothers summer catalogue. He had chosen the clothes, Keegan guessed, for the newspaper lens man who was bound to show up at Ormsby’s place sooner or later. Maybe the KTLA news truck would rumble up from downtown once the story of an actor’s murder broke. It would be good TV. Hell, Moore might leak the story himself, if no one showed. He’d never been camera-shy, and he’d slipped Keegan plenty of inside tips back in the day.

Keegan opened and closed his numbing hands and then dug them into his trouser pockets where he wouldn’t have to think about them. He walked along the side of the cottage to the picket fence and waited for Moore inside the closed front gate.

They shook hands over the fence. The lieutenant’s grip was cool and dry, despite the heat. Now that he was close, Keegan could see new lines etched into the other man’s cheeks and the smudge of gray hair at his temples that showed beneath the band of his hat. He was older, but he still held himself tall, buoyed up no doubt by senior rank and sterling reputation.

Moore opened the front gate, uninvited, and stepped into the garden.

“Don’t let the dog out,” Keegan told him. The caution sounded fretful and old-lady-ish in his own ears. It might have been his mother’s voice.

Moore closed the gate without hurry. “So how are you doing, Jimmy?” he said. “I’d say you haven’t changed a bit, but to be honest you look like something a sick cat spat up.”