Moore followed Keegan up the porch steps and doffed his hat at the door. Keegan pushed the door open—he’d left it unlocked—and Nora darted out to jump up on his legs. When she saw Lieutenant Moore on the porch, she barked twice and backed up into the house.

Keegan stood to one side. “After you,” he told the lieutenant. “There’s a decent chance she won’t bite.”

The lieutenant glanced at Keegan warily and then stepped inside, ducking his head. He set his hat on the entry table. Nora growled at him from the center of the rug. She barked once and then scuttled back into the kitchen, out of sight.

“Not much of a guard dog,” Keegan admitted, “but she’s a damn good judge of character.”

Moore dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief and looked around at the dim, cramped room. It was hard to read what he was thinking.

“Make yourself at home,” Keegan told him. He set the warm bottle on the coffee table. “I’ll get us some glasses.”

He went to the kitchen and opened the back door for Nora, who seemed only too happy to make her escape from the lieutenant. Lucky dog. She bounded down the back steps and across the dying lawn. Keegan left the door ajar for her and took down a couple of cartoon juice glasses—Henery Hawk and Daffy Duck—gas-station giveaways from a decade ago, when his mother was still driving her old Pontiac. No Royal Dalton for LA’s finest. He rinsed the glasses at the sink and wiped them out with a paper towel.

“Neat or rocks?” he called into the other room.

“You’re joking,” the lieutenant answered. “In weather like this the whiskey should be cold. Ice, please.”

Keegan carried the glasses into the living room and found Moore standing, looking out the side window. His jacket was draped over his arm now, and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. The afternoon light blanched his face.

“Some view,” the lieutenant said, turning from the window. “Any idea how much this place is worth?”

Keegan shrugged, and the ice jingled in the glasses he was holding. “The land alone would probably go for fifty-large,” he said—though his most interested buyer would no longer be making an offer.

The lieutenant whistled and looked up at the roof beams. “Quite a windfall for you,” he said.

Keegan went over and set the glasses on the coffee table next to his mother’s Shakespeare book and sat down on the settee. “Some of us loved our mothers,” he said. He sliced the paper seal on the bottle with his thumbnail and pulled out the stopper. He poured a generous shot into each glass and pressed the corked top back in the bottle. When Keegan looked up, Nora was watching him from the kitchen doorway. He snapped his fingers down near the floor, but she wouldn’t come to him, not with Moore in the room. Smart dog. He nudged the lieutenant’s glass to the far side of the coffee table.