ALL HE ASKED was that the car have air conditioning. The guy at the Thrifty Rent-a-Car counter—who had seen Keegan pull up in an MG convertible—tried to sell him on a red Mustang, but Keegan didn’t want anything conspicuous. He finally got the keys to a nondescript black Fairlane that might as well have been invisible. It was big and boxy and it handled like a speedboat, but it wouldn’t turn any heads.

Keegan headed over to the address for the funeral listed in Ormsby’s Times obituary. He cranked the AC up as far as it would go. The car’s big vinyl interior smelled of Pine-Sol and cigarettes, and someone had set all the radio buttons to pop music, but at least it was cold inside.

Keegan parked down the street from Knox Presbyterian, on the opposite side of the road, and left the engine running. He’d be able to see anyone who came and went. He settled in and tuned the car radio to the news on KNX. The Dodgers had won over Cincinnati, and the Angels had taken both games of a double-header. The county coroner officially ruled Marilyn’s death a suicide. There was no cooling trend on the horizon.

Keegan had expected a pack of reporters waiting on the church steps, but all he saw was a lone photographer—perhaps Ormsby was not quite the celebrity Keegan assumed him to be. Maybe the widow had been telling the truth: Nigel Ormsby wasn’t even a Joseph Cotten. The one photographer waited in front of the church, wilting, in the shade of a ficus tree. His boxy Hasselblad dangled around his neck on a lanyard. Freelance, maybe. Keegan couldn’t see a press pass.

The other car—the one Keegan had been expecting to find—was parked in the shade of a palm tree about a half-block ahead of him on the other side of the street, a dark blue Chevy Impala. It was in a good position to pull out and follow anyone who left the church. Two men sat in it—at least, from this distance, Keegan thought they were men. Keegan owned a good pair of binoculars for when he was out on a divorce case, but he hadn’t thought to bring them along. They were in his apartment’s hall closet. His Nikon, with its big telephoto lens, was locked up back in his office.

When the mourners began to arrive, they also were fewer than Keegan would have expected. A handful of cars pulled in, disgorged their passengers and drove away. Keegan thought he recognized a few of them, the usual semi-familiar, too-beautiful faces of Hollywood’s supporting ranks. Still, they were of the tribe who never had to wait for a table, who never entered a restaurant through the front door. He thought of Marilyn behind the Formosa Café, that quick glimpse of her smile before she turned away and ducked inside.