The young lady lowered her book in order to eye him over the pages.

—But a bullet, he said, that’s another thing altogether.

She put her book on the table.

—In 1924, I worked with a man in Ventura who was shot in the eye. The bullet glanced off his skull and went out his ear. He drove himself fifteen miles to a county clinic and lived to tell the tale. But Eddie O’Donnell? He got shot by a girl not much older than you with a .22 caliber pistol.

He held his fingers apart to show her how small that pistol had been.

—She’d been harboring someone; I don’t remember who. We were just going to ask a few questions, when she plucked the gun from her purse. She was shaking like a leaf. We told her not to do anything that she’d regret; but she just closed her eyes and shot Eddie in the leg. He couldn’t believe it. Would you get a load of that? he said to me. But the bullet had split his femoral artery. And Eddie bled to death right there on the floor of the kitchenette.

He looked out the window for a moment, the thoughts of Eddie O’Donnell getting the better of him—getting the better of him, after all these years.

—There’s just no telling with bullets, he said.

When he looked back, she was taking him in. She nodded a few times to show her consideration for his old partner. Then she stretched her hand across the table.

—I’m Evelyn Ross.

She had a fine grip.

—I’m Charlie Granger.

She took a new cigarette from the pack and lit it.

—So, what’s your story, Charlie?

Then she pushed the pack across the table.

It was the first time a woman had offered him a cigarette in more than twenty years.

•

SO WHAT’S YOUR STORY? she had asked, and that’s what Charlie told her.

He told her how he and Betty had come to Los Angeles with their baby boy back in 1905, after they’d seen the advert in the Chicago papers looking for experienced officers willing to relocate. And how, when they got off the train, the whole town looked like an outpost for the Pony Express.

He told her what she already knew—about the rise of the studios and the matinee idols, the mansions and grand hotels. But he told her about the other Los Angeles too. The one that had emerged from the dust right along side the glamorous one and that had grown just as fast, if not faster. The Los Angeles of flatfoots and grifters and ladies of the night; of the shysters and snappers and has-beens. That city within the city that had its own diners and cable cars, its own chapels and banks—that had its own fashioning of failure and folly, and of grace and integrity too.