“She was right,” he admitted. “Because when the opportunity arose to orbit Nelson and the Westing again, I leaped at it. I’m closer than ever. This video is one clue. And you walking on foot to the gallery that day made me realize something else about my brother. He could have easily walked from the Westing to Venice Beach and bought that snow globe for Nathaniel. But that is just speculation. I can’t prove he ever went to the Westing at all. So I started digging into Genevieve again. The name that Calvin had scrawled on a piece of paper. A person? The name of something? And who or what is now funneling Nelson’s gallery the money to survive?”

“You could have told me about Nelson and Calvin,” I said.

“I was about to, on the drive to LAAC,” Ray said evasively. “But then I thought it might distract you from your own work.”

“You were right,” I said. “I am distracted. Does Nelson know who you are?”

“That’s unclear,” he admitted. “Janis never gave him my last name.”

“But you think it might be dangerous for me to go to his house,” I said.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” said Ray.

Yet even as he spoke, I knew I would go.

“Okay,” he sighed. “Give me a definite time that you’re leaving the party, and I’ll park down the street and meet you.”

“Nine,” I said.

There was a short hesitation. “I’ll be there,” he promised.

“You sure?” I said.

“I’m flying home on a red-eye,” he said. “Tonight. My boss—my real boss, not Janis—nixed my request for an extension today. I’m out of time for now. I’ll see you later, though.”

Maybe he was telling the truth about his boss, but after everything he’d confessed that night, Ray’s departure seemed like yet another secret that he had been keeping from me. It was getting late, and I didn’t want to dwell on it, though. I sped through our good-bye. I drove to the Palisades. My beat-up station wagon climbed the curving, hilly, gate-lined streets that led to Nelson’s house, and I tried to picture myself exiting my car’s stale, safe air and donning my department-store bathing suit to swim in a pool at a home that had cost more than my father and mother had made in their whole lives combined, all while on the alert for the man who might be involved in Ray’s brother’s death.

I topped a rise and saw a number flash, indicating Nelson’s address, and the silver intercom box at the gate. The car glided past it all, and I pulled to a stop by a sycamore tree and stared at its patchy peeling bark, silhouetted before the tumble of hills, the sprawling city and sea beyond. My breath began to quicken.