“I’m friends with—” I shouldn’t mention Dee. “One of the bartenders. You?”

“I know the guitar player. From LAAC.”

The light in the bar cast Layla’s face blue, and deepened the haunted look in her eyes.

“Are you okay?” I said.

She cupped her hand to my ear. “Erik’s at the Valdivia police station. He’s claiming he murdered Brenae Brasil—remember, the suicide at LAAC last March? It’s freaking sick. I couldn’t stay, and I can’t go home to our apartment.”

I opened my eyes wide. “Erik killed someone?”

She gestured at me to follow her to a nook, against a mural where the boy hooligans of The Damned grinned through layers of disintegrating cream pie. The noise lessened.

“He didn’t pull the trigger,” she said. “It’s so complicated. I hate him right now. I hate Hal, too.”

She looked genuinely hurt and confused. And vulnerable and pretty, in a way I hadn’t appreciated before. Layla’s presence was a shock to me, but she seemed untroubled by our encounter, as if it were natural to bump into another person from the art world, and more particularly me, who had so closely witnessed her past few days.

“Don’t mind me, gallerina,” she said, pushing my arm. “I shouldn’t have told you. You barely know me. You should go have a fun night.”

“What happened with Brenae Brasil? What did Erik do?” I said.

“He saw her that week. He used to hook up with her sometimes, back in undergrad,” she said. “He went to see her because Hal sent him. Hal told Erik that Brenae was threatening to—”

Dee took the stage again, and there was a roar of approval, interrupting our conversation.

The band smashed and strummed, and Layla leaned closer to me to be heard, but I still only caught phrases: “list of demands . . . video projection . . . victimized women . . . if he didn’t meet her demands . . . she would do a performance artwork called Gun-Shot . . . Hal didn’t think she was serious. He thought she was being ridiculous, actually.” Dee began singing, and the instruments quieted. Layla kept talking. “Hal knew that Erik and Brenae had been close. He thought Erik could tone her down. So Erik went to her studio, and then two days later she was dead. But he told me all along that he didn’t do anything to her. He just left.” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “Now he’s changed his story. Because suddenly he feels so guilty that she killed herself.”

None of this was in the police report. Hal had claimed to be completely blindsided by Brenae’s suicide. Not fed a list of demands about women’s rights on campus, or else Brenae might shoot herself, as an artwork and a protest. Watch me. What else had he erased from her computer?

“You look totally confused,” said Layla.