It wasn’t all supposed to come at once, what you wanted, what hurt you, and what made you want to risk everything, but sometimes it did.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I can help you.”

5

I’D SAID NO TO THEM, and I’d left the café without eating lunch because what more was there to say? Janis wouldn’t look at me. When she told her driver to call me a cab back to the museum, her low voice dropped another octave, as if her throat had opened to a bottomless pit. The detective seemed relieved, Ray inscrutable. I hadn’t given them a reason, because I didn’t want to tell Janis that it violated a central principle of my journalistic training to deceive people into yielding up their stories, and though I respected Ray, joining his investigation would not benefit me in the slightest. In fact, for my own sanity, I refused to involve myself in another woman’s violent death.

On my way home in my own car, I called Yegina and left a message. She was on a plane to a conference in D.C. At our director’s behest, she’d started traveling a lot for the museum, speaking on panels, courting international donors. She came to work now with crisp ruffled blouses, a razored bob, and a new polished attitude that was hard for anyone to say no to. She was climbing, career-wise, and would be intensely interested in the potential downfall of Hal Giroux.

Regardless of what Janis and her team found, Hal had to be reaching the end of his tenure as director of LAAC’s star-studded MFA program. A show at the Westing Gallery in Venice might be seen as a nostalgic return for Hal, who’d cut his teeth there in the 1960s, in the assemblage and Finish Fetish studios scattered among the oil derricks. Venice was Hal’s origin story, written in sultry beach air and the smell of molded plastic.

But a show at the Westing was still a gallery show. It was not a museum show. It was the rock-band equivalent of selling out a small auditorium instead of a stadium.

I had seen Hal often at openings. He was a small man with a beard and glistening brown eyes, his attire neither formal nor sloppy, neither youthful nor old. He wore suit jackets and belted jeans or cords, and rumpled denim button-downs with an open collar. He spoke to most young people in benevolent but scolding tones, as if we were all beautiful children trespassing in his garden. Very few protégés he took seriously. Those, I’ve been told, he saturated with approval and a demanding exactitude so intense that they invariably transformed into stars.