“She has breast cancer,” he said. “Stage two. But it’s been aggressive.”

My whole body went icy and rigid. I stared at the glove compartment, the light scratches on the gleaming black vinyl. Its little silver lock. It was as far as I could look.

“I didn’t figure I’d be the one to tell you,” he added, sounding genuinely sorry. “But if you didn’t know . . . The thing is, she didn’t expect you to say no today.”

“Who else has heard this?” I said.

“Just a few people,” said Ray. “Dee, Bas. Me and Alicia.”

“Yegina,” I said. Yegina knew. On the phone, she’d sounded like she was already grieving. Of course she was.

“Probably,” agreed Ray. “Not much escapes her.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said, even though all the way back in Wonder Valley, when I’d seen Ray’s face for the first time, I’d known something was off.

What did Janis matter to him? He talked of her like an old friend.

What did Janis matter to me? It wasn’t just me; it was us. The museum. Her approval, her leadership—how could I calculate how much we all lived for it at the Rocque? Janis was our brave, intelligent, idiosyncratic presence in L.A. She was every exhibition we’d ever had.

“You ever dig into the Rocque’s history?” Ray said.

“I wrote a short book on it a couple of years ago for our twentieth anniversary.”

“Who owns the land that the building is on?”

“Well, that’s one of the great things about it,” I said, puzzled by the question. “The city rents it to us for ten dollars a year. Janis’s father paid for the construction costs, but without the city giving him the land, the museum would not exist.”

He nodded. “Any idea when the lease runs out?”

“Oh, every ten years or so, but they always renew it.” Suddenly I realized what he was implying. “Why? The city’s not renewing it?”

“I don’t know,” said Ray. “But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why a possibly terminally ill woman was so hellbent on taking down Hal Giroux, until I was talking with another collector about . . .”

Ray kept speaking, but I stopped listening. The words terminally ill dug a fresh hole in me. I’d just seen Janis today. She hadn’t looked ill, but she had looked exhausted.

“. . . and how he’s been backed by a couple of key collectors quietly looking for seed money to build a big new contemporary art museum downtown.”

“Downtown,” I said, slow to process what Ray was saying.

Hal Giroux wanted to build a museum that would supplant the Rocque.

“Your CFO ever give reports on your building, how much renovations would cost?” said Ray.