“Kiz, I don’t know what to say. I wish . . .”

“What, that I had talked to you about it? You split the gig, Harry. Remember? What were you going to tell me, to tough it out in RHD when you bailed out yourself?”

“It was different for me, Kiz. I had built up too much resistance. I was pulling too much baggage. You were different. You were the star, Kiz.”

“Well, stars burn out. It was too petty and political on the third floor. I changed directions. I just took the lieutenant’s exam. And the chief is a good man. He wants to do good things and I want to be right there with him. It’s funny, things are less political on the sixth floor. You’d think it would be the other way around.”

It sounded as though she was trying to convince herself more than me. All I could do was nod as a sense of guilt and loss flooded me. If I had stayed and taken the RHD job, she would have stayed also. I went into the living room and dropped onto the couch. She followed me but remained standing.

I reached over to turn down the music but not too much. I liked the song. I stared out through the sliding doors and across the deck to the vista of mountains across the Valley. It was no smoggier out there than most days. But the overcast somehow seemed to fit as Pepper took up the clarinet to accompany Lee Konitz on “The Shadow of Your Smile.” There was a sad wistfulness to it that I think even gave Rider pause. She stood silently listening.

I had been given the discs by a friend named Quentin McKinzie, who was an old jazzman who knew Pepper and had played with him decades earlier at Shelly Manne’s and Donte’s and some of the other long-gone Hollywood jazz clubs spawned by the West Coast sound. McKinzie had told me to listen and study the discs. They were some of Pepper’s last recordings. After years spent in jails and prisons because of his addictions, the artist was making up for lost time. Even in his work as a sideman. That relentlessness. He never stopped it until his heart stopped. There was a kind of integrity in that and the music that my friend admired. He gave me the discs and told me never to stop making up for lost time.

Soon the song ended and Kiz turned to me.

“Who was that?”

“Art Pepper, Lee Konitz.”

“White guys?”

I nodded.

“Damn. That was good.”

I nodded again.

“So what’s under the tablecloth, Harry?”

I shrugged.

“First time you’ve come around in eight months, I suppose you know.”

She nodded.

“Yeah.”

“Let me guess. Alexander Taylor’s tight with the chief or the mayor or both and he called to check me out.”

She nodded. I had gotten it right.

“And the chief knew you and I were close at one time, so . . .”