I walked in, got a headful of garlic and overripe cheese. Bad murals covered the sidewalls— walleyed grape pickers bringing in the Chianti crop under a bilious sun. Five round tables rested on a red linoleum floor, covered in the same checked gingham as the curtains. The rear wall was a takeout counter backed by a brick pizza oven that gave off yeasty fumes.

Two Hispanic men in stained white aprons worked the dinner crowd, which was three parties. The cooks had Aztec faces and took their work seriously.

The customers were a Japanese couple sharing a petite pepperoni pie, a young bespectacled couple trying to control a pair of wild-eyed, tomato-sauced preschoolers, and three black guys in their twenties wearing Fila sweats and enjoying salad and lasagna.

One of the countermen said, “Help you?”

“I’m waiting for someone. Young guy, around twenty?”

He shrugged and flipped a limp white disk of dough, sprinkled it with flour, repeated the move.

I said, “Has anyone like that been around?”

Sprinkle. Flip. “No, amigo.”

I left and waited out in front. The restaurant was on a quiet block, sandwiched between a photocopy service and a one-story office building. Both dark for the weekend. The sky was black and, two blocks up, traffic on Pico was anemic. L.A.’s never really been a nightlife city, and this part of Westwood hibernated when the mall wasn’t bustling.

The mall.

Eight years after he had brutalized Kristal Malley, Rand wanted to talk about the crime, two blocks from a mall.

I’m a good person.

If it was absolution he was after, I wasn’t a priest.

Maybe the distinction between therapy and confession was petty. Maybe he knew the difference. Maybe he just wanted to talk. Like the judge who’d sent him away.

I wondered how Tom Laskin was doing. Wondered about all of them.

I stood there, careful to stay in the reflected glare of the boot sign, watching for the man Randolph Duchay had become.

He’d been a big kid, so he was probably a large man. Unless eight years of institutional food and God knew what other indignities had stunted his growth.

I thought of the way he’d struggled to make out the word “pizza.”

The word was two feet of tricolor neon.

Five minutes passed. Ten, fifteen.

I took a stroll up the block, watching my back for no reason except that a murderer might be looking for me.

What did he want?

Returning to Newark Pizza, I cracked the door, in case I’d missed him. I hadn’t. This time the black guys checked me out and the cook I’d talked to got an unpleasant look on his face.

I went back outside, positioned myself ten feet up from the restaurant, waited five minutes more.

Nothing. I drove home.

* * *