And maybe, I thought as I pulled the cover off my car, that’s what Trevor can’t accept. Because the little I knew of his businesses (and I could have been very wrong; they were so diversified), his stake in immortality was very slim. He didn’t seem to have been much of a builder. He was a buyer and a seller and an exploiter, but El Salvadoran coffee beans and the profits they yielded weren’t tangible once the coffee was drunk and the money spent.

What buildings bear your fingerprints, Trevor?

What lovers retain your face in their memory with joy or fondness?

What marks your time on this earth?

And who mourns your passing?

No one.

I kept a cell phone in the glove compartment and I used it to call Angie on the cell phone in the Crown Victoria. But she didn’t answer.

I parked in front of my house and engaged the alarm, went upstairs, and sat around waiting.

I called her cell phone ten times in the next two hours, even checked my own phone to make sure the ringer button was in the “On” position. It was.

The battery could have died, I told myself.

Then she would have used the adapter and plugged it into the cigarette lighter.

Not if she was out of the car.

Then she would have called here.

Not if she didn’t have time or wasn’t near a phone.

I watched a few minutes of Monkey Business to get my mind off it, but even Harpo chasing women around the ocean liner and the prospect of the four Marx Brothers doing their Maurice Chevalier imitations to get off the boat with the singer’s stolen passport wasn’t enough to hold my concentration.

I turned off the TV and VCR, dialed the cell phone number again.

No answer.

That’s what I got the rest of the afternoon. No answer. Nothing but the ringing on the other end and the ringing in my head.

And the silence that followed. Loud, mocking silence.

38

The silence followed me as I drove back to Whittier Place for my six o’clock meeting with Desiree.

Angie wasn’t just my partner. She wasn’t just my best friend. And she wasn’t just my lover. She was all those things, sure, but she was far more. Ever since we’d made love the other night, it had begun to dawn on me that what lay between us—what, in all probability had lain between us since we were children—wasn’t just special; it was sacred.

Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.

Without her—without knowing where she was or how she was—I wasn’t merely half my usual self; I was a cipher.