Culpepper drove a Cord cabriolet, God love him, and I would have savored the drive were it not for the circumstances. It was, to me, a gangster’s car, dangerously handsome and serious business. It had a coffin-nose hood with a wraparound louvered radiator and two pontoon fenders in which retractable headlights hid until needed. Brand-new, it could not have gone for less than two thousand dollars. Replying to my eyebrows, he said, probably not for the first time, “Bought it secondhand from somebody who owed me a favor. I’m a bachelor, don’t go out on many dates, have a one-bedroom flat in the old part of town, plan to keep it for twenty years. It’s my one indulgence.” That might have been the story, or it might not. He was a well-placed officer on a big-city police force. This, in my experience, was often a more profitable franchise than Nedick’s or Schrafft’s.

Coming out of the Claremont, we motored up the green canyon hillside, leaving Berkeley at our backs. I couldn’t imagine why Russ and Martha had headed this way at that hour.

I asked Culpepper, “So what does one find on Grizzly Peak?”

“Grizzly Peak,” he answered, downshifting to low. “So . . . you didn’t go back very far with Russ Hewett?”

“I met both you and Russ at the same moment, Lieutenant, remember?”

“Oh yeah. What a lousy moment that was, huh?”

“For Marie Prasquier, yes, it was terrible.” I then asked, in what I thought was an eminently casual way, “Did she have any family in the area? You know, brothers or sisters?”

Culpepper let me marinate for a moment, then looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Funny question. Why do you ask?”

“I have no idea. Just making conversation, I guess.”

The Cord’s engine exulted as the grade grew more extreme. “Someone at the Folies did say she had a sister who’d been in the business, but they thought she was still in France and in the same pickle that Marie Prasquier was so terrified of.”

The scenery was becoming scrubby as we made a hairpin turn onto Grizzly Peak Boulevard, rising higher and farther north.

“So you had no connections to Russ or Martha or Gail before the day I met you, huh?”

I wondered what he could possibly have learned. “Why do you ask, Bob?”

“Well, it just seems odd that you got yourself sort of adopted by this family that isn’t quite a family, considering you’re a musician just passing through town. Spending your days at their house, in Gail’s bedroom . . .” I asked him how he knew that, and he told me that Russ had mentioned to him, a little uneasily, how I was there every day and he’d hoped I wasn’t up to something.