She followed the older man into the fort through a doorway marked APOTHECARY. Charlie saw a different couple exiting the same room through a side door as a soldier waved the new couple in.

Charlie gestured at the couple going in. “That’s her.”

“Where?” asked Lawford.

Before he could answer, a young soldier approached them. “We have two girls available,” he said. “One of them is a mulatto if you’re interested, Mr. Davis. Would you like to come with me?”

He motioned toward the wooden stairway.

Sweaty and panting from the steep ascent, Margaret and Sheryl Ann finally reached the Hollywood sign. Each letter was huge, fifty feet high and thirty feet across, made up of three-by-nine panels of sheet metal painted white on one side and held up by utility poles and wooden beams. Margaret walked along the front of the sign while Sheryl Ann walked on the opposite side.

“Nothing here,” Sheryl Ann said. “Do you know where Entwistle died?”

“She climbed to the top of the H,” said Margaret. “And then she jumped.”

Sheryl Ann slowly walked along, surveying the rocks and bramble in the predawn light. She lifted her head and gazed at the top of the H.

“That’s the lore, anyway,” Margaret said. “Couldn’t have been any more of a metaphor if she’d been nailed to the H.”

“How did she get up there?”

Margaret noticed just above her head a white ladder fastened to the back of the letter. At the top, there appeared to be something wedged between the sheet metal and a utility pole.

“Come here,” Margaret said, beckoning to her friend.

Sheryl Ann joined Margaret behind the H.

“I need a boost,” Margaret said. “Clasp your hands.”

She hauled herself up to the ladder and climbed. Each rung made a loud creak. She tried to focus on the inches in front of her and not the broad-view insanity of what she was doing.

Charlie hatched the plan in a panic. “I want to stop him,” he told Lawford and Davis as they approached the wooden steps. He told them what to do and they nodded their assent. The two walked to the front of the fort and whispered to a couple of the guards. Then they strode to the center of the parade ground.

“Hey there, kids!” Lawford said as the loudspeakers blared the zzzzzip of a needle being clumsily removed from the record. Charlie—slowly walking toward the apothecary—was surprised at how his friend’s voice boomed throughout the fort without the aid of a microphone.

“Since this is all entre nous,” Davis said, “we thought you cool cats and chicks might appreciate a song or two.”

“So unless you’re otherwise indisposed, my friends, let’s celebrate!”

The old man with Violet poked his head out of the room and smiled to see the special mini–Rat Pack concert. Violet followed him out, seizing the respite to lean against the wall.