“In cruder terms.” The gray in her eyes had deepened, as if an internal light had been dampened. “She said she knew what he was doing, but didn’t even feel it.”

“And she was blasé about it.”

“At first she was. Later—a few days later, she got loaded on Southern Comfort and started talking about it, again. Not crying. Angry. At herself. Do you know what really bugged her? Not so much what he did to her, she was out of it during the whole thing. What made her mad was that when he was finished, he didn’t drive her all the way back home, just dropped her off in East Hollywood and she had to walk a couple of miles. That ticked her off. But even there, she blamed herself. Said something along the lines of, ‘It must be something about me, makes people treat me like that. Even him.’ I said, ‘Who’s him?’ and she got this really furious look on her face, and said, ‘Him. Bowie.’ That freaked me out—first the deviant, now incest. I asked her how long that had been going on, but she clammed up again. I kept nagging her to tell me, and finally she told me to shut up or she’d tell my mother what a slut I was.”

She laughed.

“Which was a viable threat. I was no poster child for wholesome living. And even though my mother was no Betty Crocker, she wasn’t like Bowie, she would’ve cared. She would’ve come down on me, hard.”

“Bowie didn’t care,” said Milo.

“Bowie was scum, total lowlife. I guess that explains why Janie would do anything to avoid going home.”

I thought of the bareness of Janie’s room. Said, “Did she have a crash pad, or somewhere else she stayed?”

“Nowhere permanent. She’d sleep at my house, crash once in a while in those abandoned apartments north of Hollywood Boulevard. Sometimes she’d be gone for days and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been. Still, the day after the party—after Janie and I had split up, I called Bowie. I despised the ground that lowlife walked on, but even so, I wanted to know Janie was okay. That’s what I was trying to tell you: I made an attempt. But no one answered.”

“When did you split up?”