“We’ll be right outside.”

“Enjoy the view.”

We walked into the shade of the surrounding trees.

Bert said, “You need to know this: Bill doesn’t have much longer. Nerve damage, brittle diabetes, serious circulation problems, hypertension. There’s a limit to how much care I can give him, and he won’t go to a hospital. The truth is no one can really help him. Too many systems down.”

He stopped and smoothed a purple lapel. “He’s a very old man at forty-three.”

“How long have you been taking care of him?” I said.

“A long time.”

“Nearly twenty years, I’d guess.”

He didn’t answer. We walked some more, in slow, aimless circles. No sound issued from the forest. Not a trace of the music Willie Burns had heard.

“How’d you meet him?” I said.

“At a hospital in Oxnard.”

“Same place you met Schwinn.”

His eyes widened.

I said, “I was just over at Marge’s place.”

“Ah.” Once a shrink . . . “Well, that’s true,” he said. “But Pierce’s being there wasn’t really a coincidence. He’d been tracking Bill for a while. Not very successfully. And not very consistently, because his amphetamine habit had rendered him pretty much incapacitated. Occasionally, he’d grow lucid, convince himself he was still a detective, make a stab at investigating, then he’d binge and drop out of sight. Somehow, over the years—through his criminal contacts—he managed to figure out that Bill had come up the coast. He knew Bill would need medical care and eventually, he pinpointed the hospital, though not until well after Bill had been discharged. But he began hanging around, checking himself in for spurious reasons. They had him tagged as an addicted hypochondriac.”

“He was trying to get access to Burns’s records.”

Bert nodded. “The hospital staff thought he was just another down-at-the-heels junkie out to steal drugs. As it turns out, he was really ill. An on-call neurologist who didn’t know him ordered some testing and found a low-level seizure disorder—petit mal, mostly, some temporal symptoms, all due to drug toxicity. They prescribed anticonvulsants with mixed results, admitted him for short-term care several times, but I was never on duty during those periods. One day, he had a grand mal seizure out in the parking lot and they brought him into the ER and I was on call. One thing led to another.”

“Willie Burns needed medical care because he was burned in a house fire.”

Bert sighed. “You’re as skillful as ever, Alex.”

“A house on 156th Street in Watts. A neighborhood where a black man would be comfortable hiding out. Where a white face would stand out. A white police detective named Lester Poulsenn was assigned to guard Burns and Caroline Cossack and one night he was shot and the house was torched as cover. A high-ranking cop murdered but LAPD kept it quiet. Interesting, don’t you think, Bert?”