Jodi Taylor looked at Sid Markowitz without expression, and then she looked at me. Her eyes seemed tired and obscured by something that intruded. "Yes, well. If there's anything else you need, please call Sid." She gathered her things and stood to leave. Business was finished.

I stayed seated. "What are you afraid of, Ms. Taylor?"

Jodi Taylor walked away from the table and out the door without answering.

Sid Markowitz said, "Forget it. You know how it is with actresses."

Outside, I watched Jodi and Sid drive away in Markowitz's twelve-cylinder Jaguar while a parking attendant who looked like Fabio ran to get my car. Neither of them had said good-bye.

From the parking lot, you could look down on the beach and see young men and women in wetsuits carrying short, pointy boogie boards into the surf. They would run laughing into the surf, where they would bellyflop onto their boards and paddle out past the breakwater where other surfers sat with their legs hanging down, bobbing in the water, waiting for a wave. A little swell would come, and they would paddle furiously to catch its crest. They would stand and ride the little wave into the shallows where they would turn around and paddle out to wait some more. They did it again and again, and the waves were always small, but maybe each time they paddled out they were thinking that the next wave would be the big wave, the one that would make all the effort have meaning. Most people are like that, and, like most people, the surfers probably hadn't yet realized that the process was the payoff, not the waves. When they were paddling, they looked very much like sea lions and, every couple of years or so, a passing great white shark would get confused and a board would come back but not the surfer.

Fabio brought my car and I drove back along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Los Angeles.

I had thought that Jodi Taylor might be pleased when I agreed to take the job, but she wasn't. Yet she still wanted to hire me, still wanted me to uncover the elements of her past. Since my own history was known to me, it held no fear. I thought about how I might feel if the corridor of my birth held only closed doors. Maybe, like Jodi Taylor, I would be afraid.

By the time I turned away from the water toward my office, a dark anvil of clouds had formed on the horizon and the ocean had grown to be the color of raw steel.

A storm was raging, and I thought that it might find its way to shore.

Chapter 2