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fake?” he asked.
    “No, no. I just got tired of arguing about it. I’ll sell it to someone else. You were bidding on it, too, Harry. Maybe you’ll want to buy it.”
    “Not now. It’s got a cloud over it.”
    “It’s not a fake, goddamn it.”
    Earlier that morning, I had picked up the coin flip and put it in my suit coat pocket. I stuck my hand in my pocket to assure myself that it was still there. It was. I had a decision to make. Once I showed it to him, there would be no going back on my lie.
    I pulled the vinyl flip out of my pocket. “Here it is. Look for yourself.” I held it out to him.
    Harry came over, took it from me, and sat down again in the wooden chair. He opened the flip and took the coin out, holding it up to the light between his fingers. Even in the bright light from the windows, it did not glimmer. Coins that old can often appear dull, with no sheen.
    “It looks real enough to me,” he said. “Good patina, correct heft. Feels pretty much the same as it did the few times you let the rest of us touch it.”
    He put it back in the flip and handed it back to me. “But I’m hardly an expert.”
    I dropped it back into my pocket. “What else did Spritz ask you about, Harry?”
    “He wanted to know about someone named Susan Apacha. I told him I did not know who that was.”
    “I do.”
    “Well, please do not tell me. I want to be nothing more than a distant witness to this whole sordid thing.”
    “Did he ask you anything about the frosty nature of my relationship with Simon in the five years since I voted no?”
    “No.”
    “Thank God. They would probably drag that out as another motive.”
    “You know, Robert, I wouldn’t, if I were you, count on this Spritz fellow’s ignorance. He seemed quite thorough. Indeed, he had with him a very thick notebook that he had mostly filled with notes. He was writing on the last page when he was interviewing me.”
    “Harry,” I said, “I’m not counting on anything except the fact that I didn’t kill Simon and don’t know who did. But I aim to find out.”
    Harry got up, in what was clearly a signal that our talk was over. “Well, I wish you good luck and Godspeed in doing it.” He smiled. “With emphasis on the speed part, because I think Spritz is in a hurry.”
    I knew that I should have pressed to stay. To question him in more detail about what Spritz had said and what else he had wanted to know. But I was discombobulated. Lying did not agree with me.
    Harry saw me to the door, and we parted with the usual pleasantries, including a mutual promise to have dinner sometime soon. We both knew it wouldn’t happen, but it’s the kind of thing people in L.A. say to one another. Let’s have lunch. Let’s have dinner. Let’s have whatever. No one ever really means it. It’s just a more elaborate form of goodbye.
    I headed back to L.A., to my office.
     
     

CHAPTER 8
     
    In early afternoon there is relatively little traffic in L.A., even on the freeways. Unless it’s raining of course. People in L.A. can’t drive in the rain. The exact reason is a mystery, because it rains every winter. But since it wasn’t raining that December day, I covered the twenty miles between Manhattan Beach and downtown in just under twenty-five minutes.
    I spent most of those twenty-five minutes justifying my lie—to myself. I wasn’t very persuasive. Then I imagined trying to repair the damage. Calling Harry up and telling him that I had lied. Explaining why. I rehearsed the call in my head. Several times. It always came out sounding like an admission of guilt.
    When I arrived back at our office building, the Blob, somewhat thinner than the day before, as if it hadn’t eaten, was still hunkered down at the entrance into the garage. It seemed, however, to be uninterested in photographing my cheery thumbs up and parted quickly. Perhaps they already had too much tape of my up-thumbing them.
    I drove into the garage, then took the elevator to eighty-five.