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frames. With the table and television set, they were all the furniture there was. Against a wall where two strips of flocked crimson paper had been pasted up lay a big roll of carpet that looked new. Unopened gallon cans of paint waited beside it. In the center of a ceiling where cracks had lately been patched, a bright little crystal chandelier tinkled in the same impalpable breeze that moved the bamboo. Rodriguez switched off the television set. “ Hay mucho calor ,” he said. “Hot. Will you join me in a beer?”
    “Sounds good, thanks.” Dave sat in one of the sling chairs. Rodriguez went through an empty dining room where a built-in sideboard had diamond-shaped glass panes. He pushed out of sight through lumberyard-bargain louver doors that hadn’t been painted. Dave called after him, “It had to be television. You heard about me on the news—right?”
    “I telephoned Channel Ten.” Rodriguez appeared with sweaty brown bottles and slender glasses with too much gold filigree. “Soon as I could. People came, and the old man is no use. It was perhaps half an hour. You had been there but you had gone.” He handed Dave one of the flossy glasses and filled it. The beer was dark, the label Mexican. He set the bottle on the floor by Dave’s chair and folded into the beanbag chair and filled his own glass. He said, “I telephoned your company in Los Angeles. It was a hassle getting the number from the operator and all that. You dial and dial. And then”—he drank from his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand—“they didn’t know where you were. They said they would call me back. That’s why I am here.” He gestured with the glass. “Out there is much work to do. Without Cliff, twice as much. But I waited here for them to call. And they did. Just now. They still don’t know where you are.”
    “I’m not sure, myself,” Dave said. The taste of the beer was dark as its color. “What did you want me for?”
    “You don’t think Cliff killed him.” Rodriguez had to stretch to reach cigarettes on the table. He tossed the pack to Dave. “I know Cliff didn’t kill him.”
    “He was here with you, right?” They were Mexican cigarettes. The paper was brown. Dave took one and tossed back the pack. “Never left the place all day?”
    “We were trying to fix up this house.” Rodriguez lit a cigarette with a paper match. “We done quite a bit at nights. But you get tired, you know? When we got this nursery nobody had had it for a long time. It took a lot of work to get it nice again so people would come. For many weeks we slept in sleeping bags on the floor in here.”
    Dave grinned. “Under a crystal chandelier.”
    “That is what you call the gay life-style,” Rodriguez said, but his smile didn’t amount to much. “It didn’t matter. We were at peace. For a while.”
    “What happened to it?” Dave used the steel lighter on his cigarette. The sweet taste of the smoke took him back to boyhood trips down Baja with his father. In lost, sun-cracked cantinas behind dusty gas pumps, the unshaven barkeeps would sell cigarettes to kids. He used to hoard them in his blanket roll to smuggle home. He looked at his watch—not for la hora de cenar, when he could talk to Ophelia Green, but for six o’clock, when he could call the hospital again. It would be a while yet. “I saw the city-hall demonstration on film today. Your friend Kerlee didn’t look peaceable.”
    “He hates injustice,” Rodriguez said. “It makes him crazy. I told him to stay out of it. Why we came up here from L.A. was to leave all that activist shit behind. Ten years was enough. It never did no good. It only made him old. And poor. He gave it all his time, every penny he could get. Phone ringing at two in the morning. There’s always some flit in trouble. There always will be till the straights change, and you can’t change them. I told Cliff, they got to hate somebody. What have they got? Fat-ass wives that whine all