She shook her head, impatient. “I have no idea.”

The cardboard sleeve was worn, slightly burned at one end, like someone had leaned the LP against an electric heater—a toasted relic.

“Was your daughter in a band?”

“No,” she said. “But I believe Emil might have been.”

“He was?”

“Yes, but—you know, just high school boys. I don’t think they made a record.”

“Do you know who else might have been in the band?”

She made a lemon face. “It’s been thirty-five years.”

I had been holding back all afternoon, but I came out with it. “Do you know the Hawleys—your neighbors across the way?”

She glazed over, raised an eyebrow. “Sure, but we’ve never been close. Now look, I don’t want to be rude. But I really must go. Alba will let you out.”

Marjorie Persky took off down the stairs and I followed, with Alba closing the door behind me. Mrs. Persky moved swiftly into her champagne Lexus and exited the cul-de-sac in a rushed three-point turn. I was halfway to my car when I got an idea, turned around, and knocked on the door.

“Alba—so sorry, I left my cell phone upstairs.”

She nodded and I made the dash. Once up in Cinnamon’s room, I quickly tore off my jacket and pulled the test pressing from the trunk, wrapped it under my arm and skipped down the stairs and out the door.

As I hustled to the car, LP under my arm, I glanced back at the Hawley residence—a gent in his eighties was watering the lawn, could’ve been Hawley Senior. He was trim, clean-shaven, with the crystal blue eyes and wry jaw of an aging male model, waving his spritzing hose over the grass with regal self-amusement. But as he watched me get into the Jetta, his lids grew heavy and he tightened up.

Whoever I was, he did not like me.

5

Fourteen rides in four hours—the rains had stopped and the evening shift breezed by, working the hotels along Pacific Coast Highway. All the while, the LP in the trunk was tickling at my conscience. I had a wave of regret about yanking it and getting in deeper, but now that I had it, I had to at least listen to it once. There was just one problem: I didn’t own a record player and I racked my brain about who did. The only person I could think of was my sometimes ride Ziva, a painter who lived off Crescent Heights on the Westside. I knew the record player because she’d once insisted that I come in and listen to her favorite vibraphonist. The music had been superfast, almost comical, but Ziva said, “Isn’t it relaxing?”

I knocked on the door to her small cottage and to my surprise a beautiful young woman with auburn hair falling over her shoulders cracked it open—her crystal blue doe eyes almost made me lose my bearings.

“Hi…is Ziva here?”

“Can I tell her what it’s about?”

“I’m Adam. I’m her Lyft driver.”

“She didn’t tell me she was going anywhere.”

“No, no, I…” I lifted the LP, held it like a shield. “I want to see if I can borrow her record player for an hour.”

The young woman gave me a curious look. “And you’re her Lyft driver?”

“Well—” I smiled. “We’re friends, too.”

“Okay, one sec.”

“Are you Ziva’s granddaughter?”

“No.”

“New tenant?”

“Not exactly, I’m her caregiver. Let me ask her…” She hesitated, then gently closed the door in my face and I heard the lock turn. Fair enough.

A few minutes later she opened the door and said, “She’ll see you in the back house.”

I made my way through the living room past the little kitchen. I’d only been over a handful of times before but felt strangely at home here in this elf bungalow. Ziva’s husband had died about seven years before and he’d been an electrician, a Black guy from Baltimore—you could still feel his presence in the old-school light fixtures, the high stack of soul LPs, the driftwood coffee table he sanded down smooth. Ziva once told me “He was my world, my everything,” but he must’ve been pretty long-suffering, too, because even before her accident, she had to have been a handful. Ziva was one of those Spanish-speaking Jewesses whose parents fled the Nazis and landed in Argentina. In Ziva’s art, her cooking, her disposition, she was a real porteño—Buenos Aires born and bred—but past that she was a balabosta all the way, wildly affectionate and high-strung, too generous and too demanding, cynical, outspoken, and very protective of her painting life. Her closest friends called her Lady Blunt.

This caregiver was not her first lodger. It was a curious arrangement. Ziva lived in the guesthouse of her own home, just three feet out the back door, with the deal that visitors could come through the main house. There was never any chance that she’d disturb the tenants—Ziva was paraplegic from the waist down—my trickiest rider. I’d hoist her into shotgun and toss her folded chair in the trunk. She’d had a terrible freeway accident in the midnineties and hadn’t walked since. This didn’t keep her from her life’s work, though. The old master slept under a thick bungee cord with dozens of paintbrushes attached by hangwires. A special bed-friendly easel had been built by a carpenter who admired her work. At the end of each night, or sometimes at the stroke of dawn when she was done with her day’s painting, she’d yank a black-tasseled rope and all the color-tipped brushes would crowd at the far end of the room like scurrying trapeze artists.

I came to her open door, LP in hand. From under the home-stitched comforter on her king-sized bed, she glared at a canvas with impetuous fury. Ziva was no charity case and no hobbyist. She’d been written up in Artforum and had solo and group shows around the world. Many nights a week, friends and students gathered for one of her bedside salons, to pour her chardonnay and hear her soliloquize on Love, Death, Art, God—all the biggies. Tonight she was alone.

“Knock, knock,” I said. “Hi, young lady—I hope I’m not disturbing.”

“Adam.” The look of shock dissipated off her face. “I was lost in paint. I didn’t recognize you.”

“God forbid you dozed. It’s practically midnight.”

“So what,” she said. “Push the wheelchair, let me heat you some leftovers.”

“Please, don’t move—I’m beat. I just wanted to see if I could borrow your record player for an hour.”

“To play what?”

“This thing. What are you painting?”

“I’m not, that’s the problem. I’m conceptualizing. And I just wasted half the day having a tantrum about a wrinkled canvas.”

“It’s the humidifier. You’ve got it on full blast.”

“Yeah well, I’m on full blast. A nuisance to everyone who dares get near me.”

The beauty appeared in the door behind me. “Everything okay?”

Ziva said, “Better than okay—Endi Sandell, this is Adam Zantz. He is very dear to me. Will you heat him the cauliflower latkes and—”

“No, no,” I said, “really, it’s okay. I just want to give this thing a spin. I’m sorry for the late intrusion.”

Ziva propped herself up. “Adam understands me; we’re night owls. Isn’t that right, Adam? You two kids listen to your crazy music. I have to get back to this.”

“Goodnight, Ziva.”

On the way back into the house, I said, “Endi? Is that like the end?”