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college student and part-time deputy making ten thousand dollars a year,” I said.
    “And after a week, he told me he was going back to his wife. So I came back to Phoenix and started waiting tables.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    Julie ignored me. “You thought I had this great life because of my looks.”
    I started to protest, but she cut me off. “Yes, you did,” she said. “But it wasn’t a great life. I was so young, and I was just…just…overwhelmed by it all. All these men, all of them after me. I know you think it would be wonderful to be so desired, but it wasn’t that way. You’ll never know how lonely it is when somebody just wants to fuck you. I was just too young to know any better.”
    I don’t know why I asked this, but it just came out: “Did you ever care about me?”
    “Oh, David,” she said in a voice I had heard so many times before. “That’s history.”
    She drank the scotch. “I was so fucked up then. Nobody should have wanted me.”
    “I did,” I ventured.
    “You didn’t know me,” she said. Fair enough, I thought.
    “We had a very unhappy home life,” she went on. “I moved out when I was sixteen just to get away. I tried to keep you away from that. I was afraid if you knew, really knew about me, you’d just hate me.”
    “I would never have hated you. All those years, I wondered about you.”
    “Oh yeah,” she said, her voice a mix of anger and irony. “Do you really want to know? All those years I spent in dead-end jobs, a pretty ornament on some guy’s arm. I got into cocaine, and God, I loved it.”
    She stubbed out the cigarette and drank the last of her scotch. “There was always some asshole, thinking with his cock, who would buy it for me. Before he left me. Then I married a lawyer; God, what a mistake. He controlled me with coke and beat the shit out of me when I mouthed off to him. It was hell, but it was really hard to give up, too. Does that make any sense to you? I loved the money and the beautiful people and the feeling that the drugs gave me.”
    I walked to her chair, put my hand on her shoulder, and she came into my arms. I held her a long time while she cried silently, angrily.
    “I’m a mess, David,” she said finally. “Everything I touch turns bad.”

Chapter Five
    “She got the looks in the family,” Julie said. “And the brains.”
    We had moved over to the sofa, where the pictures were spread between us. I used Kleenex and scotch to nurse Julie through the tears; then I put a Charlie Parker CD on low and we got to work. I knew she was mind-fucking me, but, hell, I was lonely and it was nice to be needed, if only for the moment and on unreliable terms.
    The photos showed a young woman, pretty in a fair, red-haired way that stood out in Phoenix, with its battalions of tanned hotties. Her finely boned face had an intensely direct stare. Her smile had that ironic, mocking quality that reminded me of Julie long ago. And that hair: the natural shade of flame titian. Phaedra was beautiful in a way that would have been dangerous to me, but I was always a sucker for redheads.
    Julie blew her nose and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. “You’re sure this is okay?”
    “It was never a problem,” I said, and she lighted it. “If I were more politically correct, I’d have tenure.” I poured two more glasses of McClelland’s and asked her to walk me through the past year of Phaedra’s life.
    “She’d been living with a man in Sedona. His name is Greg Townsend. Twenty years older. His father made a fortune in real estate. Very well-off.”
    “Takes after her older sister?” I have such a mouth.
    Julie smiled unhappily. “Anyway, they’d been living together for about three months.”
    “They met how?”
    “Oh, who knows,” Julie said. “She just told me she was in love, and that she was moving to Sedona.”
    “How did he treat her?”
    “Oh, he took her to London, Paris. Mexico every other weekend, seemed like. He had his