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never allow him to relate the story to anyone, under any circumstances, and Palma had long since lost interest in both the incident and Cushing’s damaged ego. She thought he at least ought to be grateful to her for that.
    “I can’t wait to see this,” Palma said.
    “Yeah,” Birley grinned and moved into the far right lane for the Westheimer exit half a mile ahead. The traffic grew heavier now and slowed, and to their right the sun was climbing near the meridian, shriveling the Gulf clouds as it rose.
    The Hammersmith condominium complex was in a district with the cloying name of Charmwood on the southern bank of Buffalo Bayou and only blocks away from the villages of Bunker Hill, Piney Point, and Hunters Creek. Just off South Voss near Westheimer, the complex was a mingle of small wooded lanes where the buildings were joined together like row houses, different styles and colors butting up against each other in an imperfect harmony, their various rooflines and chimneys bouncing up and down like the individual notes on a musical score. They had been around a while, maybe since the sixties, which in this city of the Modern Way gave them an established air and lent them a kind of comfortable intimacy that in another time and place would have been called a neighborhood.
    To the east a little way were the trendy, uptown Post Oak and Galleria shopping districts which were once again exhibiting a grandeur and international popularity that everyone had thought had been irreparably damaged by the oil and real estate disasters of the mid-eighties. But as the new decade came onstage, so did a new city, or at least a city that was beginning to realize the end of its travail was in sight. Houston was making a comeback, and it wasn’t apologizing for the lost time. The nouveau riche had evaporated like bayou mist in the harsh sunlight of hard times, leaving the old money behind to take the heat. And they had done it. The hangers-on, who came from nowhere in particular and leeched onto good times wherever they happened to be, were gone. The city had returned to its sanity which, combined with the kind of hard-won experience that comes with the jolting reversal of fortunes, had achieved something approaching wisdom. The worst was over. And if the survivors had anything to do with the future, and they intended to, it would never again be as foolishly sublime, or as gallingly bad, as it had been.
    The moment they turned into Olympia Street, Palma saw the police cars and the white crime scene unit at the end of the lane. And she saw, at next glance, the inevitable curious. But they weren’t crowding around the police cars or pressing up to the yellow crime scene tape that circumscribed the parameter of violence; they were not aggressive in their inquisitiveness, not pushing to get closer as did their less sophisticated counterparts in whose frayed neighborhoods these sorts of scenes were usually played out. No, these curious were sober and physically remote. Unused to the intrusive sequelae of illegal death, they sensed the inappropriateness of it and wanted nothing to do with it. They hung back, demonstrating their censure by their aloofness. Violent death was a shabby affair. They didn’t approve.
    When Palma got out of the car, which Birley parked at the curb behind Cushing and Leeland’s, the gummy morning heat enveloped her like the tropical, early-day heat of the Yucatan. But instead of the fragrance of bougainvilleas and frangipani, Palma smelled the sweet, weighty breath of honeysuckle and magnolia and jasmine, and heard the spit-spit-spit-spit of a water sprinkler in between the scratchy transmissions of a patrol unit radio.
    She was on the sidewalk before Birley, who always took his time, had even gotten out of his seat belt. With her shield hanging from the side pocket of her purse, she hurried past the two young patrolmen manning the yellow-ribboned courtyard and approached the front door, shiny with heavy coats of wine