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“I tend to bring that out in people,” Cantor said. “But now you’re stuck with me, because other than your coach, I seem to be all the backup you’ve got these days.” He smiled again. “Other than an undefeated high school football team.”

“And my very own crisis manager.”

“Forgot about him,” Cantor said.

He ate some burrito, then reached over and forked some of my enchilada. The food was every bit as good as he’d said it was going to be.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you and keep forgetting, just because of everything going on,” he said. “But why are you still coaching?”

“Because I don’t quit.”

“This has to be about more than football with you,” he said.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Sixty-One

BEN CANTOR DIDN’T FEELlike any kind of ace detective at the moment.

No shit, Sherlock,she’d joked from her side of the small table.

It was like he told her: hecouldn’tbelieve she’d agreed to go out with him, especially after she said she’d turned down an invitation from her coach.

Maybe she was just blowing smoke at him. But he didn’t think she was the type. Cantor had known a lot of women in his life, beenwitha lot of women. Been married, divorced, and nearly married again. Jenny Wolf was the most right-there, up-front woman he’d ever met. Sometimes he’d forget, but only for a couple of minutes at a time, that she owned the football team in town. And one of the newspapers.

For the life of him he couldn’t come up with a good reason why the two of them being here like this was a good idea, and not just because he felt out of his league. And that didn’t mean the National Football League.

He still couldn’t escape how attracted he was to her, how attracted to her he’d been from the start, even when he was treating her like a suspect, talking about what a star swimmer she’d been. She’d asked him, before the margaritas were delivered tonight, why he hadstoppedlooking at her as a suspect.

“Unless your phone went to Sausalito for dinner that night, like you said you did, and you went to the boat without it, you couldn’t have been in two places at once.”

“You went in and checked myphonerecords?”

He gave her a little salute. “Just doing my job, ma’am.”

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me.”

He hoped now that she couldn’t tell he kept searching for reasons to look away when she was staring at him across the table.

“I wasn’t expecting to have this good a time,” Jenny said.

“Stop,” Cantor said, “before you make me blush.”

“You know what I’m trying to say.”

“Yeah, actually, I do.”

They were walking back to his old Victorian house on 18th Street by now, where she’d left her car. Before dinner, he’d asked her if she wanted to come in for a drink, but she’d said she was saving herself for her first margarita.

Jenny asked now why so many of the cross streets in the area were named after states. Texas. Missouri. Mississippi. Like that. Cantor said he happened to know the answer: it had all started before California became a state and a guy named Dr. John Townsend was mayor of San Francisco.

“Townsend saw this as an intersection of Mexican California and the United States,” he said. “So naming the streets after states was another way of kissing up to the government.”

“Why in the world do you know that?”

“Just a naturally curious guy.”

They made the turn off Mississippi, and there was his house. And her car parked in the driveway.