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“But you’ve managed to piss them off, and in a very short time, more than I have in five years,” she said. “I think you broke several league records in the process.”

Then she squeezed my hand and said, “Oprah.Damn,girl.”

I was about to leave on that note. I had texted Bobby Erlich to see if he might still be coming but hadn’t heard back. I didn’t take it personally. I knew enough about him by now to know that being this close to TV and movie people was like porn for him.

I was heading for the exit, and the elevators, when a tall, good-looking guy, one who appeared to be about half the median age in the room, wearing a sharp-looking blazer and an open-necked shirt and jeans and with a lot of wavy hair piled on top of his head, stepped out in front of me.

“I’m Clay Rosen. May I have your autograph?”

I laughed as we shook hands.

“I know who you are.”

He was the owner of the Los Angeles Chargers, is who he was. He’d inherited them from his father, Jerry Rosen, who’d owned most of the oceanfront property from San Diego down to Mexico. Clay Rosen reminded me of an actor, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember which one. It was happening to me more and more.

“You want to get a drink?” he said.

“More than you could possibly know.”

“You ever been to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel?”

I told him that sadly, I had to admit that I had not.

“The valet already has my car waiting.”

“I was supposed to meet somebody but got stood up.”

“A date?” Clay Rosen said.

“My crisis manager.”

He laughed loudly enough to turn heads. “I have mine on speed dial.” Then he said, “Come on, let’s blow this place. What else are you going to do, watch yourself on Oprah and drink alone?”

I told him that would pass for a big night with me.

“Before I give you my final answer,” I added, “answer this, Mr. Clay Rosen. Are you going to vote for me?”

“I’d vote for you twice if I could. It would give me more backup with the crypt keepers, so I wouldn’t have to keep feeling as if it’s me against the world.”

His car, a Tesla, was right where he said it was.

When he was pulling out of the drive between the two wings of the hotel, I said to Clay Rosen, “This may sound crazy, but I’m starting to think that maybe I might have a chance of getting approved after all.”

“You don’t.”

Sixty-Eight

DETECTIVE BEN CANTOR TRIEDto call Jenny when the Oprah interview was over just to tell her that even though he was hardly an impartial observer, he thought any open-minded person who’d watched her had to be on her side now.

And it wasn’t just his opinion. He did something he hardly ever did—checked Twitter and found that the majority of the people weighing in seemed to agree with him about what they’d seen tonight from Jenny Wolf.

Would it help her with the other owners? He had no way of knowing that, and neither did she. She had told him before she got to Los Angeles that she felt like she was down two touchdowns and running out of time.

The call went straight to voice mail. He left a message telling her that he thought she did great, that she should call him when she got the chance, and that there was nothing new to report on Thomas.

Cantor went back to his notes then, spread out once again on his kitchen table. He was still going through the grunt-work process of trying to get as complete a list as he could of the people who’d been in Thomas Wolf’s suite that night. It felt like he was assembling one of those thousand-piece puzzles. He’d talk to people who were there, and they’d give him as many names as they could remember. Working horizontally. Then those people would give him more names. It kept going like that.

Jenny was right. Her brother had had a lot of friends. Cantor was starting to think most of them had been there long after they’d all watched the Wolves game together. And he kept trying to see one or two of them as being capable of staging a drug overdose and then throwing Thomas to his death.