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A row of golf carts stood outside the clubhouse, several of them complete with keys, as predicted. A trusting lot, here at the country club. Julia Mann smiled regally at everyone she passed, climbed into the first one and deftly reversed it out of the rank.

“Excuse me…” called a querulous voice. “I believe you’ve taken my cart by mistake.” An old man stood nearby with his wife, color suffusing his face. “Easily done, of course.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” called back Julia. “Come on, Mason.”

“No, I’m pretty sure…” replied the man’s wife, less uncertainly. “Francis, call the attendant.”

“Don’t bother, Francis,” said Mason, who suddenly realized Julia was leaving without her. “We’ll bring it right back.” She started to sprint after the golf cart, which was moving away more rapidly than she had anticipated.

“Francis!” said the wife, moving toward another cart. “Don’t just stand there. After her!”

“How, my dear?”

“We’ll take the Abernathys’ cart. Come on.”

Mason doubled her speed and flung herself on the back of the moving cart.

“Floor it,” she yelled. “The old folks are in hot pursuit.”

Julia looked over her shoulder. “Unfortunate that I picked theirs right in front of them.” She rattled across the bridge. “Hold on, Mason, we’ll lose them on the uphill.”

But the hill made the cart slow down, and the old couple started gaining on them. Judging by the half smile on the old guy’s face, this was the highlight of his week, possibly longer.

“Get off and run, Mason,” said Julia calmly. “Your weight is slowing us down.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Not in the slightest. Jump off and prevent them from continuing this ridiculous pursuit. Tell them I’ll be right back. Charm them. Threaten them. Improvise!”

They could hear the old lady urging Francis to put his pedal to the metal. Literally.

Mason slid off the back of the cart, stumbling and nearly dislocating her ankle in the process, and started running toward the old couple, doing her best to look insane. She waved her arms in the air, made a horrible face and started roaring. She wasn’t sure where any of this came from; she was just improvising, as instructed.

Amazingly, it worked. Francis hit the brakes, nearly flinging his wife ass over teakettle over the front. Then, proving he was made of sterner stuff than your average octogenarian, he threw the cart into reverse and began whizzing backward down the hill, the high-pitched keening of his wife competing with the whine of the engine under pressure. It’s conceivable they hit fourteen miles an hour, but sadly, no one was there from Guinness World Records to adjudicate. They hit the bridge at top speed and clattered backward into the darkness.

Mason, having achieved her goal, turned back and started running up the hill. When she got to the top, Julia was nowhere in sight, and it was with a great deal of cursing that Mason made her way to Jack Simon’s house.

When she got there, she was surprised to see that the lights were on, and the golf cart was parked neatly outside. She started around the back of the house and came across her boss, pressed up against the wall. Julia held her finger to her lips and then pointed around the edge of the house. Music was playing on the outdoor speakers.

“ Codex soundtrack…” said Julia. “I’m really starting to regret having anything to do with that film, not going to lie.”

“You won an Oscar.”

“Big fucking deal. Bella died, Jonathan died, Jack got blackballed, who knows whether Tony’s death is connected. It seems like a high price to pay for ninety minutes of action and suspense.” She paused. “I don’t even think it was Jonathan’s best work.”

Mason didn’t reply because she was still a little out of breath, but she peered around the corner of the building.

Robert was sitting in the hot tub. A nearly empty bottle of tequila sat on the edge, a small pile of lime wedges next to it. Mason spontaneously thought of the uptight barman at Eddie’s, and wondered at her inability to stay focused on what was important, which in this case was the gun that sat alongside the limes.

She made a noise and Robert immediately looked up and saw her, reaching for the gun and swinging it in her direction.

Mason ducked back behind the house. “Shit, he spotted me.”

“Nice,” said Julia, dryly. “You’re a fucking ninja.”

“You left me alone on the golf course, fighting for our freedom.”

“You were scaring old people. It’s probably what you live for.” Julia was keeping her voice low, but still managing to give it a lot of emphasis.

“I know you’re there…” called Robert. “You might as well show yourself. I’m not killing anyone tonight. Well, not including myself.” He laughed, although it was a pretty feeble effort.

Julia straightened up.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Mason. “His use of ‘tonight’ suggests…”

But it was too late. Julia had already stepped out into the open.

The floodlights lit her long skirt as she walked, and as she approached the edge of the hot tub they illuminated her face.

The man in the tub made a noise.

“Julia Mann…?”

“None other,” she replied, reaching a sun lounger and plonking herself down as if she did this kind of thing every day. “I was a friend of Jack’s.” She paused. “And so were you, weren’t you, Robert?”

The hand holding the gun wavered, then gently replaced it on the edge of the tub. Robert passed his wet hand across his face and nodded.

“I was. I was his best friend. His lover, for over thirty years. Not exclusively…” He made a motion with his head, a remembered denial, a pain. “Jack liked to be free, never pretended otherwise. So did I, to start with. We met in the city, when he was filming The Codex …” He gestured in the air, as if to touch the music. “An incredible film. You were amazing.”

“Thank you,” said Julia. She looked over her shoulder. “You can come out of hiding, Mason.” She turned back to Robert. “He was going to leave you?”

Robert nodded. “They were remaking The Codex ; they offered him a role. For so long he’d told me he didn’t miss it, the whole life of a Hollywood actor, the parties, the friends who aren’t friends, the drugs…We lived a quiet, private life down here. No one at the club knew about us. He would come in for dinner every night, play that we barely knew each other; it had started out as fun and became a habit. I’d come over a few nights a week, when he wasn’t out with his other…connections. It was a small world we lived in, just the two of us.” He looked up at Julia. “We did the crossword. We watched movies. He told stories and I listened.” He sobbed, under his breath. “He was my whole world, had been since the day I met him.”

Mason had approached but stopped a little way off. She kept her eyes on the gun where it lay in a small puddle, very much within reach. She wondered how long it would take the ambulance to get here if he shot Julia, or herself. They’d passed a hospital on the way. It might be close enough…They might get lucky.

“Why did you kill him?”

“I didn’t mean to.” There was a very long silence as Robert gazed down into the water. He was naked, Mason noticed, the lights of the hot tub making his thin legs look like ribbons in the water. She looked back at the gun, smelling the tequila, wondering how drunk he was, how true his aim might be.

“What happened?” asked Julia, softly.

“Why are you here?” he asked, instead of answering the question. “You are here, right? I’m not hallucinating a movie star?”

Julia shook her head, her voice soft. “No, I’m really here. He wrote about you, you know, to Tony Eckenridge. He called you his boo, used your initial…Did he call you Bobby?”

Robert nodded. “He was the only one.”

“Did you know Tony?”

Robert nodded. “When we were first together, and later, more recently. Tony came down maybe once a year, hung out and reminisced.” He looked up at her. “He talked about you a lot. He really cared about you. He worried about you.”

Julia’s mouth twisted. “No need.”

Robert tipped his head to one side. “We worry about the ones we love, whether we need to or not.” He shrugged. “I was worried that night. I was afraid of losing him. That he would go back to the city to do the film and then get all caught up in it, in the madness. He just laughed, said he hadn’t loved it then and didn’t think he’d love it now, but I saw his face. He was excited.”

“What happened?” Julia asked again.

“We’d been drinking, of course. Smoking a little weed, watching an old movie.”

“What movie?”

He smiled at the memory, the lights of the hot tub casting his eyes into shadow. “ Passport to Pimlico . Classic Ealing comedy, one of my favorites.”

“Then what?”

“Then the stupid dog started barking outside and Jack saw a scorpion on the side of the pool. He got his gun and went out to battle the arachnids , as he always called it. I followed him, kept asking him about his plans, if he was going to rent a place up there or go up and down, stuff like that. He accused me of being jealous before the fact, reminded me that we weren’t married, that he had always been very clear that he didn’t believe fidelity was healthy or even possible.” He faltered, and looked at Mason. “He was a star when we met, you know. He was going places. Everywhere we went, people would just gravitate to him; he had so much energy, so much charm. And he was just beautiful. The most beautiful man I’d ever seen. And he chose me, just regular me. My own private star, performances every night in the beginning, Oscar-worthy.” He poured himself another shot, his hand steady where his voice was not. “Not so much lately, of course. Thirty years is a long time, even in the life of a celestial being.” He grimaced, and did the shot, reaching for a wedge of lime automatically. He threw it in the pool after sucking it, the fruit slicing through the air and splashing down, bobbing to the surface and floating. “He was only human, in the end.”

“What went wrong?” asked Mason.

“Jack was waving the gun around and firing recklessly. He nearly shot the dog. I went to take it from him and he insisted he was fine…I had my hand on it, we struggled…it went off.” He looked at the women. “Have you ever done anything terribly wrong, but you just couldn’t help yourself?”

“I’ve rarely done anything else,” replied Mason, honestly.

He nodded, then continued. “I panicked, dragged him onto the golf course and into the sand trap. Put him there, raked away my footprints, came back and washed the blood off the tile. I was very calm by then, did what needed to be done.” He shrugged again. “I’ve waited for the police to come get me, but I guess they’re not coming. Nobody seemed to question it, not until you.”

He reached for the gun again, picked it up, pointed it at Julia.

“It seems totally reasonable that an actress is the one who caught me out. You can tell when someone else is playing pretend. That was you, that old lady?” He pointed the gun at Mason, briefly. “I didn’t think she was your granddaughter, but I didn’t realize you weren’t who you said you were. But then again, who is?” He sighed. “And now you’re going to call the cops and they’re going to arrest me because I’m too tired to lie about it anymore. I’ll be in prison for the rest of my life, just another old man who did a terrible thing and has nothing to show for his life but memories. No more stars, no more stories, no more Jack.”

“There’ll still be movies and crosswords,” said Julia. “Prison isn’t as bad as you imagine.”

“You underestimate my imagination,” he replied.

Then he turned the gun against his temple and blew his own brains out.

The police took longer than you might think, seeing as they had two eyewitnesses to a suicide and were called instantaneously to the scene, but such is life. Mason started to explain that Robert had also confessed to another “suicide” they had on their books, but Julia gave her a look that caused her to subside immediately. In the scurry and tape of the crime scene, no one seemed willing to press her.

“It doesn’t matter,” Julia said, drawing Mason to one side. “Why complicate matters? We know what happened. Jack had no surviving relatives. Just let it lie.”

Mason wasn’t convinced. “But what if they reopen the case now that Robert has killed himself at the scene of a previous crime?”

“Why would they? As far as they’re concerned, a brokenhearted man just killed himself after the suicide of his longtime lover. Which is essentially the truth, if not the complete truth. I’m all for justice being served, Mason, but in this case it’s already been served.”

Mason frowned, but let it go. She’d found the experience deeply shocking, and wanted to go home, see her cat and drink a liter of vodka, in that order. She knew she was going to do the first two, and hoped against hope she’d make it to a meeting before she did the third.

“Honestly,” said Julia, tugging her wrap more securely around her, “it’s all very sad, and I’m starting to believe in the Codex Curse myself.”

“How is this to do with the curse?” Mason frowned. She didn’t see any connection at all between this case and the other two murders, but maybe she was missing something.

“If Jack hadn’t agreed to be in the remake, he’d still be alive, and so would Robert.”

“So the new Codex is as cursed as the original? That’s a stretch.”

“Is it? I’m just seeing dead bodies.”

Julia’s phone rang. It was Claudia.

“When can you get back?” She sounded stressed. “Things are going on here I don’t like. I had to throw a photographer out of the house earlier, and Will is refusing to eat because he’s digging even harder into Galliano’s now. Lorre is the only one who’s bringing me any joy.”

Julia outlined the situation, then paused. “Wait…why is Will digging even harder into Galliano’s?”

Claudia made an exasperated noise. “Didn’t he call you? I should have known; he’s reached the muttering stage of his research. You know what he’s like. He was supposed to call you an hour ago.”

Julia shook her head. “We’ve been kind of busy, what with the cops and all. What happened?”

“Maggie Galliano got attacked. She’s in the hospital. They’re not sure if she’ll make it.”

Julia looked at Mason, who had overheard the conversation and was reaching for the car keys.

“Tell Will to eat something and keep digging. We’ll be home in two hours, assuming Mason speeds as much as I want her to.” She hung up and turned to Mason. “And no one’s still angry about the golf cart thing.” She paused. “Let’s creep across the golf course and avoid the clubhouse. Better safe than sorry.”

“An unusual choice for you.”

“Yes,” replied Julia, “but we’re in a hurry.”