“Wow,” I said. I wondered what had happened to all that money.

“So that was when we decided to do the remodel of the high school,” he said.

“You did that?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, “how am I gonna get rich people to buy houses here if that school looked like shit? Smartest thing I ever did. Complete teardown. It was incredible, took years.”

It was so complicated, the good and evil in him. They were so densely intermixed.

“Did you have a good marriage? With Allison?” I asked.

“Oh, absolutely. I worshipped her. I was like a lapdog.”

I thought about Bunny telling me he would break one of Allison’s vases or some other beautiful thing she loved on purpose and then keep her up all night, accusing her of loving the object more than she loved him, trying to torture her into confessing what he suspected all along.

“She was my one true love,” he said, staring off into the distance.

We waited in that parking lot for a full forty minutes, and then Swanson appeared, and we could tell from his aggressive swagger that the news was good. We were practically jumping up and down by the time he got to the car. “What is it, what is it?”

“Huzzah!” Swanson proclaimed.

“Jesus fucking Christ, tell us what happened,” Ray said.

“Bye-bye arson, three years on voluntary manslaughter. They’re willing to support an OR at arraignment.”

“What’s an OR?” I asked.

“Released on her own recognizance,” Ray and Swanson said in unison as they swung open the doors of the BMW. I scrambled to get into the backseat as Swanson turned over the engine.

We were blind with pleasure at his triumph. It would be years before I wondered why the DA’s office seemed so eager to drop the arson and agree to voluntary manslaughter. They must have known they couldn’t take the arson or the second degree murder to trial and win. Would a seasoned criminal defense attorney have been able to talk them down to involuntary manslaughter? A suspended sentence and three years’ probation? What would Bunny’s life have been if Ray had hired her a real lawyer?

* * *

—

I did not attend the arraignment the next morning, but Ray and Swanson swung by to pick me up on their way to Lynwood Jail to get Bunny back. We were giddy and it was a short drive with no traffic on the 105, but once we were there the process ground to a halt. Getting someone out of jail was as lengthy and boring a process as buying a car. Swanson and I wound up going to Carl’s Jr. while Ray waited because Swanson complained he was getting low blood sugar. They needed to “locate the inmate,” and for some reason this was taking hours. Didn’t they know where she was? It made me anxious, but Swanson assured me it was always like this.

He ordered a Western Bacon Cheeseburger. I ordered a salad.

“So you met Ray in an AA meeting?” I asked.

He laughed. “Pretty ironic, huh?”

“It’s like a meet-cute in a romantic comedy. Two alcoholic men, running from their financial and spiritual obligations…”

Swanson giggled and covered his mouth with his hands so his chewed-up burger wouldn’t show. “Exactly, exactly,” he said.

I punctured a little cherry tomato with my plastic fork. “But he said you helped with the lawsuit after Allison’s death.”

“I did, I did,” Swanson said. “That’s what bonded us, I think. He was trying to get sober after she died, and we met. Honestly, we met a few times before I put the pieces together. I’d heard him share multiple times, but he’d never gone into detail about the accident before, and as soon as he said ‘tire,’ I thought: I’ve gotta talk to this guy.”

“Right,” I said. “He told me. Because you were already working on a case against Ford.”

“But we sure worked some magic on this one,” Swanson said. “Boy.” He took a big bite of his burger.

“So you think Bunny got a good deal?” I asked.

“Mmm—yes! Absolutely. The arson alone could have been up to three years. That was really very stupid. She should not have done that.”

“Well, you know why she did it, right?”

“Angst?” he asked.

For a moment I could not speak, and the entire world seemed to me as sinister and sad as a fast-food restaurant, and even the beautiful photons of sunlight cascading through the air outside were nothing but extensions of the absurd and heartless Rube Goldberg machine that was the universe. I tried to speak with as little emotion as possible. “The panels weren’t up to code. The inspector had been bribed. She was worried families would move in and one of the panels would malfunction and a real fire would start that actually killed people.”

He laughed, a little uneasy. “Still illegal, however!”

“Moral, however,” I shot back.

“The law of man has never been about morality,” Swanson said, wiping his lips with his napkin. “Thank god!”

“What’s it about, then?”

“Capital!” he cried, his face joyful, even resplendent. He sucked on his Diet Coke, and I saw the brown liquid come up through the straw and for a flashing moment I saw him as an ape. “Money is a more tangible thing than the Good, the Beautiful, or the True, right? I mean, I mean, money is about value, right? Whatever you value. Used to be, when you killed someone you just paid their family a lump sum, Beowulf and all that, right? A wergild. Man price. I don’t know, don’t worry too hard, Michael, everything’s made up!” He giggled again. “It’s all just made up!”

His phone buzzed. “All right,” he said, “she’s out.”

* * *

—

On the car ride home from the jail, I felt so elated to see Bunny again, to have her in the car, that it was like being in love. We sat in the back of her father’s car together, and held hands, and I remembered that first ride to Manhattan Beach together because Bamboo Forest’s egg drop soup was too watery, and the way Ray had gotten drunk and rammed the light pole, and the way we had walked home through the salt air, bathed by the whooshing noise of cars and the ancient churning of the Pacific. How light our bodies were as we walked, how easy it was to begin to love her, how nimbly my tongue managed to tell her the truth. It seemed to me that it had been much easier then to know what the truth even was.

“Are you okay? Was it terrible?”

“Not terrible,” she said. “I mean, I cried at night, which was embarrassing. But it wasn’t like the movies, no one tried to beat me up or anything.”