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neither dated nor witnessed and quoted a retainer’s fee which made Brad decide to shelve the matter until he could meet Harry face to face. By that time his termination pay was almost gone and his old studio contacts were lost. Through the U.S.E.S. he got a job parking cars at a Beverly Hills office complex and there he met Estelle Vance, who was an extremely smart fifty, traded her Cadillacs at twenty thousand miles and operated a highly successful real estate business. She needed a salesman and Brad needed a job. She coached him through the licencing period and practically gave him his first sale, with enough commission to buy some suits that didn’t look like 1964, pay cash for a used Mustang and take a furnished bachelor flat in a stylish new Mediterranean type apartment building in West Hollywood. It was a much better life than parking cars or picking up bit parts in TV westerns, but Brad was restless. Immobilization didn’t come with a piece of paper. He picked up a passport and toyed with the idea of taking a construction job abroad. The army had taught him a lot about machinery and communications, and he had a low tolerance for being charming with people like the retired Wittenbergs from Kenosha, who had already consumed two weeks of his young life trying to decide if a fifty-unit apartment building in Santa Monica was the investment they really wanted for the golden years. Entertaining the Wittenbergs in the notable spas on the Strip, a sales approach recommended by Estelle Vance, had left him exhausted and awakening with Rhona on his mind was like rubbing salt in an old wound. He had once calculated that Harry was now a millionaire several times over, and that it had all started with his own idea so that at least a quarter of that amount should be in the bank account of Omar Bradley Smith. It was a depressing calculation that he tried to keep out of his mind, but the subconscious wasn’t easy to boss around.
    He went into the bathroom, took a bromide and changed into bathing trunks. Outside the sliding glass doors, that led to the private patio of his apartment, was a huge swimming pool usually unoccupied at 9 a.m. He vaulted the wrought-iron guard rail, sprinted across the decking and plunged into the pool. It was one of those rare clear days in the city. The sky above was almost as blue as the pool, and the caress of the water and the warmth of the sun reminded him that his body was whole: he had two strong arms, two good legs and firm flesh that hadn’t been blasted away by bomb fragments or so seered by napalm that, unlike many of the once young men who had come back from Vietnam, he wasn’t prepared to spend the rest of his life hiding in a veterans’ hospital because he was too ashamed to go home with a featureless face. He had his health and his youth. He was poor but he was alive. He swam with sure, strong strokes to the opposite side of the pool and emerged on to the decking. A Mr. Atlas he was not. In his celluloid cowboy days, one director had referred to him as the poor man’s Jimmy Stewart, which wasn’t too flattering when all he wanted was to be the rich man’s Brad Smith. But he was reasonably attractive, and the pounds he had added in Vietnam, all muscle, gave him the confident feeling that he had nothing to fear from appearing in public wearing only swimming trunks and a smile.
    He had been alone in the pool, but he wasn’t alone on the decking. Two of the distaff occupants of the complex were sunning themselves poolside. One was blonde—slightly reminiscent of Rhona—who wore a tiny pink bikini and stretched voluptuously, full length on a foam rubber pad. The other, a brunette, wore a white chenille jacket over her suit and was studying a formidable looking text. Brad had noticed the pair on other mornings, and made a mental note to cultivate the bookish one. The blonde might be more fun, but it would be nice to have the company of a woman with whom he could talk. A bright beach towel