Jimmy and Jean stepped in at the back of the crowd.

The man in the guayabera plopped down in the wingback chair directly over the body. He was an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

“Don’t touch anything, Ben,” a woman said.

“I wouldn’t think of it, Deborah,” JPL Ben said.

Joel was up front playing host. He stepped up onto the first rung of the library ladder.

“Well? Anyone?”

“She looks dead,” the TV comic said. They all laughed like it was the funniest thing.

“I talked to her,” a young man said. He was tall, red-haired, still in his teens. He wore corduroy shorts down over his knees, Birkenstocks with white socks, a T-shirt with a word on it that made no sense. He had a squat brown bottle of Bohemia by the throat, propped against his leg.

“What did she say?” the woman asked.

The young man hesitated.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” someone else said.

“What happened to the third shot?” Deborah said. “Give us something to start with, Joel.”

Kinser was enjoying himself more than he should have been. “I will tell you this,” he said. “She’s a screenwriter.”

“What’s her name?”

“Rosie Scenario,” the red-headed teenager said, very dry.

Ben bounded up out of the wingback chair. He had already made a discovery behind the couch, was just waiting to reveal it.

“So this would be her agent …”

The amateur sleuths gathered around the half-hidden second body, a young Latino in khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt, new running shoes on his feet, stage blood on his temple.

The gore was threatening to drip onto the off-white carpet. Joel lifted the lifeless head and put an Architectural Digest under it.

“What’s in his hand?” one of the women said.