PATTERNS.

They fascinated Anthony Clemenza.

At sundown, before Hilary Thomas had even gone home, while she was still driving through the hills and canyons for relaxation, Anthony Clemenza and his partner, Lieutenant Frank Howard, were questioning a bartender in Santa Monica.  Beyond the enormous windows in the room's west wall, the sinking sun created constantly changing purple and orange and silver-fleck patterns on the darkening sea.

The place was a singles' bar called Paradise, meeting ground for the chronically lonely and terminally horny of both sexes in an age when all the traditional meeting grounds - church suppers, neighborhood dances, community picnics, social clubs - had been leveled with real (and sociological) bulldozers, the ground where they once stood now covered with highrise offices, towering cement and glass condominiums, pizza parlors, and five-story parking garages.  The singles' bar was where space-age boy met space-age girl, where the macho stud connected with the nymphomaniac, where the shy little secretary from Chatsworth met the socially inept computer programmer from Burbank, and, where, sometimes, the rapist met the rapee.

To Anthony Clemenza's eye, the people in Paradise made patterns that identified the place.  The most beautiful women and the handsomest men sat very erect on barstools and at minuscule cocktail tables, legs crossed in geometric perfection, elbows bent just so, posing to display the clean lines of their faces and their strong limbs; they made elegantly angular patterns as they watched and courted one another.  Those who were less physically attractive than the crème de la crème, but who were nonetheless undeniably appealing and desirable, tended to sit and stand with less than ideal posture, choosing to make up in attitude and image what they lacked in form.  Their posture made a statement: I am at ease here, relaxed, unimpressed with those gorgeous straight-backed girls and guys, confident, my own person.  This group slouched and slumped gracefully, using the eye-pleasing rounded lines of a body at rest to conceal slight imperfections of bone and muscle.  The third and largest group of people in the bar was composed of the plain ones, neither pretty nor ugly, who made jagged anxious patterns as they huddled in corners and darted from table to table to exchange gaping smiles and nervous gossip, worried that no one would love them.

The overall pattern of Paradise is sadness, Tony Clemenza thought.  Dark strips of unfulfilled need.  A checkered field of loneliness.  Quiet desperation in a colorful herringbone.

But he and Frank Howard were not there to study the patterns in the sunset and the customers.  What they were there to do was get a lead on Bobby "Angel" Valdez.

Last April, Bobby Valdez had been released from prison after serving seven years and a few months of a fifteen-year sentence for rape and manslaughter.  It looked like letting him go had been a big mistake.