Before I got into the taxi, I hugged Griffin and kissed him. As I threw clothes into a suitcase, I hesitated over a black suit and tie, thinking they might be bad luck, but I packed them. Then he went to an automatic teller machine and got me money.

He called TWA and reserved a seat on the next flight. I called Griffin, then twenty-seven, who lives two blocks away from me in New York, and within minutes he was at my door. “What happened?” I asked, afraid to hear. Lenny got on the phone and said, “I need you.” Detective Harold Johnston of the Los Angeles Homicide Bureau told me that my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Dominique, was near death at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. When the telephone in my New York apartment woke me up at five o’clock in the morning on October 31, 1982, I sensed as I reached for the receiver that disaster loomed. We communicate regularly and mail each other clippings we cut out of newspapers, and I no longer resent, as I once did, addressing her as Mrs. I refer to her in conversation as my wife, never my ex-wife, and there is not a day in which she does not occupy my thoughts for some period of time. We never venture into the realm of what might have been. Often I have felt through the years that our lives might have been better if we had just stuck out the difficult years of our marriage, but I do not know if she would agree with that. Long divorced, we have, rightly or wrongly, never become unmarried. We had five children, two of whom died when they were only a few days old. We had a large wedding at her family’s ranch in Nogales, Arizona, in 1954, and after living briefly in New York, we moved to Beverly Hills, where I worked for twenty-five years in television and films. She was ravishing, and I knew that instant that I would marry her if she would have me.

The first time I saw Lenny she was getting off a train at the railroad station in Hartford, Connecticut. We were gathering, a family again, for a murder trial. Lenny has multiple sclerosis and is confined to a wheelchair. It is not the house we lived in as a family. Alex, the younger one, met me at the airport, and we drove into Beverly Hills to the house where my former wife, Ellen Griffin Dunne, called Lenny, lives. My two sons, Griffin and Alex, had preceded me out from New York. Throughout the flight from New York I engaged in diligent conversation with the stranger next to me, postponing as long as possible facing the feelings of dread within me. I flew to Los Angeles on July 5, 1983, for an indefinite stay. It was the beginning of a long hot summer.

Stalker of the endless dunes