Los Angeles becomes the setting for the epilogue’s closing revelations, linking Danna Olsen’s belated decision to release Richard Flynn’s manuscript with John Keller’s account of how the murder investigation reached the truth. Rather than serving as a major location in the earlier crime story, the city frames the aftermath and the return of the missing manuscript to Peter Katz.

Setting and Narrative Context

A few days after Derek Simmons’s story made an impression far beyond its original setting, Peter Katz was travelling to Los Angeles to meet a television producer. He was also due to see John Keller, who had recently moved to the West Coast and rented a house in Orange County, California. The planned meetings place the epilogue in a changed present: the investigation’s consequences have travelled with its participants, even as their lives have moved elsewhere.

One encounter is located on Rosewood Avenue in West Hollywood, where Peter was standing outside the restaurant where he was supposed to meet a man. Later that evening, John picked him up outside his hotel. They had dinner at Sugarfish on West 7th Street, a restaurant John described as a fashionable new spot. The waiters brought a succession of dishes whose contents Peter could not identify, giving the meeting an ordinary, unsettled texture against the weight of what they discussed.

The Manuscript and Its Return

While Peter was in Los Angeles, Danna called to confess that she had known where the rest of Richard’s manuscript was and had read it before his death. She had withheld it because reading about Richard’s love for Laura Baines had left her feeling betrayed: she had cared for him through the final months of his life, while he spent that time writing a book still bound to his past. Her explanation turns the missing manuscript from a merely unresolved object into evidence of a private wound within Richard and Danna’s relationship.

Danna now believed Richard’s last wish had been for the manuscript to be published. She told Peter she would send it to him, despite having refused to hand it over earlier. She also warned that the final chapters reflected how difficult Richard’s last weeks had been, hinting at material Peter had not yet seen. Los Angeles thus marks not the manuscript’s physical recovery in a described scene, but the moment its custodian chooses to release it and its intended future becomes possible.

Keller’s Retrospective and the City’s Role

At dinner, Peter told John about Danna’s call. John saw the reversal in the chain of events: had Danna given Peter the manuscript at the time, Peter would not have drawn John into the story; John would not have sought out Roy Freeman; and Freeman would not have uncovered the old files. Their conversation makes the Los Angeles meeting a retrospective hinge, connecting Danna’s earlier silence to the investigative steps that ultimately exposed the truth about the murder.

The city’s narrative importance lies in this convergence rather than in any extended description of its landscape. West Hollywood and West 7th Street provide specific places for the epilogue’s encounters, while the wider Los Angeles visit gathers the people and consequences of the case into one final exchange. The manuscript’s delayed return and Keller’s account of the investigation’s contingent path make the ending turn on what was withheld, when it was shared, and what followed.