Joe Valery finds Ethel dead

Joe Valery, Kate's assistant and executioner, lives by a private code — believe nobody, keep your mouth shut, put your faith in dough — and by a protective love for Joe. He fears Kate because he cannot find her weaknesses, and she keeps him because she has a note in her files about one Joseph Venuta, who walked away from a San Quentin road gang. Sleepless with arthritis, Kate turns her nights over: Faye, for whom she finds she feels nothing at all; and Ethel, whose floating she now sees as her one mistake. She sends Joe to find her for five hundred dollars, then asks whether the name Venuta means anything to him. Joe doubles back to Monterey under a false name, drinks a pint alone, weeps over the boy he was, and decides Ethel might be a hole-card worth gambling on. In Santa Cruz a poolroom keeper tells him for twenty-five dollars that Ethel was pulled dead out of the sand months ago. Joe reports instead that she means to come back to Salinas and lie low.

Kate is beaten by the one thing she never allowed for: a stupid man withholding information he does not understand. Ethel's death is reported over a rib steak by a man more interested in his chips, and the narrator stops to say she wanted dignity — the only kindness anyone shows her. Kate's morning of high spirits is placed just before the lie, so the recovery is visibly spent.