“Caro?”she said into the phone. “Listen, we’ve got a situation here…No, just a…no, will you listen?Si calmi! Christ.Stà zitto! Put Frank on…No, I’m not going to say another word to you…oh, really? Well,va f’an culo, Mr. Big Shit Detective. I’m hanging up. And if this phone rings, it had better be your partner calling!”

She pressed a button. “Excuse me,” she said to me-very calmly, as if she hadn’t just been insulting her husband bilingually and with enough gestures to make a mime envious.

I just looked at her. I felt as if I were watching an experimental theater production from a front row seat. Up close, and it still didn’t make sense. I put my head down on my knees.

“Irene,” she started to say, but the phone chirped. She pushed a button and leaned out the window again.

“Frank? What do you know-he’s catching on. Listen, we found Irene’s friend. Possible 187…Yeah. Well, exactly. I’ll tell you in a minute-we’re in an old hotel, and it’s a little hard to describe how to get here. You out of earshot of your boss? Good. Now, what I want to say is, I think the situation could use a little TLC, you know what I mean? Yeah, I’ll let you talk to her. She’s right here. But about the, er, business aspects of all of this…exactly. Good…And can you talk Carlos Hernandez into handling this one himself?” There was a long pause, then she said, “No. Not from the looks of things.” She glanced over at me. “Coins on the eyes, for one thing. Also some sort of head injury, although-no, of course not. Stepped right back out of there…Yeah. We’re at the Angelus Hotel. Fourteenth floor.” She gave him the address, and when she started to describe the entry, I interrupted her.

“Tell them about the footprints near the drive.”

She passed the message along, gave him a few more details, then gestured for me to come near the window. I took the phone, and leaned out as she had done.

“Irene?” I heard him say.

“Tell Pete not to blame Rachel.”

“They’ll be all right. How are you doing?”

I didn’t know how to answer that.

“Irene?”

“I know it won’t be your case,” I said. “But do you think you could come over here, maybe take me home afterward?”

“Of course. We’ll be there soon.”

“Thanks. Here’s Rachel.” I handed the phone back to her and sat against a wall, the one facing the wall which adjoined Lucas’s room.

Questions and guilt and disbelief took turns somersaulting through my mind. Rachel talked for a while to Frank and somebody else in the homicide division, then hung up the phone and sat down next to me.

She didn’t try to force any conversation out of me. I was grateful.

A few minutes passed before I said, “Nothing went the way it should have gone for Lucas.”

She just listened.

“I don’t know how he ended up on the bus bench that day I saw him there,” I went on. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was trying to make something of his life. He was trying to come back from that. I believe that with all my heart.”

“Sure he was,” she said gently. “Everybody who knew him said so.”

“I want to look around in there.”

“You hired the wrong PI, then. I spent too many years as a cop to go in there and fuck with a crime scene. We’ll end up pissing off a bunch of people whose cooperation we’re going to need.”

I sighed. “I suppose you won’t let me go back in by myself.”

“No. Frank’s going to do what he can to make sure we don’t get locked out of this. My guess is they’re going to want to talk to us, because otherwise, they probably won’t have jack.”

“Don’t try to convince me that this is going to be investigated with much enthusiasm. Lucas wasn’t exactly the biggest mover and shaker in Las Piernas.”

“You’re wrong, Irene. All kinds of people end up as homicide victims. Thepress may treat them differently, but that doesn’t mean the cops will.”

“Forgive me if I’m a little slow to buy that.”

She shrugged. “Believe what you want to. Me, when I was working homicide, I didn’t care if the victim was a prince or a pauper. I wanted to nail the killer. I didn’t want that son of a bitch walking around thinking he was too smart to get caught, thinking he beat me.

“Besides, if you don’t think the police are doing the job they should be doing on this case, you’ve got a powerful way to put pressure on them.”

“Which reminds me of something, Rachel. Can I borrow your phone?”

I dialed John Walters’s home phone number.

John listened patiently as I told him about finding Lucas.

“Well,” he said, “sorry about your friend. Sounds like you’ve had a tough day. Tell you what. Tomorrow, come in a couple of hours late if you like. But before the end of the day, I want you to do some serious work on Moffett’s resignation.”

“What?”

“Yeah, take a couple of hours off. Ido have a heart-no matter what you tell the interns.”

“Serious work on Moffett?Is that what I heard you say?”

“Exactly. You tell me some cock-and-bull story about some bum causing everything from Watterson’s suicide to Moffett’s resignation. You’ve pulled this kind of shit on me before, so I know to let you have a little time to spend the morning trying to find out what happened to your friend, or you’re not going to have your mind on your work.”

“This wasn’t some ruse, John,” I said, trying to hold on to my temper. “I’ll admit, there have been times when I wasn’t exactly working on a story in the way you asked me to-”

“-Oh, yes, Ms. Kelly. Ithas been known to happen. Like the time you spent the day sailing when you were supposedly doing an investigative piece on the harbor?”

“That harbor piece won a CNPA!”

“And theExpress is proud of that award. But the California Newspaper Publishers Association didn’t give it to you for anything that skipper taught you on the way to Catalina.”

Not for the first time, I cursed the storm that came up that day, trapping me in Avalon with a guy who turned out to be a bigger drip than anything that fell from the sky.

“Look, John, I don’t have time to dredge up old history. This is different. Lucas Monroe is the key to all of this. You should have Mark down here on this.”

“Mr. Baker is busy with other assignments.”

“If not Mark, then-”

“Then nobody.”

“Nobody!”

“Nobody. Irene, think like a reporter, will you? The death of your friend is not newsworthy.”

“Why? Because he’s black? Because he’s homeless? Because he died in a part of town that everyone wishes would just sink into the core of the earth?”

“You know what Wrigley’s going to say if I start printing stories about druggies OD-ing and bums croaking in abandoned hotels?”

“This is not about-”

“You’ve heard his speech. Right after he tells me that our subscribers do not want to open the morning paper and read about dirtbags dying-good riddance, etc.-he’ll ask me if I’d like to try another line of work.”

“It’s a bullshit policy and you know it. If we aren’t going to print anything about ‘dirtbags,’ then pull Wrigley’s name off the masthead.”

“I’ll tell him you suggested it. I’m certain it will cause him to reconsider his position.”

“I hate this crap,” I said, my anger not lessened by defeat. “I absolutely hate it. The policy’s wrong. And you’re wrong, too, John. You’re wrong about Lucas. He wasn’t-” Something caught in my throat, and I couldn’t speak. I was thinking of the man who had patiently taught me one of the most difficult subjects I’d ever studied. A man who had given me a great gift, the ability to tell at least a few of the lies from a few of the truths-a man I respected, no matter what had become of him since those student days. That man, reduced to this.

“Kelly, listen to me,” John said. “I’m not trying to insult the memory of this friend of yours. I’ve got nothing against him. I’m just trying to get you to see it from the paper’s point of view. I know you’re upset-hell, if I could, I’d give you the whole day off tomorrow. But I’ve got a nasty feeling that if we don’t get a handle on this Moffett thing, theTimes is going to beat us in our own backyard.”