“You only take cases every once in a while,” she said.

He waited. He wasn’t going to make it any easier for her.

“Nobody seems to know why you take the cases you take,” she said, putting one word after another. “Money doesn’t seem to be a factor — but I have money.”

He already knew that. And he knew that she was used to people listening to her, doing what she said.

He put the cue in the rack.

“Are you in business?” he said.

“I own a company.”

“I’m sure you know some investigators, security companies. There are some good ones.”

“This isn’t about my business,” she said. “It’s about something that happened a long time ago.”

Each one of the words of that second sentence came hard for her. But he still just looked at her and smiled and left her standing there.

A Mexican maid was watching a little TV on the counter in the kitchen. On screen was a school picture of a Latino boy ten or eleven, an image that has come to mean “missing child” or “dead boy.” The story was being told in Spanish. The picture of the boy gave way to a family crying in front of a little house, then an angle on a relative arriving, caught in the first moment he stepped from the car and got the news. On the L.A. Spanish stations the crime coverage was always more explicit, more theatrical, more frightening: Monsters walk among us! was the theme.

Jimmy came in. The maid tensed, but smiled. He opened a couple of cabinets until he found a glass. She watched as he filled it at the sink and drank it down.

She had a Band-Aid on her finger. He asked her about it. “Te cortaste el dedo? Penso que era un hot dog?”

She laughed and shook her head.

Then Jean came in.

She stopped under a bright recessed ceiling light, stood under its glare like a defendant in a sci-fi scene.