I addressed the empty room. “Listen, Nick, if you’re here, thanks for whatever you did to make your mother pay up. Maybe you’re low on ectoplasm or something, so you can’t pop in, but if you can hear me, would you mind looking after Russell for me for a few hours?”

Nothing.

I patted Russell’s head, told him to be a good boy and filled a second bowl with Greer’s gourmet kibble before slipping out of the apartment. I might have had some qualms if the dog had whimpered, or even looked lonely, but he just thumped his tail on the floor once and went back to dreamland.

I left with a clear conscience and some low-grade anxiety.

The first candidate for Alex’s squeeze-on-the-side ran a gallery in Old Town Scottsdale. Her name was Gina Marchand, she was thirty-five, three times divorced and struggling to keep the store open. All that, I’d learned by Googling. Now, it was time to get a firsthand look at her. Size her up.

I stopped off at Wal-Mart on the way and bought a digital camera and a pretzel the size of a Frisbee.

Proper nutrition is fundamental to the achievement of any goal—The Damn Fool’s Guide to Success, page 72.

Gina was in the shop when I walked in, explaining the virtues of a twelve-foot bronze statue of a bear eating a fish to a middle-aged woman who’d apparently thrown in her lot with the I-shall-wear-purple movement. No red hat, though, so maybe she was on the fence.

Ms. Marchand resembled the publicity picture on her Web site. She looked up at me briefly, as I entered, and dismissed me in the next moment. I checked the front of my blouse for pretzel crumbs.

“We can certainly ship the piece to Cincinnati with no problem,” she told the woman in purple.

I wandered over to examine an oil painting on the eastern wall. It was gigantic, roughly the size of the area rug in Greer’s dining room, and showed four dead outlaws, of the Old West persuasion, strapped to boards and leaning against the facade of a vintage saloon. The title was, “Wages of Sin,” and I could have bought an Escalade, fully loaded, for what it cost, according to the discreet little card tucked into the lower right hand corner of the frame.

“You probably can’t afford it,” Gina Marchand said, stepping up beside me.

Maybe she smelled the Wal-Mart pretzel on my breath.

“You might be surprised,” I countered. I could have bought that painting, but it would have been a crazy thing to do. It wouldn’t fit on any of the walls in my apartment and, besides, I had enough ghosts hanging around without adding a band of outlaws to the mix.

“Somehow,” Gina said, “I just don’t think you’re here to buy art.”