It was about noon. It was very hot, too hot in the hotel room. It was the heat that made me do it, the sticky ennui, the dust over the earth, the hot blasts from the Mojave. I went to the rear of the Temple Street apartment. There was a wooden stairway leading to the second floor. On such a day as this, her door would be open, to cool the place by cross ventilation from the window.

I was right. The door was open, but she was not there. Her stuff was piled in the middle of the room, boxes and suitcases with garments squirming from them. The bed was down, the naked mattress showing the sheets gone. The place was stripped of life. Then I caught the odour of disinfectant. The room had been fumigated. I took the stairs three at a time to the landlady’s door.

‘You!’ she said, opening the door. ‘You!’ and she slammed it shut.

I stood outside and pleaded with her. ‘I’m her friend,’ I said. ‘I swear to God. I want to help her. You got to believe me.’

‘Go away or I’ll call the police.’

‘She was sick,’ I said. ‘She needed help. I want to do something for her. You’ve got to believe me.’

The door opened. The woman stood looking straight into my eyes. She was of medium height, stout, her face hardened and without emotion.

She said: ‘Come in.’

I stepped into a drab room, ornate and weird, cluttered with fantastic gadgets, a piano littered with heavy photographs, wild-coloured shawls, fancy lamps and vases. She asked me to sit down, but I didn’t.

‘That girl’s gone,’ she said. ‘She’s gone crazy. I had to do it.’

‘Where is she? What happened?’

‘I had to do it. She was a nice girl too.’

She had been forced to call the police — that was her story. That had happened the night after I was there. Camilla had gone wild, throwing dishes, dumping furniture out of the window, screaming and kicking the walls, slashing the curtains with a knife. The landlady had called the police. The police had come, broken down the door, and seized her. But the police had refused to take her away. They had held her, quieted her, until an ambulance arrived. Wailing and struggling, she had been led away. That was all, except that Camilla owed three weeks’ rent and had done irreparable damage to the furniture and apartment. The landlady mentioned a figure, and I paid her the money. She handed me a receipt and smiled her greasy hypocrisy. ‘I knew you were a good boy,’ she said. ‘I knew it from the moment I first laid eyes on you. But you just can’t trust strangers in this town.’

I took the street car to the County Hospital. The nurse in the reception room checked a card file when I mentioned the name of Camilla Lopez. ‘She’s here,’ the nurse said. ‘But she can’t have visitors.’