“Well, I give you an A. Some of our patients can't be counted upon to feed themselves, let alone calibrate dosage. In my opinion, deinstitutionalization's the major culprit in the homeless problem. Sure, some street people are working folks who hit the skids, but at least thirty or forty percent are severely mentally debilitated. They belong in hospitals, not under some freeway. And now with all the weird street drugs out there, the old cliché that the mentally ill aren't violent just isn't true anymore. Each year it gets uglier and uglier, Dr. Delaware. I pray there won't be another Hewitt, but I don't count on it.”

“Do you try at all to identify which patients are violent?”

“If we have police records, we take them seriously, but like I said, that's rare. We've got to be our own police here. If someone goes around making threats, we call security. But most of them are quiet. Hewitt was. Didn't really relate to anyone else that I'm aware of—that's why we're probably not going to be much help to Detective Sturgis. What exactly is he after, anyway?”

“Apparently, he suspects Hewitt had a friend who may be harassing some people, and he's trying to find out if the friend was a patient here.”

“Well, after Sturgis called me I asked some of the other workers if they'd seen Hewitt with anyone, and none of them had. The only one who might have known was Becky.”

“Is she the only one who worked with him?”

She nodded.

“How long had she been working here?”

“A little over a year. She got her assistantship from junior college last summer and applied right afterward. One of those second careers—she'd worked as a secretary for a while, decided to go back to school in order to do something socially important—her words.”

Her eyes flickered and her mouth set—the lower lip compressing and making her look older.

“Such a sweet girl,” she said. She shook her head, then looked at me. “You know—I just thought of something. Hewitt's attorney—the one defending him on that theft thing? He might know if Hewitt had any friends. I think I've got his name tucked away somewhere—hold on.”

She went to the file, opened the middle drawer, and began flipping. “Just one second, so much junk in here. . . . He called me—the attorney—after Becky's murder. Wanting to know if there was anything he could do. I think he wanted to talk—to get his own guilt off his chest. I didn't have time for . . . ah, here we go.”

She pulled out a piece of cardboard stapled with business cards. Working a staple free with her fingernails, she removed a card and gave it to me.

Cheap white paper, green letters.

Andrew Coburg

Attorney-at-Law

The Human Interest Law Center

1912 Lincoln Avenue

Venice, California

“Human interest law,” I said.

“I think it's one of those storefront things.”