“I don’t think he’d given up on the flesh,” I said. “From the looks of it he was with a girl just before he got shot. He was about to snap a photo but instead caught a bullet.”

“You think she shot him while he was fuckin’ her?”

“That would be a difficult move,” I surmised.

“Maybe she had some help.”

This notion sent me to the camera, but its back had been pried open and any film was gone.

“Well, at least you fount your man,” Raymond said. “I hope he didn’t owe you no money, though. You’d have to collect it with a dump truck.”

“I don’t think this is the guy I’m lookin’ for.”

“Why not?” Mouse said. It was almost a challenge.

“The Alonzo I was hired to find had long straight hair and he’d been stabbed pretty bad a few days before—in the chest.”

“Maybe he was shot but whoever had the story figured it was a knife man done it.”

“The person who hired me was the one that stabbed him.”

“Oh.”

There was a desk beyond where the empty camera stood. It had a flex desk lamp, stacks of blank paper, and also pages with notes on them. I turned on the light and started going through papers, looking for some clue. There was a journal filled with men’s names and addresses (mostly PO boxes) along with what they liked: in the ass, regular, big titties, long dicks, and many combinations of these and others—including race, sex, size, and hair color. There was a box of nine-by-twelve envelopes on the floor addressed to men all over California and, to a lesser degree, the country.

There was an overabundance of information but nothing that resembled a hint as to why a man who should have been Craig Kilian’s victim was not.

I’d spent nearly half an hour going through the office looking for something that would connect Craig and this Alonzo. I say I was looking rather than we were because Mouse had gone outside to play with the dogs. He let them out of the pen and roughhoused with them while I searched.

I found a pair of trousers that Alonzo must have shucked off before climbing into the cot. In the right back pocket there was a thin ostrich-skin wallet that contained twenty-seven dollars, his driver’s license, three Social Security cards under different names, and a few business cards. There was also the snapshot of a young white woman in a demure pose. On the back of the photograph, in what I suspected was the dead man’s scrawl, was written DD, with an AXminister exchange phone number.

Donning a pair of cotton gloves I found in the dead man’s desk, I dialed the number on Alonzo’s phone. No one answered.

Mouse and I parted ways in the alley.