“Myra Breckinridge,” she said with a twist to her lips that added, Something you wouldn’t know a thing about.

“Oh, that book by Gore Vidal. Came out last year, right?”

“Um. Did you read it?”

“Only skimmed,” I said. “There was too much sex for an old man like me.”

The young woman’s practiced smile turned into an honest grin.

I looked up at the high wall behind the reception desk. There were dozens of photographs tacked there upon a huge corkboard. Mostly women in various glamorous, and sometimes naked, poses. But there were also a few young men models—and one older one.

“I’m Sata,” the literate receptionist offered.

“Easy Rawlins.”

“That’s a good name. How can I help you, Easy Rawlins?” Sata looked me up and down. I assumed that was habit for a modeling agency: most people who went in there were either in the market—or on it.

The picture with the older gentleman wasn’t him alone. Five young miniskirted women stood around him smiling and touching. Somewhere in his early forties, he wore sunglasses and a tight-brimmed Stetson. But that didn’t fool me.

“Who’s that?” I asked Sata, “one of your brawny man models?”

“That’s Brock Oldstein. He’s the owner.”

“I’d like you to tell Mr. Oldstein that Easy Rawlins came to see him about Donata Delphine.”

“Oh,” the child of many continents said. “Um, Miss Delphine doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Then it’ll be a short conversation.”

Sata had become wary of me, showing that Miss Delphine was persona non grata and that I now fell under that shadow.

“May I have your contact information please?” The receptionist’s language turned proper and her shoulder—cold.

“Mr. Oldstein already has my number . . . and now I have his.”

Sitting in the driver’s seat of the borrowed Pontiac, I was slowly coming to consciousness about the case I should have turned down. It’s like I had been knocked out and in the middle of a dream while coming to—there was reality and then there was the dream.

In the year 1929 at the age of nine I arrived in the Fifth Ward. I was already a man and on my own. I’d jumped a boxcar outside of New Iberia and spent one day and two nights in there with dark, desperate men. I never talk about that ride . . .

After that I spent more than a week wandering the streets of the Fifth Ward asking people if they knew my grandfather, Winston Marquette, a man I had never met.

Eleven days I wandered. My mother’s father most probably lived in that district somewhere, but even if he had moved, someone might remember where to. Finally, on my twelfth morning without breakfast, I came upon a woman they called Mad Mary.