“A hundred thousand dollars. A lot of money, obviously, but not in and of itself the reason for us to investigate. The cause of death is accidental asphyxiation—apparently, there was a gas leak in the insured’s apartment. His, uh, male companion was also in the apartment but he survived. The companion is also the beneficiary. The claim was filed on his behalf a few days after the accident, but we haven’t been able to reach him since.”

“Who filed the claim?”

“The agent who wrote up the policy. Not one of our agents. We bought the policy from Confederation Insurance.”

“You bought a policy from another insurance company? Is that a common practice?”

“Yes. It’s called reinsurance. The selling company wants to spread the risk of loss by carrying fewer policies and the buying company wants the business. It works out for everyone. Anyway, we called the Confederation agent and he said he can’t find the claimant either. Obviously, we’re not going to take any action on the claim until we have a beneficiary.”

“That’s all you want me to do? Find the beneficiary?”

She allowed herself a tight little smile. “Well, to start. After that, I expect you to do the standard investigation.”

“Which involves?”

She swiveled her chair away from me and reached for a fat binder on the credenza behind her. “This is our operations manual. You’ll find a chapter on investigating death claims.”

I took the binder and the manila folder. “May I call you if I have a question?”

“I’m vice president in charge of operations,” she said. “Perhaps you could call Myles.”

I crammed the operations manual and the case file into my briefcase and lugged it into the Gold Mountain Café, a Chinese-American restaurant near Civic Center. The restaurant was close by the county law library and within walking distance of both the civil and criminal courthouses. I was drawn by its cheap prices, decent food and the willingness of its elderly owners, the Chus, to let me camp out at a back booth for a couple of hours and work when it was inconvenient to walk back to my office. If I was being entirely truthful, Gold Mountain held one other big attraction for me: Adam, the Chus’ twenty-three-year-old grandson. Adam was their jack-of-all-trades who cooked, waited tables, ran the cash register and even, I saw, passing the place late one night, mopped the floors after closing time.