I walked through the house again, searching for a telephone. I found three phone jacks, but the phones were gone. The police would have taken them to check their memory chips.

I ended up back in the kitchen, finding a jack above the counter beside a small corkboard. Business cards and take-out menus were pinned to the board. Alan Levy's card was pinned at the top for easy reference. It looked greasy and dark, as if it had been there a while. The rest of the board was cluttered with discount coupons and flyers.

Even with everything Gladstone had discarded, the kitchen counters were crowded with cartons and cans and other food waiting to be tossed. It was a lot of food for someone who hadn't been able to leave his house, and much of it looked pretty fresh.

I went back downstairs to the garbage, and dumped the fruit and other things out of the grocery bags. They were the thin plastic bags that people keep to line their wastebaskets. Most people get home from the market, they take out their groceries but leave the receipt in the bag.

Byrd had kept plenty of the bags, and Gladstone had used them when he cleaned out the house. I dumped fourteen bags and found five receipts. The receipts were all from the Laurel Market at the bottom of the canyon, and all showed the date of purchase. Lionel Byrd's body was discovered eight days ago, and the M.E. determined his death had occurred five days earlier. I did the math. The date of the most recent receipt was two days before Lionel Byrd died. If he was in too much pain to drive, I wondered how he had gone shopping.

I put the bags and the trash back into the can, then headed down to find out. Tina Isbecki watched me go. I waved. She waved back. We were getting to be friends.

Chapter 13

THE RURAL vibe of Laurel Canyon set the sixties stage for crossover folk-rockers like David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Joni Mitchell to write about peaceful easy feelings, cocaine cowboys, and very nice houses with two cats in the yard. The high, tight trails wrapped through the ridges were only a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard, but, separated from the city by steep canyon walls, felt as if they were miles in the country. That rural sensibility was preserved and sustained by a small encampment of shops, markets, and restaurants at the base of the canyon.

I pulled into the tiny parking lot, then ambled into the market. You get a peaceful easy feeling, amblin' is how you walk.

The market was larger than it looked from the outside, with a high ceiling and narrow aisles jammed with goods, supplies, and candy. A pretty young woman was seated behind the register. An older man wearing a Lakers cap was behind a nearby deli counter, mixing a large bowl of tuna salad.