Obviously I couldn’t tell if anything had been taken, but I got the feeling that the person or persons who had done this had done it more to frighten than to find anything. There was nothing in the bathroom to indicate what had happened. A tube of toothpaste neatly squeezed from the bottom up lay to the side of the sink. I opened the mirrored cabinet. An overwhelming array of cosmetics and lotions were lined up according to size, products by the same cosmetics company neatly side by side. There was a prescription for Tylenol with codeine. It was nearly empty.

At the back of the duplex was a surprisingly large kitchen with a wooden dining table in the middle of the room. All of the cabinet doors were thrown open. Monica Fullbright owned only a few mismatched dishes, a couple of pans. On the table were a bottle of cheap scotch, a razor blade and a glass of water. I licked my finger and ran it lightly across the razor blade; I put my finger on my tongue. Cocaine. I wondered if Monica Fullbright had been home when her apartment was destroyed. I wondered where she was now. I took a dishcloth, went back and wiped off everything I had touched.

The old lady was still standing in the front yard, watering again. She didn’t look up until I was standing almost in front of her. Up close I could see she was at least eighty. I asked her to turn off the hose to talk to me. I had to repeat myself several times. She hadn’t seen Monica for two days. She said this without much interest, as though Monica Fullbright was frequently gone. Without mentioning anything about the condition of the duplex, I managed to learn that the old lady was hard of hearing and that she drove to Gardena nearly every night to play poker.

I turned my car toward downtown. Why did the Guatemalans tear up her apartment? Monica Fullbright was in over her head, and whatever Cathy Vega had been doing had backfired on both of them. Cathy Vega was Carmen Luzano. That is who Monica Fullbright had sent me out to find. A Guatemalan woman named Carmen Luzano. If I was going to figure out what they were involved in, I was going to have to figure out why Cathy Vega had become Carmen Luzano.

And I was pissed off someone had gotten to Monica Fullbright before I had.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN