She pulled her attention back to me. “There are more than 200,000 Guatemalans in Los Angeles now.” She wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I thought you would know her.”

“No.” Emma Garcia folded her arms across her chest.

“I’m positive she mentioned—”

“The only thing that is positive is the historical inevitability of the peoples’ will,” a heavily accented voice interrupted. It was the man from this morning. The handsome one with the charming smile. Like a shoe salesman’s. We nodded at each other in recognition. He wore a white shirt and a pair of black slacks. “Esta en su casa. “

The man on the roof had worn a white shirt and black slacks. Were they the same person? I told the man standing in front of me my name, and he told me his. Tony Guerrero. He was in his late twenties and too good looking. He had not been in the room when I arrived. Was he the man with the accent who had called Cathy’s agent? If Emma Garcia had been nervous, he was cool as ice.

“I was just saying that I knew a woman named Carmen Lozano. That’s how I found out about you.”

He frowned slightly at me as though giving this some real consideration.

“Maybe you knew her as Cathy Vega.”

“I don’t understand. My English is not that good.”

I wondered if Cathy Vega and he had been lovers.

“This woman I’m talking about, she disappeared.”

“Ah yes,” he sighed. “This happens. In our country many times, people disappear. A man is walking down the street, a car pulls up, two men in dark suits jump out and drag him away. The man is never seen again. A woman goes to the market in the morning to buy milk for her baby. She never comes back. The only thing found is a broken bottle on the sidewalk.”

“You don’t know her?” It was hot in the room and starting to get smoky.

“What?” He smiled. “Do you think that people disappear here? In your country? This great land of freedom?”

Emma Garcia placed her hand on his arm in an attempt to get him to stop talking. “It is time we should be starting our show. I will go tell Tommy.” With a brief nod toward me she hurried away and over to the red-haired man Lupe was still talking with.

“No,” I said to him, “to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought about people disappearing. Not until recently.” It wasn’t until I’d seen Cathy Vega’s body that I started to think about people dying. I always thought about dying as cancer, something long and protracted. Of course, there was the occasional sudden head-on automobile crash on the Fourth of July. But not people dying. Getting killed. Not people my age. Not people I knew.