“Sure, I’m sure.” He sounded bored and cranky about this kind of minimum wage tedium I was putting him through. “I’m looking right at it. Are you going to need a copy of this?”

I hung up the phone. Why had Armando Diaz lied about selling a picture to the paper? Picking up my purse from the edge of the desk as I was getting ready to go meet Tommy Hutchings, I checked to see if I still had the can of mace in it. What did the Cuban do with the photographs?

When I arrived, he was waiting on the street. Leaning against the wall, he stopped reading a paper when he saw me coming. He folded it and stuffed it in his back pocket. His red hair was pulled back with a bandanna; he wore faded jeans, expensive new black and white Air Nikes and a shrunken white T-shirt. I wondered if he lifted weights. He was a tight machine for a skinny guy.

“You were at the video last night, right? That’s where I know you from?” he asked.

I nodded impatiently. He’d already called Casa Guatemala before coming out to meet me. I was certain of that. Still, there was a certain ritual we were going to have to perform, only the lump on my head was making me forget my lines.

“You work in television,” I said to center us. We were standing under the marquee of a sitcom about two extraterrestrials who crash land in the San Fernando Valley.

“Yeah, this used to be the RKO lot, then it was Desilu, now it’s TV stages....” His voice trailed off. He wanted me to get to the point.

By silent agreement we started to walk north toward Santa Monica Boulevard past the black cast iron Spanish Renaissance gates of the studio. He seemed to be the type who thought better in motion.

I drew closer to him. “I came to talk about Cathy Vega. She was your friend. More than with the others, wasn’t she?”

“Hey, I barely knew her. Just saw her around sometimes,” he said without looking at me.

“I saw her diary at her apartment,” I lied. “She wrote everything down, or didn’t you know that? Names, dates. She had lots of good things to say about you.”

He turned toward me and studied my face, trying to decide if this could be true. I hoped that he knew as little about women as Lupe seemed to think.

“Yeah?” he dared me, slowing his pace slightly. “What did she have to say about me?”

“Don’t embarrass me. Let’s just say she kept the diary in the drawer with her diaphragm.”

Bingo. He sped up again as though he were uncomfortable. We turned the corner at the end of one of the two white stucco tile-roofed buildings.

I pressed on. “She told me you helped her carry the five thousand dollars.”