I wanted either to find the woman and do what I had been hired to do or to get back to more challenging work, like the muni court trial I had coming up. I was obligated to Monica Fullbright for only three more hours. That was how I decided to try Inglewood first, because it was the farthest. Actually nothing in Los Angeles is that far. If it’s farther than a forty-minute drive, you don’t need to know about it. It’s a foreign world. The majority of the people in this city have no idea what is forty minutes away from them. Leo Hernandez, who was born in East LA, once told me he had not been to the west side of town until he went to buy his books for the first year of law school at UCLA.

Inglewood is only thirty minutes from downtown. It is the home of Hollywood Park racetrack and the Forum, where the usherettes are outfitted in orange-and-black gladiator costumes. The detention center is southwest of the city hall so that it lies almost directly under the flight path of jets landing at LAX. It looked like an abandoned Quonset hut hastily erected on a piece of property bordering the light industrial zone of Inglewood. A high metal fence surrounded the area. The silence was punctuated every couple of minutes by the whine of a jet descending into the city. I saw only one driveway in and out of the detention center. When I tried to drive in, an INS officer sitting outside a kiosk motioned me to back out and find parking on the street. He looked bored when I handed him my representation-of-attorney form. I gave him the same info I had given the woman downtown. Running a fat thumb down a ledger of green-and-white computer printout, he shook his head. I got back on the freeway. Later I found out Inglewood is used only for busts from the airport.

In Hollywood the detention center is on Orange Grove, one of those anonymous north-south streets, where the rental prices are high and sometimes two or more undocumented families crowd into the first apartment they have ever had with hot water and a garbage disposal. Although crime is high, it looks like a regular residential area. Freebase is everywhere. Kids stand on the street corners, whistling to get your attention and sell you the crack. The older homes are inhabited by little old ladies with blue hair and broken hips who take long strolls in aluminum walkers, pursing their lips at everything. There is no sign on the detention center, but you can’t miss it; it’s the only building on the block with a high metal fence around it. A group of boys played soccer on the worn-out lawn behind the locked gate.