I pushed myself between them. I was glad she had him on the defensive, but I was going to be the one to take him down. “The woman who was in my car has been killed. You must have killed her.”

“I saw the woman...” he stammered, losing his careful shoe salesman composure and addressing himself more to Emma, who was hovering behind me, than to me.

“I’ll bet you did,” she snapped in his face. “Who was she?”

“I don’t know who she was,” he whined, making a weak gesture with his hands.

Lupe sniffed in disgust.

“It was the woman who gave money to Cathy to take into Mexico. She thought Cathy was going to buy heroin they could sell here. But Cathy was going to buy guns, wasn’t she? Or didn’t you know about that?” I poked Guerrero in the chest to make sure he was paying attention to me.

“Our goals are educational only,” he said, drawing himself up tall and trying to recapture some of his billboard magnetism. “We have nothing to do with guns.”

Emma laughed as she swaggered toward him. “Speak for yourself. You’re afraid to take up a gun and fight like a man. If Cathy had told me about the money, I would have known what to do with it.”

Cathy Vega, being who she was, would have done something big and risky to prove herself. Making an arms deal would be the ultimate wedding of courage and conviction. Five thousand dollars. It didn’t seem like much on the international scene, but the people of Guatemala live in desperate conditions. What could she buy? How many AK-47s? How many submachine guns? But how could she possibly believe she could succeed in such an undertaking? Only if she knew whom to give the money to or if she knew someone who would be able to direct her to an arms dealer. I thought of how easily I had bought the .22 from Tim Watson. It had to be someone as desperate as she was.

Tony Guerrero shuffled from one foot to the other. “I tell you, she never talked to me about no guns.”

“What about in bed?” asked Lupe.

“Yeah, what about in bed?” Emma and I echoed together. He looked uncomfortably from one to the other of us.

“She must have told you,” I insisted impatiently, my adrenaline pumping like crazy. This was taking too long. I wanted to hit someone again and thought fleetingly of the satisfaction of bench-pressing sixty pounds, the pleasure in the simple relief of physical tension. “She had to travel around with a lot of money, find the right people to give it to and then get back into this country, here to Hollywood, without Monica Fullbright learning what had become of her money. Cathy thought she could disappear from Monica, but that meant she couldn’t work as an actress.”