Sucking the rest of her Coke out of the plastic cup, she ground up the remaining ice cubes, then nodded a couple of times as she examined me. “Ok, give it to me.”

I scribbled Monica Fullbright’s phone number on the back of one of my business cards.

I sat alone in the employee lounge watching the palm trees dance around the edge of MacArthur Park lake. In the center of the lake a fountain shoots straight up like a geyser. No design factor. No bent sculpture. No curvature or flowing water. The water shoots straight up in the air and pounds back down. They rent paddleboats from a ramshackle shed covered with graffiti. No standing in the boat. Don’t go near the fountain. The lake was full of paddleboats with little Salvadorean and Mexican kids trying to get as close to the fountain as possible.

Lisa came back in. She had stopped somewhere to recomb her hair. “Call me if you change your mind.”

“Sure. Definite. Thanks a lot.” I stood up to shake hands with her. She pressed a small piece of paper into my hand.

I waited till I was outside to open it. There was an address in Culver City.

Culver City is a narrow strip of land between the dry concrete channel of the LA riverbed and Venice Boulevard. It’s the home of MGM Studios and a sizable community of Hare Krishnas who live in apartment buildings surrounding their main temple. The temple is across the street from the Michael Jackson Burn Center of Brotman Memorial Hospital, a gift the singer was apparently moved to make after having part of his scalp blown away during the filming of a soft-drink commercial. Other than that, Culver City is Anyplace, U.S.A., with self-service gas stations, shops selling croissant sandwiches and a couple of restaurants with bad Mexican food.

The residential parts of Culver City are rather dismal shoebox apartment houses inhabited by people who stick plastic flamingos in their front yards and blue and green Hollywood lights in the bushes.

Monica Fullbright’s true address was on Allison Street in the back unit of a decaying set of bungalows. An old lady in an orange plaid housedress and a gold pair of rundown-at-the-heel mules with marabou feathers on the toes was watering a strip of camellia bushes. A rheumy-eyed little poodle lay apathetically on the side of the driveway with its tongue hanging out.

I quickly invented a name for myself and a story to tell the woman, but she wasn’t interested in me. She didn’t even see me. All of her concentration was focused on the hose, the stream of water and the snails and dog shit she was flooding in the pools forming beneath the camellia bushes. She looked like the kind of woman who was used to minding her own business. I strode purposefully but quietly behind her to the back of the property.