“No, I didn’t say that. But we have to hurry. The woman’s waiting for us, and I’m sure we both have other things we want to do this evening.”

A fire escape snaked up the right side of the building. It made the place look like a seedy East Coast tenement. From the construction, the general air of neglect, I guessed it to be forty to fifty years old. That is an old building for Los Angeles. The lobby was ocher-painted stone. Two stairways flanked a bank of elevators. A guard was on duty, but his back was turned and he was trying to make time with a pretty woman in her early twenties who was waiting for an elevator. He didn’t notice us.

With the paper on which the address was written clutched in her hand, Lupe was already halfway up the stairs.

“You got terrible handwriting,” she said. “Look at the way it’s all jammed into the right side of the paper and the way your loops are all crooked. You know what that means?”

It means I must be out of my mind to be rattling around this old building with some birdbrained harlot who thinks she’s a movie star. And a dead one at that. I was slightly out of breath by the time we got to the third floor and my legs felt like they were on fire from the squats I’d done that morning. The hall was deserted.

“Here’s 320!” Lupe called out.

“Be quiet.” I knocked on the door. The sound echoed down the hall. From somewhere else came the hum of sewing machines. No one answered the door.

“I thought you said she was waiting,” Lupe said rather smugly, jiggling the door now.

I knocked again, louder. “She is.”

“Somos amigos. Abre la puerta,” Lupe called, twisting the knob and leaning into the room as the door swung open.

The room was empty down to its yellow walls. A broken fluorescent tube of light in the ceiling blinked on and off. A kicked-in gray metal wastebasket was on its side in the middle of the floor. Beside it a woman lay stretched out as if she were crawling. The windows were closed and it smelled like gardenias.

I have never seen a dead person except for Kevin O’Rourke’s mother. She died of cancer when we were in the tenth grade. There was a rosary at St. Margaret’s, and they put her on display in an open casket. Someone had dressed her in a frilly navy dress and a pair of red earrings. Her hair looked very stiff. Kevin O’Rourke stopped dating my friend Jacquie Dill shortly after that. He eventually left school and transferred to a seminary.

“She’s dead,” Lupe decided as she strode past me. She put both hands under the woman’s right shoulder and turned her over so I could see for myself.