“You said it wasn’t the same woman, so why should I—”

“Exactamente. You don’t know if it was the same woman or not. Shouldn’t you find out? That’s what you got paid for. You think I put myself out on the street, take someone’s money and then say, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I want to do this or not.’ “

“It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it? You took money from a trick, a client, whatever you people call them. Fucking lawyers. Biggest crooks around.” Lupe shook her head. “Well, you might try to jack her, but not me. You still owe me fifty bucks.”

I turned and went back up the stairs. I did owe Monica Fullbright something. I searched the room again. I looked in the alley. I opened the dumpsters. Lupe sauntered after me, not saying anything.

“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to do?” She put her hands on her hips when I had lifted the cover of the last garbage can.

“Yeah. What the fuck else do you think I should do?” I dropped the lid of the dumpster loudly.

“Go to the Blossom Club. Ask who she was.”

All the way down Figueroa I asked myself what I was getting into. Yes, why was I doing this? Because I felt obligated to Monica Fullbright? Something about my childhood has made me believe that whenever something goes wrong it’s my fault. It could be a drought in Ethiopia, a flood in Peru, and it’s my fault. And I should do something to fix it. I’d already worked past the number of hours Monica Fullbright had paid me for. Now I was moving fast into territory I knew nothing about. I’m not talking Figueroa Street, a major north-south transection named after one of the original Spanish land grant dons and commemorated in the Christmas Parade down Hollywood Boulevard by stylized banditos on palominos weighted down with fifteen hundred pounds of silver saddle trappings and embroidered charm hats. I’m talking about bodies that moved and women who died with their legs splayed.

Lupe stirred restlessly in her seat. It was only a few blocks to where we were going. I had tried to give her cab fare, to tell her to go home, to leave me alone, but she wouldn’t. Her insistence was almost savage. At first I had thought she was scared because she believed the dead woman was a prostitute. Maybe the woman’s death reminded her of the brutality and danger of her own life on the streets. Maybe the woman reminded her of a friend. The more I watched Lupe in her silence, I realized she wasn’t scared, she was angry.