The address I had memorized from Bob Alton’s file was a sagging four story Spanish style apartment with a red-tile roof in the Central American refugee camp that has sprung up around Cherokee and Yucca. There was a cactus on a balcony of the third floor, and someone else had glass wind chimes that tinkled above the din of traffic. A pregnant teenage girl sprawled against the car in front of mine, spitting on the sidewalk. Paint was peeling off window frames around open windows. The windows on the ground floor all had bars over them. I stopped. What was I doing? I felt peculiar. My stomach hurt. I didn’t belong here. Yes, a woman was dead, but it was not my responsibility. Why did I need to be the one to find out what had happened? Everything I’d been told so far had turned out to be a lie. I turned back toward the car.

As soon as I had done that, I knew what the sickness in my gut was. Like when I was a kid and my dad got drunk. The same cold nauseous feeling I had for six weeks when I was studying for the bar exam. I was afraid.

I made myself walk up red tiled stairs into a courtyard with palm trees and flowering bushes. It was the old Hollywood glamor, but the tile around the empty fountain was carved with gang names and filthy words.

I didn’t expect to find her name on the mailbox, but it was there. Vega. Number 9. There was another name below it scratched out. Doors were flung open because of the heat. A few Salvadorean families were gathered around a plastic wading pool, men drinking beer and women yelling at the kids splashing in the water. In front of apartment 5 three musician pasty dudes stood swigging some nasty-looking swamp water from jelly jars. A ghetto blaster was pounding the ground with predictable three chord Satan reverie.

Number 9 was the last unit on the left. I knocked on the door. I kept knocking until it suddenly opened.

“Fucking heavy-metal freaks.” The woman who answered the door scratched herself sleepily through a torn hot-pink baby doll nightie. She had mascara all over her face. Her hair, dyed blue-black, stood out stiffly. Another Midwestern sweetheart who’d come to be discovered.

“I want to see Cathy.”

“Not here.” The woman started to close the door in my face. I surprised myself by putting my hand on the door and pushing back. It was getting to be a drag being the bearer of bad news, particularly that in which no one was interested.

“I hope you know where to find her, because I think she’s dead.”

The woman staggered backward until she fell into a chair beside a shaky chrome dinette table.