I didn’t have to wait long before Monica Fullbright came in. She was wearing a white skirt, a black cotton pullover and a gold bracelet that might have been real. For a moment she stood in the doorway to the bar, blinking and disoriented, pushing a pair of heavy black sunglasses to the top of her head. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail by a silk scarf. She looked like Jackie 0 on the back of Aristotle’s yacht. When she saw me, she smiled, gliding forward with that purposeful hip-rolling stride models have.

“I’m sorry it’s been so hard to get hold of me lately. I’ve been so busy.” She smiled more as she sat down across from me and put her purse on the table between us.

I picked her purse up—a Louis Vuitton. Real or fake? I shook it and placed it on the other chair at our table. That should take care of any tape recorder. “Can it, Monica. You’ve been jerking me around long enough. I want to know what this is about.”

“Really? I don’t know what this is about or why you asked me to come here. You asked me, remember?” Monica Fulbright frowned at the purse, then took a cigarette from it. She lit the cigarette and blew the smoke away from me.

“I could be in trouble, Monica. I think you could be, too, so why don’t you just come clean with me and I’ll try to figure it out. All right?”

“I’m not in any trouble. What are you talking about? I hired you to do a simple job; find someone for me and take care of her immigration papers. You call me and tell me you’ve done it. What’s the problem? Just tell me where the girl is, and if I owe you any more money, you can give me a bill.”

“Yeah, I found Carmen for you.” I got the head shot of Cathy Vega from my purse and dropped it on the table between us. “Of course, she doesn’t look this good now. She’s dead.”

Monica started to reach for the photo but then pulled her hand back so it rested on the edge of the table. She stared at the photo and blinked a few times, something pulling the corner of her mouth. “I’m sorry to hear that, of course, but I don’t know who this woman is.”

I pushed the photo closer to her. “She o.d’d in a loft downtown, but she wasn’t alone. Somebody fucked her either before or after she died. I don’t know. I can’t tell. I’d have to have the guys at the police forensic lab tell me.”

“It’s not Carmen.” Monica Fullbright tapped her cigarette against the ashtray several times although it didn’t need it. “It s not Carmen,” she repeated.