The front door was locked, but there was a light on upstairs in Harvey Kaplan’s office. As if I had arrived safely at the proverbial port in a storm, I felt a tremendous sense of relief. I could talk to Harvey. Why not Harvey? The good daddy I’d never had. Everyone getting started in the business needed a mentor, a godfather. Why not Harvey Kaplan? We’d had some fairly decent conversations. He’d given me a few pointers on my first prelim—a rather uninspired and sloppy grand theft by a poor vato who lived on Berendo near the freeways. He’d hotwired an old orange Toyota, then nodded out at the wheel behind some Mexican horse in the entrance to the alley, just west of New Hampshire and north of Washington. I’d already forgotten his name. He was bound over and was on his way to two years in Chino. That’s the way it is. They go to state prison, and we go to lunch. Manny Washington said Harvey Kaplan had been an ace.

I heard music as I went up the stairs in the dark. Harvey’s door was closed. I knocked softly. Pushing the door, I peeked in. Harvey was laid out on the couch snoring, his mouth open, a cloud of pot smoke thick as the haze in the beginning of June. Harvey’s leg twitched like a dog with a bad dream. There was an embroidered afghan on the arm of the couch; I laid it over him. Before I left, I turned off his radio. The all-oldies station in Pasadena was playing the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. Coo coo ca choo.

The paperwork on Mrs. Peterson’s motion was still spread across the top of my desk along with Harvey’s book I’d been using. I turned on the desk lamp, opened the book and started to work. I was down to the part where I had to think of a reason why Mrs. Peterson’s First Amendment rights assumed priority over the safety of the women in the abortion clinic when a small stone came flying in the window, landing on the desk.

I snapped off the lamp and hit the floor. Another small rock came sailing through the window. I crawled over to the wall beside the window and peered out. In the circle of light beneath the streetlight was Lupe Ramos in another one of her goofy getups: this time a pair of purple toreador pants, silver high heels and a yellow halter top. I think she thought she was Rita Hayworth in some postmodern Blood and Sand.

“Hey you, Whitney, Whitney. Come here.”

“Shh, what the hell are you doing?” Was she going to drive me crazy about the fifty bucks I owed her? I was almost broke again, the way I’d been laying out money today on drinks and bad leads.

“I’m in trouble.”

“Go away. I’m busy.”