“Here you go, sweetheart.” He picked up his glass of champagne as he handed the polaroid to Lupe. “Downtown? No, not hardly. Look, I’m sorry if she was a friend of yours, but she was a dog. Totally ordinary looking, no cheekbones, no neck. She couldn’t get a job modeling trash bags. I don’t know who the hell she thought she was kidding. How was she going to get any movie or TV gigs?” He took the polaroid from Lupe’s hand and dropped it along with the other one onto a wooden counter I was leaning against. “Let’s have one more, Lupe. Look to the left. Lots of attitude. Stick your boobies out. That’s good.”

I took the other photograph, the nude one of Cathy Vega, from my purse. Incongruously she was sprawled against a painted backdrop of palm trees. I glanced around the studio. In a corner were a lot of backdrops rolled up and leaning against the wall. Black, light, blue, pale pink, red.

“Rudy, is this one of your pictures?” I held it out to him.

He was still counting and didn’t look up immediately when I spoke to him.

“She really looks a lot better with her clothes off,” he said when he did glance at it. “I didn’t realize that.”

“You didn’t take this picture?”

“Is that the kind of picture you’d like?” More interest in me flickered in his beady, coked-up eyes than he had demonstrated so far. “How about you, Lupe, you want some pictures like that?”

Lupe stared blank-faced at the photo for a second. She looked confused, and her eyes met mine. She pulled her halter strap up on her shoulder.

“You never did any nude pictures with her?” I asked.

“Her?” scoffed Rudy. “She was a goody-two-shoes type. At least she pretended to be. A real professional virgin. Probably saving it all for the casting couch, for someone who could do something for her.”

So he’d tried to hit on her and she put him off. This was certainly different from what I would have guessed about her. The type my father used to call round heels. With a push-button forehead. He used to say things like that. Why buy a cow when milk was so cheap?

“She was a real whiner. Not a trooper like our little Lupe here. And she bored the shit out of me talking about politics. I mean, we try to get a party attitude going here so people can relax, look natural. But no, she wants to talk about Central America and discrimination.”

“Guatemala?” I guessed and wondered whether to take the flier out of my purse and show it to him.