It was nearly three-thirty and time to go out to Pete Manzo’s so I got back on the freeway headed east and back to the Boulevard near my office.

I took Hollywood Boulevard to where it converges with Sunset a little east of Vermont, then down Sunset into downtown and over to First Street, up across the bridge to Boyle Heights. You pass through a million neighborhoods demarcated by graffiti and the changing languages of signs above stores. Armenian, Thai, Spanish, Japanese. Back to Spanish. Around the beginning of the century Boyle Heights was where the wealthy Jews lived in big Victorian houses. Italians, too. There was an Italian community then, long since disappeared. The first thing you see when you come across the bridge is a housing project called Aliso Gardens. Two-story buildings, parched grass, kids who look like they don’t get anything to eat except macaroni and chicken necks.

High wispy clouds stretched out to the east of the city. I followed First Street to Evergreen, where I checked the map again and turned left past a cemetery. His house was a yellow bungalow with bougainvillea. I drove by it twice, then parked twenty yards away behind a pickup truck on the same side of the street and turned off the engine.

Surveillance work is not like it is in the movies. It is hot. It is boring. At the end of an hour I was busting for a pee. Two little kids kept coming up to the passenger window to ask me what I was doing. One asked me for fifty cents to get some ice cream.

Behind me the street sloped up to the north where City Terrace hangs over the 10 Freeway. The top of the hills had been leveled. Sybil Brand is up there in the trees. It was a lower working class barrio where women grew yellow roses in their front yards and the men rebuilt cars in driveways. Pete Manzo’s house was surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence, matching bars across the windows. A woman went out the back door, and I slouched down in the seat, watching her hang laundry across a line stretched the width of the backyard. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, with graying hair cut short. It was the kind of neighborhood where men lived with their mothers, brought home their paychecks and drank too much.