My phone rang. I jumped up, hoping it was the building super, but it was only Bernie. I let it go to voice mail, but the call reminded me to check whether August was old-fashioned enough for a landline and voice mail.

I didn’t find any jacks or dismembered phones: like his peers, he did everything via cell towers. I came upon an artist’s sketchbook. I didn’t touch it with my hands but lifted some of the pages with a kitchen knife. The book seemed to be a kind of artist’s diary, where August wrote down story ideas and made rough drawings of sets.

I found a garbage bag in one of the open kitchen drawers and slipped the book inside. I also took some of the unlabeled DVDs, hoping they might include August’s own film efforts. Perhaps he’d been filming something dangerous and the perpetrators had come hunting him, first at the gym and then in his own apartment. Perhaps it would be exciting footage of weddings and bar mitzvahs. Maybe I’d offload them onto Bernie and Angela—it would keep them occupied, keep them from buzzing around me demanding to know what I was doing.

As I made a last circuit of the rooms, I stopped to study the outsize film posters on the walls. Oscar Micheaux held pride of place over the bed, with a poster for Within Our Gates. Facing him was Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl.

I squinted to study the paper through the glare on the glass covers—the posters looked like originals, but along with luminol I lacked paper-authenticating equipment. And expertise.

Kasi Lemmons and Gordon Parks were in the main room. Emerald Ferring, in Pride of Place, faced the entryway. Her portrait, the expression aloof, filled most of the poster, with a small inset of her in prison garb, presumably a scene from the movie. It was different from the others because it was signed.

“August, I believe in you: believe in yourself,” she’d written in small, neat letters along the right side and then signed her name with a flourish that covered most of the bottom of the frame. I’d never heard of Emerald Ferring or Pride of Place, but that didn’t mean anything: I’m not a pop-culture maven like Alan Banks or Rebus.

The ruined apartment seemed to be draining my self-confidence—no luminol, no paper expertise, ignorant of pop culture. There must be something I was good at.

Jorge Baros, the building super, came up the walk as I was leaving the building. He was a tall, lean man, with the noble face of an Afghan hound. Incongruously, he was followed by a small white terrier, who sniffed at my jeans legs but sat at a hand sign from Baros.