The dogs had come upstairs while I was on the phone, delighted to have me back in the middle of the day. I petted them absentmindedly.

I needed to talk to someone who knew August better than Bernie and Angela did. I’d run a search on him through my subscription utilities, which give me access to a lot of law-enforcement and financial data that ought not to be available to people like me.

Neither LifeStory nor DataMonitor had turned up much beyond what Angela had told me: August had studied exercise therapy and film at Loyola, he worked for Six-Points as a contract employee, he was an orphan whose father had died in the First Gulf War, and his only relatives were Angela’s branch of the family down in Louisiana. His bank account was modest, but twelve days ago he’d cashed a check for four thousand dollars.

I whistled softly. Even though it didn’t go as far today as it used to, that was a respectable wad to be carrying around. No sign of where it came from either. Maybe he’d done an exceptional job filming a middle reliever’s trapezius movement.

Both search engines mentioned August’s film work and his website: Spectral Vision, with the tagline “Turning ghosts of ideas from reel to real.” I clicked on the link and found clips of some of his work—weddings, mostly of gay or lesbian couples; First Communions and bar mitzvahs; forays into art shorts of the kind that are popular today, featuring ominous unseeable presences with people running from horrors too terrible to make concrete. Nothing that suggested a four-thousand-dollar check.

His publicity photo on the website was an artfully arranged shot of him staring at himself in a sequence of mirrors. It showed him in standard young-auteur dress: black turtleneck, black leather jacket, blue jeans. His face was round, with full cheeks and deep-set, serious eyes. I copied the picture to my photo album.

“August, I believe in you,” Emerald Ferring had written on his poster. I asked my phone if it knew anything about Ferring or Pride of Place. The movie had been made in 1967 by Jarvis Nilsson, a black male director I’d also never heard of. Pride of Place had been screened at only a handful of theaters in Harlem, Bronzeville, and other black neighborhoods around the country before it disappeared without a trace.