Del Rios said, “No sense drawing this out. My family had nothing to do with it but I can’t tell you none of the tenants did. Nor can I give you a name, I have no idea who rented the place, stayed completely out of it.”

“Out of real estate?”

“Out of anything that got in the way of having fun.” Del Rios drank grape juice. Smacked his lips, dabbed them with a linen handkerchief. The resulting magenta stain seemed to fascinate him.

Milo said, “We’ve narrowed the time frame to the period your mother lived in the house.”

“And what period might that be?”

“Nineteen fifty to ’52.”

“Well,” said Del Rios, “I’m sure you think you’re clever. Problem is you’re wrong. After Dad died in ’47, Mom did live there by herself, but only until she was diagnosed with both heart disease and cancer.” The seams across Del Rios’s brow deepened. “She was a devout woman, talk about a one-two punch from a benevolent God. It happened winter of ’49, right after the two-year anniversary of Dad’s death. She hung on for four years, the last two were a horror show, the only question was which disease would get her first. We tried having her stay in the house with a nurse but that got to be too much and by the spring of 1950 she was living with my brother Frankie, his real name was Ferdinand, but he hated it so he had us call him Frank. He and his wife lived in Palo Alto, he was in medical residency back then, orthopedics. That lasted until the beginning of ’52, when Mom had to be put in a home near Stanford. During her last year, she was basically vegetative, by ’54 she was gone. Before she moved up north with Frankie and Bertie, she put the house in trust for the four of us. But none of us wanted to live there, it reminded us of dead parents. Frankie was living in Palo Alto, my sister Mary Alice was studying medicine in Chicago, and I, the rotten kid, the dropout, was in the marines and couldn’t care less. So Eddie—the oldest one, he was a priest—hired a management company and we rented it out for years. Like I said, I can’t tell you who any of the tenants were. And everyone else is dead, so you’re out of luck, son.”

“Do you remember the name of the management company?”