“I’m glad you asked.” In the sodium lights on the Inner Drive I could see Mary Louise’s grin. “I have eaten and drunk Lacey Dowell facts for the last two weeks, ever since you called with the invite, and it’s high time you shared the treat. Lacey’s birth name was Magdalena Lucida Dowell. Her mother was Mexican, her father Irish; she’s an only child who grew up in Humboldt Park and went to St. Remigio’s, where she starred in all the school plays and won a scholarship to Northern Illinois. They have an important theater program. She got her first break in film twelve years ago, when—”

“All right, all right. I’m sure you know her shoe size and her favorite color, too.”

“Green, and eight–and–a–half. And she still likes the chorizo from her home neighborhood better than any trendy food in L.A. Ha, ha. Her father died in an industrial accident before she started making real money, but her mother lives with her in Santa Monica in a nice oceanfront mansion. Supposedly Lacey gives money to St. Remigio’s. They say she kept the cardinal from closing the school by shoring up its scholarship fund. If that’s true it’s worth something.”

“A lot.” The light at Lake Shore Drive turned green, and I swung into the northbound lanes.

“Come to think of it, you should have picked up some of these gems from Murray’s interview. Didn’t you watch?”

I grimaced at the dashboard. “I think I was so embarrassed to see him doing it at all that I couldn’t focus on what he was saying.”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Mary Louise said. “Guy has to live on something, and you’re the one who told me the Global team axed his biggest stories.”

She was right. I knew Murray had been having a tough time since Global bought the paper. They hadn’t stopped any of his digging, but they wouldn’t print any stories they considered politically sensitive. “We have to pay attention to the people who do us favors in this state,” Murray quoted to me bitterly when management killed a story he’d been working on for months about the new women’s prison in Coolis. He mimicked his editor one night at dinner last winter: Americans have grown accustomed to sound bites. Sex, sports, and violence are good sound bites. Skimming pension funds or buying off the state legislature are not. Get the picture, Murray?