I watched women with spiked hair and men with tattooed necks, and men with pageboy cuts and women with pageboy cuts, and jeans and flowing dresses and sleeves of roses and no jewelry and fists full of big rings and shaved heads and light brown skin and white skin and dark brown skin. Hands fluttering in the air and hands holding blue plastic cups of beer. People leaving in clumps, and one by one. I saw Erik, I saw Layla, I saw Lynne Feldman, I saw Zania and Hal, I saw my coworkers Phil and Spike, wearing cutoff overalls and combat boots, their legs long and hairy. I half expected to see myself. I’d probably been to one of these openings. The dirty, faded lanterns of Chinatown swung overhead. The traffic lights of Sunset blinked and shone. The partygoers were stuffing themselves into cars and climbing onto motorcycles and stumbling away on foot. The video was boring and endearing, in the way yearbooks and slide shows were boring and endearing. Hal was right. This wasn’t great art. I felt my eyes grow tired, and wondered what I was missing at the gallery. Then on the screen I saw Nelson de Wilde walking away down the street, side by side with a young man it took me a moment to recognize. I knew him from somewhere. From a picture online. I paused the image and went to my search engine to make sure. I was sure. Brenae had captured Nelson de Wilde leaving a party with Ray’s brother, Calvin.

IN 1993, JAMES COMPTON THREW a street fair called Ditchfest in East London that drew hundreds to a run-down area of the city. In 1994, he died. In 1995, a new venue opened half a mile away, operated by an East London native named Nelson de Wilde. It was a music club at night, but Nelson invited many of the Ditchfest artists to design the walls and spaces. Soon it became one of the hottest nightspots in the area. When he closed the club two years later, Nelson became a de facto dealer, unloading now valuable works in order to fund his emigration to Los Angeles. Then he opened the Westing, his golden nest for so many future art careers. Had Nelson known James Compton? How could he not? Had Calvin talked to him about Compton? Did Nelson know about Calvin’s murder? What about his half brother, a detective, working for Janis? Ray and Calvin didn’t share a last name, but still.

Nagging at me most of all: Did Ray know who Nelson was, and where he had been? It had taken me thumbing through Calvin’s thesis bibliography and forty hasty minutes on an art history database to piece these bits of Nelson’s past together, and potentially connect him to Calvin. So how could Ray not know all this?

And yet he had never said anything to me about it.