And the sadness was, unfortunately, beside the point. No matter what had happened to Brenae, her story was a pawn in Janis’s game. Janis’s real goal was to keep her own strong hand in shaping downtown culture. If L.A. in the sixties and seventies had had the best parties, and the eighties and nineties massive riots and earthquake devastation, then our moment now was about spending the future, building the new cosmopolis from the center outward. We were two years post 9/11, and American cities were precious, necessary, ours. Everyone rich enough in L.A. craved a building project; even famous actors and pop stars asked our museum director for introductions to the architects showing their designs at the Rocque. Drugs, sex, and high-end vacations were all fine and good, but renovating a loft building off Broadway, or opening a dark-paneled Sixth Street speakeasy—now that was a lucky life. Janis wanted her own vision to endure in this urban frontier frenzy, and who could blame her? For decades, the Rocque had been the reason to visit its block on weekends, when the surrounding skyscrapers had emptied themselves of their bankers and lawyers and the only open restaurant served the same Thai chicken pizza you could get in Hemet. Now Janis’s nemesis threatened to sail in and claim the same turf she’d fought so hard for. She would find a reason to stop him. But Brenae wasn’t a reason. She was a person. I looked over at the closed file, the thick stack of papers inside. I desperately need your help. I turned away, crawled into bed, and closed my eyes.

AN HOUR LATER, I FOUND I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and wrote to my mother. Whenever I didn’t want to update my mother on my life, I told her about what I was reading. I presumed that we both found this a reassuring practice. In her mind, as long as I was reading books, I must be staying home at night and I had not fallen off a cliff into despondency or self-destructive behavior; in my mind, as long as Mom was there to listen to my thoughts, they actually mattered.