“So is my life,” he said. “Filed under Horror or Comedy depending on what day you catch me.”

“No progress on that poor girl?”

“More like anti-progress.”

“Tell me.”

“Trust me, you don’t wanna know.”

“Trust me, Milo. I do.”

Blanche let out a soft, breathy bark.

“Outvoted,” he said and proceeded to summarize.

Robin said, “Mystery. A girl who sells herself to the highest bidder is anything but mysterious. How old was she?”

“Her profile says twenty-four.”

“Pathetic.”

She got up, hugged me. “You guys eat yet? I made spaghetti with porcinis, there’s plenty left.”

I said, “The gourmet here prefers cold chicken.”

Milo said, “The gourmet will eat spaghetti with porcinis and like it.”

“You can have both,” said Robin.

“You are a wise, wise woman.”

The two of them headed for the kitchen but I veered to my office and cybersearched tara sly.

That pulled up MySpace pages for three separate women, one of them tarra. None was the girl who called herself Mystery.

I tried variants: torra, terri, sligh, sleigh, with no success.

Plugging in markham mcreynold suss was more productive: nine hits, most from business and trade journals covering the sale, twenty-five months ago, of Markham Industries to a private equity group based in Abu Dhabi.

A garment manufacturer with headquarters in Los Angeles and factories in Macao and Taiwan, Markham specialized in bottom-grade women’s undergarments and panty hose designed to look expensive. The company had been established in 1946 by Alger and Marjorie Suss, postwar transplants to L.A. from Ohio, where the couple had built up a small chain of dry-goods stores in Dayton, Columbus, and Akron before Marjorie’s chronic bronchitis spurred a move westward.

Her designs had formed the basis for the new concern based upon a conviction that only a woman could understand what made a “female foundation garment” comfortable. Eventually, that practical sensibility gave way to “cutting-edge concepts combined with low-cost materials” under the direction of Alger and Marjorie’s son Markham.

“This is a business based on sensory gratification not durability,” he was quoted in Barron’s. “There’s no reason a bra or a pair of panties should be expected to last forever. Women want style, they want class, they want that intangible but inexorable feeling of tactile sensuality that enhances feelings of femininity. To that end, polyester works as well as silk.”

A black-and-white photo of Suss’s parents said they could’ve posed for American Gothic if Grant Wood had been looking for more dour. Markham’s resemblance to his father was obvious. Both men were bald with distinctive faces: long, lean, lantern-jawed, thin-lipped. But where Alger’s prim visage radiated self-denial, Markham’s triumphant smile trumpeted bon vivant.

Alger looked as if he lived indoors. Tara Sly’s Sugar Daddy was flamboyantly tan.