I opened the door to Lou’s office. One of the benefits of our office’s past as a massage parlor: none of the doors locked from the outside.

In the unlit office, a disjointed shrub the size of a yacht squatted on Lou’s desk, threatening to topple her sea of notes. I squinted, stepping forward.

The arrangement was a monster, reaching nearly to the ceiling, a bright and gaudy spray of hot-pink calla lilies, dotted through with blood-red roses and choked by baby’s breath. It might as well have come with a price tag attached. It hadn’t been enough to rub my nose in her exploits with the bartender, Lou had to flaunt roses, too? Probably from Mr. Alibi. I slapped the vase, sending the water sloshing and rocking.

A slim white card fell onto Lou’s floor. Of course Mr. Alibi would leave a card. He’d want credit. Maybe he’d included the receipt, too, for good measure. I didn’t even hesitate.

Dear Lou, thank you for a job well done. I shall keep the Agency in mind for any future jobs.—Widow in the Sunshine City

I frowned at the card. It struck me as overly paranoid, to send flowers and sign a card that way, even for our clients. But the sign-off was tugging at some half-forgotten thing I knew, an itch I couldn’t scratch or shake. I flipped the card over my knuckles as I sifted through the rest of Lou’s notes—some might call it snooping—looking for an envelope with a blue fleur-de-lis.

My eyes registered it before my fingers, and I had to skim backward a few pages before I found it again. The blue fleur-de-lis envelope was identical to the one I was looking for, except instead of a license plate written on the back, Jackal’s name was printed on the front. I shook out its contents.

Inside, there was a receipt from the Albatross Coffee Shop in Koreatown, an address not even a mile from our office. I squinted. The receipt was for $713.36. That was a shitload of coffee. There was nothing else in the envelope, but when I flipped the receipt over, in delicate blue pen strokes, there was a note: Due Nov. 30. Albatross—I’d seen that on Jackal’s desk once before, I remembered. So there was something the Lady was covering up for Jackal. Gambling debts, maybe. A lot of slates she was wiping clean on behalf of her employees. I tried not to imagine what she might have on Lou.

I slid the receipt into the envelope and placed the stacks of paper back on top of it, combing through them one time to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. But there were only more notes, magazines, invoices. The Lady Upstairs must’ve been the last woman in Los Angeles to keep paper invoices. No envelopes. Nothing that looked the least bit useful.