“School records,” I said. “Living in Bel Air would’ve meant Palisades or University High if the Cossacks chose public school. Beverly, if they played fast and loose with residency forms. On the private side, there’d be Harvard-Westlake—which was Westlake School for Girls, back then—or Marlborough, Buckley, John Thomas Dye, Crossroads.”

He flipped open his pad, scrawled notes.

“Or,” I added, “a school for troubled kids.”

“Any particular place come to mind?”

“I was in practice back then, can recall three very high-priced spreads. One was in West L.A., the others were in Santa Monica and the Valley—North Hollywood.”

“Names?”

I recited, and he got back on the phone. Santa Monica Prep was defunct, but Achievement House in Cheviot Hills and Valley Educational Academy in North Hollywood were still in business. He reached both schools but hung up frowning.

“No one’ll give me the time of day. Confidentiality and all that.”

“Schools don’t enjoy confidentiality privileges,” I said.

“You ever deal with either of the places, professionally?”

“I visited Achievement House, once,” I said. “The parents of a boy I was seeing kept holding the place over the kid’s head as a threat. ‘If you don’t shape up, we’ll send you to Achievement House.’ That seemed to scare him, so I dropped by to see what spooked him. Talked to a so-cial worker, got the five-minute tour. Converted apartment building near Motor and Palms. What stuck in my mind was how small it was—maybe twenty-five, thirty kids boarding in, meaning it had to cost a fortune. No snake pit that I could see. Later, I talked to my patient and turns out what he was worried about was stigmatization. Being thought of as a ‘weirdo-geek-loser.’ ”

“Achievement House had a bad reputation?”

“In his mind, any special placement had a bad reputation.”

“Did he get sent there?”

“No, he ran away, wasn’t seen for years.”

“Oh,” he said.

I smiled. “Don’t you mean ‘Ah’?”

He laughed. Got himself grapefruit juice, opened the freezer and stared at the vodka bottle but changed his mind. “Ran away. Your version of loose ends.”

“Loose ends were a big part of my life, back then,” I said. “The price of an interesting job. As it turns out, this particular kid made it okay.”

“He stayed in touch?”

“He called after his second child was born. Ostensibly to ask about how to handle sibling jealousy. He ended up apologizing for being a surly teen. I told him he had nothing to be sorry about. Because I’d finally learned the whole story from his mother. His older brother had been molesting him since he was five.”