Amazon was a huge discovery. No one liked to have a bunch of different passwords. So I always knew if I could get the one password for someone’s e-mail, it was probably the same password for all the other accounts. The great thing about Amazon was that your screen name was your home e-mail, so if you were investigating someone you immediately got that right.

I punched in Grant’s e-mail address on AOL and then waited for the prompt for the password. Again, I logged in Grant’s first and last name. The three seconds crawled by as the computer thought about my answer and then the “Grant’s Amazon.com” screen popped up. I clicked over to “Your Account” and then to “Recent Orders.” I knew that someone as busy as Grant didn’t have a lot of time to go to the store; he probably bought a ton of stuff online. First I checked to see where he was shipping everything. I could see that his address was on Kings above Sunset. Very nice. Real estate up there was pricey and it was hard to find anything to rent, which meant he probably owned, which was great.

He’d bought box sets of DVDs: Hitchcock and Scorsese. I made a mental note to bring up a couple of their movies during dinner. Grant had also bought a bunch of diet books, including The South Beach Diet and The Abs Diet. There were a few workout tapes also. He looked fine to me, but maybe he’d secretly been a chub when he was younger, so he had a complex about it.

He’d gifted The Three Tenors CD to an M. Katz at an address on Park Avenue, which I figured was his mom. Park Avenue was another good sign, but I knew he came from money because he went to Harvard. The strange thing was that he had purchased a half-dozen DVD box sets of Monty Python for different people. Why so many copies of the same set? I read through the addresses. One went to a Tiffany, others to a Sabine, a Monica, a Margo, and a Summer who lived in Santa Monica. “This is part of his foreplay,” I said out loud. He was a comedy writer and I bet he wanted to “enlighten” the chicks he dated. Maybe it was a test to see if his dates had a good sense of humor. I loved John Cleese and thought he was hysterical, so I knew I’d pass. At least he wasn’t sending box sets of the Three Stooges to women. I’d yet to meet a girl who was a Stooges fan.

I logged out of my AOL account and wondered when I’d get my set of DVDs. Pushing back from my desk, I stared down the hallway to the bedroom. I knew I should call it a night and get some sleep.