A couple of weeks later I got home late after another bad fixup date, some guy who worked in business affairs at Paramount. He spent the first twenty minutes of our date explaining why he hated his mother. I smiled and nodded at what seemed like the appropriate times. I tried to read the time upside down on his Cartier watch. Two glasses of wine and I was out of there. There was no TiVo love waiting for me, so I got ready for bed, and then made my way to the computer to log on to Grant’s e-mail. After a few weeks, it had become a habit, something I did at the beginning and the end of my day.

Tonight I came across a message from a Harvard college buddy who was working at some tech firm in Silicon Valley and was e-mailing him about a “sure thing” stock tip. I wrote down the name and did a little googling of my own to find out more on his company. Anagen was a biotech start-up with several big drug patents pending. I reminded myself that the rich were a very exclusive group and helped each other get richer in these kinds of ways. And his buddy after all did go to Harvard. The rich only got richer, and everybody had inside information; that was the way this world worked. Martha got busted for something that was only standard practice.

I had recently received the big check for writing the Marilyn show solo, so I called Alec, my business manager, and told him to buy, buy, buy. He was, of course, a little dubious. “You know, Dani,” he began, “you should just concentrate on the business of being Danielle Hale and let us concentrate on the business of Danielle Hale.”

That one made me shake my head, and I told him again to put in the buy order. Hearing the insistent tone in my voice, he relented.

A week later the stock split. Then soared and split again.

I made a lot of money. Now when I logged on as speedracer11@ aol.com, instead of checking his e-mail in and out boxes, I first checked on how his stock portfolio was performing. Thank goodness AOL made it easy to monitor those things from your personalized home page. Grant was becoming a savvier investor, and now when his friends e-mailed him about a “new great stock lead,” he would write back and tell them to call him at his office. No need to have an e-mail trail. But there was a trail for me to follow; it was there in what he was buying and selling in his online portfolio. In only a month, starting with that first stock split, I continued to make money.

During one of these visits, an instant message suddenly popped up from someone named Cooterfiend.

“Hey man . . . where are you?”