Ina’s sister, Denise, picked her up. I waved good-bye to them both and was suddenly engulfed by a crowd of paparazzi in pursuit of someone famous. There was a break in the crush and I saw the orange glow of Paris Hilton. She was all orange knees and elbows, and she looked like a very tan pelican.

After seeing Ina, I knew what I needed: new shoes. In Beverly Hills, there was no better place to shop for shoes than Neiman Marcus on Wilshire. The best thing about going to NM was that they had a bar on the fourth floor. Each barstool was equipped with its own monitor, for watching endless repeats of Sports Center or whatever game was on. One of the bad things about going to the fourth floor for a drink, however, was that you had to travel all the way back to the first floor to stumble around the shoe department. Also, the men’s department was on the fourth floor. So usually the bar chairs were filled with Beverly Hills men who had nothing better to do in the middle of the afternoon.

I hadn’t had anything alcoholic to drink with Ina, so I nursed a glass of chardonnay and then another, and scribbled some show idea in my notebook. Over the past ten days I had been doing my usual trawling of the cable channels late at night, and I’d come across a great story. While visiting Korea, a young American exchange student had been brutally murdered after a night of partying with friends. The group had been staying overnight in a youth hostel, the kind that usually rented by the hour. It was St. Patrick’s Day, so the Westerners had gone out looking to party. They’d found green beer at a pseudo-English pub and danced until late. The place had also been full of American GIs. Most of the group had gone back to the hostel around 2 AM. Two girls, Gina and Nancy, stayed another hour, bumping and grinding to the music on the dance floor and flirting with some of the GIs. When they left, which Nancy said was around 3 AM, the girls had said good night to each other in the hall and gone to their separate rooms. In the morning, Gina was found stomped to death. Korean authorities and the US embassy jumped into action, tracking down the soldiers from the club and interviewing various witnesses who’d seen men loitering in the hostel hallway. The wife of the hostel owner said she saw a Westerner leave the hotel through the lobby around 4 AM.