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We had gimlets and toffee peanuts at the downstairs bar. She told me about how much she didn’t understand love and I told her that I didn’t have a handle on it either; except when it came to my daughter and other blood relatives.

“You want to show me your room?” she asked in the wee hours.

“I want to show you everything, but I’d rather just be your friend.”

“I’d like to see everything before making that decision.”

“Unlike your boyfriend, I can say that I wouldn’t be able to come up to the mark.”

After seeing my new friend to her car, I went to the business office room of the hotel and spent an hour or so looking up public employment databases of LA and LA County. I found that Shelley Toomes worked at a small library not far from UCLA and the Hammer Museum, owned by the selfsame vaunted university.

It was a small structure, barely larger than a four-family home, set on a side street near a drugstore. Upon entering, the first thing I saw was a big desk behind which sat a substantial woman wearing a blue and red loose but nifty blouse and makeup applied in a style that had its heyday in the 1950s. She had red, red lips, blue eyeshadow, and enough foundation to erect a Westwood skyscraper. There were long tables on either side of the desk, populated with six or seven stack dwellers.

Stack dwellers was the name I had settled on for those who spent long days in public book repositories doing anything from perusing some publication that had struck their fancy that day to—like Karl Marx—studying for thirty years in the British Library, defining the only system created by humanity that had become an independent, artificially intelligent, parasitic mind that controlled every aspect of the lives that we falsely believed belonged to us.

“Hello,” I said to the woman in charge.

Looking up at me, she smiled, and I was surprised to see that in spite of her clothing and greasepaint, the woman was not yet forty and shapely despite the loose blouse.

“Yes?” she answered with a practiced smile.

“Are you, um, Shelley Toomes?”

“I am.” Her smile became a touch more intense but no less friendly. “And who are you?”

There was a generous-bottomed walnut chair in front of the librarian’s desk. I sat while saying, “My name is Joe Oliver.”

“How can I help you, Mr. Oliver?”

“I’m a private detective, licensed in the state of New York. My grandmother is here in Los Angeles, being treated for cancer at Pilgrim’s.”

She exhibited an honest frown and asked, “The research hospital?”

“That’s the one.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I mean, that your grandmother is sick, not where she is.”

“It’s serious, but Brenda Naples, my grandmother, is what my grandfather used to call a tough old bird. She goes all over the various units, meeting people and making friends.”

“That’s the spirit of survival right there,” Shelley said, identifying her heritage as being at least partially Southern.

“It certainly is. She’s from the eastern South and the only rule she follows without fail is to help out.”

“I’m a little confused, Joe,” Shelley said. “Are you out here to care for your grandmother or to do some kind of detecting?”

This was the moment that I needed to arrive at. I needed Shelley to want to understand me.

“I came out to spend a few days with Grandma B. But she had met a guy in one of the treatment halls and they struck up a kind of friendship. His name is Arman Babylon.”

“Oh,” she said, sitting up a little straighter. “You know Arman?”

“He gave me your name.”

“Whatever for?”

“I asked him to introduce me to people he associated with because I might get from you something that might help me do what he needs.”

“And what is that?” She’d put away her smile for the nonce.