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Of the many calls, there were no voicemails.

Making it down to the office, via the stairs this time, I sat at Aja’s desk with a pencil in my hand and an empty yellow pad before me on the green felt blotter. I had nothing to write down, no expectations or leads to follow. I felt confused and even dirty, like a hobo who had been on the road so long that no amount of water could wash away the filth.

I’d done what’d been asked of me. I’d found the missing so-called granddaughter, telling her that Arman had been looking for her. She’d disappeared again, but she had my card. I thought about going back to the cave I’d found her in, but why would I? She might get it in her mind to shoot me the next time we met. I could have gone armed, but Babylon wouldn’t have wanted that.

Would he?

Most of all, I was exhausted. It’s not that I needed sleep, but rather what I craved was what the poets called surcease, a well-deserved break. The job was over and the real criminal, Melton “Malto” Lamming, had escaped unscathed.

I had solved the mystery of a suspected murder that never happened and then discovered a murder that no one knew about. This errant thought caused me to fire up the office computer.

Less than a minute later, I found the article that had to be there.

Randolph David Blass had been found in his Redondo Beach apartment when the across-the-hall neighbor got back home from a long-distance biking vacation and smelled something bad.

The description of the torture milieu was mostly as I remembered, minus the grimmer details. The article said that young Randy had been a drug dealer, burglar, and perpetrator of assault and battery in his brief career. An added bonus was that there was no mention of a man of my dimensions and coloring reported in the vicinity of the crime.

The door buzzer sounded a few seconds after I’d finished reading the article for the third time.

The peephole in my security door was not aligned with its outer-door counterpart. This was because I’d read too many accounts of people peeping and then getting shot through the eye. Instead, the tiny aperture was a camera lens that transmitted images to a monitor that was at the far left of the portal I’d paid many thousands of dollars for.

When I saw who it was, I stepped back three paces, wondering what to do.

The buzzer sounded again.

Manning up, I approached the door and turned the knob, which released eight different latches and bolts. Then I pulled the techno-entrance open.

She wore a bright orange dress that exposed bare brown shoulders and that flared out just below the knee. Her perfectly round brimmed straw hat was what I can only describe as a blacker black with a brim at least a yard in diameter. Grasped by the fingers of her right hand was a foot-square yellow purse that was cardboard thin.

“Miss Macintosh,” I said, “or should I say Miss Mann?”

“You can call me Twyla,” she said, adding emphasis by thrusting her right shoulder forward. “Can I come in?”

Stepping back and away, I said, “By all means. Have a seat.”

I gestured toward the visitors’ chairs set before my daughter’s desk.

Half the way there the object of my investigation stopped and looked around the room.

“Problem?” I asked.

“This isn’t what I imagined your office to be like.”

“And right you are. This is my daughter’s space. Three days a week she sits in as my receptionist and aide général.”

“That’s French for what again?”

“A general aide.”

“Oh.”

My client’s daughter lowered into the nearest chair like she was a professional model whose specialty was sitting down. Her three-inch heels were ivory colored, perfectly accenting the rest of her ensemble.

I got myself behind Aja’s desk, descended into the swivel chair there, and prepared for the bout of verbal jousting that I knew we just had to have.

Twyla eyed me and smiled. In her thirties, which looked like her twenties, resting in the chair like some visiting dignitary, illuminated by raw electric light that she somehow made seem like the glow of the sun, she was stately and confident—maybe even learnèd, in some obscure way. The brown of her skin was smooth and flawless. The whites of her eyes gave no hint of the desperate path she’d traveled.

“I called my mother,” she said.