“Mind if I hang on to this for a while?” I ask Lola.
“Yes, I do,” Lola says. “It’s Risa’s. Leave it the hell alone. Didn’t I tell you not to touch anything?”
I show her the picture. “You recognize this woman?”
“No,” she says, “but that doesn’t matter. It’s not yours. It belongs right where you found it.”
“Okay, okay, you win.” I nod and drop the picture, which floats back down to the carpet.
The bed is unmade, though the left side is neat and tidy while the right indicates there was once a living, breathing person there. “Does she own a suitcase?” I ask.
“Every woman in the world owns a suitcase,” Lola says contemptuously. “You never know when it’s time to move.”
“So where would Risa keep hers, do you guess?”
She points with her head. “That closet, probably. On the rack above her clothes. I saw it in there, if I remember.”
Risa Barsky has a long foldout closet with twin wooden doors. I pry them open cautiously and check out the overhead rack. Nothing. Some skirts and pants and blouses down below, but at least half the hangers are bare. “Looks like she left in a hurry,” I say.
We walk back toward the front door. Lola taps me forcefully on the shoulder. She’s staring hard now; this brief tour of her neighbor’s has upset her. “Okay,” she says, “I let you in. Now you owe me. Tell me what you think.”
I shrug. “What do I think? Well, that should be pretty plain, right? I think she’s in trouble. Somebody—some man—wants something she has. A woman would never do this. So a man. Maybe he’s an old lover, maybe he’s still fuming about how it ended and he wants to get back at her. Scare her half to death. I can’t think of a better way to do that than to walk right in and tear up the place, can you?”
Lola shakes her head. “I guess not,” she says.
“And then later that day she came home from wherever she works. She looked around and got the message. She’s not stupid. She probably knew who he was, what he was capable of. That he might come back. She needed to protect herself, so she packed her bag and left.”
“She’s had a lot of boyfriends,” Lola admits. “But how would he get in without breaking down the door?”
“Maybe she gave him a key in a weak moment. Or maybe he stole her key and made a duplicate without telling her. You’re right, though,” I say. “He just walked in the door.”
We head back toward B26. Lola asks me if I’d like to come in, have a cup of coffee, talk. “Why not?” I say.
Her apartment is much warmer and more orderly. Everything is in its place, but she’s obviously been here a very long time, long enough to invest it with her own personality. When she sets her glasses on her nose from a certain angle, she looks a little bit like an owl. She must have embraced this years ago, I figure, because there seem to be lots of owl tchotchkes everywhere you turn. Owl paintings. Owl throw rugs. Owl salt and pepper shakers. She has a thing about owls. She sits me down at the Formica table in the kitchen nook and presently I’m nursing a mug of black French roast. Lola sits across from me with her own cup warming her hands.
“When was the last time you saw her, Lola?”
“I’m not good with time,” she says. “Four or five days ago? A week?”
“And how did she seem to you then? What did you talk about? She say anything? Was she scared?”
She shakes her head. “No, but I’m scared,” she says. “Should we call the police?”
“I thought you didn’t care for the police.”
“I know, I know. But this isn’t about me. Risa’s a friend. And like you said, she’s in trouble. She moved to this complex about a year ago. I was still married then, barely. She helped me get through my divorce.”
“That’s what friends are for. Maybe you should call the police, Lola. I’m thinking about doing it myself.”
“All right,” she says. “I will. And while I’m at it, I’m going downstairs to check her mailbox, too.” She holds up a smaller bronze key attached to the gold chain with the rabbit’s foot. “Risa left me a copy, just in case she was ever on the road with a band, you know. I haven’t been too good about checking it, though.”
“She gets a lot of mail?”
“I don’t know. The usual. Magazines, bills, requests for donations. She’s a big donor to political causes. Well, maybe not a big donor. But a regular one.”
When we finish our coffee, Lola and I ride the elevator down to the ground floor where there’s a large bank of mailboxes. She opens Risa’s, pulls everything out, and hands it to me. There’s a Wells Fargo statement. Also a phone bill and a heating bill and one from a dentist named Samuel Wong in Culver City. A New Yorker that’s a week old, a plea for money from Planned Parenthood, and a glossy invitation to a new Vietnamese nail salon coming soon to Sherman Oaks. At the bottom of the pile is a small powder-blue envelope from Pincus Bleistiff. It’s dated seven days earlier.
“So how much does she trust you?” I ask Lola.
“What do you mean? We’re best friends. Best fucking friends in the world. She trusts me with everything.”
“What I mean is, seeing as how she’s missing and may be in trouble, do you think she’d mind if you took it upon yourself to look at her mail?”
“Isn’t that against the law?”
I sigh. She’s a long way from being a child; surely she gets where I’m going. “A lot of things are against the law, Lola, but sometimes, if you have to, if it’s your best fucking friend, you do it anyway, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
She stares at me and folds her arms, but she doesn’t say anything more, and I take her rumpled brow and prolonged silence as a form of consent. With my thumb I pry open Pinky’s letter and read it aloud.
Dear Risa, we missed you the last few times. I’m writing you an old-fashioned letter tonight because I’m at my wits’ end. You don’t answer your phone or email and we have to have a resolution to this or the band simply can’t go on. I hope you know how important you are to us. If there’s something wrong, if any one of us said something that offended you, please, please tell me. I’m here to help. Love, Pinky
“Do you know this fellow—this Pincus Bleistiff?” I ask, trying not to sound too disingenuous.
Lola shakes her head. “Sounds like one of her musician buddies. There were a lot of guitar players and guys with saxophones trooping in and out of her place. Sometimes she slept with them. Sometimes they slept on the couch. That was one area of her life I never got involved in. I like to get out on the dance floor now and then, but I’m not very musical.”
I open the Wells Fargo statement. There’s nothing there to write home about. The phone bill gives me more hope. Seems like she made a ton of calls last month to one particular number. I pull out my notepad and jot it down. “All right, fine,” I say. “You weren’t very musical. But who was her last boyfriend?”
Lola kind of winces. “The last boyfriend? Or the last one I can name? Which?”
“Is there a difference?”
“Like I say, people trooped in and out of her place at all hours.”
“Think,