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smiled a tolerant smile. I knew it was a tolerant smile because I got a lot of those from Rita. He leaned forward, flicked his cigarette ash into a round onyx ashtray. “Joshua, most of this has been retrieved from databases that’re accessible from anywhere in the world. And Rita is one of the best on-line investigators in the business. I send business to her by modem all the time. I know three or four other P.I.’s who’d be lost without her. She does it all—prejudgment and postjudgment asset searches, corporation and limited partnership information, state and federal court records. I could use one of my own people, but Rita’s faster and better. She goes whizzing through those gateways like she was wearing roller skates.” He inhaled on the cigarette.
    â€œGateways?” I said, beginning to feel like a fool.
    â€œInformation gateways. DIALOG. BSR. CompuServe. They provide access to five or six hundred different databases.” He frowned. “You don’t talk to Rita about all this?”
    â€œRita handles the computers,” I said. “I’m the one who hustles the bad guys into the alley and pounds the shit out of them.”
    He was looking at me. I had no real idea what was going on beneath the surface of his handsome black face, but I had a sense that it was something like puzzlement, and perhaps even something like pity.
    By then my transformation into fool was feeling fairly complete. I had known for years that Rita played around with a computer. Played around being my perception of what she did. I’d even known that from time to time she helped out other agencies, searching for information in what I had assumed was a single database. But I’d had no notion at all that she did this so extensively and so frequently.
    My first reaction was to wonder why she hadn’t told me. My second reaction was a variation on this, a variation distorted by a sudden, full-blown attack of the weasely unease I’d been feeling lately: why was she keeping secrets from me?
    I nodded to the sheaf of computer paper in Ed Norman’s hand. “So what do we have?”
    Ed had the grace to pretend that nothing had happened. “Okay,” he said briskly. He looked down. “Roy Alonzo. Born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, in 1946. Did elementary and high school there. Grades okay, nothing spectacular. Interest in drama. Played football, first string. No apparent trouble, no arrests. Went to Reed College, out in Oregon, in ‘sixty-five. Head Start Program. Drama major. Graduated in ‘sixty-nine. Once again, grades okay but not spectacular. No trouble, no arrests. Toured for a while with some improvisational group—” He looked up. “More of this, or shall I cut to the good stuff?”
    â€œWhat’s the good stuff?” Was she planning to abandon the agency and go full time into this computer investigating?
    â€œIn ’seventy-eight,” said Ed, “there was a story going around that he was nearly busted for statutory rape. The girl was fifteen. Her parents got paid off and backed away. Or so the story goes.”
    â€œHow reliable is the story?” Why else would she hide from me what she was doing?
    Forget it for now, I told myself.
    Ed shrugged his heavy shoulders. “No arrest was made, no charges were ever brought. Alonzo was here in L.A. by then, and his career was coming along pretty well. He was also a certified stud, if you believe the fan magazines.”
    â€œYou bet I do.” How could she let Ed Norman—and at least three or four other P.I.’s—know things about her that I didn’t?
    He smiled. “From the source I talked to, I get the impression that there was a young girl, but that she didn’t look anything like fifteen. One of those precocious little numbers with a twenty-three-year-old body and a forty-five-year-old soul. In fact, assuming it did happen, the whole deal could’ve been