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the rent from six to sixteen thousand a month.”
    “That’s a lot of money,” I noted.
    “I guess it is. That’s why they decided to relocate. They offered to take me with them.”
    “But you didn’t go,” I surmised.
    “My wife didn’t like the idea and I…I thought that I could, I could get another job easily enough. I mean, I have an MBA and twelve years’ experience working for LVTW.”
    “But that was the time of the market slump,” I said.
    “Exactly, the economic slump,” he said, grabbing onto the phrase like it was a lifeline. “I couldn’t get work anywhere, anywhere. And even when things got better no one wanted a CFO who’d been unemployed for three years. I only knew how LVTW worked and I was too old for most entry positions. My wife took the kids and left to go stay with her family while I was job hunting. She connected with an old boyfriend…”
    I didn’t need to ask anything; his story was as obvious as a pair of worn shoes.
    “I kept looking,” he said. “When I asked Lois to come back she said no. When I called again she’d had her number disconnected. Her mother wouldn’t tell me where she went. I haven’t seen my children for two years.”
    There were tears in his reptilian eyes.
    “After a while I lost the condo on Thirty-third and now I stay in a rooming house on Flatbush in Brooklyn when I can get enough money together…”
    “So why are you here, Mr. Stent?”
    “Lois’s old boyfriend is a handyman. He doesn’t make much. I was being paid nearly two hundred thousand when LVTW moved out west. If I had that kind of money now I could buy a plane ticket and go down to Florida and get my family back.”
    His tone was plaintive, his dreams the dreams of a child. I felt for the guy.
    “But why are you here?” I asked.
    “I need to get back on my feet, Mr. McGill,” he said. It seemed to me that he’d lost the thread of his purpose.
    “And how could I help with that?”
    “By finding, locating Celia Landis.”
    I was half convinced that Stent had lost his mind from sorrow, homelessness, and alcohol consumption. But then he uttered a real name. I wondered if there was an actual person attached to the name.
    “And who is that?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I mean I’ve never met her.”
    “Then why are you looking for her?”
    “A guy, a man named Bernard Shonefeld, sent a letter to my old address and a neighbor who knew me sent it on to my post office box. You know I keep that box in case my children ever need me—they’ll know how to find me.”
    “Bernard Shonefeld,” I said.
    “He’s doing work for a law firm in San Francisco—Briscoe/Thyme. They’re looking for this Celia Landis woman…young woman. I think she’s twenty-eight or -nine. That’s what Mr. Shonefeld said.”
    “Why is a law firm in San Francisco asking you about a woman that you don’t know?” I was fascinated by the twists and turns of his hapless story.
    “They said, Shonefeld told me that, that this Celia Landis is a distant cousin on my mother’s side. I never heard of her but Briscoe/Thyme had been looking for her for a long time, eleven months, and all they could locate was me.”
    “What did they say they wanted with Celia?” I asked.
    “Her grandfather, on the other side of her family, people I’m not related to, died and left her many millions of dollars. The estate tasked the lawyers to find her for a ten percent fee. Shonefeld told me that they’d give me ten percent of that if I could find her.”
    “Did this Shonefeld ask you for money?” I asked.
    “No. No. He just said that I should find her and I’d get ten percent of ten percent of over a hundred million dollars. That’s at least a million, more than enough to go down to Miami and get Lois and the kids back.
    “I used the computers at the New York Public Library to try and find her through the genealogy search engines. But there wasn’t anything. I tried every kind of search but there was