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that my house was broken into. I don’t want to leave her, but I can’t take her with me and don’t want to scare her with the whole story. She shakes her head and says, “Fine.”
    I change into some decent slacks and a dress shirt. I take a light sports jacket along for the interview. I check the side of my head in the mirror. The hole is screaming
Stick a finger in me or cover me up
. The cap stays. On my way out to the garage Mindy says, “Bye Dad. I love you.”
    All a guy could ever ask for.

8
    So I lied. With traffic, the Wilshire District is about forty minutes. The radio feeds me a constant stream of crap about the Federal Reserve and China dumping the dollar and a fifteen-year-old pop singer who’s suing her parents. Enough already, I’m switching to music. I punch in “Kind of Blue.” My dad’s road music when I was a kid and we’d drive to Lake Arrowhead. Miles of Miles. I wonder where the old man is. Haven’t seen him for years.
    I turn off Wilshire and go up Crescent Heights. There’s a church on my right. A few more blocks and then left on Fifth. The house is a neat little cottage with leaded windows and brown trim. I ring and wait. And wait.
    The door opens and I look down at a tiny woman with close-cropped steel-gray hair. She has an oxygen tank on a strap at her side, with a clear plastic tube coiled once around her neck and then leading to her nose. She says, “Mr. Harris?” and when I nod, she steps back to let me in. She tells me her name is Cynthia Caffey and her friends call her CC, but when I put out my hand she doesn’t take it.
    The house smells like cigarette smoke, which seems like a bad idea, but I judge no man. Nor widow. We settle at the kitchen table. She offers me lemonade, which I accept. The drink feels like nothing; it just goes down.

    ¤ ¤ ¤

    “You say you work for a local paper.” Voice like rusty scissors, then a cough.
    I tell her, “Yeah, I’m doing a series of articles on mining investments and kicking it off with Jason Hamel because he seems like such a colorful character.”
    CC removes the plug from her nostrils and shuffles out of the room. She returns without the oxygen canister and lights a cigarette. I watch the first drag change her. She stares at me and blows a huge plume of smoke out of the side of her mouth and says, “Jason Hamel is no colorful character, he’s a murderer. He killed my husband and my brother-in-law and you can print that as your headline.”
    “Why do you think that?” I jot down “Caffeys murdered?” in the notebook I brought as a prop.
    “Because James was terrified of heights and would never have stood on the ledge they say he fell off of. Ridiculous. But try to get the Mexican police to investigate. Bah!” and she turns her head and hacks like a blender full of gravel until it blows over for her and she can take another drag.
    “How did his brother die?” I move in my chair and the lemonade sloshes in my stomach. The motion isn’t necessary, but the living appear to be, well, animated.
    “Just as ridiculous. Barbiturate overdose. Mark never took a drug in his life. Slept like a baby. I knew them both for over forty years. If Mark was suicidal, then I’m a tennis pro. Bullshit!”
    “Why would Mr. Hamel want them dead?”
    “He had something up his sleeve; I don’t know what. They had a business deal, and he had some money invested. Then the deal went south. My house got ransacked while I was at my husband’s funeral. I think Jason took all the papers having to do with the Mexico property.”
    “Are there copies of those papers?” Maybe I wouldn’t even have to go to Jimmy’s.
    “Nope. He got them all. The thing of it is, James and Mark were just about to publish the drilling results. They were very excited.” She shakes her head and pulls on her Camel. “You know he’s a religious nut, don’t you?”
    I tell her I’ve seen his website, but haven’t yet met the man himself. She says, “Funny way to