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who can cook three meals a day for him. Just as you do for Julius. Leona Brueger also likes an occasional little dinner party at home, but the people she's hired have been unsatisfactory. It's not so easy for her to find a man who can cook and manage a dinner party as well as do the rest of it for her brother-in-law. After we met, I realized that with your background and experience, you're just what she's been looking for. You're a perfect fit, Raleigh."
    "But I've got a job," Raleigh said. "And it's permanent, not temporary."
    "If you're happy where you are, forget I mentioned it," Nigel Wickland said. "But Leona told me she'd pay seven thousand dollars a month to the right man, and of course you'd have luxury quarters to live in and meals you'd prepared yourself. You can buy anything you'd like from the markets and bill it to your employer's account. You'd have no living expenses. The job would probably end around the first of next year. After that, she's going to arrange for a luxurious retirement home for Marty Brueger when she sells the house. She'd do it now, but he refuses to go, and his lifetime care and contentment are prominently mentioned in Sammy's will, so she must accommodate him. But by year's end, his growing dementia will probably take care of things. The urgency here and now is that she wants to leave for a long holiday in Tuscany and she's in need of the right man ASAP."
    Raleigh was quiet for a moment and then said, "Of course that's a whole lot more than I make, but my job's permanent. I don't know about quitting Mr. Hampton for a temporary job."
    "How permanent is any job with a boss who's eighty-nine years old?" Nigel Wickland asked. "Do think about it and let me know if you're interested. I'm just doing this as a favor to my client Leona Brueger. It's nothing to me one way or the other."
    Raleigh thought there was something not quite right, and he said, "I remember that when you and Mr. Hampton talked about Leona Brueger, you wondered if she was holding up well since her husband's death. It seemed like you didn't know all that much about her."
    Then it was Nigel Wickland's turn to pause. He finally said, "Frankly, since I've been involved in the appraisal of her artwork, I've come to know her well enough that I've learned about her plans. Naturally I couldn't mention to Julius that I thought you'd be so much better off working for my client. If it weren't that you're just so perfect for this job, I wouldn't be bringing it up to you at all. So whatever you decide, mum's the word, Raleigh."
    "I've got to think about this," Raleigh said.
    "Yes, do have a think," Nigel said.
    When Raleigh left Nigel Wickland, he decided that the prospect of earning that kind of easy money was tempting, but after the job ended, what would he do? He'd successfully completed his parole, but memories of prison had kept him superstraight. He'd even been afraid to tell lies on job resumes, and it was no cinch for an ex-con to get decent employment after mentioning a prison record. Yet it was true that with an eighty-nine-year-old boss, how permanent could his current job be? And he was sick of having to plead with the shyster who managed the Hampton trust fund to give him the pay he deserved.
    Raleigh Dibble hardly slept that night. The next morning he phoned Nigel Wickland, and when he reached the art dealer, he said, "Nigel, it's Raleigh Dibble here. When can I have an interview with Mrs. Brueger?"

    Chapter Four.
    AN EXTRAORDINARY NUMBER of celebrity names turned up in crime stories during the first full year of the Great Recession. Many of them ended up on reports passing across the desks of Hollywood Division detectives. The police station in which the detectives were housed was an unusual place, perhaps the world's only police facility where framed one-sheet movie posters decorated the walls. In the geographic territory of the station the bizarre was commonplace, and if something eerie or outlandish could not be explained