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play my brother’s recording.
    â€œI’m not home. You know what to do at the sound of the beep.”
    I played it again and again, though I already knew the voice. I was hearing a memory speak out loud to me. The voice was just an octave higher than you would expect. It was the sound of my father saying good night to me for the last time before he disappeared from my life, and the hapless salesman on Bonanza trying to convince cowboys to trade in their horses for bicycles.
    I went through the desk looking for a thread to connect the events of the last twenty-four hours—a meeting in a date book, a phone number on a Post-it— but there was nothing.
    I stepped over to the window to get some fresh air. I could search the apartment for hours but I already knew what I needed to know. The one person who loved him didn’t believe he would take his own life.
    I walked back into the living room and took the photograph of my father off the mantel, slipped it into the inside pocket of my suit, and walked out. A siren was wailing somewhere in the distance. The wind carried the faint presence of smoke with it. Someone had lit the first match, and L.A. was beginning to burn.

6
    The clerk from the Western Union office lived in a large ten-story apartment building a block off Vermont on the edge of Koreatown. It was a short drive from Los Feliz so I decided to check it out rather than wait until tomorrow.
    It was a prewar building that in its day must have been elegant, but was now, like most of its inhabitants, just barely hanging on. The sun had been down an hour, but the street was still crowded with people of every age trying to escape from the heat indoors. I parked across the street and got out.
    Mariachi music drifted out of one of the building’s windows. Rap music boomed from a car down the block. A street vendor with the heavily lined face of a Mexican peasant was doing a brisk business selling flavored ices on the corner. As I walked across the street there wasn’t an individual within a block radius who failed to take notice that a cop had just arrived.
    If I was lucky, the clerk would be able to ID the man who confiscated the security tape. If I was right, that man would turn out to be the same individual who took the computer from my half brother’s apartment.
    An old Otis elevator with brass doors that were faded with grime and tarnish dominated the lobby. The floor was a diamond pattern of black-and-white marble tiles. Two young women holding small children sat on benches across from the elevator talking in Spanish. As I walked toward the elevator one of the women said, “Peligro,” and pointed toward the stairs.
    I thanked her and started up the stairs to the seventh floor, where the clerk lived. The air inside the building felt as if it hadn’t been circulated in years, and it carried the scent of the thousands of lives that had passed through the building. On the seventh-floor landing, a large window looked toward the east, where a thin orange line of flame glowing in the dark snaked across the Verdugo hills above Burbank.
    A baby was crying somewhere, and the soft voice of a mother singing in Spanish drifted into the hallway. The clerk, Hector Lopez, lived in apartment 715 at the end of the hallway. I could hear a television inside when I stepped up. I knocked on the door, but no one responded. I knocked again.
    â€œThis is the police, Mr. Lopez.”
    A small dog began barking in the next apartment. A door across the hallway opened a crack and then quickly closed.
    â€œMr. Lopez, I have a few questions.”
    I started to knock again, then saw a thin stream of blood trickle out from under the door at my feet. I pulled my Glock and took hold of the door handle. It wasn’t locked, and I flung it open and raised my weapon.
    The only light in the room was the glow of the TV but it was enough to see the shape of a body lying faceup on the floor. I reached around the