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and take a vacation. Okay, doll?”
    “Uh…okay,” she said, still lost in the unreality of this turn of events.
    “I can’t believe this,” Marty said. “Pepper walks in here with this CD, and a little while later I’m on hold with my doctor’s office, so I stick it in the machine, and out come these voices, and they’re singing a songwith the title of my movie in it. And it’s good. So I pick up this CD case, and I see ‘written by Dahlia Gordon and—’” Marty was quiet for a second, then he asked, “Hey, hold it. Who the hell is Sunny Gordon?”
    “My cousin. She was the composer.”
    “You mean you only wrote the words?” Marty said, with more than a little disappointment in his voice. “Well, then she has to sign off on this, too,” he said. “So I’ll have the paperwork done by tomorrow, and you gals can come on in.”
    Sunny. Come in? No chance. “Oh…that won’t work, because I’m not even sure where she is,” Dahlia blurted out.
    “Better find her, tootsie. Or no deal. No way we can take a chance she’ll surface later lookin’ to screw us. Bring me two signatures or I’m usin’ some Randy Newman song I heard him do a couple of weeks ago. Talk on ya tomorrow.” Marty clicked off.
    Dahlia put the phone down. Shit! Shit! Shit! Okay, it was a stupid idea. Sunny was off in some lockup wacko ward where she’d been for years. Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Max were dead. Louie, Sunny’s son-of-a-bitch brother, was around, but years ago he had stopped going to see Sunny. Probably because he was scared she’d rub off on his kids or something like that.
    “Lost cause,” Louie told Dahlia the one time she’d asked him about it. And that was years ago, when she bumped into him at Gelson’s Market in Sherman Oaks. He kept clucking his tongue and shaking his head. “She’s not even really alive. Just existing. What’s the point of going to see her? She doesn’t know me.She wouldn’t know you. My parents used to go all the time. She didn’t even know them . I’m sure it’s why the two of them died so young. They couldn’t bear to go there one more time.”
    When Uncle Max died in the eighties, Louie, who had been his father’s business partner, took over their hardware store on Moorpark Street. Somehow, in spite of his abrasive personality and the big discount retailers opening all around him, Louie managed to stay in business with that little firetrap of a store all these years. God, what a schmuck he’d always been to both Dahlia and Sunny. He had been fiercely jealous of their relationship and tortured them because he felt so left out when they didn’t want to play games with him, just wanted to be left alone to work on their songs.
    “Who cares about lousy songs from two unpopular scags?” he’d say, passing through the living room on his way to work at the store.
    “You’re supposed to be an adult,” Aunt Ruthie would yell. “Leave them alone.”
    Once, when they were kids, he put a mouse in the piano while they were rehearsing, and it skittered onto the keyboard and made both girls scream. Dahlia remembered how the screaming had triggered a bad episode for Sunny that day. Another time Louie had smeared oil all over the keys, ruining the mechanism so a specialist had to be called in to clean it, and then he lied about it. And now the nasty bozo was her only source of information on Sunny’s whereabouts.
    Bad idea. There was no way she was going to go begging Louie. If she told him she had to get throughto Sunny, he’d laugh at her. He’d definitely want to take Sunny’s share of any money for himself. Somehow, just because he was Louie, he’d figure out a way to screw it up. Shit! Why had she written Sunny’s name on the CD? That was really stupid. Maybe she could just tell Marty that Sunny was a fictitious person she made up. Yeah, sure. He’d really believe that. Maybe she could get him to send the contract over and she could forge a signature. Sunny would never know