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any ideas about how to find your fortune-teller’s daughter.”

CHAPTER 4
    Leon’s wife answered the door. Her name is Eleanor, and the first thing you notice about Eleanor is how large she is. You can’t help it. There was a time when Leon hated me, back when he believed in his heart that I had cost him his job as a private investigator. In those days, I was honestly more afraid of Eleanor than of Leon. They’re both bigger than I am, but something about Eleanor always made me think she’d move a lot faster than her husband.
    Since then, I’ve gotten to know Eleanor a little bit, enough to know that she’s a good woman, with a quick mind and a sense of humor. And a lot of patience about her husband’s dream of being a practicing private eye. I’d still take her over Leon, though, if I needed some backup in a bar fight.
    Randy kissed her hand when I introduced them. Another woman charmed right out of her socks.
    “Don’t mind him,” I said.
    “I don’t mind him one bit, Alex,” she said.
    “What in hell happened to your husband?” I said. “Randy said he fell off the roof?”
    She rolled her eyes and pointed behind her. There was an open door on the other side of the kitchen, and through it I could see Leon lying on the bed with both feet propped up on pillows. There were casts onboth ankles. “Alex!” he called when he saw me. “Bring our client in here!”
    The lights were off in the bedroom. There was a computer monitor set up on one side of the double bed, and Leon was bathed in the blue glow off the screen. It made his unruly red hair look downright frightening. He had a plaid flannel shirt on and gray sweatpants. The keyboard from the computer was in his lap.
    “You must be Mr. Wilkins,” he said, extending his right hand.
    “Call me Randy.” He shook Leon’s hand.
    “Leon,” I said, “did you actually fall off the roof and break both your ankles?”
    “I was trying to get the ice out of the gutters,” he said. “Ellie’s been carrying me around for the last week. Good thing I’m as light as a ballet dancer.”
    “Make that three ballet dancers,” Eleanor said as she came into the room. “I should have just left him out in the snow.” She was carrying a big wooden kitchen chair in each hand as casually as a pair of dinner plates. “You’ll be wanting some chairs in here,” she said, “seeing as how my husband isn’t going anywhere.”
    When we were sitting on either side of the bed, he finished tapping something on the keyboard. From somewhere behind me, a printer sprang to life.
    “Okay, then,” he said. “I’ve put in a good twenty hours on the case, and here’s what I’ve done so far.”
    “Twenty hours?” I said.
    “Hey, what else am I gonna do?”
    “I’m glad that you’re keeping track,” Randy said. “I’m going to be paying you both for your time.”
    “And getting your money’s worth, I hope,” Leon said. “You can count on our best efforts.”
    “Save the commercial,” I said. “And speaking of which, remind me to ask you about that Web site. . . .”
    Leon moved his eyes over to Randy and kept them there. “As I said, here’s what I’ve done so far. I know that you’ve already tried a couple of the locator services. For both Maria and her brother, Leopold. They can run the names through every database out there, but there just isn’t enough information to go on. All we have are a couple names, an approximate year of birth for Maria at least—sometime in 1952, based on the fact that she was nineteen years old in 1971—and a very old address, where she worked with her mother and . . . you said they lived there, as well?”
    “Yes,” Randy said. “On the top floor.”
    “And you don’t remember either of the parents’ first names?”
    “No, I don’t,” Randy said. “Her mother was just Mama to Maria and Madame Valeska to everybody else. I don’t think I ever heard her father’s first name.”
    “And it was just the one