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brother, you think? No other siblings?”
    “Yes,” Randy said. “She said her parents had a hard life before they came to America. They were already in their forties when they had Leopold and Maria. I think that’s part of why they were so protective of her.”
    “And you don’t know how old Leopold was in 1971?”
    “I know he was older,” Randy said. “But I have no idea how much.”
    “Those locator services,” Leon said. “They usually need a date of birth, a Social Security number, or a recent address,” Leon said. “Without any of those, they’re not going to get very far. But then, you know that. That’s why you’re here.”
    “Absolutely,” Randy said.
    “The good news, right off the bat,” he said, “is that she isn’t dead. Not if she’s in the Social Security system, anyway. There have been four women with that name who have died since 1971. All four of them were a lot older than she would have been.”
    “Okay,” Randy said. “Okay, that’s good.”
    “I didn’t see a Leopold Valeska, either. For what that’s worth.”
    “That’s good, too,” Randy said. “Even though he did hate me.”
    “She’s not in prison, either. Not in a Michigan state prison, or a federal prison. Again, same thing for Leopold.”
    “Right.”
    “Our biggest problem,” Leon went on, “is the amount of time that has passed since you last saw her. Obviously, a lot can happen in that almost thirty years. A woman can get married. Leopold has the same last name, you would think, but Maria’s name may be different now. She may have moved out of the area. How many people do you know who still live in the same neighborhood they did in 1971? What we have to do, in effect, is go back in time and try to trace her whereabouts from 1971 until the present. It’s not going to be easy, but I think it can be done. The one thing we have going for us is her last name. If you were looking for Maria Smith, I wouldn’t beoptimistic. Maria Valeska is another story. That’s gotta be what, some kind of Eastern European name? Yugoslavian maybe? Romanian?”
    “I don’t know for sure,” Randy said. “I just know that both of her parents were born in Europe.”
    “You didn’t even ask her where they came from?” I said. “Or were you too busy doing—how did you put it? What everybody else was doing in 1971?”
    “I might have,” he said. “I just don’t remember.”
    “Alex,” Leon said, “when the man is in this room, he’s our client, okay?”
    “Yeah,” Randy said, “so treat me with some respect.”
    “What happened to your eye, anyway?” Leon said.
    Before I could decide which one to strangle first, Randy told Leon to continue.
    “I know those services must have already given you the numbers for every Maria Valeska listed in all the phone directories in the country right now. Just doing a quick search, I found five of them.”
    “Yeah, I think they gave me seven numbers,” Randy said. “I called them all, but none of them was her.”
    “And Leopold . . .”
    “They found two Leopold Valeskas,” Randy said. “Neither was the right one.”
    “Life’s not that easy,” Leon said. “But the phone directories are still one way to go here. The name is still an important link. If we call every Valeska in the country, we might find another relative.”
    “Every single Valeska?” Randy said. “In the whole country?”
    “Just counting the people who have listed numbers,” Leon said, “I’ve found about three hundred of them. I did a search on the national directory. That’s what’s printing out right now.”
    “We have to call every one of them?”
    “Well, exactly thirty-one of them live in Michigan, so I started there. I pretended to be a lawyer working on a class-action suit, told them I was looking for a Maria Valeska who lived in the Detroit area in 1971. I said she might be eligible to receive part of a large settlement.”
    “You couldn’t just ask them up front?” Randy