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later, after picking up Granger and making a phone call from Stinovenov’s two-room apartment, I was in front of Louise Antolini’s front door in Westwood.
    She opened the door before I knocked and took the cat from my arms, which was fine with me since Granger had scratched me as soon as he saw the house. I got the feeling he preferred the open road. I also got the feeling he would be back on it again as soon as he could escape the smothering kisses smacking against his furry face.
    “Granger, Granger, Granger. No longer a stranger,” she said, looking at me triumphantly while holding the cat tightly against her more than ample breasts. “I’ve been waiting to say that for more than two years. Is he all right?”
    Till he saw your house, I thought, but said, “Fine. I had to pay a thirty-dollar reward to the guy who found him.”
    “People shouldn’t take money for returning other people’s missing pets,” she said, clutching the meowing cat. The noise didn’t seem to be a result of pleasure but of Granger’s desire to escape. Maybe I was seeing more than was there. I knew I was hearing what I didn’t want to hear.
    “They shouldn’t,” I agreed. “But they do.”
    “I’m not paying,” she said. “For all I know, whoever is demanding this ransom took Granger in the first place.”
    “And kept him for two years?” I asked. “He saw my ad in the paper, spotted Granger hanging around the hospital.”
    “Hospital?”
    “County. The guy who found your cat is a nurse.”
    “A man is a nurse?” she asked, bestowing further kisses on the cat, whose eyes were now closed.
    “It happens. He’s Russian. I paid him thirty dollars.”
    “You weren’t authorized to do that,” she said.
    “I …,” I began. But before I could finish she had closed the door.
    Another job completed by Toby Peters, Confidential Investigator.
    “Happy New Year,” I told the closed door.
    To cheer myself up I drove to Hancock Park, parked on the street with no problem, and went through the entrance at Wilshire and Curson. I headed right for the La Brea Tar Pits near the center of the park. The pits are bogs with subterranean oil and tar bubbling slowly to the surface. A pool of water camouflages the sticky sludge that had been a trap for unwary animals gathering there thousands of years earlier to drink from what they thought was a quiet pool. Skeletal remains of saber-toothed tigers, Imperial elephants, woolly mammoths, giant sloths, condors, Great American lions, and even a specimen of the only American peacock had been found and removed from the pits. Birds of prey and carrion-eaters had fed on these doomed, sinking animals and sometimes they, too, had been caught in the bog.
    On days like today, the pits suggested that Los Angeles had not changed much since the days of the dinosaurs.
    I stood there alone, watching a black bubble as it expanded into a surface balloon. A woman with two children came up and stood a few feet away. She had a book in her hand. We all looked at the pit, waiting.
    And then the bubble burst.
    I still had most of the day till I had to meet Grant at Wally’s. I didn’t feel like going back to the Farraday, and I definitely didn’t want to go back to Mrs. Plaut’s.
    I left the car parked where it was, picked up a copy of the L. A. Times from a hotel lobby, and walked two blocks to J & W’s Downtown Restaurant. I arrived a little after the lunch crowd, had there been one on New Year’s Day. I got a table near the kitchen, ordered a tuna on white, fries and coffee, and looked at the paper.
    Twenty minutes later and eighty cents lighter, I knew that Japanese girls were now wearing slacks or mompei instead of kimonos; was reminded that USC was going to play undefeated Washington in the Rose Bowl in a few hours; that Alley Oop, stone ax in hand, was lost in time; that Scorchy Smith was being transfered to combat duty; that the Red Army, under Ukrainian General Nikolai Vatotin, was within