As she rides by

Dick Distlers, which is to say nada, except I now knew more or less what publishing was. What more I could do to establish that Jonesy was a fully paid-up member in the angel of the month club, I did not know. Check out his thirty-six-track studio, maybe, just to show willingness. And maybe his warehouse and shipping setup, if he had one. Talk to someone or members of some group he’d already recorded, that I could do. Check with ASCAP and BMI to see if they’d ever listed him as a type to be avoided due to his reluctance to pay his debts or his habit of booking his prettier clients, especially all-girl dance acts, into unsavory night spots in the Middle East, if not beyond, from whence no all-girl dance act ever returned still retaining that first blush of youth. I knew BMI, anyway, had such a shit list, I’d seen it up at Rickie’s in their annual, after a list of members who had money owed to them by various agencies, and before the list of those members recently deceased. I’d known it was a long shot but I’d checked just in case—my name was on none of the lists.
    The nerve of that woman, declaring it was unlikely that I could ever write a song. How hard could it be, anyway? I resolved right then, while I was waiting for the light at the corner of Sunset and Western to change, that I would begin one that very eve. So it took a couple of hours, so what.
    Then I’d slip it casually to Tom ‘n’ Jerry, who’d go wild about it, they’d put a few simple chords to it, then I’d sit back and just wait for the heavy bread to roll in. A cinch; I was surprised I’d never thought of it before. Let’s see... what rhymes with bartender... car fender, maybe… brilliant, Daniel.
    Back at the office, I parked right in front, walked the dog, then went to church. A Catholic church. There were two in my immediate neighborhood, I knew, because Mrs. Morales had once so told me. The beauteous Senora Morales owned and ran the taco/burger joint three stores up from me, and a while back when I was looking for the nearest Catholic church I’d asked her as (a) I’d suspected she was a Catholic as she came from Mexico and always wore a gold cross around her neck, and (b) I knew she lived nearby because I’d once given her daughter a ride home. She had informed me that there was one around the corner more or less, for Anglos, which I’d wound up visiting, and one a few blocks down Victory where all the Latinos and Latinas went, Saint Barnabas.
    It was toward the latter that I directed my size twelves. During the short stroll, I spied with my all-seeing eye the bloody remains of two pigeons, a needleless Christmas tree sticking up in a pail of sand, a well-dressed woman sitting at a bus stop bench, crying, a cat scooting across the boulevard and just managing to escape extinction, and a file of cyclists all dressed up for the Tour de France and all wearing gauze masks tied around their mouths.
    The church itself was a simple white-finished, one-story structure set back from the street, with a bell tower in the rear and a wooden cross mounted in the front. A couple of steps led up to the front door, which was open. In I went, to blessed coolness. Not a creature was stirring, so I sat in the rearmost pew and ruminated. Time passed. An old lady dressed in black appeared briefly from behind the altar, looked around, then disappeared again before I could get her attention. Time passed. Finally a gentleman in a long black robe emerged from a door at the side. He was toting an armful of papers, which he proceeded to distribute at regular intervals on all pews. When he’d covered the whole church, he tucked the remaining papers under his cassock, dusted his hands vigorously, came over to me, smiled, and said, “Good afternoon.”
    “And to you, sir,” I said, getting to my feet.
    “Please,” he said. “Sit. I’ll join you.” We sat.
    “Victor Daniel,” I said.
    “Father Romero,” he said. We shook hands, extremely firmly on his part. He looked to be a man in his forties, very fit, with a brown, pockmarked face, round steel-rimmed glasses, and black hair swept straight back from a pronounced widow’s peak. What he saw was a man also in his forties (just), fairly fit, all things considered, with a broken-nosed puss hastily assembled from a few spare parts and some leftover scar tissue. As I only wore my wretched specs for reading, he got the full force of my world-weary hazel eyes, those once-bright orbs that had