As she rides by

again.
    “Nice lawn,” I remarked.
    “All John,” she said. “He was fanatic about it. One stray scrap of paper blown onto it and he was out of the house like a shot. As for weeds, he could spot the birth of a dandelion at a hundred yards in a thick fog.
    “Richard,” she said, pulling up abruptly. “Richard found a stray scrap of paper, only it wasn’t really a scrap.”
    “Richard?”
    “Richard the lawyer.”
    “Where?”
    “In the safe-deposit box, of all the unlikely places. King, no!” King backed out of the flowerbed he had one paw in.
    “If it wasn’t a scrap,” I said, “what was it?”
    “A sheet,” she said. I opened the car door and King hopped in.
    “Of figures?” I inquired hopefully. “Like money figures?”
    “Nope,” she said. “Just some names and addresses.”
    “Lots?”
    “Ten, twelve, fifteen?” she said. “I don’t know. I was sitting there like a zombie and Richard said, ‘What’s this?’ and shoved it under my nose. I looked at it and said I didn’t know so he chucked it away. Who cared. If he wanted to keep a secret list of old flames so he could send them Valentine’s cards, more power to him.”
    “Absolutely,” I said. “Don’t suppose you remember any details at all on the piece of paper, given the state you were in and the quick look you got at it.”
    She shook her head. “There was something they all had in common, it seems to me, but I can’t remember what and maybe I’m even wrong about that.”
    “And maybe not,” I said. “I hear tell that a terrible disaster can sometimes provoke a heightened awareness as well as shock. Say just for fun you are right. What could they have had in common? Not something easy like different names but the same address?” She shook her head again. “Similar addresses, like Orange , Mulberry, Mango, and Lemon avenues? That doesn’t even make sense to me. All LA addresses?”
    "Who knows?” she said. “It’s gone, Victor, if it was ever there. What does it matter, anyway?”
    “You got me there.” She gave me a tired smile. We shook hands. She said good-bye to King, and headed back to her packing. King and I headed back to the office. On the way, I mentioned to him that, generally speaking, safe-deposit boxes were designed to contain items of value, and while a list of old flames certainly did have a value of a kind, was a safe-deposit box really the most appropriate place to cache it? Likewise lists of debtors, say, or Freemasonry brothers’ secret names, or German pen pals, or whatever. The kind of list one does put in a safe-deposit box, especially an accountant obsessed with order, is, therefore, a list of some importance, some value. A list of credit card numbers, the manufacturers’ identification numbers of valuable household appliances, your car(s) engine block number, and of course a list of all your secret Swiss and Cayman bank accounts, if you’re Benny; they are worth storing away safely. Likewise your real Hope diamond, while you wear the fake to hoity-toity gatherings.
    Thus the surmise that said list had some importance to the deceased. And where did that get me? Right up the old polluted waterway, and without a propelling instrument.

Chapter Thirteen

    But somebody musta had a loose mouth, or else they couldn’t hold their juice,
    Or it coulda been some dirty little stoolie after a piece of the reward...

    W HAT do I want?” I asked the office wall.
    It responded not.
    “What have I got?”
    Again, a definite lack of answer.
    “What do I do now?”
    That one I answered myself—call Benny the Boy. So I did, catching him just on the way out, he informed me.
    “The way out to do what?”
    “Oh, looking at an old airstrip out Norco way that’s up for sale,” he said.
    “Are your intentions honorable, Benny?”
    “Need you ask?” he said.
    “That’s a relief,” I said. “I’d hate to think of you getting mixed up in anything legal.”
    “Fat chance,” he said. “I tried it once, remember?”
    “Sure do,” I said. “For a while there you were the hammock king of San Diego .”
    “All things must pass, thank goodness,” he said.
    “Pensions,” I said.
    “What about them?”
    “Anything.”
    “Company-operated pension plans,” said Benny, “began to proliferate in 1948 because of a National Labor Relations Board ruling that unions should be allowed to negotiate for pension plans as a part of their overall bargaining process.”
    “Did they,” I