When I got to Pinx Video the next morning, there were two policemen waiting for me. I didn’t notice them when I walked in. Yes, there were two guys in their thirties skulking around the classic films section, but that didn’t seem unusual. With a porn section like ours it was common for men to skulk around the store for a while before slipping back into the adult section, usually the minute we looked away.

“I think we should change out the posters today,” I told Mikey when I got to the counter. “Time for a fresh start.”

The studios sent us new posters every week or so. The big videos coming out soon were The Prince of Tides, Cape Fear and The Addams Family. We needed to get them in the window soon to generate excitement.

“Those two guys are here for you. They’re LAPD,” Mikey said. Then under his breath he whispered, “What did you do?” The look on his face told me he didn’t think I was interesting enough to break the law.

I came out from behind the counter and walked over to the classics section. “Can I help you gentlemen? I’m Noah Valentine.”

The shorter one was bedraggled and blond, his face the map of a hard life. He reminded me of Charles Bronson, just not as friendly. The taller one was better looking, with honeyed skin and coal black hair.

The shorter one said, “Nino Percy. Murder squad out of Rampart Station.”

“Javier O’Shea. Same.” I had the immediate feeling Javier’s family reunions were interesting in at least two languages.

“What can I do for you?” I asked. “I’m guessing you’re not here to rent videos.”

“I understand you saw the Peterson family yesterday?” Percy said more than asked.

“I did.”

“You’re a friend of Guy’s?”

“Not exactly. He had some videos checked out. They were overdue and I knew his business had burned down, so I stopped by to pick up the videos and tell him there were no late fees because of the riot.”

“Really? You stopped by to personally pick up videos?” Percy said with a lot of derision. Though I had to admit, it did sound suspicious.

O’Shea took over. “Did you know Peterson socially? Or was he just a customer?”

“I took his photography class about a year ago. We had dinner once.” My cheeks flushed, suggesting more.

“Do you know any of his friends?” Percy asked.

“No. I don’t remember him talking about his friends. I’m sure he had friends. He just didn’t say anything to me about them.”

Percy stared at me as though I were lying.

“Why is this important? I assumed…wasn’t Guy killed in the riot?”

“That’s the way it appears, yes,” O’Shea said. “We just want to talk to some of his friends. Get an idea what his mind set was that night.”

“Afternoon,” I corrected. “The fire was in the afternoon.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, I live a few blocks from the camera store. We were in the courtyard having lunch when ashes began to fall. I suppose they could have come from somewhere else, I just thought…”

“Well,” said O’Shea. “If you run across any of his friends ask them to call us.”

“You must be very busy,” I said. “A lot of people died.”

“We’re always busy,” said Percy, and turned to stalk out of the store. O’Shea briefly looked at me and then followed.

They left me with a very unsettled feeling. Was Guy’s death more complicated than it seemed? I didn’t have a good way to answer that question, unless—

I went back to Mikey at the counter and said, “I need to run an errand.”

“You know, we should talk to a lawyer before we give the police any information on our customers.”

“What brought that up?” I asked.

“Those two policeman. They were asking about a customer right? I mean, they weren’t here to talk to you about you, were they?”

“I’m perfectly capable of breaking the law,” I said in my defense.

“No you’re not. You’re not the type.”

I decided to ignore the paradoxical insult. “They were asking questions about Guy Peterson.”

“Oh, him. He owns that camera store on Vermont.”

“Yes. The one that burned down. With him in it.”

He gave me a funny look. “Did you know that when you went to pick up videos up from him?”

“How did you—?”

“You went to run an errand and you came back with the videos he’d rented. Two and two usually equals four.” Sometimes it felt like Mikey knew more about me than I knew myself.

“No, I didn’t know he was dead. His family gave me the videos. But not before they tried to sell them to me.”

“That’s sad, that he’s dead. And that he had an awful family, I guess. He was always friendly when he came in.”

“I don’t want to say I told you so—” Well, I kind of did. “But you see it would have been a bad idea to stay and try to protect the store.”

“Of course I see that,” he said. “You didn’t have a gun. It would have been foolish to try and protect the store without at least one gun. Three would have been optimal.”

I had no idea why Mikey thought he knew about guns and I didn’t want to know. Of course, I didn’t think Guy Peterson had a gun. At least, no one had mentioned a gun being found. Did he have one? Had it been taken by the rioters? For all I knew he might have been shot before the store was burned. I’d assumed the fire was what killed him, but was that even true? I should have asked the police more questions. Not that they would have answered them. But I could have asked.

“How’s Randy? Have things calmed down at the hospital?”

“He’s back down to ten hour shifts. No days off, though. They’re still over-crowded. All elective surgeries have been rescheduled.”

“Well, I have something I need to do,” I said.

“What kind of something?” Mikey pried.

“Just something. Why don’t you put up the new posters while I’m gone. And take down whatever…”

His eyes lit up. He had very specific ideas about poster placement that I rarely let him implement.

Ten minutes later, I was parking in front of what was left of Guy’s Camera. I got out and walked up to the burned out store. The crime scene tape was still up, fluttering in the breeze.

I looked around, God knows for what, and stepped over the tape—which clearly said DO NOT CROSS. The double front door to the shop had been two large pieces of glass framed in varnished wood. The glass was gone and I was able to step through into the shop. It had been a while, but I tried to remember what the space had once looked like.

The front of the store had been devoted to tables and shelves which held the cameras Guy was selling. I thought that a terrible idea. Someone could just step into the shop and grab a camera. By the time Guy got to the front door the thief would be long gone. I stood in the front for a moment. The tables were still standing, on them cameras that had warped and melted. On the wall, there had been shelves. The shelves had either fallen in the heat or had been scraped off the wall by firemen. There on the floor were dozens of cameras, smashed, charred, destroyed.

In the back of the store, there had been an open area with a large worktable on one side. The cash register—melted like something out of Dali—and a darkroom were on the other side. The worktable was in blackened pieces. It was obvious the fire had burned hotter and longer in the back than it had in the front. I wondered if that meant something.

Looking at the surrealistic cash register, I wondered if there was anything in the drawer. At Pinx, we locked the cash drawer in the desk in my office. But that was mainly done so that employees couldn’t steal. Certainly, if someone were to rob the store they could make their way back to the office easily. But I didn’t think Guy had employees. And I didn’t remember anyplace where he could have hidden a cash drawer.

I decided to try and open the drawer. The cash register was from sometime in the eighties and really wasn’t much more than a plastic adding machine on top of a metal cash drawer. The keys were all melted so even if I could turn it on, I wouldn’t be able to get the drawer to open automatically. I looked around to find something to pry the drawer open with.

It took a bit, but I finally found something on the floor in front of the door to the burned out dark room. It was some kind of specialized tool made of four pieces of metal crossed over each other, like a frame for playing tic-tac-toe. Two of the metal pieces had a screwdriver tip at one end and a kind of awl on the other end. The tool was black with soot, and sticky.

I stuck one of the screwdriver tips into the lock and tried to force the drawer open. Just then someone behind me said, “What are you doing in here?”

The voice belonged to a man of about seventy. He was thin, pale, and swayed to his right. I turned around and faced him. “I was a friend of Guy’s,” was the only thing I could think to say, though it was hardly an answer. Or even true.

“Nobody’s supposed to be in here.”

“And you are…?”

“I own this building. Sherman Dooley.” He was eyeing the sooty tool in my hand.

“I’m sorry you lost your building, Mr. Dooley,” I said carefully.

He shrugged. “It’s going to be a month before I can get anyone to come clean up this mess.”

“Yes, well, there were a lot of fires.”

“Of course there were a lot of fires.”

“I know. I’m sorry for your loss,” I said again.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he said. Of course, it was the end of the world for Guy Peterson. But Dooley didn’t seem to care about that.

“What are you doing there?” he finally asked.

“Trying to open the cash drawer.”

“If there’s anything in there it’s mine.”

“Okay. I wasn’t trying to open it to get the money. I just wanted to see if there was money in there.”

“So you just like to look at it?” he asked, obviously doubtful.

“No. It’s just—most of the cameras are still here. If the money’s still here, too, then maybe the shop wasn’t looted.”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know exactly. I’m just wondering if maybe the building wasn’t set on fire because of the riot.”

“Are you accusing me of something?”

“What? No.” Of course, I immediately wondered if I should be accusing him of something. I turned back to the cash register and jammed the screw end of the tool I was holding into the lock and gave it a good hard turn. I felt it break but the drawer didn’t budge. I twisted until the edge of the drawer pulled away from its casing. Then I slipped the screw end into the slot and pried until the drawer finally popped out. It was full. Twenties, tens, fives, ones and change. Though I imagined it smelled of smoke, the money was intact.

Dooley stepped forward and began to fill his pockets.

“Did you know Guy?” I asked.

“He was always five days late with the rent.” It was pretty clear where Dooley’s priorities lay.

“So you wouldn’t have any idea why he was here that day?”

“He was protecting his investment like they did in Koreatown.”

“So you think he had a gun?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know what time the fire started?”

“I got a phone call about it near four o’clock. The whole place was gone by the time I got down here.”

“And they knew Guy was inside?”

“Well sure. They was in here chopping things up. He lay right where you’re standing,” Dooley said.

I moved instinctively and looked down at the floor. It was badly charred in a way that the front of the store wasn’t. I realized I was still holding the tool I’d used to open the drawer.

I set it down on the counter. Glancing at my hand, I noticed something brown across my palm. That didn’t seem right. Soot was black or gray maybe. Not brown. I looked closely at the tool. The sharp, awl-like tips were covered in something sticky and brown, but what—

Casually, I picked up the tool again. I said good-bye to Mr. Dooley, but he was too busy trying to pry up a quarter that had stuck to the plastic drawer to notice me leaving. Or to notice I’d taken the tool with me.

* * *

“Tell me if I’m crazy,” I said that night in the courtyard after I’d explained everything that had happened that day. I’d stayed at the store until almost nine, feeling guilty for having spent time away looking at Guy’s store. So, I arrived home in time for dessert with Louis, Marc and their friend, Leon. Louis had made flourless chocolate cake that he’d served with fresh whipped cream and Irish coffee. “I went back to Guy’s shop and noticed there were a lot of cameras, most of them melted, still in the shop. There was cash in the cash register. And there was this.”

I put the tool out onto the table.

“Do you guys know what it is?”

Marc and Louis looked at me blankly, while Leon said, “It’s a spanner wrench. You use it to repair camera lenses.”

“How do you know that?” Marc asked.

“I went to film school. And, believe it or not, they actually taught us things.” He picked it up and pointed to the four adjustable knobs. “See, you can turn these and make it whatever size—oh, there’s something sticky all over it. What is that?” He sniffed at his fingers and said, “Oooo, Louis smell this.”

He stuck his fingers under Louis’ nose. Louis pushed back in his chair. “Uh no. ‘Oooo, Louis smell this’ is never a good recommendation.”

“Just smell.”

Louis did. “Is that blood?”

“I think so,” Leon said. “I mean, it smells like something a butcher left out on the counter.”

Louis looked at me and asked, “Do you think this is the murder weapon? One of the rioters picked this up and stabbed Guy with it before the place was torched?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It might be.”

“You should turn it over to the police,” Marc said.

“But…what if it wasn’t a rioter? What if it was someone just using the riot as cover? Is that crazy?”

“Absolutely. Isn’t there some rule that the most likely explanation is actually the explanation?” Louis said before refilling our coffee.

“Occam’s razor; and that’s not exactly what it says. I think Noah’s onto something, though. Especially since the police are poking around,” Leon disagreed.

“They’re just doing their jobs. Do you take cream, Noah? I forget.”

“Are they, though?” Leon continued. “Fifty-some people died, thousands injured. It sounds like they have a lot of jobs to do. Why investigate this death if it’s just random mob violence?”

“That does seem suspicious,” I said.

“Let’s not get carried away,” Marc said. “If Guy the Camera Guy was killed by random rioters, how would that have happened?”

We all took a moment, sipped our coffee, took a bite of cake and thought about our answer.

“Given what we all saw on TV, looters would have broken the front windows and started taking things,” I said.

“And Guy the Camera Guy would have tried to stop them,” Leon picked up. “Possibly getting stabbed with the spanner wrench and then trapped in a burning building.”

“Except there’s no evidence of looting, according to Noah.”

“And Guy the Cam—Guy died at the back of the store. Which was also where the fire was most intense.”

“All right, let’s say there were no looters,” Marc suggested. “That doesn’t mean people weren’t going around torching buildings. It was a riot. No one handed out instructions.”

“They just randomly chose that building? And he happened to be inside bleeding on a spanner wrench?’ Leon asked, before telling Louis, “Darling I’ll take more coffee but make mine whiskey with a splash of coffee.”

“Okay, first of all, it was the only building for blocks that burned. And second of all, if they did randomly torch that building, wouldn’t he have tried to get things out of there? It didn’t look like anything had been moved and the cash register was still in there full of cash.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Leon said. “I think he was murdered.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Louis agreed.

“What do the police think?” Marc asked.

“I don’t know. They mainly wanted to know who his friends were.”

“Well, if he was murdered, it might be a friend who did it,” Marc guessed.

“Or his friends might know.”

“All right then,” Louis said. “If he was murdered, who do we think did it?”

“Well obviously, it’s the police,” Leon said. “Why else would they be poking around?”

“But why would the police want to kill him?” Marc asked.

Louis asked. “Those pictures with the Frontier Scouts aren’t flattering.”

“They’re also not real,” Marc pointed out.

“We’ll have to look at them again,” I said. The photos were upstairs, though, and the cake was too tempting and the Irish coffee too strong to be interrupted.

“Well if it’s about photos, then I’m switching my vote to Rex Hoffman,” Leon said.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“The VJ with the hidden assets.”

“No, you’re wrong,” insisted Louis. “You have to follow the money. The person who’ll benefit the most here is the landlord. He’ll get a nice fat insurance check, then he’ll sell the property for what he would have gotten even before the fire.”

“He was at least seventy,” I pointed out.

“The murder weapon isn’t exactly heavy. Neither are matches.”

“What about the family?” Marc asked. “They sound horrible.”

“I think they were in Fresno when Guy was murdered.”

“Well, that’s hardly an airtight alibi. Do you think they’ll get a lot of money? Do you think he had life insurance?”

“I don’t think he was rich. And I doubt he had life insurance. The inventory in the camera shop was probably insured, though.”

“We need more information,” Leon said. Then he turned to me and asked, “Do you want to talk to Rex Hoffman?”

“Me? Um, yeah, yes, I would like to talk to Rex Hoffman.”

“Come by the studio tomorrow about eleven. I’ll leave a drive-on for you.”

“Oh, I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“I won’t get into trouble. I’m not going to use my name. I’ll look through the directory and find someone in the production company that makes Rex’s show. I’ll say that’s who I am.”

“Is that all there is to it?”

“Well, not exactly. The guard will direct you to the soundstage where they shoot Rex’s show. There will be some trailers outside. One of them will have Rex’s name written on a piece of masking tape stuck to the door. Just knock and Rex will answer.”

“What if he’s not there?”

“Then just go inside and wait. They never lock those things.”

“Why is he going to tell me anything?” I asked.

“Because you’re going to give him the photographs.”