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“Locating Twyla, his granddaughter.”

Moving her head slowly from side to side, she said, “I have no idea where she might be. I know who she is. Arman showed me her photograph.”

I took the framed snapshot from my pocket and held it out, a piece of evidence showing her something she’d already seen and therefore proving that I knew the man in question.

“That’s the one. He gave that to you?”

“Lent it. I use it when asking around about her.”

“But Twyla is in New York. That’s what Arman told me.”

I sighed, pretending frustration but also expressing the complexities of this kind of job.

“I went to the son of one of Mr. Babylon’s old friends, Paulie Antonucci.”

Shelley’s lips twisted into a sour expression, seemingly of their own accord.

“You don’t like Paulie Jr.?” I asked.

“He’s a worm.”

The word worm caused me to laugh loud enough that one of the stack dwellers, an elderly Black man, frowned at me.

I didn’t care, because Shelley was smiling again.

“I’d say that he was more like a grub,” I remarked. “How did you meet him?”

“He was visiting Armie at the hospital one day when I got there. You could tell that he was there to get something, not to cheer him up. He didn’t even look at me.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “He’s kinda brusque.”

“What about him?” she asked.

“Not him, but the receptionist at his security firm said that she’d seen Twyla with a man with the name, um, something like Blast.”

Surprising herself, Shelley said, “Blass.”

“Come again?”

“Arman asked me to look up his granddaughter a short while ago.”

“How long?”

“A few weeks. Something like that. I come to the hospital twice a month or so, to offer library services to those who could use them. You’d be surprised at how many people want books and magazines and don’t even know it until you ask them.”

“That’s how you met Arman?”

“Yes. At first he was just interested in old-time phrases, and then, one day, he asked me to do a search for his granddaughter.”

“Twyla,” I said.

“I didn’t come up with much. She had half a dozen addresses, mostly in and around New York City. I found that, and there was also a man in a photo with her with the name David Blass.”

“How did you get his name?”

“There was some kind of event—a photo-gallery opening—and that was one of the pictures taken by a professional photographer they’d hired. He wrote down the names on the photos of everyone he got a shot of.”

“Did you find out anything about this David Blass? Where he works? Where he lives?”