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“You know why,” she said with confidence.

“I guess. How long you been workin’ here?”

“Since I was sixteen.” She looked into my eyes as if maybe she was daring me to question her.

“Mrs. Macintosh wants me to call you at seven this evening.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you mind?”

“No.”

“Do you know why I’m supposed to call?”

“Just do as she asks. It’ll all work out from there.”

I wasn’t sure what to do after leaving Turnings Rest Home, so I went to the local library. The building had recently been updated and rebuilt. I ascended to a table by the window on the upper floor and began to study my phone.

My daughter was a fast worker, accurate and exhaustive.

Aja wrote a complete report on the Twyla Mann and the Twyla Macintosh whom, she thought, I was probably looking for. The two women, who were the same woman, had, from time to time, an extensive presence in public and social media records. She was somewhere in her late thirties, interested in the arts, and prone to bad luck and trouble. She’d been arrested for assault, public drunkenness, and disturbing the peace. None of those charges made it to trial. She’d had apartments in every borough except for Staten Island, but there were blank spaces in her story where, my daughter thought, she had probably stayed with various friends. She’d worked as a barista; as a crew member on a variety of films, TV shows, and commercials; and as a private cook at a residence on the far Upper East Side. Over a range of maybe two dozen photographs taken in the past twelve years I got a pretty good picture of the inner Twyla. Her hair changed from cornrows to dreadlock-like braids, from a buzz cut to a comparatively conservative shaggy style that hung at shoulder length.

For all the information Aja gathered, there was no current phone number, address, or place of employment for Twyla. She lived a bohemian existence, ending one phase of life and then, later, appearing somewhere else, as someone else who just happened to have the same, or a similar, name. In one photo she had a hundred skinny braids tied up and bunched at the top of her head. Along with this she had contact lenses that were the dark blue of the North Sea. In that picture she was looking directly into the camera as if daring the photographer, and therefore all future viewers, to question her choices.

Recently she had ended any online presence. Aja offered to reach out to Twyla’s friends from old iterations of X, Instagram, and Facebook, but I told her no. I didn’t want to take the chance of scaring her off.

Arman and Connie Babylon had no children. There was a forty-four-year-old nephew, Hollis Stanworth, who lived in Miami, but he did not seem to be in contact with Arman.

Finally, in the last attachment to my daughter’s e-mail, there was a recent article from the LA Times.

Strange Goings-on in Brentwood

At around 1:00 a.m. Tuesday morning there were silent fire and home-invasion alarms sent to police and fire departments from the home of longtime resident M. Lamming. When the police and firemen arrived, they found the gates to the property and the door to the house open. Mr. Lamming and an as-yet-unidentified woman were unconscious on the foyer floor of the four-story mansion. Mr. Lamming was only partially clothed, and the young woman had on what was described as a party dress. The two were taken to a nearby hospital where, when Lamming regained consciousness, he claimed that the house had been invaded by four men.

Detective Pell Andrews told this reporter that an investigation was under way.

I had hoped that the police might discover the Rohypnol in the nightclub owner’s bar or Greta’s drink. That would have been better, but then again there was no worse.

12.

AT AROUND FIVE thirty I relocated from the Rego Park branch of the Queens Public Library to a diner down the street. They served bitter black coffee that I, for some reason, enjoyed.

At 7:01 I made a call.

“Hello, who is this please?”

“It’s Joe Oliver, Mrs. Person.”

“Do you know the Crimson King?”

“That jazz club up there near Columbus Circle?”

She replied, in a clipped tone, “That’s it. Miss Mara and I will be there under her reservation at nine.” She then disconnected the call.

I had another cup of coffee while wondering about my grandmother and how she managed to get so much out of her barely legal clan. She took care of everyone: my fireman grandfather, who loved her without reservation; Cousin Rags; my dad, Chief Odin Oliver; and even Aja, who visited Brenda once a week to record her oral history on a digital device and through meticulous notes. Even when Brenda went to LA for her cancer treatments, she set aside a few hours each Sunday to talk to Aja.

All the lost family stuff I’d been dealing with for the past few days made me think about my dad. My relationship with Chief seemed tame compared with what had happened in Twyla Mann’s life. At least I knew that my father was my father, even if he had abandoned me, and nearly killed my mother, with his refusing to break street code and coming home to us.