The rain in Los Angeles does not wash things clean. It makes the smog wet, turns it to a gray paste that sticks to everything, coats the windshield in a film that the wipers smear rather than clear. I sat in my office on Sunset, watching the drops race each other down the glass, thinking about the fifty thousand dollars that had vanished three weeks ago along with a man named Harold Voss, and wondering if Voss was dead or just very good at disappearing.

The cat appeared at three in the afternoon, which was unusual because cats do not usually visit private investigators during working hours. This one was different. Three tails, Siamese coloring, green eyes that took in the room in a single sweeping glance before settling on me with an expression I could only describe as appraisal. It walked in through the open door, sat on the rug beside my desk, and began to clean its left front paw with deliberate casualness.

I did not have a cat. I had never had a cat. I had rats, sometimes, in the buildings I watched, and occasionally a stray dog would wander into a scene I was working, but cats were above my pay grade.

The client was Victor Kessler, a man who looked like he had been carved from money and polished until he shone. His import business occupied three floors of a building on Wilshire, and his office on the top floor had a view of the entire city, which I assumed was the point. Kessler was charming, cooperative, and clearly hiding something. The cat, I learned, belonged to his mistress, a woman named Lola who worked at a nightclub called the Blue Note in downtown LA.

Harold Voss had been Kessler's bookkeeper for twelve years. He disappeared on a Tuesday with fifty thousand dollars in cash from the company safe. The insurance company hired me because they did not trust the police, and in Los Angeles, that was a reasonable position to hold.

I started with Voss's apartment, a small place in Westwood that smelled of instant coffee and loneliness. His landlady told me he had been worried lately, nervous, jumping at noises. She had seen him meet with people, she said, men in dark suits who spoke in low voices and never came to the door but waited in his car. She did not know who they were. Nobody in Los Angeles knows who the men in dark suits are. That is the point.

Kessler's mansion was a modern thing, all glass and steel and concrete, perched on a hill above Bel Air with a view that would have made a lesser man feel small. The cat was there too, lounging on the marble floor in the foyer like it owned the place. It did not look at me. It did not need to.

Lola was everything I expected and nothing like it. She was twenty-four, sharp-featured, with eyes that missed nothing and a mouth that said exactly what it wanted to say. She told me Kessler had been laundering money through his import business for years, she told me Voss had found out and tried to leave, and she told me that men in dark suits did not disappear in Los Angeles, they were made to disappear.

I wrote it all down in my notebook. I had a plan. I would take it to the Los Angeles Times, to a reporter named Frank who owed me a favor from a case involving a corrupt city councilman, and Frank would publish it, and Kessler would go to prison, and fifty thousand dollars would be recovered, and I would finally have enough money to close the office on Bunker Hill and rent something with a view of the ocean, even if it was just a studio with a leaky faucet.

Detective Ray Morales found out before I could make the call. He came to my office on a Thursday evening, which was suspicious in itself because detectives do not visit private investigators in their offices on Thursday evenings. He was tall, dark-haired, and wore his LAPD badge like a cologne, spraying it on everyone he met. He told me to drop the Kessler case. He told me Kessler had friends in high places. He told me I was a smart man and smart men know when to walk away.

I did not walk away. I called Frank.

The lawsuit came two weeks later. Kessler sued me for defamation, for invasion of privacy, for whatever legal terms his lawyers could string together. I lost my license. I lost my office. I lost my reputation, which in Los Angeles is the same thing as losing your license and your office combined.

They found me in a cell at Skid Row, drinking a whiskey that tasted like turpentine and regret. The cat was gone from Kessler's mansion. Lola had moved to San Francisco, according to a tip from an old contact at the station. Voss was never found. Kessler continued his import business from a new office on a new street, with a new bookkeeper who asked fewer questions.

I sat in the cell and thought about truth and about cats and about how in Los Angeles, the truth is like a cat, always slipping away without a sound, always finding its way back to the people who can feed it.

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