“Oh good, he called! How’d it go?”

“Not great, he’s near the end.” I told her the story—pancreatic cancer, visitor Hawley, the big promises, and Elkaim’s jittery request.

“That’s so sad, Adam. That poor man—still holding on all these years later? Awful.”

I said, “I don’t know, the whole thing just seems…a little futile to me. I mean, what does he hope to get out of all this?”

“Closure, obviously.”

“Maya—you think there’s even a chance Emil was innocent?”

“Welllll…he definitely sold weed when we were kids.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because we saw him do it.”

“I never saw shit.”

“You’re too young to remember.”

“Like maybe once he met someone at the bleachers or something.”

“Not something—he was a dealer, Adam.”

“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean he was a murderer.”

“No, but dealers deal with crooks. And when you deal with crooks, bad stuff happens.”

“But the guy Emil supposedly killed, Durazo, was he a real crook?”

“I don’t know. I think they said he was a gangbanger, 18th Street or White Fence or I-don’t-know-what. What does Mr. Elkaim want you to do exactly?”

“He’s paying me a grand to shake Hawley down, see what’s up.”

“Adam,” she said, suddenly measured, as if addressing judge and jury. “First of all, you’re not shaking anybody down. Don’t do something stupid and lose your one shot at getting licensed.”

“Yeah? Maybe you should have thought about that before you gave Elkaim my number.”

“Second of all, I don’t know how much I like the idea of you taking a terminally ill man’s money.”

“I know, I don’t like that either. And I don’t want to get tangled up in this but—”

“This is Daddy’s dearest friend we’re talking about—you cannot jump ship.”

“I know that.”

“And he’s dying. Please don’t screw this up, Adam. It’s a simple assignment. You talk to this Hawley, you relay whatever information he gives you, you humor Mr. Elkaim—he’s practically our family.”

“There’s that word again.”

“What word.”

“Family. People only ever seem to use it when they want me to do shit I don’t want to do.”

“And third.”

“What.”

“When we send our pros out on these kinds of things, there’s due diligence. You don’t just walk in ready to get sandbagged. For all you know, this Hawley person is a raging loon. And, ya know, just showing up with an outstretched hand might not be the happy surprise of his day. Oh shoot—judge is here, gotta go.”

She hung up and I stared at my phone in sudden disbelief—the grand master of getting my goat got it once again. Leave it to Maya to hand me a performance improvement plan before I even started a job I didn’t want in the first place.

But—she had a point.

Before I knew it, I was parking in the underground lot of the downtown public library and crashing through the swinging doors. Up the escalators I rode, into the giant belly of paper knowledge. I pulled out my phone and googled Hawley movie sets. An IMDb list came up first, thirty-eight credits under “Art Department.” I recognized a few of the flicks. One was a Hugh Jackman thing, Tokyo Nights. A few re-posts of the Downtown Courier article, and under images a handful of press shots of Hawley Junior posing with his crazy city models. But there was very little about the man himself—no Wiki, no website, no bio, no socials. On the very last search page, there was a reference to the March 2014 issue of PERSPECTIVE: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild—“Gulliver in Wonderland: The Set Designs of Devon Hawley Jr.”

A cute blonde with red glasses held down the desk at Collections. She looked up from some giant yellowing tome. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking to pull some old mags and newspapers,” I said.

“Some of our resources are online, some of it’s bound, some of it’s in the process of being converted from microfiche.”

“Wow,” I said. “Microfiche—keeping it real.”

She tried to hold back a smile as she closed her book and slipped me a stack of mini-forms and a three-inch pencil.

I filled out my orders—the issue of PERSPECTIVE and LA Herald-Examiner, Local News January 1983 through December 1988. I was just about to hand them over when I said, “Do you have a system for tracking obituaries?”

“I can search on a name,” she said, “but if it’s common, you might get back a whole database.”

“Let’s try.” I scribbled Reynaldo Durazo on another slip of paper and slid it across the table.

She said, “Give me a few minutes,” spun her chair, and walked away nice and smooth. I envied her peace in this high-ceilinged room. All around, across the giant windows, the falling rain made dramatic trails of silver.

Minutes later she came back with a great big bound black book. The word PERSPECTIVE 2014 was embossed on the cover. I thanked her and shlepped it over to a reader’s table, thumbed to March. Page thirty-two, a six-page photo spread of some of the incredible, elaborate city miniatures I’d seen, so vivid they looked realer than real. There he was standing among them, the bald, affable creator in another Hawaiian shirt—this one orange—hovering over his mini-world like the sun, holding up a tiny milk truck in a pair of tweezers.

Alongside the photos, they ran a Q and A column.

Hawley: It’s more than a work style, really. It’s a philosophy…miniaturism.

Perspective: You got a taste for set building very young, apprenticing with your father.

Hawley: I wouldn’t call it an apprenticeship, ’cause he wasn’t bossy. And he wasn’t exactly a teacher. He was more of a jack-of-all-trades, my dad.

Perspective: But he worked in the art department at several major studios.

Hawley: Sometimes. But when his contracts for Globus and Paramount ran out, he would do anything. He sometimes conducted the Steamer trains in Griffith Park.