I had arrived before ten that Wednesday morning and parked my car in a garage a few blocks away so I would not have to run out periodically and feed a meter. She offered me coffee but I refused. I just wanted to get to work.It was an apartment in an old building, one with a foyer big enough to double as a dining area. Alice had pushed aside the centerpiece that decorated the table, a large, heavy cut-crystal vase filled with dried flowers, giving me a work area as far as I could reach. In that space lay two open boxes, each filled to the top with paper. The one on the left had a plastic-covered sheet of lined paper on top with some handwriting in smudged pencil. The other box had a typed sheet that read The Lost Boulevard with the name Arthur A. Wien centered two lines beneath it.“There’s no title page on the original,” I said.“Art didn’t think it was necessary. We both knew what the title was and no one but us would ever read it. I’ve covered the acknowledgment page to keep it from smudging and tearing.”I lifted about half the manuscript carefully out of the box and set it where I could reach it easily.
