Meanwhile--

Unless anything else suddenly occurs to her Lacie's obvious contact here is her adoptive dad! Yay. It is very silly that she's nervous about this.

One of her adoptive father's large, burly Mexican guards informs her that her father is busy working in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, but that she is welcome to make an appointment to see him.

"Of course, silly me. I'm meeting up with some friends this afternoon, maybe we could do lunch? I just wanted to see him while I was in town."

"He already has plans for lunch," the guard says, not unkindly. "Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow works just fine. Can I come in? It'd be nice to see everything again, and certainly it's not going to take up his time for me to visit my old bedroom and so on."

"Of course," the guard says.

The first floor, Lacie remember, has the grand entry, the cellar entry, the ballroom, the sunroom, the formal dining room, the conservatory, Trammel's library, and Trammel's study.

The second floor has the small dining room, the bedrooms for her and the servants, and the guest room.

The cellars she was never allowed to enter.

Lacie visits every room. She is feeling nostalgic in addition to investigative. She wants to scour the library but it's a little nervewracking and might attract Trammel's attention and she's maybe putting it off a bit; anyway, the library is always locked, and she's not allowed in. The conservatory has some new African plants, but otherwise it is basically as she left it. 

She peers in through the window of the library to see what she can see. Lacie makes out the book titles "The Broken Ouroboros of Ahtu" and "Children of the Night and Nahua Legends."

She notes these down, whether they're important to the case or not, because if she has the titles she can look them up and maybe read them whether she's allowed to or not.

Meanwhile--

On the way to Long Beach, Zoe and Anemone see more open fields interspersed with oil derricks. As they get closer to Long Beach, they see more half-destroyed buildings: damaged in the 1933 earthquake and no one had the money to repair them.

"Wow, this place is a mess."

When they arrive at the First Bank of Long Beach, they see a damaged brick edifice. Scaffolding stands outside the building, abandoned for more than a year. The broad stone steps, badly cracked, are occupied by a foul-smelling assortment of vagrants, squatters, and drunks. “First Bank of Long Beach” is still inscribed in the granite above the boarded-up front doors. A single tattered sheet of filthy newsprint skitters across the street — it sounds vaguely like it’s hissing at them and then lodges itself in a sewer grate where a bunch of other scraps of garbage have accumulated.

Probably Carrie Should rescue it and throw it out but she is not going to touch it. 

"Well. I can't say this is what I was expecting."

As she look at the squatters, you think of something... there weren't any squatters in LA, were there?

Awfully weird in the Great Depression.

"Huh. Well... I don't have high hopes that the safety deposit box is intact, but at least these folks don't look more dangerous than... any other assortment of drunks and vagrants. I don't suppose we can really wait for them to leave, given that they don't have anywhere else to be. Should we just... go in?"

"We might as well? I don't think anything will improve with waiting?"

"We could try walking around and looking for other entrances, but yeah, I don't think waiting is going to help. I've got a prybar, if it's all boarded up."

They try this, but there aren't any other open entrances. 

One of the bums says, "you girls looking for a good time?"

"S'cuse me, fellas." And she tries to pry the door open.

"What are you looking for in there?" says a bum with a prominent boil on his face.

"Good question. I'll know when I see it."

She tries to push open the door with the prybar and it doesn't budge. 

"Carrie, little help here?"

"You little ladies need someone to help?"

"We'll see, give us a second."

And with Carrie and Zoe both pushing on the prybar they manage to open the door.

You pry the door and find what was once a glamorous bank. Rats scuttle across the floor.

"Hey LADY!" boils bum says. "You're not going to find anything worth stealing in there."

"Thanks Carrie. Looks like we got it, mister. If we don't find anything, we don't find anything."

Zoe is quietly regretting not bringing any muscle with them. Not that they really HAVE muscle but people might at least think twice if Magnificence were here.

Carrie and Zoe search the building, but the only thing they find is sufficient information for a very interesting set of papers on the ecology of the urban rat. The building has fallen apart very badly, and someone has stripped it of all the valuables, down to the record books.

"Looks like the bum was right. Damn. Time to go hit the books, I guess? Maybe we can ask at city hall where the First Bank of Long Beach relocated."

On the way back to the car Zoe tell boils bum he was right and throws him a buck.

Zoe and Carrie go look at City Hall for records.

The bank failed in ’33 in the wake of the Long Beach earthquake. The newly established FDIC is now the administrator of all its debts (many), assets (few), property, and records. The offices of the FDIC are in the Los Angeles Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles 

>.<