her personal as well as her professional life, more so than any of the so-called experts -- lovers, life-long friends, long-grown children -- who have since come out of the woodwork to explain her disappearance. This was inevitable, because Laney's personal life was her public life. She combined the two a decade ago when she launched the lawsuit that caused her name to become a household word. At that time, she revealed the story of her sexual abuse at the hands of her father, well-known and respected as the founder and C.E.O. of Bruce Oil, the international consortium that not only financed Laney's Foundation for the Reinterpretation of Native Cultures, now defunct, but indirectly paid my not-inconsiderable wages. I did not, of course, buy her clothes, as one of her daughters recently claimed on national television; such a task would have been inappropriate. I did set up all her personal as well as professional appointments, paid