“Love to, Julie, but I can’t. Thanks, though.”

She waited for me to make a move. When I didn’t, her face fell.

“Nothing personal,” I said. “It’s just a bad time.”

“Sure,” she said, and snapped her head away. As I left I heard her mutter, “All the cute ones are faggots.”

At six Milo came by. Despite the fact that he wasn’t due back at the station until Monday, he was dressed for work- wilted seersucker suit, wash-and-wear shirt, atrocious tie, desert boots.

“Spent all day detecting,” he said, after getting himself a beer and remarking that I was a good boy for restocking my cupboards. “Hollywood Division, the coroner’s, Hall of Records, Building and Safety. Your lady doc’s a goddam phantom. I’d sure love to know what the hell’s going on.”

He sat down at the kitchen table. I settled across from him and waited for him to finish the beer.

“It’s as if she never was processed through anyone’s system,” he said. “I had to skulk around at Hollywood, pretend to be looking at something else while I checked for any file on her. Nothing. Not on paper or in the central computer. I couldn’t even find out who put the call in the night she died, or who took it. Zilch at the coroner’s, too- no autopsy report, no cold-storage log, death certificate, release. I mean, there’s cover-up and there’s cover-up but this is twilight zone stuff.”

He rubbed his hand over his face.

“One of the pathologists,” he said, “is a guy Rick knew in med school. Usually I can get him to talk to me off the record, give me results before he writes up the final report, speculate about stuff that he can’t put into writing. I thought he’d at least get me a copy of the report. No way. He made a big deal out of showing me there was no report, made it clear I shouldn’t ask for any favors on this one.”

“Same pathologist Del spoke to?”

“No. That was Itatani. I talked to him first, and it was the same thing. The fix has come down hard and heavy on this one. I confess to being intrigued.”

“Maybe it wasn’t suicide.”

“Any reason to think that?”

“She made lots of people angry.”

“Such as?”

I told him about the patient seductions, keeping Leslie Weingarden’s name out of it.

“Beautiful, Alex. Why didn’t you let me know about this in the first place?”

“Confidential source. I can’t give you any more details.”

“Jesus.” He got up, walked around, sat back down. “You ask me to dig you a hole, but won’t give me a shovel. Jesus, Alex.” He went to get another beer. “It’s bad enough being back in Realityville, without spinning my wheels all day.”

“I didn’t mean to send you on a wild-goose chase.”

“Honk honk.”

Then he waved his hand. “Nah, who am I kidding- I didn’t do it for you. I did it for myself. Trapp. And I still don’t think there’s any big whodunit here. Ransom killed herself. She was a maladjust- what you just told me corroborates that.”

Out on the ledge. I nodded. “Find out anything about the twin sister?”

“Nada. Another phantom. No Shirlee Ransom in any of our files or anyone else’s. If you came up with the name of that hospital you saw her at, we could search the business transfer and bankruptcy files. But even then, tracing individual patients would be a very long shot.”

“I can’t come up with it, because I never knew it, Milo. What about checking the Medi-Cal files?”

“You said Ransom was rich. Why would her sister be on Medi-Cal?”

“The parents were rich, but that was years ago. Money runs out. Also…”

“Also,” he said, “with all the lying she did, you don’t know what to believe.”

I nodded.

“Lie she did, pal. Like about owning the Jalmia house. The place is deeded to a corporation, just like the real estate agent said. A management company named Western Properties that’s owned by a holding company that’s owned by a savings-and-loan that’s owned by the Magna Corporation. I think that’s where it ends, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“Magna,” I said. “Isn’t that Leland Belding’s company?”

“Was till he died. No idea who owns it now.” He drank beer. “The old basket-case billionaire himself. Now a guy like that you could see putting on a big fix. But he’s been buried for… what? Fifteen years?”

“Something like that. Wasn’t his death disputed?”

“By who? The guy who wrote that hoax book? He killed himself after they exposed it, which is a pretty good indication he had something to be ashamed of. Even the conspiracy freaks didn’t believe that one. Anyway, whoever owns it, the corporation lives on- clerk told me it’s one of the biggest landowners west of the Mississippi, thousands of parcels. Ransom’s house happened to be one of them. With that kind of landlord, you can see why there’d be a quick sale.”

He finished his beer, got up to get a third.

“How’s your liver?” I asked.

“Peachy. Mom.” He made a point of guzzling. “Okay, so where were we? Magna, Medi-Cal files on the sister. All right, I guess it might be worth a try in terms of finding her, though I don’t know what the hell finding her’s going to tell us. How disabled was she?”

“Very.”

“Could she talk?”

“No.”

“Terrific.” He wiped foam from his lips. “I want to interview vegetables, I’ll go to a salad bar. What I am going to do is drive up Jalmia and talk to the neighbors. Maybe one of them phoned in the call, knows something about her.”

“About her and Trapp?”

“That would be nice.”

He went into the living room, turned on the TV, put his feet up, and watched the evening news. Within moments he was asleep. And I was remembering a black-and-white snapshot and thinking, despite what he’d said, about Shirlee Ransom. I went into the library and called Olivia Brickerman.

“Hello, darling,” she said, “I just got in and started tending to Prince Albert.”

“If I’m catching you in the middle of something-”

“What? Prunes and oat bran is something? Just hold on one second and I’ll be with you.”

When she came back on the line, she said, “There, he’s taken care of for the evening.”

“How’s Al doing?”

“Still the life of the party.”

Her husband, a grandmaster and former chess editor for the Times, was a white-haired, white-bearded man who looked like an Old Testament prophet and had been known to go for days at a time without talking.

“I keep him around for torrid sex,” she said. “So, how are you, handsome?”

“Just fine, Olivia. How about yourself? Still enjoying the private sector?”

“Actually, right now I’m feeling pretty abandoned by the private sector. You remember how I got into this hotshot group, don’t you? My sister’s boy, Steve, the psychiatrist, wanted to rescue me from civil service hell and set me up as benefits coordinator? It was fine for a while, nothing too stimulating, but the pay was good, no winos vomiting all over my desk, and I could walk to the beach during lunch. Then, all of a sudden, Stevie takes a position at some drug-abuse hospital out in Utah. He got hooked on skiing; now it’s a religion with him. ‘Gotta go with the snow, Aunt Livvy.’ That’s an M.D. talking. Yale. The guy who replaced him is a real yutz, very cold, thinks social workers are a notch below secretaries. We’re already having friction. So if you hear I’ve retired permanently, don’t be surprised. Enough about me. How’ve you been?”

“Fine.”

“How’s Robin?”

“Terrific,” I said. “Keeping busy.”

“I’m waiting for an invitation, Alex.”

“One of these days.”

“One of these days, eh? Just make sure you tie the knot while I’m still functioning and can enjoy it. Want to hear a terrible joke? What’s the good thing about Alzheimer’s disease?”

“What?”

“You get to meet new people every day. Isn’t that terrible? The yutz told it to me. You think there was an underlying message?”