“If you were really the sensitive guy you claim to be, you would’ve lied.”

I said, “The St. Regis has butler service.”

“I’m weeping into my case stack. Which, currently, is low. Per an interdepartmental memo, we are now experiencing an official drop in crime.”

“Congratulations.”

“Not my doing. Probably karmic crystals or chanting or the moon in scorpio-squatting or the Great Baal of Randomness… what’s on your mind?”

I told him.

“That one,” he said. “You didn’t like working it.”

“It wasn’t fun.”

“Duchay give any hint what he wanted?”

“He sounded troubled.”

“He should be troubled. Eight years at the C.Y.A. for murdering a baby?”

“Any professional guesses about why he didn’t show?”

“Changed his mind, couldn’t get it together, who knows? He’s a lowlife, Alex. He was the stupid one, right?”

“Right.”

“So toss in a lousy attention span, or whatever label you guys are putting on it nowadays, in addition to his being a lowlife thrill-killer who’s been thoroughly criminalized after being locked up with gangbangers for eight years. How old is he, now?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Lowlife at the height of his criminal hormone overload,” he said. “I wouldn’t take any bets on his experiencing any serious personality enhancement. I’d also not take his calls, from now on. He’s probably more dangerous than he was eight years ago. Why get involved?”

“Looks like I’m not,” I said. “Though I didn’t pick up any threat or hostility over the phone. More like- ”

“He’s troubled, yeah, yeah. He calls you from Westwood, which isn’t that far from your place. Semi-illiterate but he managed to find your number.”

“He’d have no reason to resent me.”

Silence.

“The plan was to meet him away from my place,” I said.

“That’s a start.”

“I’m not minimizing what he did, Milo. He, himself, admitted hitting Kristal. But I always felt Troy Turner was the primary force behind the murder and Rand got caught up in the situation.”

“Put him in another situation and he’ll get caught up again.”

“I suppose.”

“Hey,” he said. “You called me, not another shrink. Meaning you were looking for hard truth, not empathy and understanding.”

“I don’t know what I was looking for.”

“You craved sage detective advice and Uncle Milo’s instinctual protective stance. Now that the former has been dispensed, I’ll do my best to provide the latter while you’re gallivanting up Fifth Avenue with a lovely lady on your arm.”

“That’s okay- ”

“Here’s the plan,” he said. “Though it falls well outside of my job description, I will drive by your house at least once a day, twice if I can swing it, pick up your paper and your mail, be on the lookout for shady characters lurking around the premises.”

“Gallivanting,” I said.

“You do know how to gallivant? Put one foot in front of the other… and just blow.”

At one p.m. he called back. “When were you planning to leave for New York?”

“Tomorrow morning. Why?”

“A body showed up last night in Bel Air, dumped in some bushes near the 405 North on-ramp. White male, young, six-two, two hundred, shot in the head, no wallet or I.D. But wadded down in the little front pocket of his jeans was a piece of paper. Greasy and frayed, like it had been pawed a lot. The writing, however, was still legible and guess what it was: your phone number.”

CHAPTER 12

I met Milo in his office on the second floor of the Westside sub station. It’s a windowless cell, formerly a utility closet, set away from the collaborative buzz of the big detective’s room. There’s barely room for a two-drawer desk, a file cabinet, a pair of folding chairs, and a senile computer. The station’s a no-smoking zone but sometimes Milo puffs panatelas, and the walls have yellowed and the air smells like a dozen old men.

He’s six-three, and when he pays attention to his diet, two-sixty. Hunched at the undersized desk, he’s a cartoon.

It’s a setup unbefitting a lieutenant, but he’s not the typical lieutenant, and he claims it’s fine with him. Maybe he means it, maybe having a second office helps- an Indian restaurant a few blocks away where the owners treat him like royalty.

The leap from Detective III to brass had resulted from leverage he’d never sought: ugly secrets unearthed about the former police chief.

The deal was that he’d get a lieutenant’s salary, avoid the executive obligations that normally went with the job, and be allowed to work cases. As long as he functioned solo and stayed out of everyone’s hair.

That chief was gone and the new one seemed intent on shaking things up. But so far Milo’s situation had escaped scrutiny. If the current regime was as results-oriented as it claimed, maybe his solve rate would afford him some grace.

Or maybe not. A gay cop was no longer the official impossibility it had been when he’d joined the force, but he’d broken ground during colder times and would never fit in.

His door was open and he was reading a preliminary investigation report. His black hair needed a trim, cowlicks reigning, the white sideburns he called his skunk stripes bushing and trailing a half inch below his earlobes.

A spruce-green sport coat hung from the back of his chair and puddled onto the floor. His short-sleeved white shirt looked defeated, his skinny yellow tie could’ve passed for a mustard stain. Gray cords and tan desert boots topped off the ensemble. The unshielded ceiling bulb was vaguely pink and graced his acne-pitted cheeks with a phony sunburn.

He hooked a thumb at the spare chair and I unfolded it and sat. He handed me the prelim and some crime scene photos.

The report was the usual detached affair, recorded on the scene by Detective I S. J. Binchy. Sean was a former bass player in a ska band turned born-again Christian, a compliant kid who Milo sometimes enlisted for grunt work.

Nice kid, decent speller. The only new thing I learned was that a freeway cleanup crew had found the body at four-fourteen a.m.

The first photo was a frontal of the corpse, lying on its back, face up, as the coroner’s photographer click-clicked from above.

Night-bleached face, hard to make out details. A close-up shot showed the gaping mouth and half-closed eyes I’d seen so many times before. Hollowness behind the irises. The right cheek was slightly convex, but it wasn’t the distortion you’d see with a small-caliber bullet dancing around in the head.

A pair of lateral views revealed a dark, star-shaped entry wound, surrounded by a black halo of powder, just in front of the left ear, and a ragged exit, much larger and slightly higher on the right temple, that showcased bone and red-meat muscle and the oatmeal of brain matter.

I said, “Through-and-through shot.”

“Coroner thinks contact shot, or just short of contact, full metal jacket, no larger than a thirty-eight, no supplementary load.”

His voice was remote. Keeping his distance from this victim.

The next photo was a close-up. “What about these cheek abrasions?”

“He was found lying on his face, maybe he got dragged a bit during the dump. No defense wounds or tissue under his nails or any other signs of struggle. No major blood at the scene, so he was shot somewhere else.”

“He’s big,” I said. “So if there was no struggle, he was probably taken by surprise.”

“I’d ask if you recognize him, but we just got word from AFIS. The prints confirm it’s Duchay.”

I reviewed the pictures, tried to look past damage and death. Rand Duchay’s boyhood facial structure had been transformed by puberty into something longer and harder. His hair was darker than I remembered but that could’ve been the lighting. In life, he’d been a slow kid, with slack features. Death hadn’t changed that, but death has a way of blunting everyone around the edges. Would I have recognized him if we’d passed on the street?