“He buy ice cream and want me to put it under counter? Ice cream melt under counter.”

“The freezer. Whatever. I’m just saying.”

Kang shifted his eye slits back to the druggie, who was getting a little too intimate with a twelve-pack of Ding Dongs.

“You gonna buy those or have-a-sex with them?”

The tweaker looked over at the no-nonsense Korean shopkeeper and the no-nonsense bulge under Windhauser’s sport coat, and wisely returned the Ding Dongs to the shelf.

“Ice cream in a bag, under a-da counter,” Kang said to Windhauser, still watching the crank head. “You fuckin’ crazy, man.”

“Look,” Windhauser said, “you need to understand something here, chief. We’re conducting a homicide investigation. Let me repeat that: a homicide investigation, OK? I find out you’re providing false and misleading information, you’re on the first sampan back to Peking.”

Kang slowly shifted both eye slits back toward Windhauser like the battleship Missouri bringing all guns to bear.

“I’m Korean-American,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of my store, chief.”

The detectives drove me the two blocks home. Windhauser said he still harbored suspicions, but conceded that there was no evidence to keep me in custody. Czarnek said he hoped there were no hard feelings and shook my hand. I offered to take them both sightseeing in my airplane. Forgive and forget, I always say. Well, maybe not always. Czarnek said he’d definitely think about it and gave me my gun back. Windhauser said nothing.

I returned Lamont Royale’s call the next morning and got his voice mail. If he had any insights as to who killed Echevarria, I told him, I was all ears. My next call was to Detective Czarnek. I asked him to fax me a copy of Echevarria’s autopsy report.

“I can’t do that,” Czarnek said.

“Sure you can. All you do is put some paper in the machine and hit send.”

“I’d have to clear it with my supervisor, and I don’t think he’d go for it.”

“I’m trying to help you, Detective.”

Czarnek exhaled. “I know.”

Kiddiot sat in front of his cat door and looked at it like he’d never seen it before, yowling mournfully to be let out. No use arguing with an animal that dumb. I opened the people door. He sauntered past my feet and into the backyard like he was the one doing me a big favor.

I asked Czarnek if the LAPD had any other suspects in the case. He cleared his throat and lowered his voice.

“You were it,” he said.

I could hear Windhauser’s voice in the background. He was bitching to someone about how much he’d been ripped off for termite repairs on his house.

“How many other homicides you guys working?” I asked Czarnek.

“I don’t even fucking know at this point,” the detective said. “Gangs are keeping us crazy busy right now. Big turf war going on. Pacoima Flats and Paxton Street Locos. Little punks. I’d like to take a bazooka to all of ’em.”

“I know a couple of places where you could pick one up cheap.”

“That story you rattled off at lunch the other day,” Czarnek said, “about you and Echevarria doing the Lord’s work. That true?”

“Well, if it wasn’t, it ought to be.”

There was a pause like he was thinking about it. Then he said, “Gimme your fax number.”

I had no fax number. Mainly because I had no fax machine. Couldn’t afford one. I gave Czarnek the number to Larry’s machine in the hangar instead.

Larry’s fax machine was broken. Something about the feeder mechanism. Every incoming page looked like it had gone through an accordion, then splotched black. Larry said he’d been intending to get the piece of crap fixed but lacked the necessary funds. Now that I’d finally paid him what I owed him in back rent, he could send it out for repair.

“I’ll get to it next week,” he said, bent over his workbench, tinkering with a troublesome magneto.

I called Czarnek back, told him my machine was on the fritz, and gave him the number for my “other fax.” I didn’t tell him I happened to share it with Kinko’s.

The seven-page report was waiting for me by the time I drove downtown to the copy shop a half-hour later. Czarnek had also faxed a copy of the LAPD’s preliminary investigation of Echevarria’s homicide, including witness statements.

“Interesting reading,” the clerk said.

“Only if you like blood and gore,” I said.

She was maybe twenty-two, not unattractive in an underfed, nose ring, urban grunge kind of way. “I’m totally into blood and gore,” she said. “Seriously, I would kill to work for CSI.” She slid the faxed pages into a flat paper bag. “You know where else I’d like to work? Caltrans. Picking up road kill. Would that be a great job or what?”

“‘Enjoys scraping dead animals off the freeway.’ I’ve heard that’s one of eHarmony’s twenty-nine dimensions of compatibility.”

She smiled. “With tax, it comes to nineteen dollars and thirtyone cents.”

I gave her a twenty and she handed me my change, accidentally dropping a quarter on the floor.

“Oops. Sorry about that.” Her Kinko’s polo shirt hiked a few inches above her waistline as she stooped to pick up the coin, exposing what looked like a bowl of fruit inked across the small of her back.

They must’ve passed some new law. Every woman in California under the age of twenty-five is now required to visit her local tattoo parlor so that some sleazoid can etch a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling just north of her butt crack and call it art.

Like a bumper sticker on a Bentley, I thought, trying not to stare.

She handed me the quarter and my receipt. I said I’d let her know if I heard about any vacancies in the field of dead animal retrieval. She thanked me like she meant it.

A block down the street was a coffee shop. The barista working the counter was all pimples and puka necklace. I ordered a cup of black coffee to go. Not a grande Chai Creme Frappuccino. Not a skinny Caramel Macchiato with soy milk. A cup of coffee. Black. To go. The extraordinarily unusual nature of my order seemed to throw him.

“That’s a first,” he said. “Could I get a name?”

“Lord Emilio Fishbinder, member of Parliament.”

He scrawled something with a Sharpie on a wax paper cup and said, “Next in line.”

I waited. The place featured the usual collection of office workers reluctant to return to their desks, college girls commiserating about their loser boyfriends, and a paunchy Hemingway wannabe pecking away on his laptop, trying hard to appear deep in creative thought.

“Order ready for Lord Emilio.”

I fetched my coffee, sat down at a table outside and read Arlo Echevarria’s autopsy report.

If it’s true what your mother says, that it’s all about what a person is inside, then Arlo Echevarria was a human garbage disposal. Among the approximately 500 milliliters of partially digested contents found in his stomach, the coroner identified tortillas chips, a hot dog, peanuts, barbequed chicken, bamboo shoots, penne pasta with spinach, white rice, and what appeared to be either a Milky Way or Snickers candy bar. His blood-alcohol content registered.07 percent. No narcotics were found in his system. The autopsy also revealed that Echevarria had gone through life with an undescended testicle. Who knew?

The bullet that most likely killed him entered his body slightly above his nipples, fifteen inches below the top of his head and left of his midline. It ripped through the second intercostal space, shredded the lateral edge of his sternum, perforated the arch of his aorta, deflected one and a half inches at the junction of his left subclavian and left common carotid arteries, then punched through the upper lobe of his left lung and fractured the left aspect of his third thoracic vertebra before exiting the middle of his upper back. There was abundant gunpowder stippling around the entry wound, as well as stippling around the other two wounds to Echevarria’s torso. This meant that all three shots had been fired at a distance close enough to singe his skin through his T-shirt. Bullet fragments recovered during the autopsy were consistent with a Smith & Wesson .40-caliber, 165-grain, copper-jacketed round.