“Are you asking out of personal interest, Lamont, or on behalf of your boss?”

“Mr. Carlisle has no idea I’m even talking to you, Mr. Logan. I consider him and his daughter family. I’m just trying to help.”

“The police are looking into it,” is all I said.

“Would you know whether they’ve ruled out Mr. Carlisle or Mr. Zambelli as a suspect?”

“They haven’t ruled out anyone at this point, so far as I know.”

“OK, well, whatever. I just thought I’d ask. Like I said, I’m just trying to help, that’s all.”

My phone chirped — a text message from Micah Echevarria. It said, “kneed too talk ASAP.” Proper grammar. The first casualty of the Digital Revolution.

Royale promised to let me know if he came up with any other information. He started to tell me how generous Carlisle had been to him, how he’d saved him from a life on the streets, when we were disconnected. Unreliable cell phone reception. The second casualty of the Digital Revolution.

I returned Micah Echevarria’s text message with a phone call.

“The fucking LAPD’s saying I shot my own father!” he shouted over the phone. “Some detective named Czarnek. I already told them I was in school that night, but he says everybody they’ve talked to was too wasted to remember me being there. It’s fucking bullshit, man!”

“Why tell me all this? I’m the guy you told to go perform a particular carnal act on himself, which, by the way, I’m fairly sure is impossible.”

“Look, I’m sorry, OK? I was pissed. You jumped me and choked me out. What was I supposed to say?”

Micah Echevarria said he’d had time to reflect. We’d watched meerkats on TV together. He liked meerkats. I seemed to as well. Perhaps it was possible that I wasn’t the complete turd he thought I was upon first impression.

“Anybody who likes animal shows can’t be all bad,” he said.

“My cat loves animal shows and he’s beyond bad.”

“Yeah, but he’s just a cat.”

“Good luck telling him that. He thinks it’s his world; we all just live in it.”

“I need you to talk to the cops. Get ’em off my fuckin’ back.”

“They say they have witnesses who saw you at your dad’s place the night before he was shot.”

The kid cleared his throat. “So what? Don’t mean I fucking shot him.”

“You said you hadn’t seen him in a long time. You lied to me.”

“I lied because you came fucking busting into my house! Plus, you said you and my old man were friends. What was I supposed to do? Give you a fucking hug? He abandoned us, OK? He abandoned my mom.”

I told him that I’d seen the clip he’d posted on YouTube. His poem about Echevarria struck me as heartfelt, I said.

“So you’ll tell the cops I didn’t do it?”

“You drove all the way down from Oakland to LA to see your father the night before he died. I need to know why.”

“I wanted to talk to him about a business proposition.”

“What kind of proposition?”

“Are you gonna help me or not?”

“What kind of business proposition?”

He blew some air. I waited.

“A weed dispensary,” Micah said.

“You wanted your father to bankroll a pot shop?”

“For medical purposes. Dude, it’s perfectly legal. Prime location, low overhead. You can make serious bank. He was good for it. He had the coin. That fine bitch he hooked up with after he dumped my mom, she was fucking rich, man. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He said it was a stupid idea.”

I toyed with the notion of setting the kid straight — that “fine bitch” who married his father used to be married to me — but what would’ve been the point?

“So you argued with your father,” I said.

“Yeah, we argued. But that don’t mean I capped him. He told me go talk to my mother if I wanted money. I told him I already did. She thought it was a stupid idea, too. For once, they agreed on something. He tells me I need to get a job, go work for a living for once in my life. Same thing she said. I told him he could go eat his fuckin’ money and rode back up to Oakland. Couple days later, my mother calls and tells me he got shot. I fucking partied all night, man.”

I could hear a diesel engine behind him, revving, and the hiss of air brakes. He was outside a truck stop somewhere. I asked where he was calling from. He said Nevada.

I glanced up in my rearview mirror. A small white car was coming up fast in the left lane. A Honda. With a rear spoiler.

“If you’re innocent, why are you running?”

“I ain’t running,” he said. “I just don’t want to be trying to clear my name from inside a jail cell, that’s all.”

“No such word as ain’t,” I said. “Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

I set the phone down on the center console and watched the Honda converge. Adrenaline sluiced through my veins, a metallic taste on the edges of my tongue. I reached under the driver’s seat where I’d stashed my revolver and wedged it for quick access between my right thigh and the seat cushion. I needn’t have bothered. The white car whizzed past me — a Honda with a yellow Lab riding right seat. The dog yawned as he motored by. I grabbed up the phone. By what manner, I asked Micah Echevarria, did he propose that I get the police off his back?

“My old man said something that night I went to see him,” Arlo’s son said, “something I didn’t tell the cops.”

I waited.

“He said a friend of his got killed. Some guy he used to work with.”

“I need a name, Micah.”

“He didn’t say a name. The guy was from Arizona somewhere. That’s all he said.”

“Did your father mention anybody named Bondarenko?”

“No.”

“What about a guy named Pavel Tarasov?”

“He didn’t talk names, OK? Just that some friend got killed. He said he couldn’t give me any money because he had to pay for a plane ticket to the funeral. But, see, what I’m saying is, if his friend gets killed, then he gets killed, it ain’t me doing ’em both, you know what I’m saying? It’s more like a, you know, one of those things. What do you call it?”

“A conspiracy.”

“A conspiracy. Exactly.”

I told him I’d talk to the police and see what I could do.

It was hard for Micah Echevarria to say thank you. He did anyway.

SEVENTEEN

I washed out the petrified Tuna Feast in gravy that Kiddiot refused to eat while I was away and refilled his dish with Chicken Feast in gravy, the last can of cat food I had in the house. I knew he wouldn’t eat that, either. I wish I could say that his refusing to eat, like other cats, was his way of punishing me for my having left him alone, but I knew him better than that. I was barely a blip on Kiddiot’s feline radar. He watched me refill his water bowl, flicked his tail a couple of times, and left.

Buzz was working on a plate of lasagna when I phoned him at his home in suburban Maryland. He excused himself from the dinner table and took the call outside.

“This better be important,” he said. “I’m freezing my ass off out here. My goddamn testicles have shrunk up so much, they’re now ovaries.”

I asked him if he’d heard of any other former members of Alpha aside from Echevarria who had died in recent months under mysterious circumstances. I told him what Micah Echevarria had said about his father planning to attend the funeral in Arizona. Buzz drew a blank.

“Could’ve been the funeral of somebody he knew before he went to Alpha,” Buzz said.

“Possibly.”

Buzz said he’d call around and see what he could find out. His teeth were chattering audibly. I urged him to go back inside before he froze to death. He asked me what the weather was like in California. I told him he didn’t want to know.

“It’s, like, fifty below zero out here,” Buzz said. “My next door neighbor’s a vice cop. He said the hookers downtown are charging twenty bucks just to blow on your hands.”

I needed cat food and craved a cold beer. Not drinking anymore totally sucked.