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“Getting off easy by doling out cash? Okay, could be. You see it as relating to her murder?”
I said, “Just thinking out loud.”
The light changed. He crossed Santa Monica, turned left to Comstock, continued north grinning. “Hey, I can get symbolic, too. Ready for some Dr. Milo?”
“Go for it.”
“Maybe when Blanding told us he didn’t love her, that was code for ‘I didn’t have sex with her.’ ”
I said, “He really twangs your antenna affair-wise.”
“Too-good-to-be-truetwangs my antenna,” he said. “On top of that, I’m trying to stay in practice.”
“How so?”
“Thinking the worst of everybody.”
He drove to Wilshire, hit another red. “By the way, the crypt did manage to roll prints from the poor guy on the sofa. No match anywhere, which is why I forgot to mention it.”
I said, “Maybe Missing Persons can tell you something.”
He said, “Called the West L.A. D but nothing fits. When I have time to go through all those faces, I’ll go online.”
“When are Alicia and Sean coming back?”
“Who the hell knows? I’m not into helicopter parenting.”
At the green, he lurched forward.
In one of those moods, when nothing but negativity would do. As long as that was the case…
I said, “Cordi’s phone listings were all business. The neighbor reports people coming in and out so she had to make appointments. Where’s the record of all those contacts?”
Silence. “Maybe she booked on her computer—if no one messed with it, the lab will tell me.”
“Or there’s another phone.”
“Or that.” He gripped the wheel, big hands tight, mottled like lunch meat. “Jesus, why didn’t I get curious about that? I’m slipping, amigo?”
“No one can think of everything.”
He looked at me. “What’s that, supportive therapy?”
I smiled.
He said, “Jesus, your brain’s like a sponge. Yet another reason to have you ride shotgun.”
—
He drove west on Wilshire, through the immaculate canyon created by high-rises lining both sides of the boulevard.
As he approached Beverly Glen, I said, “We could talk to that neighbor again and try to get more details about the visitors. How they showed up, maybe physical descriptions. You could show him photos of Hoffgarden and Blanding.”
“Reinterview Scrooge.” He phoned Reed again, got the neighbor’s name.
“Rainer Gibbs, might as well. When do you wanna do it?”
“I’m free right now if you are.”
