Gloria called out his name. We approached her, tried to stand sufficiently back to avoid the wafting of death fumes.
“This was in his jacket, Milo. Upper inside pocket.”
She held out a matchbook, white cover, unmarked. The kind you get with cigarettes at the liquor store.
Milo said, “So he had a fuel source for his dope.”
Gloria opened the book. No matches left, just fuzzy stubs. Inside the book’s cover, someone had scrawled in blue ballpoint. Tiny, cramped cursive.
Milo put on reading glasses, gloved up, took the book.
I read over his shoulder.
Gloria said, “Can I theorize a little?”
“Sure.”
“If we’d found a gun, I’d look at this as maybe a suicide note. Seeing as it’s clearly a homicide, either your victim had remorse for something and wrote this himself or someone else thought he should pay for something.”
“Have you checked his other pockets yet?”
“Twice. I even looked in his underwear.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m dedicated up to a point. Any idea what Mr. Wedd could be guilty of?”
“Before this I had a few ideas.” He shook his head. “Anything else?”
“The driver’s-seat adjustment seems to roughly fit Wedd’s height, so either he was driving and moved to the passenger side or your offender’s around the same size. I guess the weed and the bong are meant to imply a drug party. But with no matches in the book or anywhere else, same for ashes or residue?”
“It looks staged to you?”
“That or there was an interruption before the party got going,” she said. “Was Wedd involved in that world?”
“Not that I know,” said Milo. “But I don’t know much, period.”
He stepped away from the stench. Gloria and I followed. She said, “I’ll do my best to rush DNA on the bag and the pipe, see if any chemistry other than his comes back. You saw those prints the techies pulled from the car. They’ve already gone to the lab, maybe you’ll get lucky.”
He said, “That’s my middle name.”
“Lucky?”
“Maybe.”
A tow truck arrived to hook up the SUV. Neighbors had begun to emerge and uniforms were doing their usual blank-faced centurion thing, easing concerned citizens away from the scene with no thought to reassurance.
Milo looked at the white-bagged body being gurneyed away. “Melvin, Melvin, Melvin, so now you’re another victim.” To me: “All those women he had coming in and out, there could be a horde of angry husbands, boyfriends.” Back at the corpse: “Thanks a bundle for your dissolute lifestyle, pal.”
I said, “You see Wedd getting into a car with an angry husband? Letting him drive?”
“Someone with a gun? Sure. Or the offender’s a jilted female, hell hath no fury and all that.”
“Tall girl.”
“Plenty of those in SoCal-what, you don’t like the jealousy angle?”
“It’s a common motive.”
“But you have a better idea.”
I told him my growing suspicions about Premadonny, leaving out the possibility of a violent child.
He said, “Creepy-World flourishes in Coldwater Canyon? What’s the motive for doing two, maybe three employees, Alex? They’re abusing their kids and bumping off the staff to keep them quiet?”
“Put that way, it sounds pretty weak.”
“No, no, I take every product of your fertile mind seriously, it just came out of left field. Okay, let me focus for a sec: They bug you because they isolate their kids. Maybe they got tired of the hustle, had enough dough, said screw it.”
I said, “That could be it.”
“But,” he said.
“No buts.”
Gathering the flesh above his nose with two fingers, he deepened the fissure that time and age had provided. “Dealing with suspects like that. God, I hope you’re wrong.”
“Forget I brought it up.”
His cell squawked Tchaikovsky. He said, “Okay, thanks,” dropped the phone back in his pocket. “Prints from two individuals in the car: Wedd’s and an unknown contributor with no match to AFIS. Unknown’s was on the driver’s side of the center console, Wedd’s showed up on the trunk latch and the interior of the trunk. To me that says our movie stars
“How so?”
“Someone at that level chauffeuring the help? More likely some disreputable who Wedd pissed off did this. Not that it makes a difference in terms of Adriana and the baby getting icier by the second.”
He left me standing there, headed toward the SUV, stopped, returned. “That canceled appointment, any hint about what kind of problem their kid was having?”
“The guy I spoke to wouldn’t even tell me which kid it was.”
“Okay, they’re weirdly secretive. Maybe shitty parents-no shock, given all the money, no one getting told no. But that’s a long way from linking them to my murders and I’ve still got Qeesha, a confirmed criminal and likely a killer herself. And Wedd, a guy who defrauded insurance, and Adriana, who might’ve had a secret life. Toss in ingredients like that and no telling what’ll cook up.”
I said, “Felony gumbo.”
“You figure I’m in denial. Hell, yeah, sure I am. But aren’t you the one says denial can be useful?”
“I love being quoted.”
“Hey,” he said, “it’s either you or the Bible and right now I’m not feeling sufficiently pious to invoke Scripture. C’mon, I’ll walk you to your car.”
CHAPTER 41
Obsessiveness and anxiety are traits that can clog up your life.
But the way I figure, they’ve got plenty of evolutionary value.
Think of cave-people surrounded by predators. Jumpy, annoyingly picky Oog sleeps fitfully because he’s mindful of creatures that roar in the night. More often than not, he wakes up with a dry mouth and a pounding heart.
Easygoing Moog, in contrast, sinks easily into beautiful dreams. One morning he fails to wake up at all because his heart’s been chewed to hamburger and the rest of his innards have been served up as steaming mounds of carnivore candy.
The blessing-curse of an overly developed attention span helped me escape a family situation that would’ve continued to damage me and might’ve ended up killing me. Since then, over-the-shoulder vigilance has saved my life more than once.
So I’ll sacrifice a bit of serenity.
Milo was right; denial could be the right way to go but this morning it felt wrong and I got home itching to focus.
An hour on the computer gave way to double that time on the phone. My pitch grew better with repeated use but it proved useless. Then I switched gears and everything fell into place.
By four p.m. I was dressed in a steel-gray Italian suit, open-necked white shirt, brown loafers, and hanging
