that, he needed a quick, dramatic result.”
“Look what I did for you, Little Buddy,” said Petra.
“There was also time pressure: Shacker was elderly and he’d just been fired, meaning he would’ve left town. So Pitty reverted to something that had worked for him a few months before.”
“Poisoning, as in Eccles’s lady friend,” said Petra. “Two people drop dead within moments of leaving the hospital. What kind of poison could be calibrated that precisely?”
I said, “It wouldn’t have to be poison, per se. With a man of Shacker’s age and dietary habits, a huge dose of a strong heart stimulant could do the trick. As an alcoholic and a cocaine abuser, Eccles’s wife would also be vulnerable to cardiac insult.”
Milo said, “No poison, per se, means nothing on the tox screen.”
He got up, paced, tugged an earlobe. “Everything you’re saying makes sense, Alex, but unless one of these two monsters confesses, I don’t see Mentor going down for anything other than I.D. theft and practicing without a license. And Men tee could get away clean. He’s left no trace evidence and all we have on him are ambiguous sightings and a V-sign he shot to John Banforth that could be interpreted any number of ways.”
I said, “Find them and separate them. Huggler could be crackable.”
“Your mouth FedExed to God’s ears,” said Petra. “I’ve got another timing issue: If Pitty got slimed one too many times by Eccles and took it out on Eccles’s wife, why wait all these years to get the slimer himself?”
“Maybe he figured he’d get more immediate pleasure from watching Eccles suffer than from dispatching him. From having Eccles know what had happened and being powerless to do anything about it.”
Milo said, “Who the hell’s gonna pay attention to some lunatic’s ravings?”
I said, “Pitty could’ve planned to do Eccles after Eccles was discharged but Eccles went underground and Pitty couldn’t find him. As to why didn’t Eccles try to get back at Pitty, maybe his mental illness got in the way-too disturbed and scattered to devise a plan.”
“Or,” said Petra, “he was scared and got the heck out of Dodge.”
Milo said, “Then Pitty just happens to spot Eccles years later in Hollyweird?”
I said, “It’s not that big a coincidence. You’ve got a tip placing Huggler at a Hollywood clinic. The neighborhood’s a magnet for drifters and short-term residents. With Shacker renting a Beverly Hills office, I’ve been figuring him for a nice crib. But maybe he economizes in order to afford that office and he and Huggler are bunking in some pay-by-the-week.”
“On my turf,” said Petra. “Thrilling.”
Milo said, “We could write screenplays all night but at this point we don’t even know if Huggler was actually transferred to Atascadero, let alone Pitty or whatever his name is moving to be with him. So let’s stake out this fake shrink, nab him on I.D. theft, and see what shakes out. B.H. business district is small, we’ll need to be subtle, meaning more sets of eyes, extra-low profile. I’m gonna have Moe and Sean with me and whoever B.H. wants to send, assuming they cooperate. Wouldn’t mind Raul, either, if it’s okay with you.”
Petra made the call. “Done.”
I said, “Did you manage to get hold of Eccles’s last arrest report?”
“Sure did and the complainant wasn’t named Pitty or close. Something Stewart.”
“What’d he list for an address?”
“You really think he could be Pitty?”
“Something about him got Eccles hyped up.”
Back to her iPhone. “Mr. Loyal Steward. With a d.” She read off a phone number and a street address and her eyes got tight. “Main Street, City of Ventura. That’s commercial, isn’t it?”
“It’s also two towns north of Camarillo.”
Her aerial GPS confirmed it. “Big old parking lot, guys.”
She checked the phone number Loyal Steward had given to the arresting officers. Inactive, and a call to the phone company revealed it had never been in use.
“Loyal Steward,” said Milo. “That’s gotta be phony.”
I said, “It’s not a name. It’s how he sees himself.”
CHAPTER
33
Milo played database piano on my computer with the grim concentration of a lonely kid at an arcade.
No residential listings, driver’s license, or criminal record for Loyal Steward.
He said, “Big surprise,” and called Deputy Chief Maria Thomas. She was miffed about being interrupted at home and balked at disturbing the chief. Milo began with tact, eased into bland persistence, ended up with barely veiled menace. Like a lot of bureaucrats, she had a weak will when confronted with dedication.
Within minutes, the chief had phoned Milo and Milo was doing a lot of blank-faced listening. Soon after, a senior Beverly Hills detective named Eaton rang in.
Milo started to explain.
Eaton said, “It came straight from my boss, like I’m gonna say no?”
When Milo hung up, Petra said, “Maybe one day I can be a loo- tenant.”
“That’s like wishing for wrinkles, kid.”
Six the following morning found eight people surveilling the office building on Bedford Drive where a yet-to- be-identified man pretended to be Dr. Bernhard Shacker. Downtown Beverly Hills was yawning itself awake, vanilla swirls of daylight scratching their way through a gray-satin sky. A few delivery trucks rumbled by. But for a scatter of joggers and put-upon citizens ruled by the intestinal tracts of fluffy dogs, the sidewalks were bare.
BHPD knew the building, couldn’t recall a problem there since three years ago when a plastic surgeon and his wife had been hauled off for mutual domestic violence.
“They start whaling on each other in the waiting room,” said B.H. detective Roland Munoz. “Anorexic women with stitched-up faces are sitting there, freaking out.”
An hour into the watch, a custodian unlocked the building’s brass front doors. Tenants had keys and the alarm code and could come and go 24/7 but none had appeared after nine the night before when Munoz and Detective Richard Eaton had earned overtime watching the last trickle of weary health-care providers, none of them Shacker, exiting. Between nine and this morning, hourly drive-bys by B.H. patrol cars had spotted no activity in or around the structure. Not an ironclad assurance, but confidence was high that the identity thief had yet to appear.
The rear alley door was also key-operated and Sean Binchy watched it from the front seat of a borrowed Con Edison van, accompanied by Munoz, a jovial man whose mood was even rosier because he’d rather be doing this than responding to false intruder calls phoned in by hysterical rich people. Lost cats, too; last week a woman on North Linden Drive had 911’d on “Melissa.” Making her sound like a human in jeopardy, not an Angora up a tree.
The building offered no on-site parking but doctors and their staffs got a discount at the private pay facility two doors south that opened at six thirty. This early, plenty of metered street parking remained available but only seven vehicles had seized the opportunity. Milo ran the tags. Nothing interesting.
He and I were stationed on the east side of Bedford Drive, twenty yards north of the brass doors, in a silver, black-windowed Mercedes 500 that he’d borrowed from the LAPD confiscation lot. The former owner was an Ecstasy dealer from Torrance. The interior was spotless black calfskin, the brightwork polished steel, the white bunny-rabbit headliner and matching carpeting sucked free of lint. A strong shampoo fragrance lingered, mixed in with the smell of honey-roasted peanuts.
Milo had told me to “dress B.H.”
“Meaning?”
“Knock yourself out so you blend in with the hoohahs.”
The best I could come up with was jeans and a gray wool pullover emblazoned with an Italian designer’s surname. The sweater was a ten-year-old gift from the sister I never saw. Other people’s names on my clothing
