Ah.'
'Too abstract?' he said. 'Do you get a porno connotation?'
'No, it's fine very L.A. Whose voice is on the message?'
'Rick's sister.'
'The dentist?'
'Yeah. Good pipes, huh?'
'Terrific. She sounds like Peggy Lee.'
'Gives you fever when she drills your molars.'
'When'd you go private?'
'Yeah, well, you know how it is-the lure of the dollar. Just a little moonlighting, actually. Long as the department keeps forcefeeding me tedium during the day, might as well get paid well for it on the off hours.'
'Not loving your computers yet?'
'Hey, I love em but they don't love me. Course, now they're saying the goddam things give off bad vibes- literally. Electromagnetic crap, probably slowly destroying this perfect body.' A burst of static washed over the tail end of the sentence.
'Where are you calling from?' I said.
'Car phone. Wrapping up a job.'
'Rick's car?'
'Mine. My phone too. It's a new age, Doctor. Rapid communication and even faster decay. Anyway, what's up?'
'I wanted to ask your advice on something-a case I'm working on-' 'Say no more-' 'I-' 'I mean it, Alex. Say. No. More. Cellular and privacy don't mix.
Anyone can listen in. Hold tight.'
He cut the line. My doorbell rang twenty minutes later.
'I was close,' he said, tramping into my kitchen. 'Wilshire near Barrington, paranoid lover surveillance.'
In his left hand was an LAPD note pad and a black mobile phone the size of a bar of soap. He was dressed for undercover work: navyblue Members Only jacket over a shirt of the same color, gray twill pants, brown desert boots. Maybe five pounds lighter than the last time I'd seen him but that still added up to at least 250 of them distributed unevenly over 75 inches: long thin legs, protruberant gut, jowls surrendering to gravity and crowding his collar.
His hair had been recently cut-clipped short at back and sides, left full at the top. The black thatch hanging over his forehead showed a few strands of white. His sideburns reached the bottom of his ear lobes, a good inch longer than department regulations-but that was the least of the department's problems with him.
Milo was oblivious to fashion. He'd had the same look since I'd known him. Now Melrose trendies were adopting it; I doubted he'd noticed.
His big, pockmarked face was night-shift pale. But his startling green eyes seemed clearer than usual.
He said, 'You look wired.'
Opening the refrigerator, he bypassed the bottles of Grolsch, removed an unopened quart jar of grapefruit juice, and uncapped it with a quick twist of two thick fingers.
I handed him a glass. He filled it, drained it, filled again and drank.
'Vitamin C, free enterprise, snappy-sounding business titleyou're moving too fast for me, Milo.'
Putting the glass down, he licked his lips. Actually,' he said 'Blue's an acronym. Big Lug's Uneasy Enterprise-Rick's idea of wit.
