I phoned a West Hollywood number. A sultry female voice said, “You’ve reached Blue Investigations. Our office is closed. If you wish to leave a nonemergency message, do so after the first tone. In an emergency, wait until two tones have sounded.”
After the second beep, I said, “It’s Alex, Milo. Call me at home,” and picked up my guitar again.
I’d played ten bars of “Windy and Warm” when the phone rang.
A voice that sounded far away said, “What’s the emergency, pal?”
“Blue Investigations?”
“As in cop.”
“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 force-feeding 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: navy-blue 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 title — you’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. Though I admit it was accurate at the time — jumping into the private sector wasn’t exactly your smooth transition. But I’m glad I did it, because of the bread. I’ve become serious about financial security in my old age.”
“What do you charge?”
“Fifty to eighty per hour, depending. Not as good as a shrink, but I’m not complaining. City wants to waste what it taught me, have me sit in front of a screen all day, it’s their loss. By night, I’m getting my detective exercise.”
“Any interesting cases?”
“Nah, mostly petty bullshit surveillance to keep the paranoids happy. But at least it gets me out on the street.”
He poured more juice and drank. “I don’t know how long I can take it — the day job.”
He rubbed his face, as if washing without water. Suddenly, he looked worn, stripped of entrepreneurial cheer.
I thought of all he’d been through during the last year. Breaking the jaw of a superior who’d put his life in danger. Doing it on live television. The police department settling with him because going public could have proved embarrassing. No charges pressed, six months’ unpaid leave, then a return to West L.A. Robbery/Homicide with a one-notch demotion to Detective II. Finding out, six months later, that no detective jobs were open at West L.A., or any other division, due to “unforeseen” budget cuts.
They shunted him — “temporarily” — to a data-processing job at Parker Center, where he was put under the tutelage of a flagrantly effeminate civilian instructor and taught how to play with computers. The department’s not-so-subtle reminder that assault was one thing, but what he did in bed was neither forgotten nor forgiven.
“Still thinking of going to court?” I said.
“I don’t know. Rick wants me to fight to the death. Says the way they reneged proves they’ll never give me a break. But I know if I take it to court, that’s it for me in the department. Even if I win.”
He removed his jacket and tossed it on the counter. “Enough bullshit self-pity. What can I do for you?”
I told him about Cassie Jones, gave him a mini-lecture on Munchausen syndrome. He drank and made no comment. Looked almost as if he were tuning out.
I said, “Have you heard of this before?”
“No. Why?”
“Most people react a little more strongly.”
“Just taking it all in... Actually, it reminded me of something. Several years ago. There was this guy came into the E.R. at Cedars. Bleeding ulcer. Rick saw him, asked him about stress. Guy says he’s been hitting the bottle very heavy ’cause he’s guilty about being a murderer and getting away with it. Seems he’d been with a call girl, gotten mad and cut her up. Badly — real psycho slasher thing. Rick nodded and said uh-huh; then he got the hell out of there and called Security — then me. The murder had taken place in Westwood. At the time I was in a car with Del Hardy, working on some robberies over in Pico-Robertson, and the two of us bopped over right away, Mirandized him, and listened to what he had to say.
“The turkey was overjoyed to see us. Vomiting out details like we were his salvation. Names, addresses, dates, weapon. He denied any other murders and came up clean for wants and warrants. A real middle-of-the-road type of guy, even owned his own business — carpet cleaning, I think. We booked him, had him repeat his confession on tape, and figured we’d picked up a dream solve. Then we proceeded to round up verifying details and found nothing. No crime, no physical evidence of any murder at that particular date and place; no hooker had ever lived at that address or anywhere nearby. No hooker fitting the name and description he’d given us had ever existed anywhere in L.A. So we checked unidentified victims, but none of the Jane Does in the morgue fit, and no moniker in Vice’s files matched the one he said his girl used. We even ran checks in other cities, contacted the FBI, figuring maybe he got disoriented — some kind of psycho thing — and mixed up his locale. He kept insisting it had happened exactly the way he was telling it. Kept saying he wanted to be punished.