In the car, I said, “Nice of you to run Halasz.”
“Did it for myself. Maybe I’d actually have a suspect. But should life be easy?” He started up the car. “So what do you think about Gurnsey’s choice in women?”
I said, “Cerillos and Blunt are highly educated and extremely bright. Other than that, it doesn’t seem as if he went for a type.”
“More like who he could pick up and put against a wall. You find Cerillos any more interesting than Blunt?”
I shook my head.
“Damn,” he said. “Great minds moving in the same futile direction. How about the fact that the other women dumped Gurnsey but Gurnsey dumped Cerillos?”
“She could’ve told us different,” I said. “Maybe some of the others did.”
“Making themselves look good. Good point. Unfortunately.”
He phoned Reed, told him to add the Proud Rooster to his canvass list.
Reed said, “Sure, it’s right on the way, just finished at Shutters and Loew’s. No one remembers Gurnsey. I also called a few animal shelters, see if anyone adopted two pit mixes. Waste of time, L.T. Pits and Chihuahuas make up a big proportion of roundups, we’re talking thousands of dogs. Record keeping is sketchy and we have no idea when these two dogs were actually acquired. Plus, they could’ve come from another source—puppy-milled, bred for fighting, bought in a parking lot.”
“A dog’s life,” said Milo.
“On the bright side, Sean had good luck with Roget’s phone records, they’re coming tomorrow.”
“Fingers crossed, Moses.”
“Speaking of crosses,” said Reed, “be nice to crucify this bastard.”
CHAPTER
18
We stopped for coffee at a diner on Moorpark near Fulton. Twenty-year-old retro refit of what had once been a chain restaurant. Two decades of paradigm shift made it an L.A. antiquity.
The place was thinly occupied and smelled of vintage grease. Pastries revolved in a slo-mo, sugar-flecked case. Milo glanced at them, contemplated, shook his head.
A middle-aged waitress in a too-tight brown dress came over smiling, took our coffee order, and straightened her lips when Milo said, “Just coffee.”
“We’ve got nice pies, boys.”
Milo glanced at the menu. “Okay, throw in a slice of your ‘famous berry-merry.’ ”
“There you go, bone-apperteet.”
“Is it really famous?”
“Sure,” she said. “Isn’t everything, nowadays?”
—
A copper-colored thermal pitcher, two mugs, and a wedge of pie bleeding crimson on two sides arrived moments later.
Milo’s fork descended like a hawk blitzing a nest of hatchlings. Half the pie vanished before he put it back down.
“Cerillos just put our working hypothesis into words: Gurnsey demeaned the wrong woman. Likely one who knew the Benedict house. But maybe not because she’d partied there, because she once owned it.”
“Mrs. Ansar?”
“Why not, Alex? Same scenario Joan Blunt described: cheating husband, nasty divorce, time for some fun. How about calling your judge buddy and finding out when Mrs. A. left the country.”
