Logging off, I returned to the bedroom and managed to get back in bed without evoking more than a sweet purr from Robin.
I kissed her hair and fell back asleep quickly.
—
The following morning was taken up by patients. It was twelve thirty when I checked for messages. Milo had called me at eleven.
He answered his office phone. “Nothing iffy in Mrs. Boykins’s past.”
I said, “On the surface.”
“What does that mean?”
I described Kiki Boykins’s posts.
He said, “She loves her kid. So what?”
“Her only child with a high IQ, suffering from some sort of illness that keeps her home? It was serious enough for her to offer a prayer note when she was in Israel. Maybe that’s why she went in the first place. We’re talking a vulnerable young girl who Parmenter threatened not very subtly. The other thing is, Kiki travels a lot, which could expand her opportunity to find a skilled shooter.”
Silence.
I said, “You think I’m making too much of it.”
“I’m thinking what Nguyen would say if I asked for a warrant based on someone being a good parent. Where else does Kiki do all this travel?”
I recited a few locales.
He said, “Globe-trotting like a proper rich woman. Nice spas and boutiques and she works in a meeting with some International Man of Intrigue? Forget the local hypothesis?”
“Fine,” I said, “forget double-oh seven but the threat posed by Parmenter to Keisha was still real.”
“Only child…so maybe Mama—or sheandDaddy—are into crime prevention. Which is what I’ve been saying from the beginning. Have to tell you, can’t say I’d blame them, those lyrics wereugly.But it still doesn’t change the warrant situation, Alex. It was all I could do to get an okay on Boykins’s money paper and that was mostly based on his criminal record. And it’s still not yielding anything. So where the hell do I take it?”
I had no answer for that and kept silent.
He said, “I was afraid you’d say that.”
Chapter
27
Robin was busy in her shop but my workday had ended. Nothing like free time to make you antsy.
I tried to tolerate the quiet, failed, left the house and got into the Seville.
The drive from the Glen into the flats of Beverly Hills was smooth and pretty. At North Bedford Drive, I hooked a right off Sunset and cruised two and a half blocks to Gerald and Kiki Boykins’s impeccable Tudor.
As before, the gates were closed. Unlike before, Walt Swanson’s orange Camaro was gone, replaced by a black Mustang GT. And a different guard.
Swanson had preferred sitting in his car. This guy had positioned himself in front of the house’s main door, face impassive, arms folded across his chest. Pink face but everything else black. Black suit, black shirt, black shoes, black crew cut, clipped black beard, black sunglasses.
Bigger than Swanson. Arms as thick as thighs. A defensive-tackle-sized column of muscle, bone, and hard suet. If he cared about my slow drive-by, he didn’t show it.
Our easy entry to the house the first time had angered Boykins. Time for an upgrade.
The Swede’s useless, give me someone scary.
I continued a block, reversed, and returned, wondering if that would capture the new guard’s attention. Thought I caught the merest movement of a face, florid and compressed as a canned ham.
