I nodded. “Okay. I can do that. You know, I met this kid the other day, a Chicano like me, from a working-class family. They didn’t seem to have any problem with his being gay. I was envious.”

“If we could choose our families, I wouldn’t have picked a bunch of tight-assed Scotch Presbyterians who taught me to stuff my feelings so deep I couldn’t find them until I was in my fifties.” He turned his coffee mug in his hands. “Fortunately, we get to choose our friends and they become our real family. This Chicano boy have anything to do with the case you’re investigating for Myles’s company?”

“The boyfriend of the decedent.” I filled him in on my investigation and on my suspicion that Nick Trejo was sitting on secrets.

“Do you really think the kid killed his lover with a gas leak?”

“Does sound improbable when you say it aloud. But if Ryan was abusing Nick, it could be like the burning bed case they made a TV movie about.”

“The one with Farrah Fawcett? I missed it. What was it about?”

“An abused woman who finally had enough and killed her husband by setting him on fire after he got drunk and raped her and passed out on their bed.”

“She wasn’t in the bed with him when she set him on fire. Your kid was. The gas leak could have killed him too.”

“Yes, well, there’s that. On the other hand, his family was awfully eager to shut down my investigation. They’re protecting him from something.”

“More likely they object to a nosy insurance investigator poking around in something they would like to put behind them. I mean, what do you really have? An old lady telling you Ryan gave Nick a black eye and Nick denying it.”

“I know. It’s thin.”

“It’s transparent.”

“But something’s not right,” I said. “I feel it.”

“Okay, well, you’ve good instincts, kiddo, so if you think there’s something there, you should follow up on it.” He uncurled his long body from his chair. “I have to go into the office. I’ll be back by five and we’ll hit a meeting and go out to sushi. I’ve had enough turkey to last me to next Thanksgiving.”

“Sounds good.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go for a run and work on this,” I said, lifting a corner of the pad.

“If you run through Griffith Park, watch out for coyotes and rattlesnakes and the undercover vice cops cruising the bushes. I don’t want to go looking for you in the morgue or bailing you out of jail.”

“I’ll stick to the path.”

He clamped my shoulder. “Always a good idea, Henry.” He stopped at the door, turned and asked, “By the way, what happened between you and the guy you liked? Alan? The one who used the f-word.”