“Maybe not. Getting symbolic can lead to all sorts of dark places.”

“Ol’ Tony’s sitting on a whole lot of primal anger and chronic pain doesn’t improve his disposition?”

I said, “As long as Ella helped him financially, he was able to keep his feelings under control. She turns off the tap, he views it as yet another abandonment. Comes to see her, pleads his case, she says no. He argues. She gets mad. If she really lost her cool and threatened to change the will, leave it all to the Salvation Army, that could’ve done it.”

“She told Barone she didn’t want a copy of the will at home. Maybe to shield it from Tony.”

“A million three for that house,” I said. “More than tempting. If he does have a gambling problem, he could know bad guys who’d take on the job.”

He drove for a while. “It’s as logical as any scenario, but Hochswelder labeled Tony a compulsive gambler based on a secondhand account of a single episode. And he doesn’t like Tony, so anything he says is suspect.”

A block later: “A slovenly fat guy who’s not a decorator or a florist or a choreographer being gay? Impossible.”

I laughed. “You see his sexuality as relevant?”

“You don’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something else for Mama to disapprove of,” he said. “Parents can get picky that way.”

Back at the station, he checked in with the plainclothes officer surveilling Tony Mancusi. The subject had left his apartment once to get a burrito and a soda at a stand on Sunset near Hillhurst. Walking distance but Mancusi had taken his car, which he’d used as his dining room, munching in the parking lot.

“Officer Ruiz also observed that subject tossed his junk out the car window onto the ground, rather than use a trash basket ten feet away. Officer Ruiz began a violation roster on the subject. When I pointed out to Officer Ruiz that littering private property was bad behavior but nothing citable, he was conspicuously disappointed.”

“Eager,” I said.

“Twenty-one years old, six months out of the academy. The other two are just as green. I feel like I’m running a day care center, but at least they’re motivated.”

“Mancusi go anywhere after lunch?”

“Right back home and he’s still there. I’d love to have grounds for his phone records.”

Shuffling through the message slips on his desk, he tossed the first four, read the fifth, and said, “Wonders never cease. Sean got creative.”

Binchy, though still on Auto Theft, had continued combing the crime reports for incidents coinciding with the time period the Bentley had been missing. Coming up empty on homicides, rapes, and assaults just as Milo had. But the young detective had gone further and a missing person had surfaced.

Milo phoned him, grunted approval, got the details.