He appeared to doze off, but a few miles later, without opening his eyes, he said, "As far as young Master Mendoza with the temper, he's Latino, meaning he might know Spanish. Meaning he'd find it easy enough to pay Mr. Anteater for buying ice. On the other hand, murder's a pretty strong reaction to being tutored against your will and according to Franck, Mendoza had stopped showing up at Elise's place."

I said, "For tutoring."

His lids rose. "She was doing him, too?"

"Another younger man."

"Oh, boy... but with a young offender, something sexual gone bad, I'd expect disorganization, overkill. This was just the opposite, Alex. Antiseptic, staged. It doesn't feel right."

"It doesn't, unless Martin's one of those long-simmering types."

He called in an AutoTrack on Martin Mendoza. Plenty of registered drivers with that name but none in the age range. Same for a criminal record.

"Kid doesn't even have a license. Must love watching rich kids zoom into the student parking lot. Okay, gotta find him."

I said, "His father works at one of the country clubs. That narrows it down a bit."

"Hell with that." He bared teeth. "It's back-to-school for Uncle Milo."

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER
20

The Hotel Bel-Air sits on twelve of the most expensive acres on the planet, sharing precious dirt with eight-figure estates. No sidewalks in Old Bel Air discourages pedestrian riffraff. So do high walls and gates, closed-circuit cameras, guard dogs, and rent-a-cops.

Try building a hotel in Old Bel Air today and the Not-in-my-backyard roar will set off sonic booms. But when the foreign potentate who purchased the property several years ago proposed to convert the hotel to his private Xanadu, the avalanche of neighborly rage caused him to fly back home and become an absentee innkeeper.

Time can rot but it can also lay on patina, and people learn to love what they're used to. That, it occurred to me, might explain the pride north-of-Sunset Brentwood takes in hosting Windsor Preparatory Academy's sixteen-acre campus. A core belief in the value of education isn't the reason; the merest suggestion of constructing a public school in the district can bring down a city councilman.

Prep occupies a remote pocket of Brentwood, at the end of a northern cul-de-sac. No signage advertises its presence. A thousand feet of two-way, cobbled drive heralded by fifteen-foot gateposts winds its way toward a guardhouse equipped with a yardarm. Beyond the barrier, a generous roundabout leads to baroque iron gates offering a glimpse of the rarefied world beyond.