“Oh, you’d thrive, sweetie. It would be one thing if you were a twerp with no libido, but I know otherwise.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Sexual Superman with the morals of a saint.”

“You laugh,” she said. “I smile.”

CHAPTER

10

We drove home well fed and watered. As I held the door open, Robin said, “Nice place you’ve got here, Don.” We disrobed in the dark, collapsed under the covers. Afterward, she said, “That was great, but next time platform shoes.”

I awoke at four eighteen, was at my desk five minutes later, pupils constricting as the computer screen filled with light. Plugging in the Borodi address produced a four-year-old squib in L.A. Design Quarterly.

“Masterson and Associates, Century City, will be the architects for a mammoth project planned in Holmby Hills this fall. The 28,000-square-foot residence sits on a 2.42-acre lot on Borodi Lane and will be the L.A. pied-à-terre for an unnamed foreign investor.”

Marjorie Holman’s dismissive comment about Helga Gemein flashed in my head. No need to work, Daddy was a German shipping tycoon.

A stretch, but you needed to be at that level for a project of that scope.

I searched some more, pairing Gemein and Borodi, found nothing.

Five hours later, I was in Milo’s office and he was shaking his head. “Already checked the assessor, nada.”

“What about the building permit?”

“There’s a perfectly legit four-year-old permit on file. And that Century City outfit—Masterson—were the architects, but the property owner of record is a corporation called DSD Incorporated, Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C., and for the last thirty-nine months, that address matches the headquarters of a soybean industry lobbyist who never heard of DSD. No corporate listings, anywhere. Maybe they were a sleazeball hedge fund that went poof.”

I said, “The article said foreign investor.”

“So DSD was a holding company set up as some kind of tax dodge. Does that bother me? Not unless it relates to two bodies in a turret.”

He opened a desk drawer, slammed it shut. Wheeled his chair back the three inches allotted and knuckled his eyelids. His windowless cell was ripe with stale tobacco and fumes from the burnt coffee cooked up in the big detective room. He’d fetched two cups, had finished his. Mine cooled, untouched. Life was too short.

I said, “Any word on the autopsy?”