“I asked a couple of times, hoping maybe she’d figure out I loved the car, was angling for a ride. All she did was smile and change the subject. Now that I think about it, she never talked about herself, period. It was always about me, what I wanted, what I needed, how was I feeling. Pretty good approach when you’re working with a spoiled little brat, no? I can see her doing great as a nurse.”

He brightened. “Hey, maybe Lucky Bastard was a rich doctor. Isn’t that why girls became nurses back then? To hook up with M.D.s?”

Milo said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about her?”

“Nope. I turned six, got miraculously better, went to school, made friends. Don’t know exactly when Ellie moved out but it wasn’t long after and instead of the Duesenberg we got a Plymouth. Big family with a Plymouth station wagon the color of pea soup. Talk about a comedown.”

I said, “Could you estimate how many times you saw the Duesenberg?”

“You’re trying to figure out if she was entertaining some regular visitor, something hot and heavy going on? Well, all I can say is less than a dozen and probably more than half a dozen.”

“At night.”

“So how did a five-year-old see it? Because that five-year-old was a disobedient brat who’d sneak out of the house through the kitchen in the middle of the night and walk over to see the car. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t. The last time I tried it, I ran into my father. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of Ellie’s house, looking at the car, himself. I turned to escape, he saw me, caught me. I thought he’d whack me but he didn’t. He laughed. Said, yeah, it’s fantastic, Davey, can’t blame you. That’s when he told me the model. ’Thirty-eight SJ. And what the pipes meant, the advantage of supercharging. We stood there together, taking in that monster. It was one of those—I guess you’d call it a bonding thing. But then he warned me never to leave the house without permission or he would tan my hide.”

Helmholtz smiled. “I always felt he thought I was a sissy. I guess he didn’t punish me because he assumed I was out there being a guy.”

We continued up the block. No one else remembered Ellie Green or the Duesenberg.

Back at the station, Milo ran her name. Nearly two dozen women came up but none whose stats fit the slim blonde who’d lived at the bone house in 1951. He repeated the process with Greene, Gruen, Gruhn, even Breen, came up empty. Same for death notices in L.A. and the neighboring counties.

I said, “She worked as a nurse and the box came from the Swedish Hospital.”