I paced my apartment, watching time tick toward evening as Ray told me how he’d spent months studying the evidence in Calvin’s murder: a brutal beating that looked unpremeditated, and hadn’t quite killed its victim. Drowning was the cause of death, but his attacker had left him unconscious in the rising water. It could have been a drug dealer. But Calvin had bought drugs before without incident, and drug dealers were careful about homicides. It was likely someone Calvin had angered. But who? And why? Did it have to do with the conference? Murderers didn’t usually lurk at art history conferences. And yet James Compton himself had been a wild card, a figure of unpredictable violence, with some criminal associations. What new angle had Calvin found about James Compton, and why wouldn’t someone want it known?

Ray had spent last winter digging into the Los Angeles art world. By the time Ray had met me in the spring, Nelson de Wilde had become his main suspect. Nelson was from London, and he had burst onto the same cultural scene a year after James Compton’s death, with a club and money and connections that no one seemed able to explain. The man was a superstar supporter of artists, and he’d had no criminal record in England.

Desperate to find some crack in the gallerist’s armor, Ray began to look into the financial side of the gallery business and concluded that Nelson must have had a significant source of undisclosed income in order to run the Westing. Where was the cash coming from?

A gallerist’s most obvious source of revenue was art commissions. Sell an artwork, get a percentage of its cost. After Kim Lord’s case practically dropped into his lap, Ray had concluded that one of Nelson’s secret sources of cash was Steve Goetz buying and rebuying Kim’s paintings—not honestly earned money, but not technically illegal.

Soon after the Kim Lord case had been solved, Ray had gone back to North Carolina for a couple of months to maintain his job there and take care of his nephew. During that time, he and Ynez broke up. He told her he didn’t have romantic feelings for her anymore. She told him that he was dangerously obsessed with his brother. He’d been planning a trip to London to retrace Calvin’s steps.

Ray related all this information in the same cordial tone that he’d discussed Calvin’s potential killer, but his voice strained on the word obsessed.