She smiled and stroked my face. "If knitted brows are any kind of measure, Milo's getting his money's worth out of you."

"The other thing I wonder about is the first case-Richard Dada, the would-be actor. On the surface, he and Claire have little in common. But what they do seem to share is negative space-an absence of friends, enemies, quirks. Both of them were very neat. No entanglements. Maybe we're talking about loneliness and an attempt to fill the void. Some sort of lonely-hearts hookup with the wrong person."

"A man and a woman?" she said. "A bisexual killer?"

"That would make Dada gay, and Milo never found any indication of that. Or maybe it had nothing to do with sex-just companionship, some kind of common-interest club. On the other hand, the cases could be unrelated."

I raised her hand to my lips, kissed the fingertips one by one. "Mr. Romantic. I'd better switch gears before I drive you into isolation."

She grinned, waved languidly, kissed air, put on her Bette Davis voice. "Pass me the spinach, dahling. Then you can pay the check and sweep me off my feet to the nearest Baskin

Robbins for some jamoca almond fudge. After that, hi-ho all the way home, where you ah cawjully invited to add some entanglement to my life."

Chapter 8

At Eight P.M. Milo called. "Am I interrupting anything?"

He'd missed interrupting by an hour. Robin was reading in bed and I'd taken Spike for a short walk up the canyon. When the phone rang, I was sitting out on the terrace, trying to rid my mind of question marks, struggling to concentrate on the sound of the waterfall that fed the fishpond. Grateful because I couldn't hear the freeway.

"Not at all. What's up?"

"Got the info on Claire and Stargill. Married two years, divorced nearly two, no kids. I reached Stargill. He says the split was amicable. He's a partner in a ten-lawyer firm, remarried three months ago. He just learned about Claire. San Diego papers didn't carry it, but one of his partners was up here, read about it."

"What was his demeanor?"

"He sounded pretty upset over the phone, but what the hell does that mean? Said he doubted there was anything he could add but he'd talk to me. I set up an appointment for tomorrow morning at ten."

"San Diego?"

"No, he's driving up."

"Very cooperative fellow."

"He has business here anyway. Some commercial property closings-he's a real estate lawyer."

"So he comes up to L.A. regularly."

"Yeah, I made note of that. Let's see what he's like face-to-face. We're meeting at Claire's house. Which she owns. It was his bachelor place, but after the divorce he signed it over to her and agreed to pay the mortgage and taxes in lieu of alimony and her dipping into his stocks and bonds."

"Who inherits the property now?"