Milo and I sat there as Tranh did a lot of listening interspersed with brief words of comfort. After a long interlude of the former, he said, “All right, dear, please draw yourself together so I can give you to a detective.”

Milo took the phone. Did a lot of listening and not much else.

When he was through, he handed it back to Tranh, who said, “All right, darling, I’m so sorry—yes, do that, you need your rest. Bye.”

Albert Tranh said, “She says she wants to go back to sleep but I’m pretty sure she’ll be calling me soon. For parenting.”

Too late to retrieve Milo’s car from the lot in Century City so I headed for the station.

He said, “In answer to your yet-unasked question about Phyllis, mostly she cried. I’m talking geyser.”

“Over the top?”

He shrugged. “Sounded real to me but without nonverbal cues, who knows? She also volunteered the fact that she’d dated Richard briefly and that Ursula had been ‘unbelievably gracious’ about it but that she’d broken up with Richard because her friendship with Ursula was more important than ‘any guy.’ So unless I’ve wandered into the Actors Workshop, things are not looking up in the romantic rival department.”

“Maybe it was over as far as Phyllis is concerned,” I said. “But what if Richard blamed Ursula for the breakup? Not only does Ursula leave him, she gets her friend to do the same.”

He thought about that. “Good point. So back to Mr. Charmless. You like him seriously, huh?”

“He’s the best you’ve got.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I like him plenty,” I said. “The financial motive alone would keep me on him. What’s planned for tomorrow?”

“Heart-stopping drama, amigo, as I honor Richard’s permission to crawl through his phone records and his finances—but I’ll still need subpoenas and a victim’s warrant on Ursula’s house to look for date-books or computer logs of her social life. Thanks for all your time, I’ll see if I can put in a reimbursement request that actually gets you paid something.”

Not-so-subtle way of easing me off the case because when a woman gets executed the husband’s always the initial suspect, usually for good reason.

Allowing himself to start believing this one would turn out not to be different?

I had no problem with that.

CHAPTER

7

Ten days later, Milo phoned. “What’s the opposite of a progress report, a regress report?”

“No luck on Ursula.”