“Also,” Milo confided to me, “everyone likes to see a fancy house.”

One person, wandering the mansion casually, could’ve found it.

In the living-room-sized closet of Leona Suss’s Louis XIV bedroom, a push-door behind racks of Chanel, Dior, Gucci, and Patrice Lerange opened to reveal a six-foot-tall, bird’s-eye-maple-veneered jewelry safe. Whatever treasures nested within would await discovery until a locksmith arrived.

The adjoining stainless-steel gun safe, a foot taller and double wide, had been left unlocked. Inside, oiled and boxed and beautifully maintained, were two shotguns, a rifle, and fourteen handguns, many of which bore original tags and had never been fired, including a massive, gold-plated Magnum Research Desert Eagle Mark VII.

Milo hefted that one in gloved hands. “Work of art. But probably too damn heavy for her.”

Palmberg said, “Yeah, it’s a beaut … pretending she’s our size, huh? Both my daughters were like that when I took ’em to the range. I’m guiding them to lower caliber, they want to go nuclear.”

“They still shoot?”

“Nah, too busy, they’re surgeons. One does veins, the other does bones.”

“Nice.”

“You get what you put in.”

Weight issues, apparently, didn’t apply to the Asp, squat and ugly and crude. Side-by-side barrels formed a nasty omega.

On a middle shelf, Milo found the Smith & Wesson .357 revolver later determined to be the conduit for Steven “Stefan” Muhrmann’s trip to eternity.

In a drawer at the bottom of the safe were still shots from Leona Suss’s films. A few love scenes but many more featuring death, terror, or simply the star bad girl brandishing weapons. Later photos, the most recent taken the previous year, chronicled the story of a steadily aging but still fit and agile woman who’d never lost her attraction to firepower. Some pictures captured her target shooting; in others she nestled the weapons like infants.

Those, especially, caused her to smile.

“Like they’re her kids,” said John Nguyen. “This is an interesting lady.”

“She’s got real kids,” I said. “That’ll make it more interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll never go to trial.”

“What if I want to?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

No sign Mark Suss had ever shared his widow’s passion for firepower.

No sign, either, of the Glock she’d threatened to use on me. That turned up at the log house on Old Topanga Road, fully loaded and resting in a bedroom nightstand drawer.

The room itself was pink, a lace-trimmed set-up with a heart-shaped canopy bed. One-quarter the size of the suite in her mansion, frilly and redolent of lavender and sharply discordant from the house’s rustic charm. The door was dead-bolted but yielded easily to a battering ram. No sign anyone had slept there for years.