Milo and I sat on one of the beige sofas. The fabric was coarse and pebbly and I felt the bumps against the backs of my legs. Nina Balquin spent a long time adding ice to her drink. I noticed a tremor in her hands. Milo was taking in the room and I did the same.

A few family photos hung lopsided on a rear wall, too distant to make out. Sliding glass doors exposed a small rectangular swimming pool. Clumps of leaves and grit floated on greenish water. Rims of concrete decking too narrow for seating comprised the rest of the backyard.

Walk out, get wet, come back in.

Nina Balquin settled perpendicular to us and sipped her drink. “I know, it’s a mess, I don’t swim. Never used Barnett for the pool. Maybe I should’ve. He could’ve been good for one thing.” She drank some more.

Milo said, “You’re not fond of Barnett.”

“Can’t stand his guts. Because of how he treated Lara. And me. Why are you asking about him?”

“How he treated Lara before Kristal’s murder or after?”

At the mention of her granddaughter, Balquin flinched. “You ask, I answer? Fine, but just tell me one thing: Is the bastard in some kind of trouble?”

“It’s possible.”

Balquin nodded. “The answer is he was rotten to Lara before and after. She met him at a rodeo— can you believe that? She went to good schools, her father was a dentist. The plan was she was supposed to go to the U. But her grades went to hell in high school. Still, there was Plan Two, Valley College. So what does she do after graduating? Gets a job at a dude ranch in Ojai and meets Cowboy Buckaroo and the next thing I know she’s calling to inform me they’re married.”

She gulped her drink, swished liquid in her mouth, swallowed, stuck out her tongue. “Lara was eighteen, he was twenty-four. She watches him rope horses or doggies or whatever they rope and suddenly the two of them are at some tacky little drive-through chapel in Vegas. Her father could’ve . . . killed them.” She smiled uneasily. “To use an expression.”

Milo said, “Can’t blame him for being upset.”

“Ralph was furious. Who wouldn’t be? But he never said a thing to Lara, kept it all inside. A year later he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and four months after that he was gone.” She glanced back at the dirty pool. “Excuse me, not gone. Dead. At the time he was diagnosed we were in escrow on another house, Encino, south of the boulevard, gorgeous, huge. Thank God Ralph had decent life insurance.”

“Does Lara have siblings?” I said, still trying to make out the photos.