“It is when they’re packing blades themselves and their sheets are as bad as the guy who did them. Nestor’s P.D. claimed self-defense and got it pled down.”

“And Nestor promptly went freelance in prison,” I said.

“So what else is new? Bartender said Nestor was a very bad boy. Short fuse, everyone thought he was nuts. I guess that squares with the way Troy got done.”

“Nestor have a drug connection?”

“Heroin.”

“If Malley was selling, they could’ve known each other.”

He ambled back to the fridge, retrieved the milk carton, finished it.

I said, “Heading over to Westlake soon?”

“I was thinking now. Nestor got himself a job at a food stand on Alvarado. Ain’t that a pretty thought? Bloody hands stuffing your chimichangas?”

* * *

An L.A.-bound tourist plugging “Westlake” into one of those computer-map services could get confused.

There’s Westlake Village, on the far western edge of the Valley, a wide-open bedroom community of meticulous industrial parks, high-end shopping centers, tile-roofed vanilla houses perched prettily on oak-studded hills, and multiacre horse ranches. People with money and scant interest in urban pleasures move to Westlake Village to get away from crime and congestion and smog and people not like them.

All of which abounds in the Westlake District.

Set just west of downtown and named after the man-made water feature created from the swamp that was once MacArthur Park, Westlake has the population density of a third-world capital. Alvarado’s the main drag and it’s crammed with bars, dance halls, check-cashing outlets, discount stores, and fast-food joints. A few of the once-grand apartment buildings erected in the twenties remain, sprinkled among the hideous postwar instaboxes that pushed out history and architecture and destroyed Westlake’s identity as a high-rent destination. Some of the structures had been sectioned and resectioned into dorm-style rooming houses. Official residency statistics didn’t begin to explain things.

For a couple of decades after its birth, the park was a pretty place to go on Sunday. Then it became as safe as Afghanistan, overrun with dopers and dealers, strong-arm specialists and pedophiles and wild-eyed people who talked to God. Wilshire Boulevard bisects the green space and a tunnel connects the halves. Walking through the gray, graffitied conduit used to be life-threatening. Now murals have covered the gang braggadocio, and the mostly poor Hispanics who populate the district picnic near the water’s edge after church on Sunday and hope for the best.

Milo had taken Sixth Street from its inception at San Vicente. He made a left and traveled south onto Alvarado. The thoroughfare was crowded, as it always is, intersections teeming with pedestrians, some purposeful, some aimless. Better to be outdoors, sucking in grimy air, than sitting alone in the single, fetid room you share with eight strangers.