“You’d better believe it. Guy was ready to call in the ACLU. I calmed him down. I asked him what kind of car he drove. Guy chewed my ear off on the marvels of the Mercedes.”

Mike scratched his nose, thought a moment, then said, “The guy plainly likes his father. He didn’t say much about his mother.”

“You asked him about the fire?”

“Yep. He said this. Mom got drunk a lot. She was very careless about drinking and smoking in bed. More than once he had to pull her out of smoldering bedcovers. Most of the time he’d gotten her out before any real danger was done. Once in awhile, the room was really smoking and he had to call the FD. The day she died he wasn’t home.

“He spoke about his mother in a real detached way, Pete. I don’t know. Maybe it was because she died so long ago.”

“Or maybe he was real pissed off at her for setting the house on fire,” Decker suggested.

“Yeah,” Hollander nodded. “I didn’t detect much love lost.”

“What about Pode’s limited partnership movies?” Decker wanted to know.

“Pode and this partner of his,” Hollander began. “What the hell was his name?”

“Cameron Smithson.”

“That’s the one,” Hollander said. “They invested in low-budget flicks. Grade B horror movies and teenage jiggle films. I asked if it was possible to see them. I wanted to make sure they were what he said they were.”

“That was smart.”

“He showed me the videos—as much as I wanted to see. And what I saw wasn’t porno: just a lot of healthy-looking babes showing off their boobs and buns. Standard R fare. Pode also let me look at the books. Some of those turkeys even netted him some pocket money.”

“Numbers can be fudged.”

“Yeah, no doubt the sleaze has at least four sets of books: one for his accountant, one for the backers, one for the IRS, and one for himself.”

Hollander scratched his nose again.

“I can’t put my finger on why I hated him so much. Yeah, he talked down to me, but I was feeding into his image of me as the dumb cop. He wasn’t an ornery bastard. He was cooperative, polite. He seemed so…so goddamn oily. Even his looks—Pode’s a good-looking guy if you like the male model type. I could see him getting laid by a lot of Marina airheads. But to me, the guy sizes up as a grease ball.”

“Did he have the kind of good looks that could sway an impressionable young girl?”

“Definitely.”