“Me?” I pointed to my chest. “You’ve got the gold shield, Greg.”

“But you found the baby.”

“Yeah, but I stink and you’re in a suit.” I waved him off. “I’ll go yellow-tape the area and look around.”

“You sure?” But he was already straightening his tie and smoothing his hair. “Yeah, tape off the area. Don’t sweat it too much, Decker. I can pretty much take it from here. And hey, I’ll take you up on your offer … to canvass the area tomorrow.”

“That’ll work for me.”

“Good. We’ll coordinate in a moment. Just let me get these clowns off my back.”

“Of course.”

“Show ’em what a real detective looks like, huh?”

“You tell ’em, Greg.”

Van Horn made tracks toward a grouping of handheld Mini-cams, lurching like a cowboy ready for the showdown.

In Hollywood, everybody’s a star.

A half block from the restaurant was a pool of something that didn’t smell like water and shone ruby red under the beam of the flashlight. There were also intermittent drips from the puddle to the Dumpster behind The Tango. Because of the location, I thought of a homeless woman or a runaway teen, someone scared and unstable. She would have to be on the skids, pushing out a baby in a back alley, all alone amid a host of bugs and rats.

The blood of childbirth—if we were lucky.

If the mother was someone local, it would narrow the search. Maybe knocking on doors wouldn’t be the answer. Maybe my best bet would be to hunt down the throwaways, to crawl through the underbelly of Hollywood, a city that offered so much but rarely made good on its promises.

I showed the spot to Greg Van Horn after he did his dog-and-pony show for the nightly news. He regarded the blood while scratching his abundant nose.

“Homicide?” I asked him.

“Can’t be ruled out.” His jaws were bulging as if chewing on something hard. “My instincts tell me no. The configuration doesn’t look like a murder.”

“The concentration of blood in one spot as well as the absence of spatter.”

Van Horn nodded. “Yeah, exactly.”

“I was thinking about someone homeless. Who else would squat in a back alley?”

“I’ll buy that.” Eyes still on the pond of blood, he took out his cellular phone. “Time to call in the techs.”

“Want me to walk around the area, sir? See if I can find some street people?”

“Did you finish roping the area?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure. Go pretend you’re a gold shield, Decker.”

Low blow, Greg. I said with a smile, “Just testing out my mettle.”

“I thought you already passed that test.”

This time the smile was genuine. “That was nice. Thank you.”

“Get out of here.”

I skipped over the yellow tape, walking about a hundred yards north through the alley and onto Hollywood Boulevard. The sidewalks weren’t paved with gold, but they were filled with lots of black-stoned stars set into red granite. Each star represented a different icon of the entertainment media—TV, film, radio, or the recording industry. The good news was that recent gentrification and climbing real estate prices had preserved some of the older architecture and had cleaned up lots of the seedier aspects of the area.