That was not a good sign. Investigating further, Decker was hit with a strong whiff of decay, violently sparking his olfactory nerve.

He exhaled forcibly while holding back a gag.

He knew why Cal hadn’t answered the door.

He called 911.

THE RULE WAS by no means foolproof, but generally women took pills and men ate the gun.

Calvin Vitton had done both.

The shot had, among other things, taken out the old cop’s eye. His mouth was agape, and his other eye was wide open. An open vial of oxycodone was spilling its contents onto the blue bedroom carpet. Near the pills lay a half-dozen empty beer bottles. His right hand had been singed with powder burns and blood spatter. The .32-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun was lodged between the bed frame and the wall and had landed about two inches from Cal’s knee. Blood had turned the white sheets red and was still dripping crimson onto the carpet.

The old man had thin gray hair with blue eyes, although the remaining one looked black because the pupil was dilated and fixed. He had been wearing a white shirt and a pair of jeans. His feet were bare. Rigor had set in; lividity was pronounced. Although a warm temperature could speed up the biological processes—and it had been sweltering inside when the Simi Valley cops had busted inside—Decker had a sense that the deed had been done shortly after the phone call.

Two coroner’s office investigators—a woman and a man—were about ready to wrap the stiff body in plastic. The crime scene photographer had done his job. A tech was dusting for fingerprints, but almost everyone agreed that it looked like suicide. Cal had taken booze and pills to self-anesthetize. Before Cal totally passed out, he put a gun to his head…more to his face. Or maybe his hands slipped and that’s how he took out his eye. There were powder burns around the affected area, but there was also powder scatter. The investigators thought that the nose of the gun had been fired from about a half foot away.

Simi Valley was an incorporated city of Ventura County, and although it contracted out to the county for fire, the city was patrolled by its own police department. The detective assigned to the case, named Shirley Redkin, was a pixieish woman in her fifties with short black hair and round dark eyes. Suicide was worked under a homicide detail until the coroner made his ruling. She flipped over the cover on her notebook, and then pointed to the open vial. “First the pills, and when that didn’t happen, he went for the gun.”

Decker said, “It looks kind of staged.”

“Yeah, there is something a little overly dramatic about it with the pills and the booze and the gun. But killing yourself is a very dramatic act.”

“Of course.”