“Willie Burns is an old perp on a cold one. Wilbert Lorenzo Burns, DOB forty-three and a half years ago, suspicion of homicide; I picked it up right after I transferred. And guess what, another file seems to have gone missing. But I did manage to find one of Burns’s old probation officers, and he came up with some old paper and there it was: Achievement House. Willie’d finagled a summer placement there, lasted less than a month, and was booted for absenteeism.”

“A homicide suspect and he’s working with problem teens?”

“Back then he was just a junkie and a dealer.”

“Same question.”

“Guess Willie never told him about his background.”

“Who’d he kill?”

“Bail bondsman name of Boris Nemerov. Ran his business right here in West L.A. Big, tough guy, but he sometimes had a soft heart for cons because he himself had spent some time in a Siberian gulag. You know how bail bonds work?”

“The accused puts up a percentage of the bail and leaves collateral. If he skips trial, the bondsman pays the court and confiscates the collateral.”

“Basically,” he said, “except generally the bondsman doesn’t actually pay the initial bail with his own money. He buys a policy from an insurance company for two to six percent of the total bail. To cover the premiums and make a profit, he collects a fee from the perp—usually ten percent, nonrefundable. If the perp goes fugitive, the insurance company shells out to the court and has the right to collect the collateral. Which is usually a piece of property—Grandma letting her beloved felon offspring tie up the cute little bungalow where she’s lived for two hundred years. But seizing the cottage from poor old Grandma takes time and money and gets bad press and what do insurance companies want with low-rent real estate? So they’d always rather have the perp in hand. That’s why they send out bounty hunters. Who take their cut.”

“Trickle-down economics,” I said. “Crime’s good for the GDP.”

“Boris Nemerov made out okay as a bondsman. Treated people like human beings and had a low skip rate. But he sometimes took risks—forgoing collateral, discounting his ten percent. He’d done that for Willie Burns because Burns was a habitual client who’d never let him down before. Last time Burns presented himself to Nemerov, he had no collateral.”

“What was the charge?”