“You said Schwinn was a devious sort,” I said. “Suspicious, verging on paranoid. LAPD dumped him, but he continued to think like a rogue cop, played games to the end, in order to cover his rear. He decided to communicate with you, but set it up so that only you would get it. That way, if the book went astray, or was ever traced back to him, he could disclaim ownership. He took pains to make sure it wasn’t traced to him—no fingerprints. Only you were likely to recall his photography hobby and make the connection. He might have planned to send you the book himself, but changed his mind and chose someone else as a go-between, as another layer of security.”

He studied the dead black man. Paged to the truck-crash nightmare, then Janie. Repeated the process.

“Willie and Caroline’s surrogates . . . too weird.”

I pointed to the black man’s corpse. “How old does he look to you?”

He squinted at the ashen face. “Forties.”

“If Willie Burns were alive today, he’d be forty-three. That means Schwinn saw the dead man as a surrogate for Willie in the here and now. Both the pictures are faded, probably decades old. But Schwinn oriented them toward the present. Meaning he finished the book fairly recently, wanted to focus you on the present.”

He rolled the empty shot glass between his palms. “Bastard was a good detective. If the department got rid of him because someone was worried about what he knew about Janie, that means they didn’t worry about me.”

“You were a rookie—”

“I was the dumb shit they figured would just follow orders. And guess what?” He laughed.

“It’s likely when Schwinn learned he’d been forced out and you hadn’t, it confirmed his suspicions of you. Maybe he figured you’d played a role in his dismissal. That’s why he didn’t tell you what he’d learned about Janie for years.”

“And then he changed his mind.”

“He came to admire you. Told Marge.”

“Mr. Serenity,” he said. “So he enlists his girlfriend or some old cop washout to serve as go-between. Why’d whoever it was wait until seven months after Schwinn died?”

I had no answer for that. Milo tried to pace, but the confined quarters of the laundry area made it a two-step exercise.

He said, “Then the guy falls off a horse.”

“A horse so gentle Marge felt comfortable with Schwinn riding up into the hills alone. But Akhbar got spooked, anyway. Marge said, by ‘something.’ Maybe it was someone.”

He stared past me, reentered the kitchen, washed out the shot glass, returned, and glared at the book. “Nothing says Schwinn’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“Nothing at all.”

He pressed his hands flat against the wall as if straining to push it down.

“Bastards,” he said.

“Who?”

“Everyone.”