The Cossack brothers had been high school party animals, and the Bel Air bash a couple of years later was just more of the same. And the link between them and the Larners had been forged on the sands of Zuma, not in the boardroom.

That made me wonder if the idea for secreting problematic sister Caroline might have originated with the boys, not their father. “Hey, Dad, Brad’s dad works at this place for weirdos, maybe he can help out.”

I searched the yearbooks for mention or a picture of Caroline Cossack.

Nothing.

I drove around the pretty residential streets of Westwood, thinking about Pierce Schwinn and what he’d really wanted from Milo. Had the former detective finally decided to come clean with secrets held for two decades, as I’d suggested, or had he undertaken his own freelance investigation late in life and come up with new leads?

Either way, Schwinn hadn’t been as serene as his second wife believed. Or as faithful: He’d found a confidante to mail the murder book.

As I’d told Milo, Ojai was a small town and it was doubtful Schwinn could’ve pulled off a regular assignation there without Marge finding out. But before he’d married Marge, he’d lived in Oxnard in a fleabag motel. Marge hadn’t mentioned the name, but she had given us the site of Schwinn’s minimum-wage job, and said Schwinn hadn’t owned a car. Taking out the trash at Randall’s Western Wear. Somewhere within walking distance.

The place was still in business, on Oxnard Boulevard.

I’d taken the scenic route because it was the quickest way and I had no stomach for the freeway: Sunset to PCH, then north on the coast highway past the L.A.-Ventura line and Deer Creek Road and the campgrounds of Sycamore Creek—fifteen miles of state land that kissed the ocean and separated the last private beach in Malibu from Oxnard. The water was sapphire blue under a chamber-of-commerce sky, and the bodies that graced the sand were brown and perfect.

At Las Posas Road, I avoided the eastern fork that swoops into glorious, green tables of farmland and up to the foothills of Camarillo and continued on Route 1.

Nature’s beauty gave way, soon enough, to dinge and depression and seventy-five minutes after leaving the house I was enjoying the sights of central Oxnard.

Oxnard’s a funny place. The town’s beach sports a marina and luxury hotels and fishing excursions and tour boats to the Channel Islands. But the core is built around agriculture and the migrant workers whose dreadful lives put food on the nation’s tables. The crime rate’s high, and the air stinks of manure and pesticide. Once you get past the marina turnoff, Oxnard Boulevard is a low-rent artery lined with trailer parks, auto-parts yards, thrift shops, taco bars, taverns blaring Mexican music, and more Spanish than English on the signage.