“So much for that.” I scanned the tax roster he’d spread out between us. Then a name jumped out at me. A trio of Central Avenue hotels—the Excelsior, the Grande Royale, the Crossley—owned by Vance Coury and Associates.

“A kid by the name of Coury hung out with the Cossacks and Brad Larner back in high school,” I said. “They all belonged to some club called the King’s Men.”

“Coury,” he said. “Never heard of him.”

He brought his laptop over from the laundry room office. A search yielded three hits on two men named Vance Coury. An eleven-year-old Times piece described a Vance Coury, sixty-one, of Westwood, as having been brought up by the city attorney on slumlord charges. Coury was described as “the owner of several buildings in the downtown and Westlake districts who had failed repeatedly to correct numerous building and safety violations.” One year prior to his indictment, Coury had been convicted of similar charges and sentenced, by a creative judge, to live in one of his own buildings for two weeks. He’d rehabbed a single unit in two days and set up housekeeping under protection by an armed guard. But Coury’s empathy quotient hadn’t risen a notch: He’d done nothing to improve his tenants’ living conditions, and the judge lost patience. A follow-up article three weeks later reported that Coury had avoided a felony trial by collapsing in his attorney’s office and dying of a stroke. An accompanying headshot showed a rail-thin, silver-haired, silver-bearded man with the defiant/frightened eyes of one scrambling to remember his latest tall tale.

Vance Coury, Jr. appeared in a two-year-old Sunday Daily News item, having contributed the custom paint job to the winning entry in a California hot rod contest. Coury, forty-two, owned an auto body shop in Van Nuys specializing in “ground-up restoration of classic and specialty vehicles,” and his outfit had sprayed forty-five coats on a chopped and blown 1938 Dodge Roadster known as the Purple People Eater.

“Another father and son duo,” said Milo.