Milo twisted the key and listened to street sounds. Distant traffic from Santa Monica, a few bird trills, someone unseen playing a power mower. The street was poorly kept, litter sludging the gutters. He said, “Besides being a juicehead, how’s the father marginal?”

“One of those walking-around guys,” said Schwinn. “Name of Bowie Ingalls, does a little of this, little of that. Rumor has it he ran slips for a nigger bookie downtown—how’s that for a white man’s career? A few years ago, he was working as a messenger at Paramount Studios, telling people he was in the movie biz. He plays the horses, has a chicken-shit sheet, mostly drunk and disorderly, unpaid traffic tickets. Two years ago he got pulled in for receiving stolen property but never got charged. Small-time, all around.”

Details. Schwinn had found the time to pull Bowie Ingalls’s record.

“Guy like that, and he’s raising a kid,” said Milo.

“Yeah, it’s a cruel world, isn’t it? Janie’s mother was a stripper and a hype, ran off with some hippie musician when the kid was a baby, overdosed in Frisco.”

“Sounds like you’ve learned a lot.”

“That what you think?” Schwinn’s voice got flinty, and his eyes were hard, again. Figuring Milo was being sarcastic? Milo wasn’t sure he hadn’t meant to be sarcastic.

“I’ve got a lot to learn,” he said. “Wasting my time with those MP clowns. Meanwhile you’re getting all this—”

“Don’t lick my ass, son,” said Schwinn, and suddenly the hatchet face was inches from Milo’s and Milo could smell the Aqua Velva and the salsa verde. “I didn’t do dick, and I don’t know dick. And you did way less than dick.”

“Hey, sorry if—”

“Fuck sorry, pal. You think this is some game? Like getting a master’s degree, hand in your homework, and lick the teacher’s ass and get your little ass-licking grade? You think that’s what this is about?”

Talking way too fast for normal. What the hell had set him off?

Milo kept silent. Schwinn laughed bitterly, moved away, sat back so heavily against the seat that Milo’s heavy body rocked. “Let me tell you, boy-o, that other shit we’ve been shoveling since I let you ride with me—niggers and pachucos offing each other and waiting around for us to pick ’em up and if we don’t, no one gives a shit—you think that’s what the 187 universe is all about?”

Milo’s face was hot from jawline to scalp. He kept his mouth shut.

“This . . .” said Schwinn, pulling a letter-sized, baby blue envelope from an inside suit pocket and removing a stack of color photos. Twenty-four-hour photo lab logo. The Instamatic shots he’d snapped at Beaudry.