A week after that, Delano Hardy—the station’s only black D—was assigned to be his partner. The first few weeks of their rides were tight-lipped, worse than with Schwinn, almost unbearably tense. Del was a religious Baptist who’d run afoul of the brass by criticizing the department’s racial policies, but he had no use for sexual nonconformity. News of the porn stash had gotten round; ice-eyes seemed to follow Milo around.

Then things eased. Del turned out to be psychologically flexible—a meticulous, straight-arrow with good instincts and an obsession with doing the job. The two of them began working as a team, solved case after case, forged a bond based on success and the avoidance of certain topics. Within six months, they were in the groove, putting away bad guys with no sweat. Neither of them invited to station house barbecues, bar crawls. Cop-groupie gang bangs.

When the work day was over, Del returned to a Leimert Park tract home and his upright, uptight wife who still didn’t know about Milo, and Milo skulked back to his lonely-guy pad. But for the Ingalls case, he had a near-perfect solve rate.

But for the Ingalls case . . .

He never saw Pierce Schwinn again, heard a rumor the guy had taken early retirement. A few months later he called Parker Center Personnel, lied, managed to learn that Schwinn had left with no record of disciplinary action.

So maybe it had nothing to do with Schwinn, after all, and everything to do with Janie Ingalls. Emboldened, he phoned Metro again, fishing for news on the case. Again, no callback. He tried Records, just in case someone had closed it, was informed they had no listing of the case as solved, no sighting of Melinda Waters.

One hot July morning, he woke up dreaming about Janie’s corpse, drove over to Hollywood, and cruised by Bowie Ingalls’s flop on Edgemont. The pink building was gone, razed to the dirt, the soil chewed out for a subterranean parking lot, the beginnings of framework set in place. The skeleton of a much larger apartment building.

He drove to Gower and headed a mile north. Eileen Waters’s shabby little house was still standing but Waters was gone and two slender, effeminate young men—antiques dealers—were living there. Within moments, both were flirting outrageously with Milo, and that scared him. He’d put on all the cop macho, and still they could tell . . .

The pretty-boys were renting, the house had been vacant when they’d moved in, neither had any idea where the previous tenant had gone.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said one of the lads. “She was a smoker. The place reeked.”

“Disgusting,” agreed his roomie. “We cleaned up everything, went neo-Biedermeir. You wouldn’t recognize it.” Grinning conspiratorially. “So tell us. What did she do?”

CHAPTER

11

Milo finished the story and walked into my kitchen.

The beeline to the fridge, finally.