I said, “Not the best of mornings. Plus her marriage doesn’t seem to be working too well.”

“Ah … notice how I avoided telling her how you got here. No sense disillusioning the citizenry.”

Most homicides are mundane and on the way to clearance within a day or two. Milo sometimes calls me on “the interesting ones.”

This time, though, it was a matter of lunch.

Steak, salad, and scotch to be exact, at a place just west of Downtown. We’d both spent the morning at the D.A.’s office, he reviewing the file on a horrific multiple murder, I in the room next door, proofreading my witness statement on the same killings.

He’d tried to avoid the experience, taking vacation time then ignoring messages. But when Deputy D.A. John Nguyen phoned him at mid-night and threatened to come over with cartons of week-old vegan takeout, Milo had capitulated.

“Sensible decision and don’t even think of flaking on me,” said Nguyen. “Also ask Delaware if he wants to take care of his business at the same time, the drafts just came in.”

Milo picked me up at nine a.m., driving the Porsche 928 he shares with his partner, Rick Silverman. He wore an unhealthily shiny gray aloha shirt patterned with leering sea lions and clinically depressed angelfish, baggy, multi-pleated khakis, scuffed desert boots. The shirt did nothing to improve his indoor pallor, but he loved Hawaii so why not?

Solving the multiple had taken a lot out of him, chiefly because he’d nearly died in the process. I’d saved his life and that was something neither of us had ever imagined. Months had passed and we still hadn’t talked about it. I figured it was up to him to broach the topic and so far he hadn’t.

When we finished at the court building, he looked anything but celebratory. But he insisted on taking me out for a seventy-buck sirloin-T-bone combo and “all the Chivas you can tolerate, boy-o, seeing as I’m the designated wheelman.”

An hour later, all we’d done was eat and drink and make the kind of small talk that doesn’t work well between real friends.

I rejected dessert but he went for a three-scoop praline sundae drowned in hot fudge syrup and pineapple sauce. He’d lost a bit of weight since facing mortality, was carrying maybe two forty on his stilt-legged seventy-five inches, most of it around the middle. Watching him maximize the calories made it tempting to theorize about anxiety, denial, masked depression, guilt, choose your psychobabble. I’d known him long enough to know that sometimes gluttony was a balm, other times an expression of joy.

He’d finished two scoops when his phone signaled a text. Wiping his chin and brushing coarse black hair off his pockmarked forehead, he read.

“Well, well, well. It’s good I didn’t indulge in the firewater. Time to go.”

“New case?”