I put my arm around her. “C’mon, life’s short, let’s own ours. How about music?”

“Sounds good.”

“Let me check the Catalina … here’s their calendar … Jane Monheit.”

“Like her,” she said. “If we can get tickets, let’s do it.”

Monheit was in fine voice backed by a band that never stopped swinging, the food at the club was decent, a couple of generous Chivas pours went down well.

We got home and beelined to bed and afterward I plunged into sleep, stayed out for an atypical seven hours, woke up with an aching head that filled quickly with words and pictures.

When I got to my office my cell phone was beeping and my landline message machine was blinking.

A pair of calls, less than a minute apart. I punched Play on the machine.

Milo’s voice said, “Found my boy Wedd. Call.”

“Sturgis.”

“Congrats.”

“Hear what I have to say first.”

CHAPTER
40

Melvin Jaron Wedd had been found in the passenger seat of his pimped-up black Explorer. Single gunshot wound to his left temple. The entry hole said large-caliber. The stippling said up close and personal, though probably not a contact wound.

Brain matter clotted the back of his seat. A Baggie of weed sat between his splayed knees. A glass bong glinted on the floor near his left shoe. The impact had caused him to slide down, leaving his corpse in an awkward semi-reclining state that wouldn’t have been comfortable in life.

His mouth gaped, his eyes were shut, his bowels had emptied. Rot and insect activity said he’d been there days rather than hours.

Masked and gloved, a C.I. named Gloria was going through his pockets. She’d already procured his wallet, pulled out a driver’s license, credit cards, eighty bucks in cash. Milo didn’t need any of that to know who the victim was. A BOLO-find on Wedd’s Explorer had shown up in his office email shortly after six a.m. He’d been online an hour before, “eating futility for breakfast.”

Blood in the SUV said the Explorer was the murder scene. The vehicle had been left at the rear of a construction site east of Laurel Canyon, four hundred feet up a quiet street just north of the Valley. Nice neighborhood; a while back, Milo had caught a case not far from here, a prep school teacher left in a bathtub packed with dry ice.