Jonathan Kellerman - Guilt

“It looks staged to you?”

“That or there was an interruption before the party got going,” she said. “Was Wedd involved in that world?”

“Not that I know,” said Milo. “But I don’t know much, period.”

He stepped away from the stench. Gloria and I followed. She said, “I’ll do my best to rush DNA on the bag and the pipe, see if any chemistry other than his comes back. You saw those prints the techies pulled from the car. They’ve already gone to the lab, maybe you’ll get lucky.”

He said, “That’s my middle name.”

“Lucky?”

“Maybe.”

A tow truck arrived to hook up the SUV. Neighbors had begun to emerge and uniforms were doing their usual blank-faced centurion thing, easing concerned citizens away from the scene with no thought to reassurance.

Milo looked at the white-bagged body being gurneyed away. “Melvin, Melvin, Melvin, so now you’re another victim.” To me: “All those women he had coming in and out, there could be a horde of angry husbands, boyfriends.” Back at the corpse: “Thanks a bundle for your dissolute lifestyle, pal.”

I said, “You see Wedd getting into a car with an angry husband? Letting him drive?”

“Someone with a gun? Sure. Or the offender’s a jilted female, hell hath no fury and all that.”

“Tall girl.”

“Plenty of those in SoCal-what, you don’t like the jealousy angle?”

“It’s a common motive.”

“But you have a better idea.”

I told him my growing suspicions about Premadonny, leaving out the possibility of a violent child.

He said, “Creepy-World flourishes in Coldwater Canyon? What’s the motive for doing two, maybe three employees, Alex? They’re abusing their kids and bumping off the staff to keep them quiet?”

“Put that way, it sounds pretty weak.”

“No, no, I take every product of your fertile mind seriously, it just came out of left field. Okay, let me focus for a sec: They bug you because they isolate their kids. Maybe they got tired of the hustle, had enough dough, said screw it.”

I said, “That could be it.”

“But,” he said.

“No buts.”

Gathering the flesh above his nose with two fingers, he deepened the fissure that time and age had provided. “Dealing with suspects like that. God, I hope you’re wrong.”

“Forget I brought it up.”

His cell squawked Tchaikovsky. He said, “Okay, thanks,” dropped the phone back in his pocket. “Prints from two individuals in the car: Wedd’s and an unknown contributor with no match to AFIS. Unknown’s was on the driver’s side of the center console, Wedd’s showed up on the trunk latch and the interior of the trunk. To me that says our movie stars aren’t involved.”

“How so?”

“Someone at that level chauffeuring the help? More likely some disreputable who Wedd pissed off did this. Not that it makes a difference in terms of Adriana and the baby getting icier by the second.”

He left me standing there, headed toward the SUV, stopped, returned. “That canceled appointment, any hint about what kind of problem their kid was having?”

“The guy I spoke to wouldn’t even tell me which kid it was.”

“Okay, they’re weirdly secretive. Maybe shitty parents-no shock, given all the money, no one getting told no. But that’s a long way from linking them to my murders and I’ve still got Qeesha, a confirmed criminal and likely a killer herself. And Wedd, a guy who defrauded insurance, and Adriana, who might’ve had a secret life. Toss in ingredients like that and no telling what’ll cook up.”

I said, “Felony gumbo.”

“You figure I’m in denial. Hell, yeah, sure I am. But aren’t you the one says denial can be useful?”

“I love being quoted.”

“Hey,” he said, “it’s either you or the Bible and right now I’m not feeling sufficiently pious to invoke Scripture. C’mon, I’ll walk you to your car.”

Obsessiveness and anxiety are traits that can clog up your life.

But the way I figure, they’ve got plenty of evolutionary value.

Think of cave-people surrounded by predators. Jumpy, annoyingly picky Oog sleeps fitfully because he’s mindful of creatures that roar in the night. More often than not, he wakes up with a dry mouth and a pounding heart.

Easygoing Moog, in contrast, sinks easily into beautiful dreams. One morning he fails to wake up at all because his heart’s been chewed to hamburger and the rest of his innards have been served up as steaming mounds of carnivore candy.

The blessing-curse of an overly developed attention span helped me escape a family situation that would’ve continued to damage me and might’ve ended up killing me. Since then, over-the-shoulder vigilance has saved my life more than once.

So I’ll sacrifice a bit of serenity.

Milo was right; denial could be the right way to go but this morning it felt wrong and I got home itching to focus.

An hour on the computer gave way to double that time on the phone. My pitch grew better with repeated use but it proved useless. Then I switched gears and everything fell into place.

By four p.m. I was dressed in a steel-gray Italian suit, open-necked white shirt, brown loafers, and hanging near the southwest corner of Linden Drive and Wilshire.

Busy stretch of impeccable Beverly Hills sidewalk, easy to blend in with a light pedestrian parade as I repeated a two-block circuit while pretending to window-shop.

The Seville was parked in a B.H. city lot. Two hours gratis, so shoppers could concentrate on consumer goods and cuisine.

I wasn’t planning to buy anything; I had something to sell. Or trade, depending on how things worked out.

Apex Management was headquartered in a forties-era three-story brick building that looked as if it had once housed doctors and dentists. A few months ago, I’d read about the Beverly Hills city council wanting to clamp down on medical offices because health care attracted hordes of-surprise! — sick people who took up too many parking spaces and failed to spend like tourists.

Entertainment ancillaries like Apex, on the other hand, churned expense accounts at the city’s truffled-up eateries and attracted publicity magnets and the paparazzi and there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

I was facing a collection of psychotically priced cashmere sweaters and wondering if the goats who’d donated their hair were having a rough winter when the first human outflow emerged from behind Apex’s carved oak doors.

Three men in their twenties and thirties, then four more, all wearing Italian suits, open-necked dress shirts, and loafers. Industry-ancillary uniform. Which was the point.

Next came a man and two women in tailored pantsuits, followed by a pair of younger women similarly but less expensively attired. Those two let the door close on the next person out: a tired-looking older man in a green janitor’s uniform.

Three minutes later the prey came into view.

Tall, late twenties, crowned by a thick mop of blond-streaked, light brown hair, he wore black-framed geek eyeglasses that stretched wider than his pasty, bony face. In the firm’s Christmas party photos he’d worn wire rims.

He’d also tended to pose standing slightly apart from his co-workers, which had led me to hope he was a loner.

Wish fulfilled: all by himself and looking worn out and distracted.

The perfect quarry.

I watched him stop and fidget. His suit was black with a pink pinstripe, narrow-lapelled, snugly fitted. Cheaply cut when you got close, as much hot glue as stitching in play. A Level Two Service Assistant’s salary wouldn’t cover high-end threads.

I walked toward him, noticed a loose thread curling from one shirt collar. Tsk tsk .