“They’re looking for the best baby-talk writer in the country and a guy who has this hot ad agency in Venice recommended me.”
“What’s a baby-talk writer?”
“Someone who can boil a one-hundred-page position paper down into three words. Maybe four.”
“Like a billboard?”
“Exactly.”
“Did you take it?”
“It’s a five-hundred-a-day consultant’s job. I told them I’d have to work out of L.A., not Washington, and that made them antsy until I described how wonderful modern telecommunications are. Fast, too.”
“Then you’ll have to find a place to live,” Partain said.
“We both will,” she said.
Their welcoming committee at LAX consisted only of the LAPD homicide Detective Sergeant Ovid Knox, as resplendent as ever in cashmere and gabardine. Both Partain and Carver had only carry-on luggage. Knox took it away from them, piled it on a cart he had rented, and offered them a ride into town.
When they were on the 405 in Knox’s plain brown Chevrolet sedan and heading for Wilshire, he said, “I busted a guy called Manny Rosales on an old felony rap three days ago, squeezed him some and he gave up a Washington private cop called Emory Kite. Ever hear of him?”
“He’s dead,” Partain said.
“So I found out. But it seems Kite was the one who took out your ex-boyfriend, Dave Laney, and also Jack Thomson, the doorman.”
“Why?” Jessica Carver said.
Knox ignored the question and said, “So that about wraps up Manny, Kite, Laney and Thomson. But the Washington cops tell me are tired brigadier general did Kite yesterday, then went home, wrote a confession, and did himself.”
“General Winfield was an old friend of my mother’s,” Carver said.
There was a long silence until Sergeant Knox said, “Got any questions? Because if you don’t, I do.”
“One,” Partain said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where we could rent a nice two-bedroom apartment, would you?”
Knox thought about it, then asked, “Brentwood okay?”