Interns back then worked hundred-hour weeks. This intern had found the time to indulge his extracurricular interest. Sitting and staring into the eyes of the dying, trying to capture the precise moment. My hunch about his intentions, confirmed. Early in the game, Mate's obsession had been with the minutiae of death, not the quality of life.
No comments from the Swedish journal editor. I wondered how Mate's side activities had been received at Oxford Hill Hospital.
Leaving the reading room, I found a pay phone in the hallway, got Oakland Information and asked for the number. No listing. Returning to the computers, I looked up the call.
When I pulled up, Milo was standing in front with two men in their late twenties. Both wore gray sport coats and dark slacks and held notepads against their thighs. Both were tall as Milo, each was forty pounds lighter. Neither looked happy.
The man to the left had a puffy face, squashed features and wheat-colored blow-dried hair. The other D-I was dark, balding, bespectacled.
Milo said something to them and they returned inside.
"Your little elves?" I said, when he came over.
"Korn and Demetri. They don't like working for me, and my opinion of them ain't too grand. I put them back on the phones, recontacting families. They whined about scut work-oh this younger generation. Ready for Zoghbie? Let's take my Ferrari, in case we need a police presence."
He crossed the street to the police lot and I followed in the Seville, waiting till he backed out, then sliding into his parking space. Signs all over said POLICE PERSONNEL ONLY, ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED.
I got in the unmarked and handed him the material I'd printed from the Internet. He put it on the backseat, wedged between two of the file boxes that filled the space. The car smelled of old breakfast. The police radio was stuttering and Milo snapped it off.
"What if?" I said, pointing to the warning signs.
"I'll go your bail." Stretching his neck to one side, he winced, cleared his throat, pressed down on the gas and sped to Santa Monica Boulevard, then over to the 405 North, toward the Valley. I knew what I had to do and my body responded by tightening up. When we passed the mammoth white boxes that the Getty Museum comprised, I told him about Joanne Doss.
He didn't say anything for a while. Opened his window, spit, rolled it up.
Another minute passed. "You were waiting for the right moment to inform me?"
"As a matter of fact, I was. Till a few hours ago, I couldn't tell you anything, because even the fact that I'd seen them was confidential. Then Mr. Doss called and asked me to see his daughter and I figured I'd have to bow off Mate. But he wants me to continue."
"First things first, huh?" His jaw worked.
I kept quiet.
"And if he'd said not to mention it?"
"I'd have bowed off, told you I couldn't explain why."
Half mile of silence. He stretched his neck again. "Doss… yeah, local family-the Palisades. Toward the end of the list-the missus was in her early forties."
"Traveler number forty-eight," I said.
"You knew her?"
"No, she was already dead when I saw Stacy-the daughter."
"Mr. Doss is one of those who has not returned our repeated calls."
"He travels a lot."
"That so… Anything about him I should worry about?"
"Such as?"
He shrugged. "You tell me. He said you could blab, right?"
He kept his eyes on the freeway, but I felt surveilled.
"Sorry if this is rubbing you the wrong way," I said. "Maybe I should've begged off the case right from the beginning."
Pause. Long pause, as if he was considering that. Finally, he said, "Nah, I'm just being a hard-ass. We've all got our rule books… So what was the matter with Mrs. Doss that led her to consult Dr. Mate?"
"She was one of the undiagnosed ones I mentioned. Had been deteriorating for a while. Fatigue, chronic pain, she withdrew socially, took to bed. Gained a hundred pounds."
He whistled, touched his own gut. "And no clue as to why all this happened?"
"She saw a lot of doctors, but no formal diagnosis," I said.
"Maybe a head case?"
"Like I said, I never knew her, Milo."
He smiled. "Meaning you're also thinking she might've been a head case… and Mate killed her anyway-'scuse me, assisted her passage. That could irritate a family member, if they didn't think she was really sick."
He waited.
I said nothing.
"How long after she died did you see the daughter?"
"Three months."
"Why're you seeing her again? Something to do with Mate's murder?"
"That I can't get into," I said. "Let's just say it's nothing you have to worry about."
"Something that just happens to come up now, after Mate's killed?"
"College," I said. "Now's when kids get serious about applying to college."
He didn't answer. The freeway was uncommonly clear and we sped toward the 101 interchange. Milo pumped the unmarked up the eastbound ramp and we merged into slightly heavier traffic. Orange signs on the turnoff announced impending construction for one and a half years. Everyone was going fifteen miles over the limit, as if getting in some last speed licks.
He said, "So you're telling me Mr. Doss is like all the others-big fan of Mate?"
"I'll leave it to him to express his opinion on that."
He smiled again. Not a nice smile at all. "The guy didn't like Mate."
"I didn't say that."
"No, you didn't." He eased up on the gas pedal. We cruised past the Van Nuys exits, Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood. The freeway turned into the 134.
I said, "I found a feminist journal that claimed Mate hated women. Because eighty percent of his travelers were female and he'd never been seen with a woman. Know anything about his personal life?"
Graceless change of subject. He knew what I was doing but let it ride. "Not so far. He lived alone and his landlady said she'd never seen him go out with anyone. I haven't checked marriage licenses yet, but no one's turned up claiming insurance benefits."
"Wonder if a guy like that would carry life insurance," I said.
"Why not?"
"I don't think he valued life."
"Well, maybe you're right, 'cause I didn't find any policies at his apartment. Then again, all his papers might be with that goddamn attorney, Haiselden, who is still incommunicado. Maybe Ms. Zoghbie can direct us to him."
"Find out anything else about her?"
"No criminal record, not even parking tickets. Guess she just gets off on people dying. There seems to be a lot of that going around, doesn't there? Or maybe it's just my unique perspective."
Any attraction Alice Zoghbie had to the culture of death wasn't reflected by her landscaping.
She lived in a vanilla stucco English country house centered on a modest lot in the northern hills of Glen-dale. Cute house. The spotless shake roof over the entry turret was topped by a copper rooster weather vane. White pullback drapes framed immaculate mullion windows. A flagstone path twisted its way toward an iron canopy over a carved oak door. Banks of flowers rimmed the house, arranged by descending height: the crinkled foliage and purple bloom of statice, then billowing clouds of multicolored impatiens fringed by a low border of some sort of creeping white blossom.
A white Audi sat in the cobblestoned driveway, shaded by a young, carefully shaped podocarpus tree, still staked. On the other side of the flagstone stood an equally tonsured, much larger sycamore. Where the sun hit, the sloping lawn was so green it appeared spray-painted. The big tree had started to release its leaves, and the sprinkle of rusty brown on grass and stone was the sole suggestion that not everything could be controlled.