“Locking driving that car seemed awfully personal, though Seacrest’s barter explanation could cover that. Also, Seacrest seemed to be delaying letting us in and once he did, he called upstairs to say the police were there. Which could have been his way of warning Locking. Giving him time to get his clothes on? All of which is pure supposition.”
“Okay . . . why Locking and Hope?”
“You’ve wondered all along about her having an affair. Most affairs begin at work and Locking was the guy she worked with. And after marriage to someone like Seacrest, she might have been ready for a little excitement.”
“Black leather and a skull ring,” he said, drumming the steering wheel and heading into Westwood Village. Like so much else in L.A., the district had been intellectually downscaled, the bookstores of my college days surrendering to games arcades, gyro shacks, and insta-latte assembly-line franchises.
“What I found interesting,” he said, “was the way Seacrest suggested the murder could be blamed on the book. Insisting it had nothing to do with her academic life. Which distances it from him. I’ve seen killers who think they’re smart do that—give out alternative scenarios. That way they can look helpful while thinking they’re steering us away from them. And that dog. Who better to slip her a nice big steak laced with God-knows-what. And now he’s given her away.”
“Getting rid of the reminders.”
He made an ugly sound and loosened his tie. “Locking and Hope, Locking and Seacrest. Guess I’ll make use of some of my homosexual contacts. Maybe the lieutenant was right and I am the perfect guy for the case.”
“I wonder,” I said, “why it took so long for Locking to come get his data. Hope’s been dead three months. That’s a lot of time when you’re working on your dissertation. Then again, Locking hasn’t found a new advisor so maybe he’s having trouble adjusting to Hope’s death. Maybe because they had more going than a student-teacher thing. Or, he’s just a hang-loose guy in no great hurry to finish. You see that in grad school. Though his go-round with Kenneth Storm was anything but mellow.”
“What do you think of Hope appointing her own prize student to the committee?”
“Packing the jury. She could have justified it in the name of efficiency. Seacrest said she distrusted organizations, and everything else tells us she wasn’t much of a team player.”
“That’s why I’m interested in meeting people she did work with. Lawyer Barone’s still ignoring me but Dr. Cruvic left a message saying he’ll see me briefly at ten-thirty tomorrow morning. Care to come, psych him out?”
“Sure.”
“Not a team player,” he said. “Cowgirl with a Ph.D. Sometimes cowgirls get thrown.”
CHAPTER
7
The following day I met Milo for breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s on Beverly, then we drove to Dr. Cruvic’s office on Civic Center Drive.
Interesting location for a private practitioner. Most of Beverly Hills’s medical suites are housed in the stylish neo-Federal buildings that line North Bedford, Roxbury, and Camden, and in the big reflective towers on Wilshire.
Civic Center was the northern edge of the city’s meager industrial district, a few nondescript blocks that paralleled Santa Monica Boulevard but were blocked from motorists’ view by tall hedges and eucalyptus. Unused railroad tracks cut diagonally through the street. Past the tracks were a pink granite office complex, the frosted-glass headquarters of a record company, and the neo-retro-post-whatever-revival municipal center that contained Beverly Hills’s city hall, library, police and fire departments.
Development hadn’t come yet to the other side of the tracks, where Cruvic’s pink stucco Spanish building shared space with an assortment of narrow, shabby/cute single- and double-story structures dating from World War I and earlier. The doctor’s immediate neighbors were a beauty parlor, a telephone answering service, and an unmarked building with a loading dock. The pink building had no front windows, just a massive wood-and-iron door like those you see in Spain and Italy and Greece, leading to courtyards. A ring-in buzzer was topped by a tarnished bronze sign so small it seemed intent on avoiding discovery. M. CRUVIC, M.D. etched shallowly.
Milo punched the buzzer and we waited. But for the hum of the cars on Santa Monica, the street was sleepy. Geraniums grew out of boxes in the beautician’s window. In all my years in L.A., I’d never had a reason to be here.