Mo Barnard sighed. Milo smiled at her, and the way she reciprocated it let me know he’d been here with her for a while.
“Strange,” she said. “All these years. I thought he was with a whore, didn’t know whether to be sad or mad. After a while, I forgot about that part of it. Now you come and tell me it could have been something else. You just never know, do you.”
“Just a possibility,” Milo reminded her.
“Yes, I know, it’ll probably never be solved. But just the chance that he wasn’t with a whore cheers me up a bit. He wasn’t a bad guy—lots of good qualities, really.”
Milo told me, “The motel was one of those places rented by the hour. So you can see why Mo assumed that.”
“The police assumed it,” she said. “Even though the motel clerk said he hadn’t seen any woman go in with Felix. But of course, he could’ve lied. Felix was once a policeman himself. Just for a short time, in Baltimore; that’s where he grew up. I met him in San Bernadino. He was working for an insurance company, investigating accident claims. I was a records clerk at city hall. He got let go right after we got married, and we moved to L.A.”
“Did you work for the city here, too?” I said.
“No, I got a job doing the books for Fred Shale Real Estate, over in Pacific Palisades. I did that for thirty-one years. Felix and I lived in Santa Monica, near the Venice side. Felix’s office was out here in Malibu, but this last year’s the first time I’ve actually lived in Malibu. My sister and her husband own this place, but he’s got bad lungs so they moved over to Cathedral City, near Palm Springs.”
Milo said, “The interesting thing is, Mo feels Felix may have come into some money about a year before he was killed.”
“I’m pretty sure of it,” said Mo. “He denied it but the signs were there. I thought he was keeping someone on the side.” Her cheeks colored. “Truth be known, he’d done that before, more than once. But in his younger days. He was sixty-three by then—ten years older than me, but when I married him I thought he was mature.” She chuckled and said, “Hand me a Krackel bar, will you?”
Milo did.
“What signs did you notice?” I said.
“First of all, his retiring. For years he’d talked about it, but he always complained he couldn’t get enough money together—always griped about my having health benefits and a pension from San Berdoo and from Shale, and he was out on his own with nothing. Then, all of a sudden, he just walks in and announces there’s enough in the kitty. I said, “What pie dropped out of the sky, Felix?’ He just smiled and patted my head and said, “Don’t you worry, Sugaroo, we’re finally going to get that place in Laguna Niguel.’ We were always talking about buying a condo down there, but we didn’t have the money. We might have been able to afford one of those retirement communities, but Felix never saw himself as old. When he turned fifty, he bought himself a toopay and contact lenses. I guess he figured being so much older than me—I used to look like a kid, people would sometimes mistake me for his daughter—he should do something about it. The other thing he did that made me suspicious was get a new car, a cherry-red Thunderbird, the Landau model, the vinyl top. Which was their top of the line. We had a big fight over that, me wanting to know how we could afford it and him saying it was none of my business.”
She shook her head. “We fought a lot, but we stayed together thirty-one years. Then he got himself killed and there was no big money in his bank account, just a little over three thousand dollars, and I figured he’d spent whatever he had on the car. And whores. I drove that car for fifteen years, finally junked it.”
“Did he leave any business records behind?” I said.
“You mean his detective files? No, I told Mr. Sturgis he wasn’t much for keeping records—truth is, he was pretty disorganized in general. After he died, I went through his things and was surprised how little there was—just scraps of paper with scrawls. I figured, his line of work, there might be things there that would embarrass people. I threw everything out.”