Free Kind of Blue by Miles Corwin Page B

father, mother, and brother marched to a corner of the camp. His father panicked at leaving his oldest son and ran toward him. He was shot in the back. My father never saw his mother and brother again.
    I leaned over, kissed Ariel’s cheek, and thought of my father’s little brother. Asher. My namesake.
    “Why aren’t you married anymore?” Ariel said.
    “That’s a long story.”
    “You miss Aunt Robin?”
    “I guess so.”
    “I miss my dad.”
    “He’ll be home soon.”
    “Maybe Aunt Robin will too?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    After Robin left me, investigating murders became a much more dismal, onerous task. The interviews with grieving relatives, the autopsies, the crime scenes with walls splashed with blood and imbedded with bone and tissue, all weighed more heavily on me. Whenever I picked up a new case, I could feel a tightness in the pit of my stomach, as if the spirit of the newly departed had remained to pressure me, to insure I did not forget my duty. Robin had always been a countervailing force; spending time with her had helped alleviate the strain of the job, ease that pressure in my gut.
    After the cruise, Ariel was hungry so we ate fish ’n’ chips at the harbor, and then bought ice cream cones and walked along the docks. I helped Ariel with his spelling by having him read the names on the fishing boats—many of them the first daughters of the skippers. At dusk, as Ariel snoozed in the backseat, I drove back to the city, thinking about Relovich’s broken hyoid bone and the smashed bedroom window.
    When I returned home, I removed from my briefcase the envelopes containing Relovich’s cancelled checks and phone records, and spread them out on my dining room table. Most of the cancelled checks covered routine expenses and none of them piqued my interest. I examined his phone bills from the last few months. His cell bills didn’t list any numbers called, just the amount owed; but his home phone bills recorded all the toll calls, which I highlighted with a yellow marker. Relovich had not made many repeat toll calls, but one phone number with a 213 area code stood out because during the past two months he’d called the number more than a dozen times.
    After clicking on my computer, accessing an LAPD site, and checking a reverse directory for the address, I discovered that it was a business listing a few miles west of downtown: L.A. Elegant Escorts. A woman by the name of Ann Licata was registered as the owner. I decided to see what she had to say.

CHAPTER 5
     
    I cruised down a side street a few blocks north of Olympic lined with small, shabby apartment buildings. The night was damp and columns of mist glowed a sickly yellow under the streetlights. When I double-checked the address, I realized that the establishment with the genteel name of L.A. Elegant Escorts was located in a rundown dingbat—Los Angeles’s grim contribution to urban blight. I was particularly incensed about dingbats because the street where I grew up was once composed of gracious Spanish-style duplexes. But when I was in grammar school, developers began tearing them down—the story of L.A.—and throwing up hastily constructed dingbats: stripped down two-story stucco boxes with rows of parking spaces in front, the exteriors adorned with flimsy metal lamps and cheesy decorative starbursts. Dingbats are the residential analogues of strip malls.
    I walked along the side of the dingbat, up a dank staircase, the steps dotted with specks of stucco that had fallen from the walls, and stood on a landing flanked by two front doors. I rang the bell of apartment number four. I waited about thirty seconds and rang the bell again. I heard rattling in the back of the apartment and then a sleepy voice call out, “Who is it?”
    “LAPD. Open up.”
    “Do you have a search warrant?”
    “I’m not interested in searching your place. I just want to talk to you. I’m investigating a murder.”
    An obese woman with stringy hair,