It would’ve made more sense if he’d started out with blood spattered across the walls in large swaths, from a body splayed on the floor, with one of those soon-to-be destroyed knives sticking out at a strange angle. I toyed with the idea of calling the police, but couldn’t think of anything reasonable to say. “Hello, Officer, I’m calling to report a crime against construction. Could you please send someone to look into a demolition that’s making me awfully uncomfortable?” I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  I also considered putting my binoculars down, getting out of my car, crossing the street, ringing the doorbell and asking. But the guy had a sledgehammer and two types of pickaxe. Not to mention the blowtorch from earlier.

  So I told myself it didn’t matter what I thought. Presumably, someone somewhere had already debated the finer moral points of the issue. All I had to do was call in now and write up the facts for delivery in the afternoon. And collect my payday, of course. I couldn’t help being a little disappointed, though, when the man I handed my report over to didn’t shed any light on the matter.

  He was a tight-lipped lawyer in an office that didn’t leave any doubt about whether he was successful. The desk could’ve doubled as a pool table, and he still had plenty of room to walk around it on either side. There were no diplomas on the wall or business cards on the desk, and he didn’t introduce himself. Or offer me a chair. I leaned against the wall and watched him read my report, then feed it into a confetti shredder.

  “Thorough,” was his only comment.

  I didn’t know if he was talking about my report or the kitchen job, but I was pretty sure I’d been dismissed. It was now or never.

  “Normal people don’t do things like that. It’s not socially acceptable.”

  The thin lips curved into a slight smile. “You’re an expert, are you?”

  The way he said it, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him pull my high school yearbook out of a mahogany filing cabinet, along with dating records and my credit report. Who was this guy? But the only name I had belonged to the man who’d hired me. I decided to drop it and see what happened.

  “Will I be hearing from Mr. Aaronson again?

  Lawyer-guy seemed genuinely surprised. “Who is Mr. Aaronson?”

  “Ethan Aaronson? The guy who hired me?” I pulled a business card out of my pocket and handed it over. Lawyer-guy looked at both sides, then fed it into the shredder too.

  “Droll,” he said.

  Droll? Did he think we were telling jokes?

  “Aaronson’s not the kind of guy you could make up,” I told him.

  “No?” He took off his glasses and wiped them carefully on an expensive shirt sleeve. “What kind of guy is he?”

  I thought back to the linen suit and designer sunglasses that had entered my office a few days ago. “‘Ethan Aaronson, Knowledge Capital Consultant,’ he had told me, flashing a wad of cash while he handed over the now-shredded business card. ‘I help people identify, obtain and prioritize various types of information that might become useful one day. I’d like to retain you to accumulate and verify information on our behalf.’”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” lawyer-guy interrupted.

  “It gets better,” I assured him. “Just wait.”

  “‘The modern knowledge marketplace is one of the most exciting and fast-paced arenas for today’s informed consumer,’ Aaronson had continued. ‘I’m offering you the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of knowledge management. Specializing, as I already mentioned, in information collection and control.’”

  Lawyer-guy was rubbing his temples like he was in pain. “Was everything this Mr. Aaronson said so unnecessarily complicated?”

  “The number of zeros he offered was particularly clear,” I told him.

  “I see.” Lawyer-guy looked me over for a long moment. “You know everything he told you was a lie, don’t you?”

  “I have that number in writing.”

  It was probably true. The slip of paper Aaronson had pushed across the table should still be in my office somewhere.

  Lawyer-guy opened a drawer in his desk and took out a check with all the zeros that Aaronson had promised. I was a little surprised to see my name on it. Aaronson had thrown around words like “expertise” and “highly recommended” until I got a little worried he was confusing me with someone who could provide references.

  “Take my advice,” lawyer-guy said, pushing the check across the table. “Rip it up.”

  Rip it up? Oh, no. I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. I’d earned it. Like it or not, he had to pay.

  Once I had the check safely in my pocket, I had to ask. “So what do you call Aaronson?”

  I should’ve known I wouldn’t get a straight answer from such thin lips.

  “A frustrated actor,” lawyer-guy said, coming around the desk. “He created a role hoping you would tell the old man.”

  He opened the door.

  “What old man?” I asked.

  Lawyer-guy sighed. “God, I hate it when he gets into his roles.” He looked at his watch. “My billing rate is six hundred an hour. How much of that check do you want to waste making sense of nonsense?”

  The answer was none of it, so I walked out.

  Just to be on the safe side, I cashed the check on my way home. Then I bought a convertible. P.I.s should drive convertibles. Especially in Los Angeles. I had just enough left over to order myself a fedora online. I had just clicked confirm when my door opened again. It was too soon for another client, so I figured it was the actor playing Aaronson again, back to congratulate me on a bang-up job. But when I looked up I found wrinkled polyester from the chin down. From the chin up was fair, square, tired and reliable. The chin itself could have used a shave. It introduced itself as Detective Hayes, homicide.

  “What can I do for you, detective?” I asked, making a note of the name. In my memoirs, I would know and be known by the entire police force, mostly disliked for my devil-may-care attitude but grudgingly respected for closing their books. And of course I would have several sympathetic but anonymous sources on the inside. Several of whom I would have slept with. And left wanting more. Hayes seemed like as good a candidate as the next guy.

  “Do you know this man?” he asked. He handed over a photograph and I found myself looking at the little man from the kitchen again.

  “I don’t know him,” I said, “but I’ve seen him before. I was hired to watch him night before last. That’s what you’re here about?”

  He nodded.

  “I knew something wasn’t right about him. He killed someone, didn’t he?”

  Hayes was watching me closely. “Do you know that for a fact?”

  “No,” I admitted, “but it makes sense. Why else would he use a blowtorch and two types of pickaxe to massacre a perfectly innocent kitchen at two in the morning?” I was just getting started on how focused and creepy the little man in the kitchen had been when Hayes started laughing.

  “Didn’t anybody tell you what he was doing?”

  I made a mental note not to use him in my memoirs after all. “I’m just hired help. Nobody tells me anything.”

  “Junior Sullivan is a special effects guy over at Silver Fox Studios. You’ve heard of Syd Sullivan? Head of the studio? That’s his uncle. Junior’s a pyro-technician. He’s in charge of anything that melts, burns or blows up. You were watching him do research on an old set that needed striking overnight.”

  I tried to wrap my head around that, but compared to what I’d seen it sounded so reasonable.

  “This isn’t about the kitchen?”

  Hayes shook his head and ironed out the smile on his face. “The kitchen was executed lawfully.”

  “What’s it about, then?”

  “Uncle Syd was murdered that same night. Sometime between eleven and two. Mr. Sullivan’s personal secretary said you could give Junior an alibi.”

  “This is a secretary not named Aaronson, right?”

  The smile crept back onto Hayes’ face. “Right, but he said you might mention that name.”

  I waited for him to elaborate but Hayes wasn’t offering any more free information. Maybe knowledge-accumulation consulting wasn’t such a scam after all.

  “How was he killed?” I prodded.

  “Pickaxe in the back.”

  “What kind of pickaxe?”

  “The sharp kind.”

  “He used two pickaxes the other night. That’s why you think it was him?”

  “That and the fact that he told the old man he was going to.”

  “So he hired me to be his alibi? Son of a bitch!”

  “No, you were just supposed to be an early warning system in case Junior decided to actually go through with it. It was old man Sullivan who hired you.”

  I thought about that for a moment. If I’d understood lawyer-guy correctly, the personal secretary not named Aaronson had played an executive entrepreneur in order to impress old man Sullivan and get an acting job at Silver Fox Studios. It didn’t sound like the best career plan. Especially with old man Sullivan dead. Oh shit, they were going to think that was my fault. I was supposed to watch Junior. What if they asked for their money back?

  Hayes glanced at his watch. “So?” he asked.

  I played it casual. “So what?”

  “You can provide the alibi?”

  “Yeah, sure. I was there.”

  “From when to when?”

  “Ten p.m. to almost four a.m.”

  “Where were you watching from?”

  “A little ways up the alley on the other side of the street.”

  “And you could see him the whole time? No bathroom breaks or anything like that?”

  I hadn’t even been gone an hour, but the fewer people who knew about my little “bathroom break” at the bar, the better. “Nothing I would call significant.”

  Detective Hayes took my word for it, which made me think he wasn’t a very good detective. After he left I googled Syd Sullivan. His death was all over the news. So was the picture of him and his fiancée from the cover of People. The young fiancée was distraught. As well she should be. One more day and she would have been Mrs. Sullivan, in the enviable position of inheriting everything. And I’d just provided an alibi for a man who very possibly might have done it.

  Sorry sister, but we all got problems.

  Hayes was definitely out of my memoirs when I found out he didn’t actually take my word for it. He checked up on my view of Junior, and ran into Paulie while he was doing it. Paulie, usually the soul of discretion, ratted me out.

  “I have a dozen witnesses who say you ducked into the bar on the night of the murder,” Hayes told me. “You were there about an hour, from approximately midnight to one a.m.?”

  There was no point in denying it now, so I nodded. “Eight minutes after twelve until one minute before one.”

  “More than enough time for Junior to murder his uncle.” Hayes opened the door. “I guess that means I have an arrest to make.”

  His tone held a cheerfulness suggestive of doffed caps and no hard feelings. Not the kind of relationship a P.I. was supposed to have with the fuzz.

  “Wait! Aren’t you going to ride me for lying to you?”

  “I’m busy, but maybe he can oblige.” Hayes pointed behind him with a thumb and expensive-lawyer-guy stepped into view.

  He had me strung up for breach of contract before I had time to notice whether he’d changed suits, and I was ordered to return the fee I’d already spent plus pay compensatory damages. Starting with Junior’s multi-million dollar bail. What was the point of writing memoirs if they were just going to put someone else in silk stockings?

  “Aren’t you working for the old man?” I protested. “Don’t you want to see Junior go down?” But until Junior was convicted, he was the sole inheritor, and lawyer-guy had aligned his loyalties with the money.

  “Besides,” he said. “We both know Junior didn’t do it.”

  “We do?” I asked.

  “If you want to keep your money, we do.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “Okay, so Junior didn’t do it. Then why did Mr. Sullivan hire me?”

  “To indulge his fiancée. He knew Junior would never follow through, but she got hysterical. Insisted he do something to protect himself.”

  “So probably not the fiancée either?”

  Lawyer-guy’s fingers were itching at his temples again. “Aren’t you a P.I?”

  I nodded.

  “So investigate,” he said.

  It was time to get tough. “What about my fee?”

  “How about I don’t make you return that ridiculous fedora?”

  “How about we’re even? I get to keep my original fee and no more garnishment for Junior’s bail,” I countered. “Or anything else.”

  “Done.”

  The thing about investigation is that it goes a lot more smoothly if you have a lead. I had squat. I had to assume that lawyer-guy wouldn’t make a deal with me if he’d done it, so I crossed him off the list. Following the money led back to Junior. That just left Aaronson—though I couldn’t actually imagine him wielding a pickaxe in linen cuffs—and anyone else who knew Sullivan.

  I decided to start with Aaronson, but I hit a brick wall as soon as I realized I could list everything I knew about the man in nine words: personal secretary, between jobs, frustrated actor, not named Aaronson. It wasn’t much to go on, but I could only imagine how much lawyer-guy would deduct from my fee if I called to ask for more. Besides, P.I.s follow their gut, and I didn’t like Aaronson for it.

  Which was strange. He should have been the ideal suspect. He’d lied to me from the start. About everything. But they weren’t the right lies for murder. The right lies for murder would’ve kept me out of the picture. Rule number one: don’t set up an alibi for the patsy. Adding me into the equation just made things unnecessarily complicated.

  I groaned. Unnecessarily complicated. I’d heard those words before to describe Aaronson. Did I need to consider the possibility that Aaronson brought me in to complicate the situation? No wonder lawyer-guy had headaches all the time.

  I had a migraine too by the time I’d convinced myself that it still didn’t make sense. Aaronson knew I was there. I gave Junior an alibi. The only way to be sure it all fell through would be to set me up too. “Unless he set me up too,” I said out loud, letting the idea take hold. Was it possible I didn’t just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  I got a couple of aspirin and told myself to stop being so paranoid. Going into the bar had been my own rotten idea. I’d heard the clinking of the bottles and started salivating, and when Paulie had let slip that it was ladies’ night, well, that was it. Nothing sinister or odd about it. Except Paulie had never had ladies’ night before. And he would never leave his liquor unattended so he could take out a few extra bottles. And he never gave anyone free drinks.

  I shook my head. How had I gone from suspecting Aaronson to suspecting Paulie? But there was also the lighting. Paulie had turned the lights up. Which meant there were plenty of witnesses to my little side trip when Hayes started poking around.

  The lights, the bottles, ladies’ night. Together, they pointed to one thing. Goddamnit, I’d been set up. Just ask the bum in the corner booth.

  But why?

  I knew I couldn’t answer that so I tried something easier.

  By who?

  I couldn’t answer that either. Except that Paulie was involved because he’d lured me in. Knew just how to do it too.

  In a Chandler story, this would be the part where I confronted Paulie at the bar and got a broken nose for my trouble. He would deny the whole thing and I’d have squandered my only lead. But Paulie was a part of it, somehow. Hopefully, I could suss out his connection the old-fashioned way. Gumshoe on a stakeout. Because until I knew more about him—like his last name—google-stalking was out.

  Early the next morning I followed Paulie from the bar back to his house, a one-story stucco affair whose chain-link fence kept in more dirt than lawn. But I was less interested in the lawn than in the mailbox nailed up on one side of the front door. That could be useful. I picked up a cup of coffee then circled back and started the long wait for the mailman.

  I snoozed for a while, but not long enough. Then I clicked my pen in and out until even I couldn’t stand it anymore. Then I just sat. And the longer I sat there, the more determined I became to get Junior off. At least he wasn’t boring.

  Which reminded me. I hadn’t gotten a chance to read that issue of People I’d gotten for Junior’s stakeout. Might as well multi-task, see if the Sullivan article had anything useful. I dug it out again and stared at the cover photo of the recently deceased. Why murder him? And why drag me into it? I clicked open my pen again and gave him horns and a tail while I thought about it.

  The only coherent thought I came up with was “God, what kind of a woman agrees to marry that?” Poor, desperate, ambitious. And let’s not forget the serious daddy issues. I tried to imagine the starlet fiancée before Silver Fox Studios had fixed her up, drawing in bags under her eyes and blacking out a few of her teeth. Funny. Paulie was missing those teeth too. Made them look a little alike.

  I almost missed the mailman while I was staring at her. He was already two houses down before I looked up. Paulie’s mail was sitting coyly in the box. I slipped up the walk and took a peek. There was a final notice bill for Mr. Paul Schnetzer. Paulie Schnetzer? What kind of a name was that?

  The kind of name that made google-stalking a cinch, it turned out. I found him on IMDB. Paul Schnetzer, father of LuAnn Schnetzer (mother Patty Schnetzer deceased) who had changed her name to Lucinda Larkin. Soon to be Lucinda Larkin Sullivan. Whose picture I had just blacked the teeth out on. I almost fell out of my car.