It was September. September is often L.A.’s hottest month. Eighty-five degrees. And still I was shivering on the inside.

Fear is the motivating force behind most of my actions. Whatever it is I’m most afraid of takes all of my attention. Right then I was afraid that the cops could place me at the scene of a murder. Forget that the man had been dead at least two days when I was caught by Warren at the back door. Forget that I had probably erased any scrap that might have put me in the dead man’s suite. If the police liked me for the murder, then I would be the murderer in their book—and their book was the only one that mattered.

I had to know why Kit Mitchell was missing, why Leora and Son were looking for him, and why he would have had free entrée to a murdered car salesman’s apartment.

To answer these questions I pulled back into traffic and drove off toward the office of the bail bondsman—Milo Sweet.

MILO HAD MOVED from his Hooper address, over the illegal chicken distributors, to an apartment building on Baring Cross Street between 109th Street and 109th Place. Loretta Kuroko—Milo’s secretary, girl Friday, and final hope—was sitting in the little front room of the domicile-turned-office. She was forty with the skin of a twenty-year-old and the eyes of some ancient sage. She lived and worked down among black people because of her hatred for the white men who imprisoned her and her family during the war. And she adored Milo with a passion that could not be understood in contemporary terms. It wasn’t sexual, or at least I didn’t think it was. Their bond was like some ancient myth about two ideal characters carrying on their labors through the centuries, living out the drama and foibles of the whole human race.