CHAPTER 20

      EATING A MAMOUL, WASHING IT DOWN with coffee from a thermos, Hazard Yancy sat in an unmarked sedan directly in front of Rolf Reynerd’s apartment house in West Hollywood.

      The early winter twilight would not descend for another thirty minutes, but under the pall of the storm, the city had an hour ago settled into a prolonged dusk. Activated by photoelectric sensors, streetlamps glowed, painting a steely sheen on the needles of rain that stitched the gauzy gray sky ever closer to the earth.

      Although it might appear that Hazard lingered over cookies on the city’s time, he was considering his approach to Reynerd.

      After lunch with Ethan, he had returned to his desk in Homicide. In a couple hours, on the Internet and off, working both the keyboard and the phone, he had learned more than a little about his subject.

      Rolf Reynerd was an actor who only intermittently made a living at his craft. Between occasional multi-episode supporting roles as a bad boy on one cheesy soap opera or another, he endured long periods of unemployment.

      In an episode of The X-Files, he’d played a federal agent driven psychotic by an alien brain leech. In an episode of Law & Order, he had been a psychotic personal trainer who killed himself and his wife near the end of the first act. In a TV commercial for a deodorant, he had been cast as a psychotic guard in a Soviet gulag; the spot had never gone national, and he’d made only a little money from it.

      An actor unlucky enough to be typecast usually didn’t fall into that career trap until he’d experienced great success in a memorable role. Thereafter, the public had difficulty accepting him as any character type other than the one that had made him famous.

      In Reynerd’s case, however, he seemed to have been typecast even in failure. This suggested to Hazard that certain qualities of the man’s personality and demeanor allowed him to portray only mentally unbalanced characters, that he played screw-loose well because several of his own screws had stripped threads.

      Despite an unreliable flow of income, Rolf Reynerd lived in a spacious apartment in a handsome building, in a good neighborhood. He dressed well, frequented the hottest nightclubs with young actresses who had a taste for Dom Perignon, and drove a new Jaguar.

      According to former friends of Reynerd’s widowed mother, Mina, she doted on her son, believed that one day he would be a star, and subsidized him with a fat monthly check.

      They were her former friends because Mina Reynerd had died four months ago. She’d first been shot in the foot, then beaten to death with a marble lamp encrusted with ornate ormolu mountings.

      Her killer remained unknown. Detectives had turned up no leads in her case.

      Not surprisingly, the sole heir to her estate had been her only child, poor typecast Rolf.

      The actor had a dead-solid perfect alibi for the evening of his mother’s murder.

      This didn’t either surprise Hazard or convince him of Reynerd’s innocence. Sole heirs usually had airtight alibis.

      According to the medical examiner, Mina had been bludgeoned to death between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m. She’d been struck with such brutal force that patterns of the bronze ormolu had been deeply imprinted on her flesh, even crushed into the bone of her forehead.

      Rolf had been partying with his current girlfriend and four other couples from seven o’clock that evening until two o’clock in the morning. They had been a flashy, noisy, memorable group at the two trendy nightclubs between which they had divided their time.

      Anyway, even though Mina’s murder remained unsolved, and even if Rolf’s alibi had been only that he’d stayed home alone, playing with himself, Hazard would have had no excuse to give the man a once-over. The case belonged to another detective.

      By happy chance, one of Reynerd’s party pals that night—Jerry Nemo—was known to Hazard from another case, which opened a door.

      Two months ago, a drug dealer named Carter Cook had been shot in the head. Apparently the murder had been incidental to robbery; Cook had been loaded with merchandise and cash.

      Reynerd’s buddy, Jerry Nemo, had placed a call to Cook’s cell phone an hour before the murder. Nemo was a customer, a cokehead. He set up a meet with Cook to score some blow.

      Nemo was no longer under suspicion. No one in Los Angeles or anywhere on Planet Earth was still under suspicion. The Cook murder qualified as classic shitcan, a case unlikely ever to be solved.

      Nevertheless, by pretending that Nemo remained a suspect, Hazard had an excuse to approach Reynerd and scope him out for Ethan.

      He didn’t need an excuse for the purpose of satisfying Reynerd. Using just badge and bluster, Hazard could spin a hundred stories convincing enough to persuade the party boy to open the door and answer questions.