When The Bough Breaks

But he was and had been comfortable with it for several years. He wasn't in the closet, neither did he flaunt it.

I asked him if the department knew about it.

"Uh - huh. Not in the sense of filing an official report. It's just something that's known."

"How do they treat you?"

"Disapproval from a distance - cold looks. But basically it's live and let live. They're short - staffed and I'm good. What do they want? To drag in the ACLU and lose a good detective in the bargain? Ed Davis was a homophobe. He's gone and it's not so bad."

"What about the other detectives?"

He shrugged. "They leave me alone. We talk business. We don't double - date."

Now the lack of recognition by the men at Angela's made sense.

Some of Milo's initial altruism, his reaching out to help me, was a little more understandable, too. He knew what it was like to be alone. A gay cop was a person in limbo. You could never be one of the gang back at the station, no matter how well you did your job. And the homosexual community was bound to be suspicious of someone who looked, acted like and was a cop.

"I figured I should tell you, since we seem to be getting friendly."

"It's no big deal, Milo."

"No?"

"No." I wasn't really all that comfortable with it. But I was damn well going to work on it.

A month after Stuart Hickle stuck a .22 in his mouth and blasted his brains all over my wallpaper, I made some major changes in my life.

I resigned my job at Western Pediatric and closed down my practice. I referred all my patients to a former student, a first - rate therapist who was starting out in practice and needed the business. I had taken very few new referrals since starting the groups for the

Kim's Korner families, so there was less separation anxiety than would normally be expected.

I sold an apartment building in Malibu, forty units that I'd purchased seven years before, for a large profit. I also let go of a duplex in Santa Monica. Part of the money - the portion that would eventually go to taxes - I put in a high - yield money market. The rest went into tax - free municipals. It wasn't the kind of investing that would make me richer, but it would provide financial stability. I figured I could live off the interest for two or three years as long as I didn't get too extravagant.

I sold my old Chevy Two and bought a Seville, a seventy - nine, the last year they looked good. It was forest - green with a saddle - colored leather interior that was cushy and quiet. With the amount of driving I'd be doing, the lousy mileage wouldn't make much difference. I threw away most of my old clothes and got new stuff - mostly soft fabrics - knits, cords, rubber soled shoes, cashmere sweaters, robes, shorts, and pullovers.

I had the pipes cleaned out on the hot tub that I'd never used since I bought the house. I started to buy food and drink milk. I pulled my old Martin out of its case and strummed it on the balcony. I listened to records. I read for pleasure for the first time since high school. I got a tan. I shaved off my beard and discovered I had a face, and not a bad one at that.

I dated good women. I met Robin and things really started to get better.

Be - kind - to - Alex time. Early retirement six months before my thirty - third birthday.

It was fun while it lasted.

3

Morton Handler's last residence - if you didn't count the morgue - had been a luxury apartment complex off Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. It had been built into a hillside and designed to give a honeycomb effect: a loosely connected chain of individual units linked by corridors that had been placed at seemingly random locations, the apartments staggered to give each one a full view of the ocean. The motif was bastard Spanish: blindingly white textured stucco walls, red tile roofs, window accents of black wrought iron. Plantings of azalea and hibiscus filled in occasional patches of earth. There were lots of potted plants sunk in large terra - cotta containers: coconut palms, rubber plants, sun ferns, temporary - looking, as if someone planned on moving them all out in the middle of the night.

Handler's unit was on an intermediate level. The front door was sealed, with an LAPD. sticker taped across it. Lots of footprints dirtied the terrazzo walkway near the entrance.

Milo led me across a terrace filled with polished stones and succulents to a unit eater - cornered from the murder scene. Adhesive letters spelling out the word MANGER were affixed to the door. Bad jokes about Baby Jesus flashed through my mind.

Milo knocked.

I realized then that the place was amazingly silent. There must have been at least fifty units but there wasn't a soul in sight. No evidence of human habitation.

We waited a few minutes. He raised his fist to knock again just before the door opened.

"Sorry. I was washin' my hair."