Dr. Death: An Alex Delaware Novel

Irony can be a rich dessert, so when the contents of the van werepublicized, some people gorged. The ones who'd believed Eldon H. Mate to bethe Angel of Death.Those who'd considered him Mercy Personified grieved.I viewed it through a different lens, had my own worries.Mate was murdered in the very early hours of a sour-smelling, fog-ladenMonday in September. No earthquakes or wars interceded by sundown, so thedeath merited a lead story on the evening news. Newspaper headlines in theTimes and the Daily News followed on Tuesday. TV dropped the story withintwenty-four hours, but recaps ran in the Wednesday papers. In total, fourdays of coverage, the maximum in short-attention-span L.A. unless the corpseis that of a princess or the killer can afford lawyers who yearn for Oscars.No easy solve on this one; no breaks of any kind. Milo had been doing hisjob long enough not to expect otherwise.He'd had an easy summer, catching a quartet of lovingly stupid homicidesduring July and August–one domestic violence taken to the horrible extremeand three brain-dead drunks shooting other inebriates in squalid Westsidebars. Four murderers hanging around long enough to be caught. It kept hissolve rate high, made it a bit–but not much–easier to be the only openlygay detective in LAPD."Knew I was due," he said. It was the Sunday after the murder when he phonedme at the house. Mate's corpse had been cold for six days and the press hadmoved on. That suited Milo just fine. Like any artist, he craved solitude. He'd playedhis part by not giving the press anything to work with. Orders from thebrass. One thing he and the brass could agree on: reporters were almostalways the enemy.What the papers HAD printed was squeezed out of clip-file biographies, theinevitable ethical debates, old photos, old quotes. Beyond the fact thatMate had been hooked up to his own killing machine, only the sketchiestdetails had been released:Van parked on a remote section of Mulholland Drive, discovery by hikers justafter dawn.DR. DEATH MURDERED.I knew more because Milo told me.The call came in at 8 P.M., just as Robin and I had finished dinner. I wasout the door, holding on to the straining leash of Spike, our little Frenchbulldog. Pooch and I both looking forward to a night walk up the glen. Spikeloved the dark because pointing at scurrying sounds let him pretend he was anoble hunter. I enjoyed getting out because I worked with people all day andsolitude was always welcome.Robin answered the phone, caught me in time, ended up doing dog-duty as Ireturned to my study."Mate's yours?" I said, surprised because he hadn't told me sooner. Suddenlyedgy because that added a whole new layer of complexity to my week."Who else merits such blessing?"I laughed softly, feeling my shoulders humping, rings of tension around myneck. The moment I'd heard about Mate I'd worried. Deliberated for a longtime, finally made a call that hadn't been returned. I'd dropped the issuebecause there'd been no good reason not to. It really WASN'T any of mybusiness. Now, with Milo involved, all that had changed.I kept the worries to myself. His call had nothing to do with my problem.Coincidence–one of those nasty little overlaps. Or maybe there really areonly a hundred people in the world.His reason for getting in touch was simple: the dreaded W word: whodunit. Acase with enough psychopathology to make me potentially useful.Also I was his friend, one of the few people left in whom he could confide.The psychopathology part was fine with me. What bothered me was thefriendship component. Things I knew but didn't tell him. COULDN'T tell him.