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highways with a thin coat of water mixed with oil that made for dicey driving conditions. Los Angeles had been experiencing unusually cold weather, thanks to a storm blustering south from the Gulf of Alaska. My response to the chill was a heavy coat and a wool hat with earflaps that made me look like a llama herder in the mountains of Peru.
    Forty minutes later, I arrived at the pie-shaped slice of land between Washington Boulevard and Washington Place in Culver City, where I shared a second-floor office suite with an ex-cop-turned-private investigator named Charley Tate.
    Charley was a combination of father, brother, uncle, and friend. He was sometimes cranky and obstinate and we often disagreed, but we’d been through trouble together and had come out on the other side with a healthy measure of mutual respect. I could count on him 100 percent to cover my back in a crisis.
    He’d taught me a lot in the short time I’d known him, including how to pick locks, not that he’d set out to do that. We’d been chatting in the car one day about copy for a new brochure I was writing for him, and one thing led to another. I guess he felt if I was going to learn to defeat locks I should have the proper tools, so a few months back he’d given me a lock-picking set of my own.
    Charley had learned some things from me, too, like how to change the color of Tate Investigations’ bottom line ink from red to black. Our businesses were separate, but we shared rent, a lobby, and an administrative assistant named Eugene Barstok.
    There was no elevator in our building, so I walked up the stairs to the second floor and found Eugene at his desk, staring trancelike at his computer screen. He was in his midtwenties with a slight physique, round blue eyes that always looked surprised, and a cowlick on the crown of his head that reminded me of an antenna on a spaceship.
    A small plastic object hung from a chain around his neck, humming in a low monotone. It was an air purifier he used to relieve allergy symptoms, which were especially bad in November when the Santa Ana winds blew in pollen from the desert. He also used the purifier when it rained, because he worried about killer mold. Truth be told, he wore the thing in the off-season, too, because he was a bit of a germophobe. The downside to this was that Charley and I were forced to read periodic bulletins from the Center for Disease Control. The upside? The office was always immaculate.
    I wanted to tell Charley about Lupe Ortiz’s murder, but that meant telling Eugene, as well. His psyche was on the fragile side of the spectrum, so I had to be careful how and when I laid out the story. Charley’s door was closed, so I assumed he was busy working or with a client. I decided to wait until he was available so I could break the news to both of them at the same time.
    “How’s the chocolate research coming?” I said. “Find anything I can use in Nectar’s advertising campaign?”
    Eugene craned his neck and squinted at the screen. “How about this? Belgium produces one hundred seventy-two tons of chocolate a year. They have two thousand chocolate shops. The Swiss each eat twenty-one pounds of chocolate per person per year. Belgians and Brits eat sixteen pounds. Americans eat only eleven and a half pounds, but I think those numbers are skewed. Venus accounts for most of that herself. Too bad all that sugar hasn’t sweetened her disposition.”
    I ignored his comment. He and Venus had a quirky kind of friendship that sometimes included trading barbs. None of them were meant to hurt. It was just the way they interacted.
    “What’s happening with the mailing list for the chocolate symposium?” I said.
    He pointed to a stack of labels on an in-basket supported by elaborate Corinthian columns and decorated with laurel wreaths. Eugene had recently become fascinated with the Greek Revival period. I was surprised his computer wasn’t wearing a toga.
    “I have the labels all made up,” he