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shakes his head, they drive off. I go back inside, Vita’s back in her booth, smiling. Says, ‘Some people have no class, I told them why would you people think the rest of the world wants to see your sick little brat, ruin their appetite? Sick people belong in hospitals, not restaurants.’ ”
    Milo said, “Describe these people.”
    “Thirty-five, forty,” said Veronese. “Nicely dressed.” Looking away.
    I said, “Something else?”
    “Black.”
    “That ‘you people’ part probably didn’t go over well.”
    “Yeah,” said Veronese, “that was evil.”
    “Did Vita show other signs of racism?”
    “Nah, she hated everyone.” He frowned. “Would’ve loved to toss her but she sues people, it’s all I can do to keep this place afloat, last thing I need is to be sued.”
    “Who’d she sue?”
    “The place she used to work, some kind of discrimination, they paid her off, that’s how she lives.”
    “Who told you?”
    “She did. Bragging.”
    Milo said, “The people she had a to-do with. Thirty-five to forty, well dressed, and black. What else?”
    “They drove a Mercedes. Not a big one, small station wagon.” Veronese scratched at his hairline. “Silver. I think. I’m sure they had nothing to do with it.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “How would they know who she was, where to find her?”
    “Maybe they knew her before.”
    “Didn’t seem that way,” said Veronese. “I mean they didn’t use names or anything.”
    “Who else has Vita had words with?”
    “Everyone leaves her alone.”
    “Big tipper, huh?”
    “You kidding?—oh, yeah, you are. Her top rate’s ten percent and for each thing that pisses her off, she drops a percent. And tells you. Hedy laughs about it, only reason she’s here is to do me a favor, her main thing’s singing, she sings in a band. I play bass behind her.” Smiling. “I like looking at the back of her.”

CHAPTER
5
    W e drove back to the crime scene. The coroner’s van had taken the body. Sakura and Flores were still busy at work, scraping, diluting, bagging, tagging.
    “Lots of prints,” said Sakura, “where you’d expect them to be. Nothing on the doorknob, that’s wiped clean. We got a few hairs off the towels, gray, consistent with hers. We did find more blood on the towels—tiny little specks tucked into the nap. Same for the carpet, we’ll cut out squares. If he nicked himself operating on her, you could get lucky.”
    Milo said, “From your mouth to the Evidence God’s ears.”
    Flores said, “The sink drain’s kind of tricky, we are going to call in the plumber. Could take a couple of days.”
    “Whatever it takes, guys. Anything else?”
    “I don’t want to tell you your business, Lieutenant, but it was me, I’d put in for a tox screen super-stat.”
    “You think she was doped?”
    “This little resistance, maybe the offender used something onher—like an anesthetic. Something that didn’t need to be injected, like chloroform or ether, because we didn’t find any needle marks. But maybe she medicated herself and that made his job easy. We found booze bottles under her bathroom sink when we were checking out the plumbing. Stashed at the back behind rolls of toilet paper.”
    Reaching into an evidence bag, he drew out two 177ml Jack Daniel’s bottles, one sealed, the other down a third.
    I said, “No booze anywhere else?”
    “Nowhere.”
    Sakura said, “Big bottles, she bought in bulk.”
    I said, “She lived alone but hid her habit.”
    “Living alone doesn’t mean she drank alone,” said Milo.
    “Then why hide the booze?”
    He had no answer for that and it made him frown.
    I said, “If she did have a drinking pal, it was someone who wouldn’t pry in the bathroom.”
    “Meaning?”
    “No intimacy.”
    “Behind toilet paper’s not the first place anyone would look. And if she was a solitary drinker, why bother to conceal?”
    “Hiding a habit from herself,” I said. “Someone who needed to think of herself as