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distant father. His hair was white but luxuriant, his dress casual. His speech slow, Southern, and suggestive. His face unlined and his smile warm, welcoming, intimate, reassuring—whatever you might order. He would have been insulted to know she thought of him in the same generation as “father.”
    â€œI have no idea how old he is,” Maggie Stutzman, Charlie’s neighbor confidant, said after meeting him at a party Charlie had given in Long Beach. “But those eyes—gawd, you just want to strip and jump in. Not that there’d be anything to land on.”
    Maurice’s specialties at Congdon and Morse were aging female stars and character actresses of daytime soaps and nighttime sitcoms. Generally they were actresses who had gained their initial audience identification in film. He was shrewd, but gently so.
    â€œAnd how is darling Libby’s little mother? I’ve missed you so, sweetie,” he said now, enfolding Charlie in a forceful embrace against a broad, slightly plump chest. Maurice was a boob man, and Charlie barely had any, but he didn’t seem to mind. Then he began swirling her around the conference room in a clutching dance step and whispered in her ear, “Dorian tells me the witch is dead. Ding dong the witch is dead. Which old witch? The wicked—”
    â€œHere, you two, none of that in the office,” Richard Morse scolded. He’d just breezed in an hour late, his way of one-upping the Beverly Hills P.D.
    Meanwhile, Lieutenant Dalrymple watched the gathering together of Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc. with apparent bewilderment.
    Charlie gave Maurice a kiss on the cheek and wiggled out of his grasp. “How was Cancun?”
    By a bare raising of the brow, a faint constriction of the nostrils and lips, a nearly inaudible moan, and a look of glassy-eyed helplessness Maurice Lavender managed to impart memories of an orgasmic delight beyond comprehension.
    â€œUh, Lieutenant? You got this all wrong, you know?” Dorian straightened a perfectly straight tie and gestured around the conference table. “You’re supposed to question each one of us separately, see? Then at the end get us all together. You oughta watch more television.”
    â€œThe end of what?” the lieutenant asked quietly.
    â€œWell, of … the story.”
    â€œThis is not a story.” He gazed around the table, lingering on each pair of eyes in turn until the owners squirmed. “It is not television. It is not a moving picture, Disneyland, make-believe. It is real, cold-blooded murder. Make no mistake, no matter your opinion of or relationship to Gloria Tuschman, her violent death will alter your lives forever. Nothing will ever again be the same for any of you. And for whoever murdered her, there will never again be true peace of mind.”
    â€œAw come o-on.” Richard Morse at the head of the table rolled slightly protruding eyes, flattening beautiful hands on its glossy surface. “Some dopehead bops a total stranger in an alley and he’s going to lay awake nights feeling guilty about it? Probably won’t even remember.”
    â€œThe victim was not ‘bopped,’ as you call it, in the alley, but at the end of the private hallway on this floor.” The lieutenant glanced at Charlie when her breath squeaked on the intake.
    â€œWell, you’re still gonna be one busy man. That hall is accessible from any floor in the building except the first, and that includes the first level parking. That’s all the bank offices on second, third, fourth, plus the floors above.” Richard Morse was a well-built man. He looked Greek, Italian, and Jewish and—like Gloria—sounded New Jersey. He had a prominent nose and long eyelashes, hair that was short and curly black with gray patches artfully preserved at the temples.
    â€œThen there’s the valet parking staff, and I understand the turnover there is horrific.