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pulled you offstage. Mr. Firth said you sprained your ankle as a result of the spill and took this past Thursday off in order to give yourself an extra day to heal. I hope you’re feeling better?”
    “Yes. Thank you.”
    “Good.” He gave himself a moment to simply look at her, into her, beyond the line of bull she persisted in feeding him, but she kept her expression locked tight. “Forgive me, Stacy, but I need to run through these facts one more time. Last night, when I told you the victim was Carlton Long, no bells of recognition rang in your head. Correct?”
    “Yes, that’s right. It’s hard to keep track of every Tom, Dick, and Carl.”
    “Despite him being a long-standing customer? Despite him spending over five thousand dollars for private dances before the night of your accident?”
    She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. Handling the charge cards and payments is someone else’s job. The dancers don’t deal with it, so names don’t necessarily come up.”
    “You’d given him at least one private dance a week for the last three months. Are you telling me his name never came up during all that time? Wouldn’t you want to address such a devoted client by name?”
    “Maybe he called himself Carl once or twice, Detective. I meet a lot of men. You stop retaining names after a while. I don’t really remember.”
    “A regular client who pulls you offstage and injures you so badly you need a full week to recover doesn’t stand out?”
    “Of course I remember the incident, but…” She shrugged.
    He leaned forward until he could look her in the eye. Hers were wide and unhappy. “Sorry, but I’m still having a tough time with this. You pick up details and you have a good memory. Last night when I showed up at the crime scene, you recognized me and remembered my name. I’m not even a regular customer, let alone one who’s spent thousands on your private dances. How do you explain your remarkable recall with me?
    Eyes down and right, like clockwork. “You’re a cop. Cops don’t blend in,” she replied, a little desperately. But he had to hand it to her. She had a marginally plausible answer for everything.
    “So, you’re not good with names, or faces?”
    “Even if I was good with faces, how would I have recognized Mr. Long? His face was… ruined.”
    “True enough.” He sighed and shook his head. “The medical examiner’s preliminary report sheds some light on his last few hours. Someone hit him on the back of his head with a blunt object—likely a liquor bottle—and fractured his skull. That blow pretty much punched his ticket. He couldn’t put up much fight when his assailant slipped on the brass knuckles and went to work on his face. Needless to say, it wasn’t quick or painless.”
    Her uneven breaths and shimmering eyes made him pause.
    “Poor man,” she whispered.
    Everything inside him believed she meant it. Her horror, her compassion, both struck him as genuine.
    “I agree. Being beaten to death is a harsh end. It’s also a fairly unusual death, statistically speaking. There were two hundred reported homicides in Los Angeles County last year, but only a handful of the male victims were beaten to death. If I look for similar crimes locally, within the last three years, I get a real short list.” He rolled his shoulders and lifted his water bottle to his lips. “Sometimes the similar crimes angle is a dead end.”
    “You have a difficult job, Detective.”
    “Trevor,” he corrected and took a long drink. Lowering the bottle, he shifted topics. “So, you think if Mr. Long had sustained less blunt force trauma, you might have recognized him as a Deuces patron?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Let’s try another face and see what you recognize.” With that, he opened the evidence envelope again, pulled out a photograph from his cold-case file and tossed it on the table between them. “Recognize this man?”
    She picked up the photo and stared at the well-groomed, swarthy