“By his standards, a dump. By mine, basic. Two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, the east end, off Pico. The living room was her studio. Despite being an artist, she wasn’t much for interior decorating.”

“That’s the tough part of Santa Monica,” I said. “Gangs, drug traffic.” Thinking about Robin’s place on Rennie. Tim Plachette was a nice man, a mild man, always courteous to me. Would he be of any use if things got tough?

Milo was saying, “… I’ll talk to the neighbors again. Take a closer look at hubbie.”

“See what you can learn about his financial situation. Sometimes investment pros get overconfident and reckless with their funds. If Kipper leveraged heavily on a deal and lost some big bucks, ditching his obligation to Julie might be tempting.”

“Strong hands,” he said. “He’s a little guy but still bigger than Julie. He’d be tough enough to overpower her in that bathroom.”

“Maybe he didn’t have to overpower her. She trusted him. That would’ve added to the element of surprise.”

“Trusted him to what?”

“He told us they were still having sex.”

“A tryst in that scuzzy place?”

“I’ve heard of stranger things,” I said.

“So have I, but… I think your mind’s gotten eviler than mine.”

I made a U-turn and headed back to Santa Monica Boulevard. “When Julie’s uncle asked you to take the case, did you talk to him about her?”

“Sure.”

“Was he aware of her background?”

“To him she was just the sweet, talented niece who’d gone off to New York. Far as her family’s concerned, she was Rembrandt.”

“Nice to be appreciated.”

“Yeah.” A moment later, he said, “Strong hands. Whoever strangled Julie didn’t rely on their hands, they used a wire.”

“Good way to keep the hands clean,” I said. “In addition to using gloves. Reduces the risk of leaving trace evidence.”

“Clean hands.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

I dropped him off, drove home, and booted up the computer. Half a dozen search engines pulled up very little on either Everett or Julie Kipper.

Three hits for him: talks he’d given at private-client seminars run by MuniScope. The identical topic each time: for high-income individuals buying tax-free bonds, going for premiums rather than discount, could actually save money in the long run.

Julie’s name came up only once: Six months ago, one of her early paintings had been sold at a Sotheby’s Arcade auction. Eighteen hundred dollars for a ten-year-old oil-on-canvas entitled Marie at Her Kitchen Table. No accompanying photo. The sale had brokered low-ticket items, few of them illustrated.

The provenance of the painting told me little I couldn’t have guessed: From the Lewis Anthony Gallery, N.Y., to a “private collector.”

I looked up Anthony. Fifty references. He’d died five years ago, but the gallery was still in business.

I thought about the pathway Julie Kipper’s life had taken. Putting herself through a drug-stoked work jag to meet the demands of the gallery owner. Three paintings.

And now one of them had been dumped by its owner for less than it had cost.

Demoralizing, if she’d known.

My bet was that she had. Somehow, someone would’ve told her.

Yet, she’d decided to chance a comeback. Perhaps the sale had spurred the comeback.

Had she created what she believed to be her best work, hoping for a second chance with another high-powered gallery, only to settle for Light and Space?

Low output meant no resale market.

Low demand for her work eliminated one possible motive for murder: someone trying to up the value of an investment because dead artists often fetch higher prices than live ones. That only applied to artists who mattered. As far as the art world was concerned, Juliet Kipper had never existed, and her death wouldn’t elicit a blink.

No, this one had nothing to do with commercial intrigue. This one was personal.

A bright killer. Forward-thinking and outwardly composed, but inside… rage tempered to something cold and measured.

When he’d first called me, Milo had called it a “weird one,” but the killer wouldn’t see it that way. To him, twisting a wire around Juliet Kipper’s neck would seem eminently reasonable.

I had a beer, thought some more about Julie’s luminous paintings and snuffed-out talent, and got on the phone.

The Lewis Anthony Gallery was listed on Fifty-seventh Street in New York. The woman who answered the phone enunciated the way clippers snip through cuticles.

“Mr. Anthony passed several years ago.” Her tone implied knowing such should be a prerequisite for American citizenship.

“Perhaps you can help me. I’m looking for works by Juliet Kipper.”

“Who?”

“Juliet Kipper, the painter. She was represented by the gallery several years ago.”

“How many is several?”

“Ten.”

She snorted. “That’s an eon. Never heard of her. Good day.”

I sat there wondering what it would be like dealing with that kind of thing, full-time. Growing up with a head full of beauty and the gift of interpretation, being told how brilliant you were by the people who loved you- getting hooked on the oohs and ahs- only to enter what passed for “the real world” and learn that love didn’t mean a damn thing.

Julie Kipper had faced a frigid universe that regarded the gifted as fodder.

The kindness of strangers, indeed.

Despite all that, she’d reached deep within herself again and produced works of transcendent beauty.

Only to be garroted and laid out and posed in a filthy bathroom.

Finding the person who’d done that suddenly seemed very important.

It wasn’t until hours later- after finishing and mailing reports, paying some bills, making a run to the bank to deposit checks from lawyers- that something else hit me about Julie.

A gifted, damaged soul snuffed out violently, during the first blush of comeback.

The same could be said about Baby Boy Lee.

I compared the two cases. Both had been Saturday night, back-alley killings. Five weeks had lapsed between them. Neither Milo nor Petra- nor anyone else- had seen any link because there were no striking similarities. And as I checked off the differences a nice-sized list materialized on my scratch pad.

Male vs. female victim.

Late forties vs. midthirties.

Single vs. divorced.

Stabbing vs. strangulation.

Outdoor vs. indoor crime scenes.

Musician vs. painter.

I decided I was being overly analytic; no sense calling Milo. I went for a forty-minute run that challenged my heart and lungs but did little to clear my head, got back on the computer, and searched for murders of creative types within the last ten years.

Despite setting that arbitrary limit, a lot of extraneous material cropped up: scads of dead rock stars, mostly, almost every demise self-inflicted. The West Hollywood stabbing death of Sal Mineo, too. That had gone down in 1976, well before the one-decade cutoff. Mineo’s murder, long a subject of film-biz intrigue and believed to be related to his homosexuality, had turned out to be a street burglary gone really bad.

The actor had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe that’s how Baby Boy- and Julie- would shake out.

I kept searching and refining, ended up, hours later, with four possibles.

Six years ago, a potter named named Valerie Brusco had been bludgeoned in an empty field behind her studio in Eugene, Oregon. I found no direct reporting of the crime, but Brusco’s name came up in a retrospective of Pacific Northwest ceramic artists, written by a Reed College professor, in which her violent end was noted. This one had been solved: Brusco’s boyfriend, a cab driver named Tom Blascovitch, had been arrested and charged and incarcerated. But murderers get out of prison, so I printed the data.