“The kid was in Oakland the night of the murder,” I said.

“So he says,” Czarnek said.

The waitress brought our meals. Czarnek insisted it was the best chicken piccata he’d ever eaten. My eggplant tasted like something Jeffrey Dahmer might’ve kept in a Tupperware bowl in his freezer.

Anya Bondarenko took the news of her husband’s death stoically, like a spouse who understood intuitively that the man she’d married years before was not destined to share with her the journey into old age. “At least,” she said, pouring herself more vodka, “he was not found fucking other woman.”

Czarnek asked if she or her late husband knew or had ever heard of Pavel Tarasov. The name rang no bell, she said, nor did Arlo Echevarria, or Gil Carlisle.

“What about Harry Ramos?” I said.

“Who?”

“Harry Ramos.”

“Harry Ramos… Harry Ramos.” Gennady Bondarenko’s widow lit a Virginia Slim and let the smoke settle in her lungs, giving her time to run the name through the Rolodex in her head. “I know this name,” she said.

She crossed from behind her late husband’s desk to the office safe from which she extracted a file folder with what looked to be various business-related correspondence. She licked her thumb and carefully perused each document before finding the one she was looking for, then handed it to me without comment.

It was a month-old letter thanking Gennady Bondarenko for his interest and possible investment in a limited partnership that was acquiring drilling rights in the “exciting” Kashagan oil field of Kazakhstan. The letter was cosigned by the partnership’s legal counsel, Miles Zambelli, and its resident business agent, Harry Ramos. I gave it to Czarnek to read.

Anya Bondarenko took another drag from her cigarette. “This Harry Ramos, he comes to see Gennady. Very fancy. Big song and dance. ‘We will make millions in this oil. Buy big house next to J.Lo,’ he tells Gennady. Gennady says we will invest our savings in this oil. I say, ‘No, this is very, very bad idea.’ We should buy Quiznos franchise in Tarzana. We fight. Back and forth. All night. Gennady will not listen. Then, he tells me he must go to see somebody on Fairfax. One hour later, he is back, his face white, the blood gone. He tells me, ‘Forget the oil. We will buy the Quiznos.’ But now…” Tears filled her eyes.

I asked her who her husband went to see that night. She shrugged.

“Gennady never said.”

The Hollywood Freeway was anything but free. Czarnek tuned his car radio to a news station with traffic reports every ten minutes. The radio let us know all about road conditions in south Orange County and east to the Inland Empire, but not word one on why the 101 was a parking lot. Gridlock in central Los Angeles at any given hour of the day apparently had stopped being news long ago.

“Might as well be in goddamn prison,” the detective said, chewing the hell out of his gum, fingers strumming the top of his steering wheel impatiently.

Fed up, he switched on the car’s flashing police lights and spun the wheel hard, wedging his unmarked Crown Vic between the stationary traffic to our left and the barrier wall to our right, its segmented concrete dividers streaked with scrape marks left by other, lesser drivers who’d tried the same maneuver and failed. We drove the shoulder that way for nearly a mile, exited onto Beverly Boulevard, and took surface streets into the hills, up to Savannah’s house.

Czarnek dropped me off outside the gate. He said he and his partner would be taking a hard look at Harry Ramos, Zambelli and Tarasov as suspects in the homicides of Echevarria and Bondarenko.

“I still don’t see it,” Czarnek said as I got out of the car.

“See what?”

“All that spook shit you told my partner and me about when we were up having lunch in Rancho Bonita. Government agent. Taking out high-value targets. Doing the Lord’s work. I mean, I’m looking at you and there’s a disconnect there. You don’t look the part, you or Echevarria. James Bond, now he looked the part.”

“James Bond wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.”

Czarnek smiled. “Behave yourself, Logan.”

“Fair skies, Detective.”

He drove on. I pressed the intercom button on the speaker box beside the gate.

“Yes?” The voice sounded young and Latina.

“Cordell Logan to see Ms. Echevarria.”

The gate buzzed and swung open. I walked up the drive. There was a metallic silver S-Class Mercedes parked in front of the house. The woman whose voice I heard on the box was waiting for me on the front steps. She said her name was Alameda Guzman, Savannah’s housekeeper. Mid-twenties. Big horsy smile. Size 00 jeans. Glossy black hair down to the small of her back.

“Mrs. Echevarria has told me much about you,” she said.

“All lies.”

“She’s with a patient right now. Would you like to come in and wait?”

“A patient. Right.”

“Actually, we were just finishing up,” Savannah said, emerging from the house.

You would’ve never guessed from her ebullient mood that her life at that moment was anything but perfect. With her was a baggy-eyed, olive-skinned man in his mid-forties who looked like a walking billboard for Brooks Brothers Friday Casual. His yellow, monogrammed, button-down shirt was tucked into a pair of indigo, dry clean-only jeans with knife-edge creases. He was toting an eel skin briefcase in his left hand.

“Cordell Logan,” Savannah said, making introductions, “Danny Katz.”

Katz’s grip wasn’t a handshake; it was a Herculean test of wills. His eyes held steady on mine as he tried to crush my fingers.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Logan.” The accent was South African.

“Mr. Katz,” I said, squeezing harder.

He gritted his teeth, smiling through the pain, and finally let go, hoping Savannah didn’t notice him rubbing the circulation back into his hand.

“Danny’s a new client,” Savannah said proudly. “He needed help with some time-management issues, to get his priorities squared away and his life back on track. So I told him, ‘Sounds to me like what you need is a life coach.’”

“That or a nagging ex-wife,” I said.

Savannah smiled but it looked more like a death threat.

I asked how they met.

“We were at the Beverly Center,” Danny said. “I was backing out of a space and accidentally scraped her bumper. I left a note apologizing, with my number. I felt so terrible.”

“He not only covered the repairs to my car,” Savannah said, “he insisted on giving me free dry cleaning for a year. Danny owns a dry-cleaning shop.”

“Seven actually,” he said, correcting her.

“Seven? Wow. How do you stand that kind of excitement?”

Katz didn’t appreciate my humor. “And what is it that you do, Mr. Logan?”

“Me? As little as possible.”

He smiled thinly, turned to Savannah and shook her hand. “A most productive meeting. I trust we can do it again soon.”

“Anytime. Call me.”

He nodded curtly to me, eased himself into his Mercedes and drove away. Alameda went back inside. Savannah’s hands were on her hips. She was pissed at me. So what else is new?

“Why do you have to be such an overbearing dick all the time?”

“How long have you known this guy?”

“I don’t know. A couple weeks. So what?”

“He just happens to run into your car and leaves you a note? You don’t know what his story is, Savannah. He could be anybody. Who else are you planning to let just waltz in here — Jack the Ripper?”

Buddhists don’t believe they’re punished for their anger. They believe they’re punished by their anger. At that moment, I was being punished by both. I unloaded on my former wife like a drill instructor addicted to Red Bulls. Wasn’t she the one who said she was getting strange phone calls and afraid someone was shadowing her? Wasn’t she the one who said she feared for her safety and mine?