The next week was emotional bouillabaisse.
Trying, with no success, to get Billy Dowd more appropriate lodgings andregular therapy.
Fending off Erica Weiss’s requests for another deposition, so she could“slam the final nail in Hauser’s coffin.”
Ignoring increasingly strident calls from Hauser’s defense attorney.
I hadn’t been to the station since viewing the DVD. Six minutes watching agirl I’d never met.
The day I moved Robin in, I pretended my head was clear. After I schleppedthe last carton of her clothes into the bedroom, she sat me down on the edge ofthe mattress, rubbed my temples, and kissed the back of my neck. “Stillthinking about it, huh?”
“Using unfamiliar muscles. The ribs don’t help.”
“Don’t waste energy trying to convince me,” she said. “This time I know whatI’m getting myself into.”
 
My contact with Milo was limited to oneeleven p.m. phone call. His voice, thick with fatigue, wondering if I couldtake care of some “ancillary stuff” while he coped with the mountain ofevidence on what the papers were calling the “Bomb Shelter Murders.”
One nitwit columnist in the Times trying to connect it to “Cold Warparanoia.”
I said, “Sure. What’s ancillary stuff?”
“Anything you can do better than me.”
 
That came down to being a grief sponge.
A forty-five-minute session with Lou and Arlene Giacomo lasted two hours.He’d lost weight since I’d seen him and his eyes were dead. She was a quiet,dignified woman, hunched over like someone twice her age.
I sat there as his rage alternated with her anguished accounts of Life WithTori, the two of them trading off with a rhythm so precise it could’ve beenscripted. As the time ground on, their chairs edged farther and farther apart.Arlene was talking about Tori’s confirmation dress when Lou shot to his feet,snarling, and left my office. She started to apologize, changed her mind. Wefound him down by the pond, feeding the fish. They left silently and neitheranswered my calls that night. The clerk at their hotel said they’d checked out.
The widowed mother of Brad Dowd’s Las Vegas victim, Juliet Dutchey, turned out to be aformer showgirl herself, a veteran of the old Flamingo Hotel. Mid-fifties andstill toned, Andrea Dutchey blamed herself for not discouraging her daughterfrom moving to Vegas, then switched to squeezing my hand and thanking me forall I’d done. I felt I’d done nothing and her gratitude made me sad.
Dr. Susan Palmer came in with her husband, Dr. Barry Palmer, a tall, quiet,well-coiffed man who wanted to be anywhere else. She started off all business,crumpled fast. He kept his mouth shut and studied the prints on my wall.
Michaela Brand’s mother............