There was no chalk outline, no bloodstain, no sad tendrils of crime-scene tape to commemorate the body that had been here less than seventy-two hours before. Just the crumbling asphalt, the beat-down coupe, and me and Chic. Vehicles hummed overhead. The ground smelled of urine and beer. The sun was in its descent, and Rampart was no place to get caught after dark. Chic spread his arms wide.

“Wah-lah.”

“Wah-lah what?”

Chic pointed at the cloud of elaborate spray paint brightening the bottom of the freeway ramp. The artist had stretched the proportion of the piece to fit the rising concrete so that when viewed straight on it looked as if it were in normal perspective. Even so, I wasn’t sure what it was. Explosions and protuberances and bubble letters, all impressively three-dimensionalized. The piece had been left unfinished, the right half fading off into gray concrete. Feathers stuck to the lower fringe, dried into the paint.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

I followed Chic over a trampled section of chain-link.

“Cops got here in a hurry, right?” he asked. “And the criminalist?”

“That’s what I was told. Nearby having a burrito.”

“Patrolmen see the body. Criminalist shoots the picture, captures how it is before everyone fucks up the evidence, all that. Then what’s the first thing they do?”

“Secure the scene.”

“Secure the scene. Which means they check this here shadow.” He ducked into the dark triangular recess where the ramp met ground. An outburst of pigeons, spooked from their nighttime roosts atop the supporting beams, disrupted the relative quiet. Chic stumbled back toward me, waving his arms, pigeons squawking around his head. He’d gotten more than he’d bargained for. His retreat detracted from the solemnity of his account, but he brushed himself off, picked something off his tongue, and continued, unfazed.

“Cops scared up the pigeons. The stray feathers got stuck to the paint.” Chic beckoned for the crime-scene photos and showed me the one that had captured Broach’s body before the crime scene had been blocked off—no feathers yet in evidence. “Which means the paint was still wet. And that means”—a finger raised with academic emphasis—“the tagger was at work spraying the ramp that night when he was interrupted.” He flicked his head at the painting’s terminated edge. “What makes a tagger run? A car. What’s the first car that showed up, scared him away?”

“The killer dumping the body.”

Chic’s wide grin broke across his face. “We got ourselves a maybe witness.”

I stared at the coupe’s hood, white with droppings. “The Case of the Telltale Bird Shit.”

“In-fuckin’-deed.”

“How do we locate the spray painter?”

Chic indicated the colorful work overhead. “You’re looking at his signature, Colonel Sanders. That’s what a tag is.”

We’d fallen into familiar roles. Chic was one of my most useful rough-draft readers, adept at inlaying street logic to a character’s motive or transforming a run of dialogue into alleyway patter. I watched him chewing his lip, another adviser turned accomplice.

He held his eyes on the graffiti an extra beat, as if committing it to memory, then said, “Lemme poke around on it, call some of my brothers.”

Spread throughout Los Angeles were about twenty-seven of Chic’s gold-incisored brothers, who appeared in various guises to fix a car, bartend at a party, unload a new flat-screen. Most, like him, were Philly transplants. A few he might actually have been related to.

The breeze swirled up debris, knocked from the beams during the pigeon eruption. I crouched over a fallen nest, larger than I would have thought. Inside was a ring of stiff plastic wrap, about twice the circumference of a beer holder, still boasting a Home Depot price sticker.

I no longer heard the whistle of the wind, the cooing of the displaced pigeons, the cars overhead. I no longer heard anything but the pounding of my heart.

It was wrapping for a roll of electrical tape.