CHAPTER XVA Party for Evangeline
Next morning, Timuroff went down to the shop at what had always been his customary time before Monrooney’s murder, and was relieved to find, awaiting him, a message from a pretentious Beverly Hills auction house insisting that he fly south immediately to appraise the hideously expensive, thoroughly nondescript collection of a millionaire recently deceased at Balboa Beach. Ordinarily, he would have turned it down, but Liselotte, on her return from the maestro’s, had awakened him to assure herself that he was still intact and to extort an accounting of his actions in her absence. She was convinced that he’d been up to something desperate, and she refused to sleep until he gave her a highly censored version—all mention of sharp instruments deleted—of what had
