Riggs

Riggs is a business associate of Mickey Wolfmann and the lover of Mickey’s wife, Sloane Wolfmann. His place in the story is deliberately hard to fix: he is at once Mickey’s old friend, a participant in an unconventional arrangement, a possible collaborator in financial schemes, and a figure whose disappearance and suspected connections deepen the uncertainty surrounding the Wolfmann household. What is known about him comes largely through other people’s accounts, so his importance lies as much in the competing explanations attached to him as in any action he takes directly on the page.

Identity and Background

Mickey’s bodyguard is identified as Glen Charlock, who works for a builder named Wolfmann; Riggs is a separate figure, described as Mickey’s old associate and as a man who stayed at the Wolfmann house when in town. The distinction matters because the investigation entwines Mickey’s property, employees, and associates, while the accounts of Riggs concern the intimate and financial life inside the household.

Riggs is also connected to a broader system of command and leverage. An account of Adrian Prussia’s position describes Prussia holding a portfolio of IOUs, each modest enough on its own but sufficient to secure obedience from the person who owed it. The people in that arrangement are described as commanders and controllers: Prussia receives money and interest, while others get actions carried out. This information does not establish that Riggs himself was one of those debtors or controllers, but it places the investigation around him in a world where influence is exercised through concealed obligations rather than a visible chain of authority.

Partnership with Mickey and Sloane

Luz tells Doc that she and Sloane have become close while Mickey remains missing, and that a bed Mickey had once refused to share with Sloane has become theirs. Her account then widens from their relationship to the Wolfmann marriage and Riggs’s place within it. She says Riggs and Mickey were old friends who worked together on projects, and that Riggs stayed at the house when he was in town. Mickey, according to Luz, encouraged Riggs and Sloane’s intimacy; the arrangement was not presented as a secret affair that Mickey had simply failed to discover.

Luz’s description also makes the arrangement sound unequal. She says Sloane initially resisted because she disliked owing Mickey anything, while Mickey had chosen Riggs partly because he was young and poor enough to remain on a kind of leash. That account presents intimacy as something folded into money, dependence, and an existing business partnership. It does not confirm what Sloane ultimately wanted or what Riggs understood the arrangement to mean, but it complicates any reading of their relationship as merely a private romance.

The reported distinction between what Riggs gained and what Mickey intended sharpens the ambiguity. Luz says Riggs framed the benefit less as access to Sloane than as Mickey’s own refusal to sleep with his wife. She also reports that Mickey had sex with other women and wanted Sloane to have fun. These details suggest that the arrangement was shaped by Mickey’s preferences as well as Sloane’s and Riggs’s, while leaving the participants’ feelings and the limits of their consent unclear.

Money, Suspicion, and Disappearance

Doc tests a possible financial explanation by asking whether Sloane and Riggs were skimming from Mickey, double-billing clients, or cheating contractors. Luz declines to confirm any of it, saying only that it was not her business. The exchange establishes suspicion, not proof: the questions identify plausible forms of financial misconduct, but Luz’s answer does not verify that either Riggs or Sloane engaged in them.

Riggs’s absence adds to the uncertainty. When Doc meets Luz, Mickey is still missing, the FBI has stopped visiting, and Riggs has gone back to the desert. Shasta, in a separate account, had suspected that Sloane and Riggs were cooking something up together. She describes Sloane as increasingly frightened while staying in a Hancock Park house Mickey rented for her: cars passed the house, calls came from people who said nothing, and she was followed when she went out in her Eldorado. Shasta’s report gives the suspicion a concrete setting, but it does not establish that Riggs was behind the surveillance or that he and Sloane were responsible for it.

The possibility that Sloane’s associates might have learned about Mickey’s plans is raised as a question rather than settled as fact. Riggs is named alongside Sloane as a potential part of that uncertainty. The evidence supports neither a definitive account of his role in any scheme nor a confirmed explanation for his desert departure. Instead, his connections place him near the unresolved collision of Mickey’s money, Sloane’s fear, and the competing efforts to control what happens to Mickey.

Narrative Role and Limits of the Evidence

Riggs functions as a hinge between the Wolfmanns’ intimate arrangements and the larger investigation into money, power, and disappearance. Through Luz, he appears as Mickey’s trusted associate, a participant in Mickey’s plan for Sloane’s intimate life, and a possible beneficiary of her financial interests. Through Shasta, he becomes a suspected collaborator at a moment when Sloane feels watched and unsafe. Those accounts overlap in naming Riggs as close to Sloane, but they do not converge into proof of a single motive or criminal act.

His absence is therefore consequential without being explanatory. Riggs has gone to the desert, while Mickey is missing and Sloane remains at the center of competing suspicions; the investigation can attach possibilities to Riggs, but the available evidence does not show him confessing, returning, or resolving them. His character remains defined by association and uncertainty: a friend within Mickey’s business world, a lover within the marriage, and a possible participant in a plot whose full shape the accounts do not disclose.