The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

  Byrum said that they weren’t arresting him, but that he might want to call his lawyer anyway. “What is it this time, Byrum, have I killed another young woman? Or two?”

  “Come along and I’ll tell you. I’ll make you an espresso in my office.”

  “I don’t remember an espresso machine. Your office barely had a chair and a cabinet, as I recall.”

  “You’re right, it’s down the hall. It’s not a good one, but it makes passable espresso.”

  Another trip in a patrol car. Did not bother to call Raboy or the subsidiaries, just didn’t feel like it. A patrolman was driving, Byrum beside him in the front seat. They were silent. Didn’t even turn around to look at him.

  “All right, I give up, Byrum. What’s happening?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  “Don’t throw me in the padded cell again. That gave me uneasy dreams.”

  Something big afoot, very big. It was the same excitement he’d sensed at the courthouse that day, when all the newsmen had seemed on the qui vive, loaded for bear. Not as many camera crews as then, but here was Katherine of KRON, looking very lovely, and here were several others camped out on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, their video equipment on. All right, another dead girl, he could read the signs. Another enormity.

  Byrum walked him indoors, Katherine of KRON calling out above the others as they passed, “Jad, what about Jad, Professor? Did you teach him how to do it?”

  “What was that? What did she say?”

  “Never you mind. We go in here,” said Byrum, and he took Landau toward an unexpected door.

  They really did have a machine. Landau couldn’t see it, but he could smell the coffee—it perfumed the halls. Here was Masha Dimitriopoulous, Carl Glebefelder also, but who had summoned them, since he hadn’t? Oh, life in a legal action is very different from TV: he had learned that much. There was a lot of unofficial give and take, the police and prosecutors and lawyers bleeding into each other, assisting or pretending to assist each other, and was that just because it was Berkeley, California? That notorious dingbat town?

  “Harold Blodgett,” Masha was saying.

  “What?”

  “Harold Blodgett is dead, sir. I’m sorry to have to tell you. He’s been murdered at home.”

  Landau stared at her. Byrum returned now to the small conference room with his trusty laptop—they were going to have a little chat, that was all, get this whole thing sorted out.

  “What did you just say, Masha?”

  “I said, Harold Blodgett has been murdered, sir. He was attacked at their place on Keeler Street.”

  “Keith Street,” Carl corrected softly, touching her elbow.

  “Keith, thank you, Carl. It happened last night. I’m very sorry to have to tell you that.”

  Byrum sat down at the plastic-topped table—fooling around with his laptop.

  “Please,” Landau urged in an odd voice. “Please, don’t say that. I have to call Deena. Can I use your cell phone, please? I left mine at home.”

  Masha made no response. It was as if she weren’t understanding him.

  “Masha, please, may I—”

  “All right, okay, here we are,” Byrum declared, having at last gotten his computer sorted out. He turned to Landau with a hopeful look.

  “Early this morning, sir. A neighbor saw some lights on in the Blodgett house. Too early, he thought, a half hour before dawn. He knows them, has lived on Keith for eighteen years. There was also a light on in the professor’s car. Someone had opened the door and left it open a crack.”

  Landau began to feel sick. He needed to sit down.

  “The neighbor, Perlwasser, went over there. He had a key but the front door was already open. No one answered his call, so he called us, which is the right thing to do, of course.”

  “Thank you, Detective,” said Masha, in a tone of I’ll-take-it-from-here.

  Carl Glebefelder broke in: “Professor, Deena Marjic was also attacked. She’s in a coma. I know she’s a friend of yours. I’m real, real sorry.”

  Landau grabbed the back of a chair. “Oh, fuck. Don’t say that.”

  “I know.”

  “No, that’s not right,” Landau insisted, and he sat down heavily in the chair.

  After a few moments he went on: “All right. Now tell me what happened.”

  The detective: “Suspect waited in the house, seems like. When Professor Blodgett came home he killed him. Then Mrs. Blodgett came home. He used a sharp instrument on her as with these others. There was a profound loss of blood, the doctors are worried. She, I’m sorry to say, she may not make it, sir. She was probably bleeding for a half hour. Then something scared him away—maybe the neighbor coming over.”

  For an instant, Landau saw Deena’s vulnerable, amused nakedness, under the tyranny of a madman’s glittering blade. Saw it with shocked clarity, then shut off that vision, definitively. Would never entertain it again. He blubbered as he had in the kitchen that night, sounding like a walrus with bronchitis. Could not stop.

  “All right,” he said after a while, the others waiting patiently before him.

  The good news was that she wasn’t dead. She had been deprived of oxygen for a while, and brains do not thrive without oxygen. But, she was still here.

  “Motherfucker. Bastard,” said Landau, wiping the tears from his cheeks. “The vile, degenerate coward. Motherfucker.”

  Here was some better news, sort of better. Landau was not a suspect. The police knew where he had been last night, they had followed him, and he had come home at five and had not left the house again. He had made two phone calls, the last just after eleven. The officers had made a report.

  “She said about Jared, though, the KRON lady was saying about Jared, my son Jared,” Landau protested.

  “Oh, right. Yes, they arrested him, sir,” said Masha. “They took him in this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “He was on Keith, sir. They asked him what he was up to and he didn’t have a convincing answer, so they took him in.”

  “On Keith Street, you say?”

  “A couple hundred yards away from the house,” the detective put in. “From the crime-scene house.”

  “No, not Keith. Corner of Shasta and Keeler, not Keith,” Carl Glebefelder corrected. “That’s close, but about a third of a mile away.”

  “Was he dressed in short pants? Wearing funny, springy rubber shoes?” Landau wondered.

  All three looked at him.

  “Breathing heavily? Sweating? Because, he’s a runner, you know. He runs all over these hills. He’s training for a marathon, running some absurd number of miles a week, sixty or seventy. He’s a road racer, I mean a foot racer, and he’s always training.”

  The detective pursed his lips. Shook his head.

  “He runs from Oakland to Richmond and back sometimes. Over the mountains to Orinda and then up. Then, he goes to work. A normal human being would go home and lie down for forty-eight hours. He’s on a tight schedule, with the only time to train in the morning, before he goes to work.”

  A doctor, you see: my son is a doctor. He is an honorable, people-helping doctor, not a killer, Landau was trying to say. Masha gave him a distressed look. Don’t defend him too warmly, she seemed to be signaling; that’s not what we want you to do.

  “What is it, Masha, what are you winking about?”

  “I’m not winking, sir.”

  “Yes you are. You’re practically waving at me behind Byrum’s head.”

  Deena. Deena is dying. The idea hit him anew as he left the police station, accompanied by the lawyers, and he had to sit down again, on a concrete bench. Masha patted him on the back. He needed to go see Deena, attend this most awful thing, but he also needed to see Jad. Could Cleveland and Co. represent Jad, too? But no, probably not—separation of attorneys,
that was an important principle.

  Masha thought that Jad might be released in two days. Then, depending on what evidence they gathered meantime, he might be rearrested.

  “But that’s not fair. They should just leave him alone,” said Landau petulantly.

  “I know. But they consider him a suspect now. Maybe the leading suspect.”

  “He is not the leading suspect—don’t say that. That’s completely wrong.”

  “We’ll talk about this later, sir.”

  “No, we’ll talk about it now. You will not build a case on the idea that my son is a deranged psycho killer. You want to create reasonable doubt and lay the charges off me, but I won’t have it, I tell you, I won’t allow it. Not with my son you don’t.”

  “All right, all right.”

  She was patting the back of his head now. “And please, stop patting. I am not a poodle.”

  “Sorry.”

  Go see Deena first. You need to see Deena more. Without a car, he walked the nine city blocks to Alta Bates Hospital, but got nowhere—she wasn’t at Alta Bates, she had been taken to an allied facility in Oakland, where critical care cases went. Oh, Deena, not critical care, not for you! All wrong, dear! Hooked up to a ventilator, she probably was, with food arriving via feeding pump. He could foresee a discussion that might transpire in a few weeks’ time, the grave ICU physician and the conscientious hospitalist saying, “In the absence of an advanced directive, Professor, we have to make certain hard choices.” Landau being only a friend, but in the absence of a living husband, any children, any brothers or sisters, a friend would be all they would have. All right—she still had the half-batty mother, the old Mitteleuropean narcissist in extended care. Mrs. Marjic would tell them to pull the plug, of course. Would offer to do it with her own bony hands.

  “Karin, this is your father-in-law speaking. I can cash some CDs if necessary,” he said into a remnant pay phone, which miraculously still worked, “and I have the name of a good lawyer for Jad, someone who was recommended to me some time ago. I’ll do whatever I can to help, just let me know. Leave me a message any time.”

  Back to the Department of Health Sciences. To Wally Winckelmann’s large office.

  “Wally, do you live here more than you do at home? That’s what certain people are saying. That’s how it is with some of you venerated disease-fighters, I’ve heard, and I respect you for it.”

  “Anthony, what’s the matter—you’re all red in the face. You look stricken. Sit down, please, sit down.”

  Landau peered around the office. Surveyed the nearby work spaces—looking for a special someone.

  “Wally, is Heitor in today?”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t seen him.”

  “If he comes in, would you please have him call me? It’s a matter of some importance.”

  “Okay. Sit down, Anthony, you’re gasping. You’re sweaty.”

  “That’s because I just ran all the way here from Alta Bates. It must be over a mile.”

  “Closer to two, I think.”

  “I think I ran, but maybe I walked. I’m not sure.”

  chapter 18

  Two days later he found his way to the Summit Medical Center, downtown Oakland. Melody drove him, then waited in the car while he ventured up to the fourth floor, to try to talk his way in to see Deena. What if he were the killer, coming to finish her off? Cut her throat in her hospital bed, in case there were a few brain cells left? But the staff wasn’t worried about that: they let him right in, happy to have a visitor. Flowers were not allowed in rooms, but balloons were okay, and somebody had left a bunch around her bed. Deena, get up, sweetheart, come on! Pull out these tubes and tear off that foolish mask, and come away with me, we’ll go dancing. You’re still alive, that’s what counts, and where there’s life, there’s hope. I can see you’re alive.

  “Nurse, what’s that whistling sound?”

  “That’s the next generation infusion pump. Don’t touch it, please. It’s working properly.”

  He wanted to speak to her neurologist. But the neurologist wouldn’t be in for some time. Here came the pulmonologist, and Landau had a tête-à-tête with him, asking many astute pulmonological questions. The pasty-faced young doc was forthcoming, but then he turned stern and didn’t want to talk anymore.

  “Doctor, where are you going?”

  “I have to go upstairs now. I have an appointment.”

  “Wait, can’t you give me a few seconds more?”

  “No—I have to go.”

  He’s made me, Landau thought. Recognized me from some Webcast, some TV bit. Doesn’t he know that the whole case is falling apart? Why, it said so in today’s Chron, on page one above the fold: “Attack on Berkeley Woman Not a Copycat Crime, Prosecutors Say.” The attack resembled the attack on Dolores Huerta in many ways, and the same instrument was used this time, too, probably. But if it was not a copycat crime, perpetrated by some wannabe monster, and if Landau had been elsewhere, then he was not the killer, right? Wasn’t that logical?

  He had been home in bed—had not slashed his best friend with a box cutter, eviscerated her husband. In a chat room he sometimes visited, an idea was being floated that he was the ringleader of a demonic cult, committing this or that murder while sending followers out to do others. Some self-described forensic psychologist had been speculating along these lines for some time, and certain dim-witted enthusiasts were persuaded, angrily persuaded.

  “Nurse, who brought those red balloons?”

  “I don’t know—her son?”

  “Her son? Mrs. Blodgett doesn’t have a son, not that I’m aware of.”

  “Nice young man. He was in yesterday for twenty minutes.”

  “Has she had many visitors?”

  “I don’t know. You could check with the desk.”

  No log of visitors was being kept. But was that possible, in this day and age? When a patient is the victim of a criminal attack? Deena’s room contained eleven half-deflated red balloons, but the desk nurse couldn’t remember who had brought them—maybe a relative, maybe some staffer, bringing them in from another room, to cheer things up.

  That night ferdy77, a chat room stalwart, launched out on more Landau-cult speculations, and it was only with difficulty that he refrained from entering the lists with him. Damn those lawyers, anyway: hadn’t they said that they were trying to “shape the discourse,” move it this way not that? The point was that Landau must not seem to be doing any of the moving—anything he wrote could be used against him.

  Melody drove them home. The delayed reckoning with what they were doing and in what circumstances was now upon them; if they had had separate bedrooms, they would have retreated to them now, to lie awake through the night, sighing. It was rude to be happy having fun sex. But they did not have separate bedrooms, so Melody slept beside him, and Landau awoke with an indiscreet erection at two thirty-two, his standard time for a first bathroom visit. When he returned the arousal was still there, an ungovernable registering of her presence. Ignoble condition, subside! Get thee away!

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m okay,” he said, “sorry to disturb.”

  “Would you hold me, please? I haven’t slept a wink.”

  In the morning he hurried to his email. Sent Byrum a message about the hospital, that someone masquerading as Deena Marjic’s son had brought her balloons. If this had been caught on a tape: oh, if only.

  Byrum responded in the old genial vein. He brought up the San Diego cases, for some reason. Nine women had died in the time period 1992 to ’97, then no one after that. Unless you counted the five hundred to seven hundred women killed in borderland Mexico, not far from San Diego after all, since about January of ’96. That was the Mujeres Contra la Violencia count of unsolved murders of women, not disputed by the Mexican federal police or most other authorities. The Mexica
n attorney general, the one who had recently been appointed to replace the one who had recently gone into hiding, had made a connection in a recent speech between San Diego and the unsolved maquiladora murders, so maybe Landau and his lawyers hadn’t been so far off, all those weeks ago, to bring up the San Diego cases.

  The man on the tape in the church basement: they were on it, still investigating. Thank you again for your suggestion, Professor. This being a Sunday, the hospital tapes wouldn’t be available today, but when they arrived tomorrow they’d inform him if they learned anything. Should they be looking for someone in particular? Did he have a name for them?

  He began to type in “Heitor Burgos-Pereira,” then paused. Typed in “Georges Vienna,” then erased that, too. He wasn’t quite ready yet to launch a full-scale witch hunt, a witch hunt aimed at any of his friends. He had been so pushed around the bend because of Deena that he had seized on Heitor, then Georges, and now he was thinking of Jad, Jad as the killer. But was any of them more suspicious now than three days ago? Was there evidence?

  Jad spent one night in jail, then was sent home. No call from him nor from Karin—well, they were grown-ups, they were on their own, obeying their own impulses. It was Masha who told him about the release.

  Out of nowhere, he felt the urge to write. Put in two intense hours, Melody making him coffee then quietly leaving, losing himself in a mental space of excitement and fear—the fear being that the mood would lift too soon, that he would fail to transcribe this diktat from some inner space, this fragment of inspiration. Did get something down. The set-theory paper of his hero, Boichenko, in the desk drawer by his right knee. Did not need to read it, just to feel it there, sending forth illumination. Some day I will go to western Ukraine and locate his grave, pay him proper homage, Landau promised. For all I know I have roots myself in the Ukraine—half the Jews in the world have those roots.