The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

  “Yes. Unless—maybe he knows Samantha, too. Maybe he’s like me, someone who knows you, works in the lab sometimes, I don’t know, maybe many years ago. To find her in your house, that doesn’t seem right. That upsets him. Still in bed with you, after everything! She was always in bed with people, even with d’Iulio, who was a hundred years old. And her work was never any good—we know that, it was shoddy. You old guys, you steel boxes, you knew it, but you let her go on anyway. You didn’t put up fences, keep her from making messes. Because, I don’t know, she’s a woman? A woman with a big mouth? Who can make trouble?”

  Landau’s heart started beating hard—it was to hear such a thing spoken, plainly spoken.

  “So, another scientist, you’re saying.”

  “Yes, possibly. I didn’t kill her,” Heitor laughed. “But I wanted to sometimes! People who knew your work, who respected it above everything—many would like her to just shut up. So, maybe this bad one, this one with a screw loose, who slices them up, he met your maid, and maybe he didn’t even know she was your maid. Look where she meets him! Whose house it is! Then, Samantha’s here too. Que engendro, too freaky. So he brings the maid back because that shows you something, I don’t know, it hurts you too, because you disappoint him, a lot. You let her get in again. Crazy Samantha.”

  Landau was silent for a while. “Too complicated, Heitor. And her work wasn’t ever shoddy—it was perfect in its way, odd but perfect. Just a little bit off in final direction. She needed colleagues who could get into it with her, get her to laugh at herself, save her from herself. But she scared off all the good colleagues eventually. Me included.”

  “No, no, she was never that good. Never a serious person.”

  Two minutes later they walked up from beneath the deck. Here was Freddy waiting for them: Landau smiled at him, blinking in the mist—he couldn’t see for a moment, drizzle was in his eyes, and there was steam on the glass sliding door. Then he saw inside, saw Graciela, just now popping a morsel into her mouth. She caught sight of them, too, and waved. Landau put his hand on the door and pushed.

  chapter 19

  The surveillance tape from the hospital showed a young man with a prominent Adam’s apple walking along fluorescent-lit hospital corridors, then riding an elevator, then signing in at a reception desk—so there was a sign-in regime in place, sometimes—a young man whom Landau eventually recognized as his neighbor’s teenaged son, Dylan Bamberg, Bob Dylan Bamberg, to give him his full appellation. Byrum had captured six frames with a computer program and sent them over. Any comments, Professor? You know this lad?

  Instead of emailing back, Landau phoned. “Yes, he lives on my street, Detective. His mother goes to a physical therapist who’s a friend of mine. I think he’s just a curious kid who’s stirred up by all this weird stuff going on, weird violent sexual stuff. Maybe they want to keep an eye on that, the parents. But I don’t think he’s a killer. I think that’s far beyond him.”

  Byrum grunted. “Yeah, okay, maybe.”

  “His mother won a MacArthur. She’s a distinguished social psychologist researcher-type. You know any MacArthur winners, Byrum? Any close personal contacts among them?”

  “Actually, I think I know who she is. She’s the one who does the old experiments over, trying to get at what they’re about. Changes the parameters. Strips away the veils. The one where they had students giving electric shocks, and they turned into sadists, supposedly. She showed that that was full of logical flaws. She’s a big debunker, a major-league skeptic-debunker. She deserves a MacArthur.”

  “Okay. You’re a very well-informed person, Byrum. I think I’ve told you that before.”

  “Yes, I think so, not that it’s true.”

  “All right, you asked me if I had a name to give you. Here’s a name,” and he spelled out, with raging internal personal resistance, the name Heitor Burgos-Pereira.

  The detective fell silent. Then said, “I think I know him. He’s on some of your papers.”

  “Right, he used to work for me. He’s from South America, half Brazilian, half Argentine. So he’s mostly down there, but lately he’s been up here on a fellowship.”

  “Just off the top of my head—he was in San Diego for a while, too. That raised a small flag for us.”

  “He was?”

  “Why are you telling me about him now, Professor?”

  “Oh, just process of elimination. He’s the only one who might have been at some of the right places. He’s not a killer or a bully or anything like that, as far as my poor brain can determine things. If he is, then I know nothing about my own species. I hope this doesn’t get him in a lot of trouble. I’m giving you his name only because while I was lying in bed last night unable to sleep I thought that not to give it would be wrong. A dereliction.”

  “Too bad he’s in Brazil. Might be hard to get hold of.”

  “That’s what I’m saying—he’s here. He’s been at Stanford for a couple months. He sleeps in Oakland.”

  Byrum betrayed no special interest. He brought up the San Diego murders again. All nine women had been attacked within sight of a body of water, pond or bay or river. All on or around the full moon. It was a kind of cluster, as these things went.

  “And Heitor was there, you say, sometimes.”

  “But the murders up here are different,” the detective added. “No bodies of water, different periodicity. It could be someone wants to be taken for the one who did those crimes, but isn’t managing it, quite, is stumbling over himself.”

  “You’re losing me. I remember how much respect you had for Occam’s razor, detective.”

  “Why don’t you describe the Bay Area cluster, Professor. Just put it in your own words.”

  Oh, no—the infernal invitation to put things into his own words.

  “Ain’t we pals no more, Byrum? You seem to want me to say something wrong. Something I shouldn’t.”

  “No, no, I’m just curious.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The policeman called back twenty minutes later. What they had on Heitor was that he was director-general of medical services administration in a city in Brazil that Byrum had never heard of before, and two weeks ago he’d been quoted in a newspaper there on a planning issue. Was Landau sure he’d seen him here? According to the federal databases the detective could access, he wasn’t in the U.S.—those databases were often in error, of course, showed foreign nationals on work visas years after they’d gone home, or failed to show them at all if they’d entered the country in some non-standard way. He’d know more in a couple of hours.

  “Byrum, he drove me home from Harold Blodgett’s funeral. He was in my house on Monday.”

  “Okay. It would help if you had his cell number. I called Walter Winckelmann’s lab like you said but no one answered.”

  “I’ll go over there. Winckelmann’s always there. He might be eating lunch.”

  Byrum was sending him a document now, another thing that came up when you Googled “Burgos-Pereira.”

  “Is Portuguese one of your languages, Professor?”

  “No.”

  “Nor mine, either, but I figured it out, sort of. Officer Hashimoto’s former live-in girlfriend was a capoeira instructor, and she helped. Want to know what she said?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s about an epidemic. A kind of pretend scientific paper about an epidemic. A parody, I guess.”

  “A parody?”

  “Yes, she says it was pretty funny in parts.”

  “Epidemic of what?”

  “I don’t know, epidemic of death? Something like that.”

  “What?”

  “An epidemic of death. That’s what the words in Portuguese mean. Women killed by guns, by knives, by chainsaws. By rat poison, by cars driven over their heads. I don’t know half what she’s telling me, but she kept on laughing, tho
ugh it didn’t seem all that funny.”

  The email arrived a few seconds later.

  “Okay, got it. Where’s Heitor’s name on this? Whoa—Wally Winckelmann! Winckelmann’s name’s all over it!”

  It looked like a paper published in an American journal. An actual research paper, with hyperlinks that worked, and the publication, Revista Brasileira de Saúde Materno Infantil, was named at the top of every other page, as was customary. Fifty-three pages, seven pages of notes.

  “Can I call the samba instructor, Byrum? To ask more about it?”

  “Capoeira, not samba. I’ll have her call you instead.”

  “Okay.”

  But she did not call him that day, the instructor. Landau used a ten-page Portuguese supplement in the back of his Spanish dictionary to puzzle out the text. It was about fatal violence against women. Treating fatal violence as a subject in population medicine. Incidence rates compared for different countries and times, prevalence rates analyzed to explain why the epidemic was chronic yet prevalence approached zero. Well, because all the subjects were dead—was that the joke part?

  Many studies were out there like this, there was a vogue for them now. Landau read them on review committees. It was the epidemiological equivalent of studying the Holocaust: to read and think and write about this was to disappear down a black hole of misery. Somebody had to do it, but if you were the one who undertook it you consigned yourself to a lifetime of bitter gloom.

  Heitor hadn’t written before on anti-women violence. His name appeared nowhere on the paper, yet when you searched “Burgos-Pereira” it was the fourth item that appeared on your screen, over and over.

  He had a sudden urge to call his son, to hear his voice, just for the hell of it. Then, a similar urge to call Georges—suddenly missed him. It was a moment of loneliness, of feeling cut off from his main males, maybe because he was in the process of betraying one of them. The moment passed.

  The point of the paper seemed to be that there was much morbidity among young Latin women, that rates were shockingly on the increase. Here followed a discussion of trends in four Central American countries, all of which were seeing sharp increases in gang violence. Existence of gangs implied violence against women, because warring gangs considered women simple property, like trucks or houses. It was fun to rape the other guy’s woman, then when you were done cut off her head. Learned investigators said that the organized gangs accounted for just a fraction of the carnage; sexism within families and cultures, endemic sex oppression over the longue durée—it wasn’t just the gangsters doing it, no, of course not.

  He wanted to talk to Winckelmann now, but he forced himself to sit and read on. Consider Mexico. And the tone of the prose changed—the prose he was reading with the help of his dictionary. Consider Mexico as a “cohort study.” If you took the border region and looked at the population of females aged ten to twenty-five who within a five-year period had ended up dead following sexual assault, against an equal number not assaulted or murdered, what did you find? What were the confounding variables, accounted for by stratification, or by regression analysis, and which really mattered?

  Crazier now. Psycho weirdness coming on. Some risk factors self-evident, such as early onset of sexual behavior, or, consider the girls who touched themselves. Girls whose nipples were preternaturally dark or protuberant. (Wait a minute, does that word mean “protuberant”? He checked his dictionary again. Seemed to.) The look of them performing fellatio with a gun to the head. Razor wounds, how they had begged and sobbed as they were ritually cut. What had happened on the eleventh through fourteenth of February 2002, in the village of La Isla, fifty miles southeast of Ciudad Juarez. In a social hall with the windows mostly broken out, six girls from Nuevo Casas Grandes, another tiny village, all fourteen-year-olds, kidnapped from a school playground and kept for four days by a group associated with the Zeta gang. They killed one by putting a chain used to pull engine blocks out of trucks around her bare chest and between her legs. Landau stopped reading. He was thinking of the capoeira instructor, that she had found this funny. He pushed on: the girls all ended up in a field within sight of the Rio Grande, buried in a sandy wash with one hand of one of them showing through, as a marker. Twenty-four men had participated in the “study.”

  He had read enough. No, he made himself read a little more: Ximena R., the “prettiest” girl it said, had been raped a specific number of times and cut with a surgical instrument in a way that made Landau gag. He put the printout down. Why was Walter Winckelmann’s name on this? How had that happened?

  A Berkeley police cruiser followed him as he descended Euclid Avenue. At a stop sign the policeman asked if he wanted a lift.

  “No, but thanks, Officer.”

  “Wherever you go, I go, you know.”

  “I know. It makes me feel all warm.”

  The cruiser pulled through the intersection and kept just ahead of him for two blocks. Then, shot off for a while.

  A few weeks before, Raboy had sent him an email containing a quote, from Kafka’s The Trial, that went: “If you want to help you must give it all your energies, you can no longer do anything else.” The point was that he could expect to be consumed by his trial; it would take him over completely. Counter to that prediction, Landau had been unbothered now for more than two weeks, and with the start of the trial just eight days away, the phone wasn’t ringing off the hook, they weren’t copying him on documents, indeed, he felt ignored. The state’s case was falling apart. That was good news, although it did not fill him with joy. He had Deena to thank for that. He had had to lose Deena and Harold in order to skate, not to face prison time or the gas. To go free.

  He would visit her later, Deena. Bring her more balloons.

  Winckelmann wasn’t there. Landau ran into a young public-health type coming back from the men’s room. He said that Professor Winckelmann hadn’t been in today.

  “Isn’t he always here? Sleeping on the floor?”

  “He might be in later, you could check.”

  Landau introduced himself. “I’m an old friend. If he’s not here, what about Heitor Burgos-Pereira, then, can I see him?”

  “Who?”

  “Heitor Burgos-Pereira. Guy in his early forties, infectious diseases specialist, from South America.”

  The public-health man took a moment. “I know him, I think, but we don’t work together.”

  Landau had been calling the wrong number, it turned out. There was a new office number, and Heitor was probably one of the extensions; Landau could leave a message if he wanted.

  “You don’t happen to know his cell number, do you?”

  “No. Like I say, we’re not together.”

  Worried about Winckelmann now. Winckelmann not coming to the office was troubling, if you were already in a troubled frame of mind. He walked out of the building with the giant Xs on the facade and headed up Oxford Street, trying to remember where Wally Winckelmann lived—he could picture the house but not recall the name of the street. Waved futilely at a taxi going past. Settled in for a stiff trudge uphill, deep into the Berkeley professorial ghetto. Everybody connected to the university lived in the hills, it had always been this way, from time immemorial.

  Would harm come to Winckelmann, was he in jeopardy? But why? Because whoever had killed Harold might now have a taste for senior professors, males. What was it Heitor had said: “You didn’t put up fences, you steel boxes, you.” Winckelmann and he had failed to police the discipline carefully, to protect it from the likes of Samantha Beevors, maker of messes. Some young epideme somewhere had been driven to madness by that.

  He might be looking to kill me, too, Landau considered. Whether it’s Heitor or Emory Musselwhite of Oklahoma or someone else I can’t recall at all, his deep respect has curdled into the old kill-thrill, the savage hunger, because, in the end, it’s always Daddy’s fault, isn’t it? Something like t
hat. Now on his mind’s screen he saw the name of Winckelmann’s street. He tried the new office number and chose Heitor’s branch on the tree: “Landau here, I’m trying to track you down, Heitor. Maybe you’re in Palo Alto today, your other office. Nobody down there seems to know your information though. I’m on my way up to Wally’s. It occurs to me I haven’t been able to phone you because you have some kind of throwaway. I myself am using a throwaway phone—I’m fond of the ones that look like hard candies, in candy-apple red or green. An unbelievable number of minutes.”

  What to say, what did he really want to say?

  “Heitor, I’ve read your paper. The one you didn’t sign, the outbreak-of-death one. There’s facetious intent, I see, which if one is a native Lusophone may be more entertaining than I was able to find it. I want to talk to you about it. You write as if you’ve been conducting a study with hundreds of these lost girls. We’re going to have to have a refresher on what constitutes a cohort, but forget that—I’m more concerned that you’re putting yourself at risk, consorting with these Zeta people. That’s not for real, is it? Yet, there was a flavor of the actual. You brought poor Ximena R. into the room as they say a good writer must do. ‘What he wrote on her nipple with the scalpel was the same inscription as on her lips.’ That’s just so eloquent, Heitor. My translation only approximate, of course.”

  He hung up. Now made another call: “Jad, this is your father speaking. Please, pick up. It’s important.”

  When Jad did not pick up: “I’m on Keeler Street, just above the pocket park. We used to call it Ray Milland Park, because the real name is Remillard, remember? You climbed the big high rock at age seven. I was so proud of you, you had such gumption. On the street above it is Wally Winckelmann’s house. Winckelmann, the public-health man. It’s not on Grizzly Peak, it’s the street just below that. You know the one.”

  There, now I’ve called in my location, he reflected. Why don’t I just call Byrum and get some squad cars up here? For that matter, why not call Melody, bring her into it as well? Well, it’s because I have a date with her tomorrow, and I don’t want her thinking I’m a big baby. A wuss.