“In both cases the killer was opportunistic—used something of the victim’s.”
“Weapons, too,” he said. “She was killed with a kitchen knife from the house she was showing, Shipler with a fireplace poker that was identified as his. So?”
“I don’t know, maybe it indicates some kind of power thing—dominance over the victims—turning the victims against themselves. Like using my tree branch on the koi. Were there any bondage or S&M overtones to either murder?”
“Paprock’s bra was wrapped around her neck, but the coroner said it was done when she was already dead. Far as I can tell there were no sexual overtones at all to Shipler.”
“Still,” I said, “the message was important. It must mean something to the killer.”
“I’m sure it does,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“Did Shipler live alone?”
“Yeah, divorced.”
“What about Paprock?”
“No match there, either. Married, two kids.”
“If nothing was taken from Shipler’s house,” I said, “what was the assumed motive?”
“A gang thing—there was lots of activity in Shipler’s neighborhood, even back then. Lots more, now. Like you said before, a trashed house could mean someone looking for something. Central figured dope. Figured Shipler was involved on some level and ‘bad love’ was some sort of gangbanger slogan they hadn’t heard of yet. They checked it out with the CRASH detail and they hadn’t heard of it, but new stuff comes up all the time.”
“Did Shipler turn out to be involved in gangs or dope?”
“Far as I can tell, he had no record, but plenty of scrotes slip through the cracks. In terms of there being no burglary, Southwest figured it was punks panicking and leaving before they could take anything. Which is consistent with gang wannabees—new recruits out on a virgin adventure.”
“An initiation thing?”
“Yeah, they start ’em young. Automatics in the diapers. Speaking of which, I caught my little truant bastards on the Palms robbery—thirteen and fifteen. No doubt they’ll get referred for some kind of therapy. Want a referral?”
“No, thanks.”
“Cynic.”
“Was there gang activity where Paprock was killed?”
“A little, on the fringes. It’s mostly working-class tough—north end of Van Nuys. No one made the gang assumption in that one, but maybe if Van Nuys had talked to Southwest, they would have. Neither of them knew about the other case—still don’t.”
“Going to tell them?” I said.
“First I’m gonna read Shipler’s file thoroughly, see what I can pull out of it. Then, yeah, I’ll have to tell them, do the old network blah blah. Both cases are real cold—be interesting to see what kind of responses I get. Hopefully the whole thing won’t deteriorate into endless memories. Though if ‘bad love’ shows up anywhere in Stoumen’s file, we’ve got interstate blah blah.”
“Hear from Seattle, yet?”
“Very briefly. They’re sending down records—it’ll probably take a week or so. Both detectives on that one are retired and unavailable. Probable translation: burnouts gone fishing. If anything provocative comes up in the file, I’ll bug ’em anyway.”
“What about the FBI records on other ‘bad love’ murders?”
“Not yet. Them gears grind slowly.”
“A real estate agent, a janitor, and ‘bad love,’ ” I said. “I still think it has something to do with that conference. Or de Bosch himself—Paprock and Shipler could have been his patients.”
“So why would someone kill them?”
“Maybe it’s another patient, mad about something.”
“Then what’s your connection?”
“I don’t know.… Nothing makes sense, dammit.”
“You learn anything from Jeffers?”
“No one at the center remembers Hewitt having any friends. But she referred me to Hewitt’s lawyer and he gave me a name and possible address.” I described my encounter with the people under the freeway.
“Gritz,” he said. “As in hominy.”
“With a ‘z.’ Could be a first name or a last, or just a nickname.”
“I’ll run it through.”
“The kid I spoke to said he’s been gone about a week. He also said Gritz was talking and singing about getting rich.”
“Singing?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Oh those romantic hoboes, strumming around the campfire.”
“Maybe Gritz had some kind of job lined up, or maybe it’s baloney. The kid could very well have been putting me on. For what it’s worth, he said he’d ask around, I should come back later.”
“Getting rich,” he said. “Everyone talks and sings about it. That Calcutta place might be the dregs, but it’s still L.A.”
“True,” I said. “But wouldn’t it be interesting if Gritz really did expect to get paid for something—like killing my koi, and other nasties.”
“Hitman on a fish? So who’s doing the hiring?”
“The anonymous bad guy—I know, it’s a ridiculous idea.”
“At this point nothing’s ridiculous, Alex, but if someone was looking to hire a nighttime skulker, would they choose a homeless nutcase?”
“True.… Maybe what Gritz was hired for was to scream on tape—to imitate Hewitt because he knew what Hewitt sounded like.”
“Imitate?” he said. “Those voice tracks sounded identical to me, Alex. Though we may never be able to verify it. I talked to the voiceprint guy over at the sheriff’s, and screams are useless, legally. In order to make a match that can be used in court, you need two samples, minimum of twenty words on each and the exact same phrases. Even then, it gets challenged a lot and thrown out.”
“What about for nonadmissible comparison?”
“Matching screams is still an iffy business. It’s words that have unique characteristics. I asked the sheriff to give a listen anyway. He said he’s backlogged but would try to get to it eventually.… Why would someone want to imitate Hewitt?”
“I don’t know—I can’t help but think the tape’s part of a ritual. Something ceremonial that means something only to the killer.”
“What about the kid on the tape?”
“Could be a homeless kid—someone from Little Calcutta or some place like it. Living down there could explain the robot quality of the voice—despair. You should have seen it, Milo. The boy’s teeth were rotting, he had a tubercular cough. The girl was naked, wrapped up in a sheet, trying to feed the baby. If I’d offered enough money, I probably could have bought the baby.”
“I’ve seen it,” he said softly.
“I know you have. I have too. It’s all around. But I haven’t really let it register for a while.”
“What’re you gonna do, solve everyone’s problems? Plenty of your own to deal with, for the time being. You get names on the freeway people?”
“Not the girl. He calls himself Terminator Three.”
He laughed. “No one else down there besides them and the baby?”
“No one I could see, and I was flashing ten-dollar bills.”
“Real smart, Alex.”
“I watched my back.”
“Yeah.”
“The kid said the place fills up at night. I could go back after dark and see if anyone else knows Gritz.”
“You’re really in the mood to get your throat cut, aren’t you?”
“If I had a macho cop with me I’d be safe, right?”
“Don’t count on it.… Yeah, okay, it’s probably a waste of time, but that makes me feel right at home.”
Robin was still working in the garage, hunched over her bench, wielding shiny sharp things that resembled dental picks. Her hair was tied up and her goggles were lodged in her curls. Under her overalls, her T-shirt was tightened by perspiration. She said, “Hi, doll,” as her hands continued to move. The dog was at her feet and he stood and licked my hand as I looked over Robin’s shoulder.
A tiny
rectangle of abalone was clamped to a padded section of the bench. The edges were beveled and the corners were inlaid with bits of ivory and gold wire. She’d traced the shell with minuscule curlicue shapes, cut out some of them, and was in the process of excising another.
“Beautiful,” I said. “Fretboard inlay?”
“Uh-huh. Thanks.” She blew away dust and cleaned the edge of a pick with a fingernail.
“You do root canal, too?”
She laughed and hunched lower. The tools clicked as she carved out a speck of shell. “Kind of baroque for my taste, but it’s for a stockbroker who wants a showpiece for his wall.”
She worked some more, finally put the tools down, wiped her forehead, and wiggled her fingers. “Enough for one day, I’m cramping up.”
“Everything okay?” I rubbed her neck.
“Nice and quiet. How about you?”
“Not bad.”
I kissed her. The wind got stronger and drier, ruffling the cypress trees and shooting a cold stream through the open garage. Robin unclamped the abalone, and put it in her pocket. Her arms were goosebumped. I put mine around them and the two of us headed for the house. By the time we got to the door, the wind was whipping the trees and stirring the dust, causing the bulldog to blink and sniff.
“Santa Ana?” she said.
“Too cold. Probably the tail end of something arctic.”
“Brr,” she said, unlocking the door. “Leave your jacket in the car?”
I shook my head. We went inside.
“You were wearing one, weren’t you?” she said, rubbing her hands together. “That baggy brown tweed.”
Artist’s eye.
“Yup.”
“Did you lose it?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“I gave it away.”
She laughed. “You what?”
“No big deal. It was fraying.”
“Who’d you give it to?”
I told her about Little Calcutta. She listened with her hands on her hips, shaking her head, and went into the kitchen to wash her hands. When she came back, her head was still moving from side to side.
“I know, I know,” I said. “It was a bleeding-heart reflex, but they really were pitiful—it was a cheap old thing, anyway.”
“You wore it the first time we went out. I never liked it.”
“You didn’t?”
“Nope. Too philosophy prof.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t that important.”
“Snoring, poor taste in haberdashery. What else don’t you like that you haven’t informed me about?”
“Nothing. Now that you’ve ditched the coat, you’re perfect.”
She ruffled my hair, walked to the French doors, and looked out at the mountains. They were shimmering, denuded in patches, where the foliage was brushed back like blow-dried hair. The pool water was choppy, the surface gritty with leaves and dirt.
Robin loosened her hair. I hung back and kept looking at her.
Perfect female statuary, rock-still against the turbulence.
She unsnapped one overall strap, then the other, letting the baggy denim collapse around her feet, and stood there in T-shirt and panties.
Half turning, hands on hips, she looked back at me. “How ’bout giving me something, big boy?” she said, in a Mae West voice.
The dog grumbled. Robin cracked up. “Quiet, you! You’re wrecking my timing.”
“Now it feels like a home,” she said, snuggling under the covers. “Though I do prefer our little love nest, be it ever so humble. So what’d you find out today?”
My second summation of the day. I did it quickly, adding what Milo’d told me about the murders and leaving out the gross pathology. Even sanitized, it was bad, and she turned quiet.
I rubbed her lower back, allowing my hand to linger on swells and dimples. Her body loosened, but only for a moment.
“You’re sure you’ve never heard of those other two people?” she said, stilling my hand.
“I’m sure. And there doesn’t even seem to be any connection between the two of them. The woman was a white real estate agent, the man a black janitor. He was twenty-six years older, they lived on opposite ends of the city, were killed in different ways. Nothing in common but ‘bad love.’ Maybe they were patients of de Bosch.”
“They couldn’t be old patients of yours?”
“No way,” I said. “I’ve been through every one of my case files. To be honest, I don’t see the patient angle as too likely, period. If someone has a hangup with de Bosch, why go after the people he treated?”
“What about group therapy, Alex? Things can get rough in groups, can’t they? People lashing out at one another? Maybe someone got dumped on badly and never forgot it.”
“I guess it’s possible,” I said, sitting up. “A good therapist always tries to keep a handle on the group’s emotional climate, but things can get out of control. And sometimes there’s no way to know someone’s feeling victimized. Once, at the hospital, I had to calm down the father of a kid with a bone tumor who brought a loaded pistol onto the ward. When I finally got him to open up, it came out that he’d been boiling for weeks. But there was no warning at all—till then he’d been a really easygoing guy.”
“There you go,” she said. “So maybe some patient of de Bosch’s sat there and took it and never told anyone. Finally, years later, he decided to get even.”
“But what kind of therapy group would bring together a real estate agent from the valley and a black janitor?”
“I don’t know—maybe they weren’t the patients, maybe their kids were. A parents’ group for problem kids—de Bosch was basically a child therapist, wasn’t he?”
I nodded, trying to imagine it. “Shipler was a lot older than Paprock—I suppose she could have been a young mother and he an old father.”
We heard scratching and thumping at the door. I got up and opened it and the dog bounded in. He headed straight for Robin’s side of the bed, stood on his hind legs, put his paws on the mattress, and began snorting. She lifted him up and he rewarded her with lusty licks.
“Settle down,” she said. “Uh-oh—look, he’s getting excited.”
“Without testicles, yet. See the effect you have on men?”
“But of course.” She batted her lashes at me, turned back to the dog, and finally got him to lie still by kneading the folds of flesh around his jowls. He lapsed into sleep with an ease that I envied. But when I leaned over to kiss her, he opened his eyes, snuffled, and insinuated himself between us, curling atop the covers and licking his paws.
I said, “Maybe Milo can get hold of Paprock’s and Shipler’s medical histories, see if de Bosch’s name or the Corrective School appears on them. Sometimes people conceal psych treatment, but with the cost, it’s more likely there’s some kind of insurance record. I’ll ask him when I see him tonight.”
“What’s tonight?”
“We were planning on going back to the freeway, try to talk to more of the homeless people in order to get a handle on this Gritz character.”
“Is it safe going back there?”
“I’ll have Milo with me. Whether or not it’s productive remains to be seen.”
“All right,” she said uneasily. “If you want it to be productive, why don’t you stop at a market and get those people some food?”
“Good idea. You’re full of them today, aren’t you?”
“Motivation,” she said. She turned serious, reached up and held my face in both of her hands. “I want this to be over. Please take care of yourself.”
“Promise.” We managed to maintain a convoluted embrace despite the dog.
I fell asleep, smelling perfume and kibble. When I woke up my stomach was sour and my feet were sore. Inhaling and letting out the air, I sat up and cleared my eyes.
“What is it?” Robin mumbled, her back to me.
“Just thinking.”
<
br /> “About what?” She rolled over and faced me.
“Someone in a therapy group, getting wounded and keeping it inside all these years.”
She touched my face.
“What the hell do I have to do with it?” I said. “Am I just a name on a damned brochure, or did I hurt someone without ever knowing it?”
CHAPTER
15
I heard the unhealthy-sounding engine from inside the house. Milo’s Fiat, reduced to a squat little toy on the monitor.
I went outside. The wind had stopped. The car expelled a plume of smoke, then convulsed. It didn’t look as if it would survive the evening.
“Figured it would blend in where we’re going,” he said, getting out. He carried a large, white plastic bag and was wearing work clothes. The bag smelled of garlic and meat.
“More food?” I said.
“Sandwiches—Italian. Just consider me your official LAPD delivery boy.”
Robin was back in the garage, working under a funnel of fluorescence. The dog was there, too, and he charged us, heading straight for the bag.
Milo lifted it out of reach. “Sit. Stay—better yet, go away.”
The dog snorted once, turned his back on us, and sank to his haunches.
Milo said, “Well, one out of three ain’t bad.” He waved at Robin. She raised a hand and put down her tools.
“She looks right at home,” he said. “How ’bout you, Nick Danger?”
“I’m fine. Anything on Gritz in the records?”
Before he could answer, Robin came over.
“He’s brought us dinner,” I said.
“What a prince.” She kissed his cheek. “Are you hungry right now?”
“Not really,” he said, touching his gut and looking down at the ground. “Had a little appetizer while I waited.”
“Good for you,” she said. “Growing boy.”
“Growing the wrong way.”
“You’re fine, Milo. You’ve got presence.” She patted his shoulder. From the way her fingers were flexing I knew she was eager to get back to her bench. I was itchy, too, thinking of the freeway people. The dog continued to sulk.
“How ’bout you, hon?” she said to me. The dog came over, thinking—or pretending—it was meant for him.
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