A Cold Heart

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The woman waved. “Yoo-hoo, Detective!” and we approached the bus.

  “Ms. Barnes,” said Milo. “What’s up?” He introduced me to CoCo Barnes, and she gripped my hand with what felt like a sparrow’s talon.

  “Just came by to see if you got in okay.” Barnes glanced at the gallery’s frontage. The dog remained in place, dull-eyed but tight-jawed. Big dog with a graybeard muzzle. Bits of dry leaves specked its coat.

  I chanced petting the animal. It licked my hand.

  Milo said, “We got in fine.”

  “You’re all finished up in there?” CoCo Barnes’s voice was scratchy, veering toward abrasive, tempered by a Southern inflection. She looked to be seventy. The white hair was cut in a boyish cap and trimmed unceremoniously. Her skin was the color and consistency of well-roasted chicken. Slate gray eyes— more acute than the dog’s, but filmy, nonetheless— checked me out.

  “What’s his name?” I said.

  “Lance.”

  “Nice dog.”

  “If he likes you.” CoCo Barnes turned to Milo. “Any progress on Julie?”

  “It’s still early in the investigation, ma’am.”

  The old woman frowned. “Didn’t I hear something about if you don’t solve it quickly, you probably won’t solve it at all?”

  “It’s not that simple, ma’am.”

  CoCo Barnes ruffled Lance’s neck. “I’m glad I caught you, it saves me a phone call. Remember how you asked me to think about anything unusual that happened Saturday night, and I said there’d been nothing, it had just been your typical opening? Well, I thought about it some more, and there was something. Not at night and not at the opening, strictly speaking. And I’m not sure it’s really what you’re after.”

  “What happened?” said Milo.

  “This was before the opening,” said Barnes. “The day of the opening, around 2 P.M. Julie wasn’t even here, yet. Just me and Lance, here. Clark Van Alstrom was here, too— the man who does those aluminum stabiles?”

  Milo nodded.

  CoCo Barnes said, “I brought Clark along because I can’t lift that metal door by myself. Once I got in, Clark left, and I started setting up. Making sure everything was in order— a few months ago we had a power outage, and that was no good.” She smiled. “Especially because the artist worked in neon . . . Anyway, I was checking things out, and I heard Lance bark. That doesn’t happen often. He’s a very quiet boy.”

  She smiled at the dog. Lance made a low, contented sound. “I’d set up a water bowl for him at the back, in the hallway near where Julie— just outside the bathrooms— but I’d left the door to the vestibule open, and I could hear him barking. He doesn’t have much of a bark, mind you, he’s fourteen years old and his vocal cords are pretty shot. What he produces is more of a cough.” She demonstrated with a series of dry hacks. Lance’s eyes shifted to her, but he remained inert. “He just kept it up, wouldn’t stop, and I went back there to see what was wrong. By the time I got there he’d shlepped himself up on his feet and was facing the back door. I wondered if he’d heard rats— we’d had some rat problems a couple of seasons ago, an opening that was absolutely disastrous, where’s the Pied Piper of Hamlin when you need him— so . . . where was I . . . oh, yes, I opened the door and had a look out back and there were no rats. But there was a woman. Foraging in the Dumpster. Obviously homeless, obviously quite mad.”

  “Mad as in angry?” said Milo.

  “Mad as in disturbed, psychotic, mentally ill. I abhor labels, but sometimes they do get the picture across. This one was mad as the proverbial chapeau maker.”

  “You could tell this by—”

  “Her eyes, for starts,” said Barnes. “Wild eyes— scared eyes. Jumping all over the place.” She tried to demonstrate with her own gray orbs, but they moved lazily. Blinking several times, as if to clear them, she turned to Lance and scratched behind his ear, and said, “Easy now, you’re a good boy . . . then there was the way she carried herself, her clothes— mismatched, oversized, too many layers for the weather. I’ve lived in Venice for fifty-three years, Detective. I’ve seen enough mental illness to know it when it stares me in the face. Then, of course, there was the foraging. The moment the door opened she jumped back, lost her balance, and nearly fell. Such fear. I said, ‘If you wait right here, I’ll fetch you something to eat.’ But she raised her hand to her mouth, chewed her knuckles, and ran off. They do that a lot, you know. Turn down food. Some of them even get hostile when you try to help them. They’ve got voices blabbering in their heads, telling them who-knows-what. Can you blame them for not trusting?”

  She ruffled the dog some more. “It’s probably nothing, but in view of what happened to Julie I don’t suppose we can be too complacent.”

  “No we can’t, ma’am. What else can you tell me about this woman?” said Milo.

  The old woman’s eyes sparked. “So you do think it’s important?”

  “At this stage, everything’s important. I appreciate your telling me.”

  “Well, that’s good to know. Because I almost didn’t tell you, being as it was a woman and my assumption was a man killed Julie— the way she was . . .” The old woman’s eyes clamped shut, then fluttered open. “I’m still trying to rid myself of the image . . . not that this woman couldn’t have overpowered Julie. She was large— maybe six feet tall. Built big, too. Though with all that clothing, it was hard to tell, precisely. And we were only face-to-face for a second or so.”

  “Big bones,” said Milo.

  “Sturdy— almost masculine.”

  “Could it have been a man dressed up as a—”

  Barnes laughed. “No, no, this one was pure girl all right. But a big girl. A lot bigger than Julie. Which got me thinking. It needn’t have been a man at all, right? Especially if we’re dealing with someone not in their right mind.”

  Milo’s pad was out. “How old would you say she was?”

  “I’d guess thirties, but it’s a guess because that kind of misery— homelessness, mental illness— it overrides age, doesn’t it?”

  “In what way, ma’am?”

  “What I mean,” said Barnes, “is that people like that all look ancient and damaged— there’s a coating of despair. This one, though, she’d managed to hold on to some of her youth; under the grime I could see some youth. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  CoCo Barnes ticked a finger. “In terms of other details, she wore a thick, padded military-type camouflage jacket over a red, black, and white flannel shirt over a blue UCLA sweatshirt. UCLA in white letters, the C was half-gone. On the bottom were heavy-duty gray sweatpants, and from the way they bulked, she had on at least one other pair of pants underneath. White, lace-up tennis shoes on her feet and a broad-brimmed black straw hat atop her head. The brim was shredded in front— pieces of straw coming loose. Her hair was bunched up in the hat, but some had come loose, and it was red. And curly. Curly red hair. Add a layer of grime to all of that, and you’ve got the picture.”

  Milo scribbled. “Ever see her before?”

  “No,” said Barnes. “Not on the walkway or kicking around the alleys in Venice or in Ocean Front Park or anywhere else you see the homeless. Maybe she’s not one of the locals.”

  “Is there anything else you remember about the encounter?”

  “It wasn’t much of an encounter, Detective. I opened the door, she got scared, I offered to get her some food, she ran off.”

  Milo scanned his notes. “You’ve got a great memory, Ms. Barnes.”

  “You should’ve known me a few years ago.” The old woman tapped her forehead. “I’m accustomed to taking mental snapshots. We artists view the world with a high-focus lens.” Two rapid blinks. “If I hadn’t chickened out of my cataract surgery, I’d be doing a lot better.”

  “Let me ask you this, ma’am: Could you draw me a picture of this woman? I’m sure it would be better than anything our police artist would come up with.”

  Barnes suppressed a surprised
smile. “Haven’t drawn in a while. Shifted to ceramics a few years ago, but, sure, why not? I’ll do it and call you.”

  “Appreciate it, ma’am.”

  “Civic duty and art,” said Barnes. “All in one swoop.”

  • • •

  As I drove back to Café Moghul, I said, “How seriously do you take it?”

  “You don’t?”

  “CoCo Barnes has cataracts, so who knows what she really saw. I still think the murder smacks of planning and intelligence. Someone well composed mentally. But that’s just a guess, not science.”

  He frowned. “Tracking this redhead down means getting hold of the patrol officers where the homeless hang out, dealing with the social service agencies and the treatment centers. And if Barnes is right about the redhead not being local, I can’t limit myself to the Westside.”

  “One thing in your favor,” I said, “a six-foot woman with curly red hair isn’t inconspicuous.”

  “Assuming I find her, then what? What I’ve got is a probable psychotic who Dumpster-dove in the alley five hours before Julie got strangled.” He shook his head. “How seriously am I taking it? Not very.”

  A block later: “On the other hand . . .”

  “What?”

  “If I don’t turn up anything else, soon, I can’t afford not to chase it down.”

  • • •

  I pulled up alongside the loading zone in front of the restaurant. A parking ticket was folded under the windshield wiper of his unmarked. He said, “Want to meet Everett Kipper?”

  “Sure.”

  He eyed the citation. “You drive— long as I’m renting, I might as well occupy.”

  “Will the city reimburse me?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ll FedEx you a box of infinite gratitude.”

  • • •

  Everett Kipper worked at a firm called MuniScope, on the twenty-first floor of a steel-and-concrete high-rise on Avenue of the Stars just south of little Santa Monica. Parking fees were stiff, but Milo’s badge impressed the attendant, and I stashed the Seville for free.

  The building’s lobby was arena-sized, serviced by a dozen elevators. We rode up in hermetic silence. MuniScope’s reception room was ovoid, paneled in bleached bird’s-eye maple, softly lit and carpeted, and ringed by saffron leather modules. Milo’s badge elicited alarm from the hard-faced, hard-bodied receptionist. Then she recovered and compensated with toothy graciousness.

  “I’ll ring him right away, gentlemen. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, tea, Sprite, Diet Coke?”

  We demurred and sank down in yellow-orange leather. Down-filled cushions. No corners in the egg-shaped space. I felt like a privileged unborn chick nestled in high-rent surroundings.

  Milo muttered, “Cushy.”

  I said, “Put the client at ease. It works. I’m ready to peck through the shell and buy something.”

  A man in a black suit appeared from around a convex wall. “Detectives? Ev Kipper.”

  Julie Kipper’s ex was a thin man with a big voice, a blond-gray crew cut and the smooth round face of an aging frat boy. Forty or so, five-eight, one-fifty. His bouncy stride suggested gymnastics or ballet training. The suit was a four-button model, tailored snug, set off by a sapphire blue shirt, gold tie, gold cuff links, gold wristwatch. His hands were manicured and smooth and outsized, and when we shook, I felt barely suppressed strength in his grip. Dry palms. Clear, brown eyes that made eye contact. A subtle bronze veneer to his complexion said outdoor sports or the tanning bed.

  “Let’s go in and talk,” he said. Confident baritone, not a trace of anxiety. If he’d murdered his former spouse, he was one hell of a psychopath.

  • • •

  He took us to an empty boardroom with a view all the way to Vegas. Oyster-colored carpeting and walls, and a black granite conference table more than large enough for the thirty Biedermeier-revival chairs that surrounded it. The three of us huddled at one end.

  “Sorry it took so long to get together,” said Kipper. “What can I help you with?”

  Milo said, “Is there anything about your ex-wife we should know? Anything that would help us figure out who strangled her?”

  Putting emphasis on wife and strangled and watching Kipper’s face.

  Kipper said, “God, no. Julie was a wonderful person.”

  “You’ve maintained contact, despite the divorce ten years ago.”

  “Life took us in other directions. We’ve remained friends.”

  “Other directions professionally?”

  “Yes,” said Kipper.

  Milo sat back. “Are you remarried?”

  Kipper smiled. “No, still looking for Ms. Right.”

  “Your ex-wife wasn’t her.”

  “Julie’s world was art. Mine is slogging through bond prospectuses. We started off in the same place but ended up too far apart.”

  “Did you study painting in Rhode Island?”

  “Sculpting.” Kipper touched the face of his watch. The timepiece was thin as a nickel with an exposed skeleton movement. Four diamonds placed equidistant around the rim, crocodile band. I tried to estimate how many paintings Julie Kipper would have had to sell to afford it.

  “Sounds like you’ve been researching me, Detective.”

  “Your marriage came up while talking to people who knew her, sir. People seem to know about your artistic origins.”

  “The Light and Space bunch?” said Kipper. “Sad crowd.”

  “How so, sir?”

  “Maximally self-labeling, minimally talented.”

  “Self-labeling?”

  “They call themselves artists,” said Kipper. New edge in his voice. “Julie was the real thing, they’re not. But that’s true of the art world in general. There are no criteria— it’s not like being a surgeon. Lots of pretense.”

  The brown eyes shifted down to his oversized hands. Square fingers, glossy nails. A well-tended hand. Hard to imagine it working a chisel, and the look in Kipper’s eyes said he knew it. “That was my story.”

  “You were pretending?” said Milo.

  “For a while. Then I gave it up.” Kipper smiled. “I sucked.”

  “You were good enough to get into the Rhode Island School of Design.”

  “Well, what do you think of that?” said Kipper. Another layer of silk had been peeled from his voice. “Like I said, there are no criteria. What Julie and I had in common was we both won awards in high school and college. The only difference was, she deserved hers. I always felt like an impostor. I’m not saying I’m a total boob. I can do things with wood and stone and bronze the average person can’t. But that’s a far cry from art. I was smart enough to realize that, and got into something that fits me.”

  Milo glanced around the room. “Any artistic satisfaction in this?”

  “Not a whit,” said Kipper. “But I make a fortune and indulge my fantasies on Sunday— home studio. Most of the time my stuff never gets out of clay. Smashing it can be quite cathartic.”

  His face remained unlined, but his color had deepened.

  Milo said, “How did your ex-wife feel about your switching careers?”

  “That was years ago, how can it be relevant?” said Kipper.

  “At this point, everything is, sir. Please bear with me.”

  “How’d she feel? She hated it, tried to talk me out of it. Which tells you something about Julie— her integrity. We were living like paupers in a hovel on the Lower East Side, doing odd jobs. Julie tried to telemarket magazine subscriptions, and I did janitorial duty in the building to make the rent. The day I got into finance was the first time we could count on a stable income. And not much of one, at that. I started off gofering for chump change at Morgan Stanley. But even that was a step up. Now we could buy food. But Julie couldn’t have cared less. She kept yelling at me— I was talented, had sold out. I don’t think she ever forgave me— not until she moved out here and looked me up and we reconnected. At that point, I think she could see that I was really happy.�
��

  “You moved here first.”

  “A year before Julie. After we divorced.”

  “And she looked you up.”

  “She called my office. She was really down— about failing to make it in New York, about having to draw stupid newspaper ads. She was also broke. I helped her out.”

  “On top of the alimony.”

  Kipper exhaled. “No big deal. Like I said, I do very well.”

  “So give me the chronology,” said Milo. “Marriage, divorce, et cetera.”