A Cold Heart

by Jonathan Kellerman

  • • •

  SeldomSceneAtoll was listed in West Hollywood, on Santa Monica near La Cienega, and the address turned out to be a genuine office building— two-story, chocolate brick, squeezed between a florist and a strip mall full of cars and short tempers. Milo left the unmarked in a loading space in the mall lot, and we entered the building through a door emblazoned with a NO SOLICITORS sign.

  The directory listed theatrical agencies, nutritionists, a yoga school, business managers, and JAGUAR TUTORIALS/SSA in a second-floor suite.

  “Sharing space,” I said. “No media empire.”

  “Jaguar Tutorials,” said Milo. “What, they train you to become a predator?”

  The ambience said none of the occupants had made it to stardom/health/wealth: shabby gray halls, filthy gray carpeting, dehydrated plywood doors, a reek that said quirky plumbing, an elevator whose lights didn’t respond to a button push.

  We took the stairs, breathing in insecticide and dancing around sprinkles of dead roaches.

  He knocked on the Jaguar/SSA door, didn’t wait for a reply, and twisted the knob. On the other side was a smallish single room set up with four movable workstations. Cute little computers in multicolored boxes, scanners, printers, photocopiers, machines I couldn’t identify. Electrical cord linguini coiled atop the vinyl floor.

  The walls were covered with enlargements of framed SSA covers, all of a type: maliciously lit, photos of young, malnourished, beautiful people lolling in body-conscious clothing and radiating contempt for the audience. Lots of vinyl and rubber; the duds looked cheap but probably required a mortgage.

  Male and female models, Nefertiti eye makeup for both. Slashes of purplish cheek blush for the skinny women, four-day beards for their male counterparts.

  A dreadlocked, dark-skinned man in his late twenties wearing a black and bumblebee yellow striped T-shirt and yellow cargo pants hunched at the nearest PC, typing nonstop. I glanced at his screen. Graphics; Escher by way of Tinkertoys. He ignored us, or didn’t notice. Miniearphones produced something that held his attention.

  The two central stations were unoccupied. At the rearmost computer, a young woman in her midtwenties, also plugged in aurally, sat reading People. Chubby and baby-faced, she wore a black patent-leather jumpsuit and red moonwalker shoes, bobbed in time to what seemed to be a three-four beat. Her hair was unremarkable brown, sprayed into a fifties bouffant. She turned toward us, arched an eyebrow— an eyebrow tattoo— and the beefy steel ring piercing the center of the arch flipped up, then clicked down. The loop in her upper lip remained stationary. So did the score of studs lining her ears and the painful-looking little knoblet parked in the center of her chin.

  “What?” she shouted. Then she yanked out the earphones, kept bobbing her head. One two three one two three. Waltz of the young and metallic.

  “What?” she repeated.

  Milo’s badge elicited twin tattoo arches. The outlines of her mouth had been inked in permanently, as well.

  “So?” she said.

  “I’m looking for the publisher of SeldomSceneAtoll.”

  She thumped her chest and made ape sounds. “You found her.”

  “We’re looking for information on an artist, Juliet Kipper.”

  “What’s up with her?”

  “You know her?”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  “Nothing’s up with her, anymore,” said Milo. “She was murdered.”

  The eyebrow ring drooped, but the face below it remained bland.

  “Whoa whoa whoa,” she said, and she got up, walked over to the graphics guy, jabbed his shoulder. Looking regretful, he pulled off his phones.

  “Juliet Kipper. Did we feature her?”

  “Who?”

  “Kipper. Dead artist. She got murdered.”

  “Um,” he said. “What kind of artist?”

  The girl looked at us.

  Milo said, “She was a painter. We’ve been told you wrote about her, Ms. . . .”

  “Patti Padgett.” Big smile. A not-small diamond was inlaid in her left frontal incisor.

  Milo smiled back and took out his pad.

  “There you go,” Patti Padgett said. “Always wanted to be part of the official police record. When did we supposedly write about the late Ms. Kipper?”

  “Within the last few months.”

  “Well that narrows it down,” she said. “We’ve only put out two issues in six months.”

  “You’re a quarterly?”

  “We’re a broke.” Patti Padgett returned to her desk, opened a drawer, began rummaging. “Let’s see if whatshername Julie merited our . . . how’d she die?”

  “Strangled,” said Milo.

  “Ooh. Any idea who did it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Yet,” said Padgett. “I like your optimism— the greatest generation and all that.”

  Bumblebee-shirt said, “That was World War II, Patricia, he’s Vietnam.” He glanced at us, as if waiting for confirmation. Received blank stares and put his earphones back on and bopped, dreadlocks swaying.

  “Whatever,” said Padgett. “Here we go. Three months ago.” She placed the magazine in her lap, licked her thumb, turned pages. Not many pages between the covers. It didn’t take long for her to say, “Oka-ay! Here she is right in our ‘Mama/Dada’ section . . . sounds like someone liked her.”

  She brought the article to us.

  “Mama/Dada” was a compendium of short pieces on local artists. Juliet Kipper shared the page with an emigrant Croatian fashion photographer and a dog trainer who moonlighted as a video artist.

  The piece on Julie Kipper was two paragraphs, noted the promising New York debut, the decade of “personal and artistic disappointments,” the “would-be rebirth as an essentially nihilistic conveyor of California dreamin’ and ecological schemin.’ “ Nothing I’d seen in Kipper’s landscapes had connoted nihilism to me, but what did I know?

  Kipper’s work, the writer concluded, “makes it obvious that her vision is more of a paean to the paradoxical holism of wishful thinking than a serious attempt to concretize and cartograph the photosynthetic dissonance, upheaval, and mulchagitation that has captivated other West Coast painters.”

  Author’s credit: FS

  “Mulchagitation,” mumbled Milo, glancing at me.

  I shook my head.

  Patti Padgett said, “I think it means moving dirt around, or something like that. Total foggoma, right?” She laughed. “Most of the art stuff we print is like that. Would-bes with no ability hitching a ride on the talent train.”

  Milo said, “ ‘Leeches on the body artistic.’ “

  Padgett stared up at him with naked worship. “You want a gig?”

  “Not in this rotation.”

  “Hindu?”

  “Make-do.”

  Padgett told Bumblebee: “Be threatened, Todd. I’m in love.”

  Milo said, “If you don’t like the writing, why do you print it?”

  “Because it’s there, mon gendarme. And some of our readership digs it.” She spit out another laugh, set off a metal whirligig. “With our budget, we ain’t exactly The New Yawker, honeybunch. Our focus—my focus, cause what I like is what flies— is lots of fashion, some interior design, a little film, a little music. We toss in the finesy-artsy shitsy because some people think it’s cool and in our niche market, cool is everything.”

  Milo said, “Who’s FS?”

  “Hmm,” said Padgett. She returned to Bumblebee and lifted an earphone. “Todd, who’s FS?”

  “Who?”

  “The credit on the Kipper story. It’s signed ‘FS.’ “

  “How would I know? I didn’t even remember Kipper.”

  Padgett turned to us. “Todd doesn’t know, either.”

  “Don’t you keep a file of contributors?”

  “Wow,” said Padgett, “this is getting seriously investigative. What’s the deal, a serial vampire killer?”

  Milo chuckled. “What makes you say
that?”

  “I dig the X-Files. C’mon, tell Patti.”

  “Sorry, Patti,” he said. “Nothing exotic, we’re collecting information.” He smiled at her. “Ma’am.”

  “Ma’am,” she said, placing a black-nailed hand over a generous breast. “Be still my fluttering heart— hey, how about you guys let me follow you around and write up what you do— day in the life and all that. I’m a kick-ass writer, MFA from Yale. Same for Todd. We’re as dynamic a duo as you could hope to encounter.”

  “Maybe one day,” said Milo. “Do you keep a contributor file?”

  “Do we, Todd?”

  Off came the earphones again. Padgett repeated the question. Todd said, “Not really.”

  “Not really?” said Milo.

  “I’ve got a quasi file,” said Todd. “But it’s random— data inputted as it comes in, no alphabetization.”

  “In your computer?” said Milo.

  Todd’s stare said, Where else?

  “Could you please call it up?”

  Todd turned to Padgett. “Isn’t there a First Amendment issue, here?”

  “Puh-leeze,” said Padgett. “These guys are going to let us ride with them, we’ll do a kick-ass law enforcement issue— use that strung-out Cambodian model for the cover, whatshername with the sixteen-syllable name, doll her up in a tight blue uniform, give her a riding crop, a gun, the works. We’ll rock.”

  Todd cleared his screen of graphics.

  • • •

  It took a second. “Here it is. FS— Faithful Scrivener.”

  Milo hunched lower and stared at the screen. “That’s it? No other name?”

  “The proverbial ‘what you see,’ “ said Todd. “This is how the submission came in, this is how I log it.”

  “When you paid, what name did you put on the check?”

  “Right,” said Todd.

  “Ha-ha-ha,” said Padgett.

  “You don’t pay.”

  Padgett said, “We pay the cover models and the photographers as little as we can. Sometimes if we get someone with a genuine résumé— a screenwriter with a credit— we can scratch up something— like a dime a word. Mostly we don’t pay because no one pays us. Distributors refuse to advance us the wholesale price until returns are caculated— we get royalties only for issues sold, and that takes months.” She shrugged. “It’s a sad day for entrepreneurship.”

  Todd said, “She was an undergrad econ major at Brown.”

  “As a sop to Daddy,” said Padgett. “He runs cor-po-ra-tions.”

  “How long have you been publishing?” I said.

  “Four years,” said Todd. Adding with pride: “We are currently four hundred thousand in the hole.”

  “In hock to my daddy,” said Padgett. “To appease him, we maintain a job.”

  “Jaguar Tutorials,” said Milo. “Which is?”

  “SAT preparation,” said Padgett, lifting a business card from her desk and flashing it at us.

  Patricia S. Padgett, B.A. (Brown) MFA (Yale)

  Senior Consultant, Jaguar Tutorials

  “Our mission should we accept it,” she said, “is to educate the offspring of anxiety-ridden social climbers in the fine points of college entrance exams.”

  Milo said, “Jaguar as in . . .”

  “The connotation,” said Todd, “is of mastery and swiftness.”

  “Also,” said Padgett, “of upscale. As in Jag-oo-ar motorcars. We can’t afford Beverly Hills rent, but we want to pull in the B.H. kids.”

  Todd said, “The Ivy League thing helps.”

  Padgett said, “Todd did his undergrad at Princeton.”

  “So,” said Milo, turning back to the screen, “this Faithful Scrivener person sent you a piece under a pseudonym, and you printed it and never paid.”

  “Looks that way,” said Todd. “This notation— OTT— means an over-the-transom submission.”

  Padgett said, “That’s publishing-speak for we didn’t solicit it, it just showed up.”

  “You get a lot of that?”

  “Plenty. Mostly garbage. Real garbage— I’m talking illiterate.”

  “Has ‘FS’ written any other pieces for you?”

  “Let’s see,” said Todd. He scrolled. “Here’s one. All the way back at the beginning.” To Padgett: “Back in Issue Two.”

  Milo read the date. “Three and a half years ago.”

  She said, “The halcyon days— look at this: evidence, clues, red herrings— we’re stylin’ and sleuthin’, Todd— hey, Officer, can we get cool badges, too?”

  She went and got a copy of Issue Two. Faithful Scrivener’s first piece was in a section entitled “Pits and Peaches.” Brutal reviews alternating with mindless raves.

  This one, a Peach. Two paragraphs singing the praises of a promising young dancer named Angelique Bernet.

  Review of a ballet concert at the Mark Taper, in L.A. Experimental piece by a Chinese composer entitled “The Swans of Tianenmen.”

  Two months before Bernet’s murder in Boston.

  The company had been to L.A., first.

  Angelique had been part of a trio of ballerinas featured during the final act. FS had picked her out because of “slap-in-the-face cygnian grace so fully synched with the tenor of the composition that it tightens one’s scrotum. This is DANCE as in paleo-instinctuo-bioenergetics, so right, so real, so unashamedly erotic. Her artistry sets her apart from the palsiform pretendeurs that comprise the rest of la compagnie allegement.”

  “Ouch,” said Padgett. “We really need to be more selective.”

  “ ‘Cygnian,’ “ said Milo.

  Todd said, “It means swanlike. It’s on the advanced SAT vocab list.”

  “ ‘Tight scrotum,’ “ said Padgett. “He had the hots for her. What are we dealing with, some kind of sexual psycho?”

  Milo said, “Could you print copies of both articles? And as long as we’re at it, have you ever run anything by someone named Drummond?”

  Padgett pouted. “I ask, he doesn’t answer.”

  “Please?” said Milo, smiling at her again, but talking in the low, threatening tones of a bear emerging from its cave.

  Padgett said, “Yeah, yeah, sure.”

  “First name?” said Todd.

  “Check any Drummond.”

  “Check Bulldog,” said Padgett.

  No one laughed.

  • • •

  No record of Kevin or Yuri or any other Drummond showed up in the SSA contributor files. No articles on Baby Boy Lee or China Maranga, either, but Todd did find a write-up of a recital given by Vassily Levitch. Another “Pits and Peaches” entry, one year ago. Levitch had played one piece at a group recital in Santa Barbara.

  “Another Over The Transom,” said Milo.

  The byline: E. Murphy.

  The hyperbolic, sexually loaded prose evoked Faithful Scrivener: Levitch was “lithe as a harem houri” as he “stroked Bartok’s tumescent etude” and “squeezed every drop from the time/space/infinity between notes.”

  Padgett rotated her chin stud. “Boy, do we print crap, this walk down memory lane is not making me proud.”

  Todd said, “Keep your perspective, Patti. Your old man markets toxic chemicals.”

  • • •

  Patti Padgett photocopied the articles and walked us to the door. Sticking close to Milo.

  He said, “Ever hear of GrooveRat?”

  “Nope. Is it a band?”

  “A zine.”

  “There are hundreds of those,” she said. “Anyone with a scanner and a printer can do one.”

  Her smile began fresh, ended up old, sad, defeated. “Anyone with a rich dad can take it a step higher.”

  21

  As we got back in the car, Milo’s cell phone chirped the first seven notes of Für Elise. He slapped it to his ear, grunted, said, “Yeah, I’ll be there ASAP, treat her nice.”

  To me: “Vassily Levitch’s mother flew in last night from New York and is waiting for me at the station. Maybe s
he’ll know something that ties Levitch to Drummond beyond ‘E. Murphy’— so what was that all about? Drummond using pen names? And if he’s got his own zine, why send stuff to Patti and Todd?”