A Cold Heart

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The outdoor dump matched Angelique Bernet and China Maranga.

  Flexibility. Creativity.

  I said so. They listened, made no comment. Ate some more. Went over old ground for twenty minutes. Then Milo said, “So what’s up with the Murphy family tree, Eric?”

  Stahl opened the white envelope and removed a computer-printed genealogy chart. “I got this from the Internet, but it seems reliable. Erna Murphy’s father, Donald, had a brother and a sister. The brother, Edward, married a woman named Colette Branigan. Only cousin there is one daughter, Mary Margaret. Edward’s dead, Colette lives in New York, Mary Margaret’s a nun in Albuquerque.”

  “There’s a hot lead for you,” said Small. “Maniacal Sister Mary.”

  Stahl said, “Murphy’s sister is named Alma Trueblood. I ran into her at the rest home where Murphy’s dying. She’s got two sons from a previous marriage, one’s deceased. Her first husband’s dead, but she divorced him before he died. I found a few distant cousins but none of them are local and none are Drummonds. No connection to Kevin I can find.”

  “The whole cousin thing was probably nut talk,” said Small.

  “A cousin who likes art,” said Schlesinger. “So what?”

  Milo reached for the chart, scanned it absently, gave a disgusted look.

  I took a look.

  “Who’s this?” I said, pointing.

  Stahl leaned across the small table and read upside down. “Alma Trueblood’s first husband. He was a real estate agent in Temple City.”

  “Alvard G. Shull,” I said. “Kevin’s faculty advisor at Charter College is a guy named A. Gordon Shull. The two sons you’ve got listed here are Bradley— deceased— and Alvard, Junior.”

  “A. Gordon,” said Petra. “My first name was Alvard, I’d want to use the middle name.”

  “Damn,” said Marvin Small. “This professor like art?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said.

  Dead silence in the room.

  I said, “Shull told me he’d grown up ‘grounded’ in art and literature and theater. He’s also got red hair.”

  “Big and strong enough?” said Milo.

  “Easily,” I said. “Six feet, close to two hundred. Outdoorsy. Outgoing. And not at all protective of Kevin, the way you might expect from a mentor. At first, he expressed surprise that Kevin was under suspicion of anything. But as we talked, he warmed to the subject of Kevin’s eccentricities. I remember one phrase he used: ‘Kevin wasn’t the type of kid you’d want to have a beer with.’ At the time, I didn’t make much of it, but in retrospect, it’s cruel. One of the last things he told me was Kevin was a lousy writer.”

  “Oh, boy,” said Petra.

  Milo rubbed his face.

  “Something else,” I said. “When I first talked to Shull’s department head about Kevin, she put on a full-force stonewall. Cited academic freedom, confidentiality. Exactly what you’d expect from a department head. Then she found out Shull had been Kevin’s advisor, and her attitude changed completely. All of a sudden she was more than willing for me to talk to Shull. I didn’t think much of it, but maybe she had a reason. Wanting Shull to have problems.”

  “Shull’s been a bad boy?” said Petra.

  “For a professor,” said Small, “being a bad boy could mean giving the wrong kid a bad grade. What do we really have on this guy except he likes art and had a nutty cousin?”

  “A cousin who got strangled,” said Petra. “And was spotted at the scene of one of our 187s.”

  Small tickled his own mustache. “So, what, we’re thinking two bad guys, now? Teacher and student? Like Buono and Bianchi, Bittaker and Norris, pair of lowlife scumbag psychopaths pulling a duo?”

  “We’ve got a literal teacher and student,” said Petra. “Maybe they branched out of academia.” To Stahl: “You said Shull’s mommy has dough. That could explain Kevin’s financing.”

  I said, “Shull’s influence could also explain the shift in Kevin’s writing style. Kevin started off simple, but Shull guided him toward greater complexity. I told Shull Kevin’s style had gotten pretentious. He laughed, and said, ‘Ouch.’ But maybe he wasn’t amused.”

  Milo said, “He show any signs of weirdness, Alex?”

  “Not really. Very self-possessed. But right from the beginning I’ve thought our guy wouldn’t come across strange. Someone who can move in and out of artistic venues without being conspicuous. Someone smart enough to plan.”

  “Someone older than Kevin,” he said. “His age bugged you from the beginning.”

  “Shull’s how old?” said Petra.

  “Midthirties to forty.”

  “Right in the zone.”

  Schlesinger said, “Where’s the family money from?”

  Stahl said, “The second husband.”

  I said, “Some of it may have found its way to her sole living child. Any idea how Shull’s father and brother died?”

  Stahl shook his head.

  Petra said, “Good work, Eric.”

  The merest flicker of emotion livened Stahl’s eyes. Then they went flat, again.

  “Life’s like that,” said Marvin Small. “All of a sudden things change.”

  “A philosopher,” said Schlesinger, with the good humor of a long-suffering spouse. “I wouldn’t mind some good change. For a change. You guys gonna learn more about this professor?”

  Petra said, “Minute we’re out of here, I’ll run him through the data banks.”

  Stahl said, “I don’t recommend interviewing his mommy.”

  “Not a nice lady?” said Milo.

  “Not someone I’d like to have a beer with.”

  The first bit of humor I’d ever heard from him. But no comic inflection. Mechanical voice. The deadened tone of someone beaten down. Or maybe he just had a weird personality.

  He placed the chart back in the white envelope and studied his empty plate.

  Milo turned to me. “What’s the name of that department head?”

  41

  Alvard Gordon Shull had been run through the law enforcement files. No criminal record, but Guadalupe Santos, Kevin Drummond’s landlady, thought she recognized Shull from the DMV photo Petra showed her.

  “Hmm . . . maybe.”

  “Maybe what, ma’am?”

  “Once I saw Yuri on the street talking to a guy. Could’ve been him.”

  “Where on the street, Mrs. Santos?”

  “Not far from here, like up on Melrose, couple of blocks that way.” Pointing east. “I figured Yuri had gone shopping or something.”

  Petra shook her head as she recounted it to Milo and me. She never thought to mention this? “Ma’am, was he carrying a bag that indicated he’d been shopping?”

  Santos thought. “It was a while ago— maybe.”

  “But you think this was the man he was with?”

  “I’m not sure . . . like I said, it was a long time ago.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I’d have to say . . . months. Only reason I noticed was I never saw Yuri with anyone. But it’s not like they were hanging out or anything.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Just talking. Like maybe the guy asked Yuri directions or something. Then Yuri walked home alone.”

  “The man left on foot?”

  “Um, I think so. But there’s no way I could testify or anything. I couldn’t honestly say I remember details, it’s more like maybe. Who is he?”

  “Maybe no one. Thank you, ma’am.”

  Santos closed her door, looking worried.

  • • •

  Shull lived in a house on Aspen Way, in the Hollywood Hills, and Stahl had been stationed down the block all night, with nothing to report.

  “How far is Aspen,” I asked Milo, “from the Hollywood sign?”

  “Right down the hill and east. Not far from Kevin, either.” He’d dropped by soon after the meeting, kept busy on the phone, finally sat down at my kitchen table to toss things around.

 
“Not far from the recording studio where China was recording,” I said. “Or the Snakepit. I’d say Shull likes his Hollywood comfort zone, but we’ve also got three murders on the Westside, not to mention Boston. This guy’s hard to pin down.”

  “How do you see the affiliation between Shull and Kevin? Teacher-student thing gone evil?”

  “That’s one possibility. I visit Shull, he gets nervous, tells Kevin to make himself scarce. Either or both of them pick up Erna and get rid of her, then Shull drives Kevin to the airport, ditches the car, takes a taxi back.”

  “I’ll have my Ds check the cab companies.” He made another call, put in the order. “What’s the other possibility?”

  “Terry Drummond’s right and her boy’s innocent.”

  “If he is, he’s also probably dead.” He went to the fridge, poured milk, brought it back. “If Kevin did rabbit, I doubt it was to Boston. Shull’d be smart enough not to want Kevin there.”

  I knew what he was thinking: How many other cities? How many other bodies?

  His beeper went off. The coroner’s office. He called in, and I went to my office and ran A. Gordon Shull through all the general search engines.

  A reference to Shull’s personal Web site connected to an inactive notice. Thirty-one additional hits, two-thirds of them duplications. Twelve of the original twenty were citations of Shull’s name in Charter College publications. Presiding over Communications Department symposia, papers he’d delivered.

  The Role of the Artist in Contemporary Society

  Advocacy Journalism: Acceptable Tool for Change or Subterfuge?

  Rock ’n’ Roll Hoochy Coo: Sexuality As a Metaphor in Contemporary Music

  Linguistics As Fate: Why Noam Chomsky Might Be God

  One title grabbed me by the throat:

  A Cold Heart: The Ultimate Fatalism of Artistic Endeavor

  No text summary, no reference. Shull had delivered the paper at a coffeehouse in Venice. A late-night party honoring the memory of Ezra Pound.

  I checked the venues of his other presentations. All were informal gatherings at cafés and the like. Padding the résumé. Was that why Dr. Martin disapproved of her faculty member? Or perhaps it went beyond that.

  I recalled Shull’s easy manner with the coed who’d waited outside his office. Cool prof? Too-friendly slickster? Like politics, academia posed all sorts of possibilities for an amoral guy.

  Venice Coffee Shop. What relevance did the concept of comfort zone have in L.A.? Here, if you had a car you mastered your destiny.

  Then I thought of something else . . .

  Milo returned. “The wounds on Mehrabian match Baby Boy’s. So do the ligament striations. And guess what: This time our bad boy left physical evidence. Couple of short facial hairs, red-gray. Mehrabian had a beard, too, but it was long and black. The killer got in his face. Literally.”

  “Shull sports one of those five-day beards. Ginger-gray.”

  “Hey, Sherlock, coroner estimates the hair was five, six days old.”

  “So now what?” I said. “You question him and get a warrant to pluck?”

  “We’re a ways off from that, yet.”

  “Even with the hair?”

  “I phoned an ADA. They want more. Significantly more.”

  “Shull being a rich kid make a difference?”

  He smiled. “ADA would shudder at the thought.”

  “This might help.” I pointed to the “Cold Heart” reference on my screen.

  He said, “Oh, my.”

  “Is Shull warrantable, now?”

  “Probably not. Literary pretension doesn’t qualify as probable cause.”

  “What about this, then: There were six conventions in Boston the week of Angelique Bernet’s murder. You mentioned one had something to do with the media. That sounds like something Shull might be interested in.”

  He whipped out his notepad, flipped pages. “The media and public policy. Harvard.”

  “Who ran it?”

  “This is all I’ve got,” he said.

  “Want me to look into it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Put that Ph.D. to good use. Please.”

  • • •

  He left with a promise to return in an hour. It took nearly that long, but finally I had a copy of the mass-media convention’s attendees in hand.

  Confidentiality and all that slowed the process, but one of my grad school classmates taught at Harvard, and I called him, made connections, combined shameless name-dropping with my academic bona fides, and spun a yarn about planning a symposium on the media and violence. Wanting the list so I could “target the right people.”

  The final target of that lie was one of the symposium’s cochairs, a fast-talking professor of journalism at the University of Washington named Lionel South.

  “That was mine, all right. Harvard let us use the K School— the Kennedy School— so we stuck one of their faculty members’ names on it as a cochair. But Vera Mancuso and I— she’s at Clark— really ran it. You say yours is going to be at the med school? What, a psychiatric slant?”

  “Eclectic,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’m running interference between the med school, the psych department, and the law school.” Sometimes falsehood came so easy. In spare moments, I wondered about that.

  “Media violence,” said South. “Great funding for that.”

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “Couple more schoolyard shootings, and you’ll really be set.”

  I forced a collegial laugh. “Anyway, about your roster.”

  “I’ll e-mail it to you right now. Do me a favor and keep us posted. And if you need a cochair . . .”

  • • •

  I found it on the third page, halfway down the “S’s”:

  Shull, A. Gordon, Prof. Comm., Charter College.

  A bit of self-aggrandizement; Shull was a lecturer.

  That fit.

  Milo came back, and I pointed.

  “Oh, yeah! Great work . . . did Shull deliver a paper?”

  “No, he just attended. Or signed up to attend.”

  “Playing hooky?”

  “It would’ve been easy. Once he registered, no one would’ve checked to see if he actually sat through the meetings. Shull had a free schedule.”

  “Plenty of time to take in the ballet.”

  “Ballet might very well be his thing,” I said. “Growing up with culture, and all that.”

  “Cold heart . . . son of a bitch.” He checked his notes, found the list of Boston hotels, began working the phone. Forty minutes later, he had confirmation. Shull had stayed at the Ritz-Carlton the week of Angelique Bernet’s murder.

  “Not far from the ballet hall,” he said. “He picks her up in Boston, takes her to Cambridge where he does her and dumps her. Because it’s away from his hotel and close to the symposium . . . carve up a girl, be back for another bullshit lecture.” His eyes had heated.

  “Time for a warrant,” I said.

  He cursed silently. “I picked the most agreeable judge I could find. She’s sympathetic but wants physical evidence.”

  “Like the facial hairs found in Mehrabian’s beard,” I said. “But you can’t verify the hair is Shull’s until you have grounds to ask him for a sample.”

  “Viva Joseph Heller,” he said. “At least we’ve got a target. Petra’s retracing her steps armed with Shull’s photo. I also talked to Small and Schlesinger about the hair. They said, thanks, keep them informed. My sense is they’d love to dump Mehrabian on us. My sense is also that’s where Mehrabian’s gonna end up.”

  He eyed my computer. “Anything else interesting out in cyberspace?”

  “Shull had a Web site, but it’s no longer operative.”

  “Covering his tracks?”

  “Or technical problems,” I said. “An ego like that, he’d want to be out there. I’d like to know what he’s been up to, recently. Dr. Martin could help us there.”

  “Think she’ll cooperate?”

  “Like I s
aid at the meeting, my sense is Shull’s not her favorite employee, so maybe.”

  “Let’s do it,” he said. “At her house, not her office.”