Survival of the Fittest

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Sitting on the largest couch was a beautiful brown-skinned woman in her thirties with very long, curly black hair and moist, deep-set black eyes. Her lips were full but parched, her cheekbones molded so severely they seemed artificial. She wore a shapeless brown dress that covered her knees, flat brown shoes, no jewelry. Her eyes were nowhere.

  Carmeli moved to her side and hovered and I fought not to stare.

  Not because of her beauty; I'd seen Irit's death photos and here was the woman she might have become.

  “This is Detective Sturgis and Dr. Delaware. My wife, Liora.”

  Liora Carmeli began to stand but her husband touched her shoulder and she remained seated.

  “Hello,” she said very softly, struggling to smile but not getting close.

  We both shook her hand. Her fingers were limp and her skin was clammy.

  I knew she'd resumed teaching school and couldn't be this depressed with her students. So our visit had raked things up.

  “Okay,” said Carmeli, sitting next to her and waving at some chairs on the other side of a glass coffee table.

  We sat and Milo went through one of those little detective speeches full of sympathy and empathy and possibility that he hates to deliver but delivers so well. Carmeli looked angry but his wife seemed to relate a bit— shoulders straightening, eyes focusing.

  I'd seen that before. Some people— usually women— respond to him immediately. He gets no satisfaction from it, always worried that he'll fail to produce. But he keeps delivering the speech, knowing no other way.

  Carmeli said, “Fine, fine, we understand all that. Let's get on with it.”

  His wife looked at him and said something in what I assumed was Hebrew. Carmeli frowned and tugged down at his tie. They were both good-looking people who seemed drained of their life-juices.

  Milo said, “Ma'am, if there's anything you can—”

  “We know nothing,” said Carmeli, touching his wife's elbow.

  “My husband is right. There's nothing more we can tell you.” Only her mouth moved when she spoke. The brown dress tented and I could see no body contours beneath it.

  “I'm sure you're right, ma'am,” said Milo. “The reason I have to ask is sometimes things occur to people. Things they think are unimportant so they never bring them up. I'm not saying that's actually the case here—”

  “Oh for God's sake,” said Carmeli, “don't you think if we knew something we'd tell you?”

  “I'm sure you would, sir.”

  “I understand what you mean,” said Liora Carmeli. “Since my Iriti is . . . gone, I think all the time. Thoughts . . . attack me. At night, especially. I think all the time, I am always thinking.”

  “Liora, maspeek,” Carmeli broke in.

  “I think,” she repeated, as if amazed. “Stupid things, crazy things, monsters, demons, Nazis, madmen . . . sometimes I'm dreaming, sometimes I'm awake.” She closed her eyes. “Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.”

  Carmeli's face was white with rage.

  His wife said, “The strange thing is, Iriti is never in the dreams, only the monsters . . . I feel that she is there but I can't see her and when I try to . . . bring her face into the picture, it . . . flies away from me.”

  She looked at me. I nodded.

  “Iriti was my treasure.”

  Carmeli whispered urgently to her in Hebrew again. She didn't seem to hear.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said to Milo. “I request you to leave at once.”

  Liora touched his arm. “The monster dreams are so . . . childish. Black things . . . with wings. When Iriti was little she was afraid of black, winged monsters— devils. Shedim, we call them in Hebrew. Ba'al zvuv—that means “lord of the flies' in Hebrew. Like that book about the schoolboys . . . it was a Philistine god that controlled insects and disease . . . Beelzebub in English. When Iriti was little, she had nightmares about insects and scorpions. She would wake up in the middle of the night and want to come to our bed . . . to help her I told her stories about shedim. The Bible— how we— the Philistines were . . . conquered . . . and their stupid gods . . . my culture— my family is from Casablanca— we have wonderful stories and I told them all to her . . . stories with children conquering monsters.”

  She smiled. “And she stopped being afraid.”

  Her husband's hands were blanched fists.

  She said, “I thought I was successful because Iriti stopped coming to our bed.”

  She looked at her husband. He stared at his trousers.

  “When Irit got older,” said Milo, “was she afraid of anything?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I thought I'd done a good job with my stories.”

  She let out a short, barking laugh, so savage it tightened my spine.

  Her husband sat there, then shot to his feet and came back with a box of tissues.

  Her eyes were dry but he wiped them.

  Liora smiled at him and held his hand. “My brave little girl. She knew she was different . . . liked being pretty . . . once, when we lived in Copenhagen, a man grabbed her and tried to kiss her. She was nine, we were shopping for jeans and I was walking in front of her instead of with her because Copenhagen was a safe city. There was a museum, there, on the Stroget— the main shopping street. The Museum of Erotica. We never went in but it was always busy. The Danes are healthy about those things but perhaps the museum attracted sick people because the man—”

  “Enough,” said Carmeli.

  “— grabbed Iriti and tried to kiss her. An old man, pathetic. She didn't hear him— she had her hearing aid off, as usual, probably singing songs.”

  “Songs?” said Milo.

  “She sang to herself. Not real songs, her own songs. I could always tell because her head would move, up and down—”

  “She stopped doing that a long time ago,” said Carmeli.

  “When this man grabbed her,” said Milo, “how did she react?”

  “She punched him and broke free and then she laughed at him because he looked so frightened. He was a little old man. I didn't even realize anything was wrong until I heard yelling in Danish and turned around and saw two young men holding the old man and Iriti standing there, laughing. They'd seen the whole thing, said the old man was crazy but harmless. Irit kept laughing and laughing. It was the old man who looked miserable.”

  “That was Denmark,” said Carmeli. “This is America.”

  Liora's smile vanished and she lowered her head, chastened.

  “So you feel,” said Milo, “that Irit wasn't afraid of strangers.”

  “She wasn't afraid of anything,” said Liora.

  “So if a stranger—”

  “I don't know,” she said, suddenly crying. “I don't know anything.”

  “Liora—” said Carmeli, taking hold of her wrist.

  “I don't know,” she repeated. “Maybe. I don't know!” She broke free of her husband's grasp and faced the wall, staring at the bare plaster. “Maybe I should have told her other stories, where the demons won, so you needed to be careful—”

  “Ma'am—”

  “Oh, please,” said Carmeli, disgusted. “This is idiotic. I insist you leave.”

  He stomped to the door.

  Milo and I got up.

  “One more thing, Mrs. Carmeli,” he said. “Irit's clothes. Were they sent back to Israel?”

  “Her clothes?” said Carmeli.

  “No,” said Liora. “We sent only . . . she— when we— our customs— we use a white robe. Her clothes are here.” She faced her husband. “I asked you to call the police and when you didn't, I had your secretary call. They arrived a month ago and I kept them.”

  Carmeli stared at her, bug-eyed.

  She said, “In the Plymouth, Zev. So I can have them with me when I drive.”

  Milo said, “If you don't mind—”

  “Crazy,” said Carmeli.

  “I am?” said Liora, smiling again.

  “No, no, no, Lili, these questions.” More Heb
rew. She listened to him calmly, then turned to us. “Why do you want the clothes?”

  “I'd like to do some analyses,” said Milo.

  “They've already been analyzed,” said Carmeli. “We waited months to get them back.”

  “I know, sir, but when I take on a case I like to make sure.”

  “Make sure what?”

  “That everything has been done.”

  “I see,” said Carmeli. “You're a careful man.”

  “I try.”

  “And your predecessors?”

  “I'm sure they tried, too.”

  “Loyal, too,” said Carmeli. “A good soldier. After all this time, the clothes being in my wife's car, what use are analyses?”

  “I never touched them,” said Liora. “I never opened the bag. I wanted to, but . . .”

  Carmeli looked ready to sting, said only, “Ah.”

  Liora said, “I'll get them for you. May I have them back?”

  “Of course, ma'am.”

  She got up and went outside.

  Unlocking the minivan's rear hatch, she lifted up a section and revealed the spare-tire compartment. Next to the wheel was a plastic bag still bearing an LAPD evidence tag. Inside was something blue— rolled jeans. And a white patch— a single sock.

  “My husband already thinks I've gone crazy because I've started talking to myself— like Iriti's singing.”

  Carmeli stiffened, then his eyes went soft. “Liora.” He put his arm around her. She patted his hand and moved away from him.

  “Take it,” she said, pointing to the bag.

  As Milo reached for it, Carmeli returned to the house.

  Watching him, Liora said, “Maybe I am sick. Maybe I am primitive. . . . What will you be analyzing? The first police told us there was nothing on it.”

  “I'll probably repeat what's been done,” said Milo. He held the bag in both hands, as if it were something precious.

  “Well,” she said. “Good-bye. Nice to meet you.”

  “Thank you, ma'am. I'm sorry we upset your husband.”

  “My husband is very . . . tender. You will return it?”

  “Absolutely, ma'am.”

  “Can you say when?”

  “As soon as possible?”

  “Thank you,” she said. “As soon as possible. I would like to have it with me again when I drive.”

  21

  She trudged back into her house and closed the door.

  Milo and I returned to our cars. “I love my job,” he said. “Those light and airy moments.” The evidence bag was nestled against his barrel chest.

  “Poor woman,” I said. “Both of them.”

  “Looks like things aren't great between them.”

  “Tragedy will do that.”

  “Any other insights?”

  “About what?” I said.

  “Her, them.”

  “He's protecting her and she doesn't want to be protected. Pretty standard male-female pattern. Why?”

  “I don't know . . . the way she talked about being crazy, primitive. She's . . . something about her made me wonder if she has a psychiatric history.”

  I stared at him.

  “Like I said, light and airy, Alex.”

  “Stalking her own child in the park and strangling her?”

  “Strangling gently . . . could be a boyfriend, I've seen that plenty of times, guy develops a relationship, sees the kids as impediments— but no, she's not a suspect. I just think ugly by reflex.”

  His arm dropped and the bag dangled. “I've seen too many kids killed by mama. Can't be effective if I avoid the shadows.”

  “True,” I said. “My guess is that she might have been wound up pretty tight— a diplomat's wife— and has unraveled. She probably used to put on a happy face, suppress things, now she says to hell with it.”

  He looked down at the bag. “What do you think about her keeping this in her car all this time?”

  “A shrine. There are all sorts of them. She knew her husband would be offended so she created a private one but she's willing to risk his disapproval in order to cooperate.”

  “Offended,” he said. “She talked about her culture. As opposed to his? Moroccan as opposed to wherever he comes from?”

  “Probably. He looks European. When I was in private practice, I had a few Israeli patients and the East versus West thing came up. When Israel was created it became a melting pot for Jews and sometimes there was conflict. I remember one family with just the opposite situation. The husband was from Iraq and the wife was Polish or Austrian. He thought she was cold, she thought he was superstitious. Maybe Mrs. Carmeli didn't want Mr. to think she was engaging in primitive rituals. Maybe she just knew he'd be grossed out by the clothes. Whatever the reason, she had no hesitation telling you she had the bag.”

  “One thing for sure, I'm talking to the neighbors. Carmeli will freak but so be it. Worse comes to worst, he gripes and they pull me off the case and someone else gets to feel useless.”

  I looked up the block. The electrician's van was the only vehicle at the curb.

  “Are you really planning to run new lab tests?”

  “Maybe. First things first.”

  I met him at the West L.A. station, upstairs in the detective room, relatively quiet now, with one other D, a young black woman, filling out forms. She didn't seem to notice as Milo sat at his metal desk, cleared papers, and placed the bag next to a stack of messages weighed down by a stapler. He scanned the slips, put them down. Then he put on surgical gloves and unsealed the bag.

  Removing the jeans first, he turned each pocket inside out. The denim gave off smells of earth, mold, and chemistry lab.

  Empty.

  Turning the pants over, he pointed out some very faint brown stains that I'd have missed.

  “Dirt, from when she lay on the ground.”

  Refolding the pants neatly, he took out the white sock and its mate, then a pair of white cotton underpants printed with small pink flowers, the crotch cut away cleanly.

  “Semen analysis,” he said.

  Next came tennis shoes. He peeled the insoles free and peered inside, saying, “The Ortiz boy's shoes were obviously bloody but let's check these out anyway— size six and a half, made in Macao, nada, no blood, surprise, surprise.”

  A white cotton training bra caused him to pause for a second before removing the last garment— the lace-trimmed white T-shirt I'd seen in the photos. The front was clean but the back bore brown stains, too. Two breast pockets.

  He put a thumb and forefinger inside the first, looked inside, moved on to the second and pulled out a small rectangle of paper, the size of a fortune-cookie slip.

  “Aha, Dr. Sherlock, a clue—“Inspected by number 11.' ” Then he turned the scrap over and his mouth dropped open.

  Typed neatly in the center were four letters.

  DVLL

  22

  That night at ten, we entered the rear party-room of a bar and grill on Santa Monica Boulevard, four blocks west of the West L.A. station. The plain-faced red-haired hostess looked happy to see us and a bill slipped into her hand improved her disposition even further.

  The room was big enough for a wedding party, with asparagus-green wallpaper and brown banquettes that were either real leather or fake. Dainty Impressionist prints hung on the walls— street scenes of Paris, the Loire Valley, other places cops were unlikely to go, but the only people in the room were three cops at the largest booth, up against the back wall.

  Southwest Division Detectives Willis Hooks and Roy McLaren drank iced tea, and a chunky, white-haired man of nearly sixty, wearing a houndstooth sportcoat and a black polo shirt, nursed a beer.

  As Milo and I slid into the booth, he introduced the older man as Detective Manuel Alvarado, Newton Division.

  “Pleased to meet you, Doctor.” His voice was mild, his skin was dark as a field-worker's, rough as bark.

  “Thanks for coming on your night off, Manny.”

  “A whodunit? Wouldn't
miss it. Things are slow in Saugus.”

  “You live all the way out there?” said Hooks.