Survival of the Fittest

by Jonathan Kellerman

  I heard her snort.

  “Garbage,” she said. “I turned them into confetti and threw them out. After I closed the garbage-can lid, I thought, what are you doing here? This city, everything's nuts. Then the next night, someone broke in and that was it.”

  “What an ordeal,” I said.

  “Dr. Delaware, I never really knew Nolan but nothing could have prepared me for those pictures. It's just so hard to reconcile, someone you grew up with. . . . Anyway, here I do feel safe. Gary's got forty-five acres with horses, all I see when I look out the window is grass and trees. I know I can't stay here forever, but right now, it's working. No offense, but, at this point, a change of scenery seems a lot more valuable than therapy. Anyway, thanks for calling. I haven't told anyone. Actually, it wasn't bad being able to unload. Knowing it won't go any further.”

  “If there's anything else—”

  “No.” She laughed. “No, I think this has been quite enough, Dr. Delaware . . . dear little brother. First he goes and kills himself on me, then he leaves me souvenirs.”

  Code 7 for hookers.

  A sleaze, but not a killer.

  Plenty of reason for guilt.

  A bleak situation.

  Perhaps Nolan had been found out, referred to Lehmann. Talked it out, got no easy answers. Lehmann letting him know he'd have to leave the force. Nolan opting for final exit.

  Now I could understand Lehmann's nervousness.

  Confidentiality issues and beyond. He made a living as an LAPD contractor. The last thing he needed was to expose yet another LAPD scandal.

  Feeling sad but relieved, I went into my office and thought about being Andrew Desmond.

  Place of birth: St. Louis. Suburbia: Creve Coeur.

  Self-made father, bourgeois, conservative, looks down on psychology, Andrew's intellectual pretensions.

  Mother: Donna Reed with an edge. Civic volunteer, sharp-tongued. Convinced Andrew was precocious, had his IQ tested as a child. Frustrated at the boy's chronic underachievement but explains it away as the school's failure: not stimulating poor Andrew.

  For simplicity's sake, no sibs.

  Poor Andrew . . .

  Robin came in at six. “What's the matter?”

  “Nothing, why?”

  “You look . . . different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I don't know.” She put her hand on my shoulder, touched my stubbled cheek. “A little down?”

  “No, I'm fine.”

  The hand moved back to my shoulder. “Alex, you're so tight. How long have you been sitting hunched like that?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  Spike waddled in. Usually he licks me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He cocked his head, stared, left the room.

  41

  On Tuesday night, at 11:03, Daniel was waiting for retired Captain Eugene Brooker in the parking lot of a bowling alley on Venice Boulevard in Mar Vista. He'd noticed the lot that afternoon, when he'd driven by Wilson Tenney's former apartment— a dismal, earthquake-cracked, ten-unit box bordering an alley.

  Wearing a suit and tie, he'd represented himself as an insurance claims adjustor to the old Mexican woman who lived in the manager's unit.

  The former park worker, he'd told her, had filed an earthquake claim for damaged personal effects and he wanted to verify Tenney's residence at the address during the Northridge quake.

  “Yeah,” she said, and nothing else.

  “How long did he live here?”

  Shrug. “Couple years.”

  “Was he a good tenant?”

  “Quiet, paid his rent.”

  “So nothing we should worry about?”

  “Nope. Tell the truth, I hardly remember him.” The door shut.

  His look into Tenney's background had been more of the same. No Medi-Cal records or state hospitalizations, no citations on the Chevrolet van, not a single entry or cross-reference to any crime files.

  Tenney hadn't applied for welfare or for a job at any other city, county, or state park within a hundred-mile radius— Daniel had lied creatively for half a day to find out.

  So either Tenney had moved, or just disappeared.

  Still, Daniel felt something about the guy— an intuition, what else could you call it? So fuzzy he'd never mention it to another detective, but he'd be foolish to ignore it.

  The first thing was what he knew about Tenney's personality— a loner who flaunted the rules, reading on the job instead of working, that remark about being a white male. Put it all together and it resonated.

  Second: a van. He could not erase the image of Raymond Ortiz being spirited away in a van.

  A vehicle that hadn't been seen since Tenney's firing from the park. Shortly after Raymond's abduction.

  Bloody shoes . . .

  He'd said nothing about Tenney to Zev Carmeli.

  The deputy consul had taken to calling him every day, between 5:00 and 8:00 P.M., getting irritated when Daniel was out, even though he knew Daniel was working on Irit and nothing else.

  Tonight, Zev had caught him just as he sat down to a tuna sandwich, the police scanner going in the kitchen. “Are they giving you what you need, Sharavi?”

  “They're being cooperative.”

  “Well, that's a switch. So . . . nothing, yet?”

  “I'm sorry, no, Zev.”

  Silence on the line. Then the same question: “Sturgis. You're sure he knows what he's doing?”

  “He seems very good.”

  “You don't sound enthusiastic.”

  “He's good, Zev. As good as anyone I've ever worked with. He takes the job seriously.”

  “Is he taking you seriously?”

  About as seriously as could be expected. “Yes. No complaints.”

  “And the psychologist?”

  “He's doing his best, as well.”

  “But no brilliant new psychological analysis.”

  “Not yet.”

  He didn't mention Petra Connor or Alvarado or any of the other detectives. Why complicate things?

  “All right,” Carmeli finally said. “Just keep me fully informed.”

  “Of course.”

  After Zev hung up, Daniel bolted down the sandwich, said grace after the meal, then the ma'ariv prayers, and resumed reading The Brain Drain. Some of the details flew over his head— graphs, statistics; a very dry book, but maybe that was the point.

  Dr. Arthur Haldane trying to obscure facts with verbiage and numbers. But the message came through:

  Smart people were superior in every way and should be encouraged to breed. Stupid people were . . . during good times, a nuisance. During bad times, an unnecessary obstruction.

  Dry, but a best-seller. Some people needed others to lose in order to feel like winners.

  He'd looked into Haldane's background.

  Yet another New Yorker.

  The book listed him as a scholar at the Loomis Institute, but Sharavi's Manhattan operative hadn't traced any calls from Haldane to Loomis's office. Haldane's apartment was in Riverdale, in the Bronx.

  “Decent place,” the operative had said. “Healthy rent, but nothing that special.”

  “Family?”

  “He's got a wife and a fourteen-year-old daughter and a dog. A mini Schnauzer. They go out to dinner twice a week, usually Italian. One time they had Chinese. He stays in a lot, doesn't go to church on Sunday.”

  “Stays inside,” said Daniel.

  “Sometimes for days at a time. Maybe he's working on another book. He doesn't own a car, either. The one phone we know about, we've secured, but he could be using E-mail and we haven't found any password yet. That's it, so far. Nothing more on Sanger and that sour-faced woman, either. Helga Cranepool. They both go to work, they go home. A boring bunch.”

  “Boring and smart.”

  “So you say.”

  “So they say.”

  The operative laughed. She was a twenty-eight-year-old Dutch-born woman whose cover job was photogr
apher for The New York Times. No connection to the Israeli government except for the cash that was deposited for her each month in a Cayman Islands bank.

  “Any pictures?” said Daniel.

  “What do you think? Coming right through. Bye.”

  The snapshot that slid through the fax machine was of a slight, bearded, gray-haired man in his late forties or early fifties. Curly hair, bushy at the sides, eyeglasses, pinched face. He wore a tweed overcoat, dark slacks, and open-necked shirt, and was walking the little Schnauzer.

  Wholly unremarkable.

  What did he expect, monsters?

  Hannah Arendt had called evil banal and the intellectuals had all jumped on that because it fit in with their disparage-the-bourgeoisie philosophy.

  But Arendt had maintained a long-term, pathetic, masochistic relationship with the anti-Semite philosopher Martin Heidegger, so her judgment, in Daniel's opinion, was questionable.

  From what he'd seen, crime was often banal.

  Most of it was downright stupid.

  But evil?

  Not the evil he'd experienced in the Butcher's dungeon of horrors.

  Not this, either.

  This was not humanity-as-usual.

  He refused to believe that.

  Gene tapped on the passenger window and Daniel unlocked the Toyota. The older man slipped in. In the darkness, his ebony face was nearly invisible, and his dark sportcoat, shirt, slacks, and shoes contributed to the phantom image.

  Only the white hair bounced back some light.

  “Hey,” he said, shifting around in the small car, trying to get comfortable.

  The bowling alley would close soon but there were still enough cars in the lot for cover and Daniel had chosen a poorly lit corner. And a neighborhood where a black man and a brown man could talk in a car without the police swooping down.

  Gene's big Buick was parked across the asphalt.

  “Seems you're right, Danny Boy,” he said. “Sturgis has sleuthed me out. Asking about me a few days ago at Newton. But what can he do? I'm out of there.”

  “He probably won't do anything, Gene, because he's busy and knows how to prioritize. But if the case goes completely sour, who knows? I'm sorry if this ends up complicating your life.”

  “It won't. What's the felony, pulling a file?”

  “And the shoes.”

  Gene grinned. “What shoes— hey, I was Newton captain for seven years, always took an interest in unsolved cases, everyone knows that. Anyway, in answer to your question, Manny Alvarado is a very good detective. No fireworks, a plodder, but thorough.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You like this Tenney as a suspect?”

  “Don't know yet,” said Daniel. “He's all we've got so far.”

  “I like him,” said Gene. “At least from what you've told me— the timing, the whole disturbed loner thing. Anything at the conservancy, yet?”

  “Tenney definitely never worked there or applied for a job under any name. No other parks, either.”

  “Ah . . . too bad. Still, he could have held on to his old city uniforms and used them to lure the kid. Believe me, the city's sloppy when it comes to that kind of thing, and a naive kid like Irit, what would she know about the different uniforms?”

  “True,” said Daniel. “We'll keep looking.”

  Not mentioning the other depressing fact: Tenney was nondescript; medium-sized, fair-haired, forgettable. Literally. The gang members from the park where Raymond Ortiz had been abducted hadn't recognized Tenney's snapshot. None of the park-goers had, and Tenney had worked there for two years.

  Just another bland white face in a uniform.

  Even reading on the job, he hadn't drawn anyone's attention.

  “So,” said Gene, “you're okay working with Sturgis, so far?”

  Daniel said, “I'm fine with it, Gene. I think he's good.”

  “So they say.” Gene stretched his feet. He'd put on weight and his belly extended past the lapels of his sportcoat.

  “You have doubts?” said Daniel.

  “No,” Gene said quickly. “Not in terms of doing the job. They all say he's good . . . excellent, actually. Want me to be honest? The gay thing. I'm from a different generation, it puts me off. When I was a rookie, we used to bust gay bars. Which was wrong, no question about it, but the things I saw— I was just wondering about you, being religious.”

  Same thing Zev had said. Belief in God made you an ayatollah.

  “What I mean,” said Gene, “was with this kind of thing, you need a cohesive team. Top of everything else, Sturgis is a cowboy.”

  “I'm fine,” said Daniel. “He's professional. He concentrates on what's important.”

  “Good. Now for the Myers boy. I know you're not going to like this but the reason I wanted to meet you was I went by that group home in Baldwin Hills, made like a cop, talked to the landlady and the other residents.”

  Daniel kept his voice even. “That puts you at risk, Gene.” Me, too, my friend.

  “I was convincing, Danny, believe me. Sturgis already did telephonic interviews, so why not be more thorough? I told the landlady— a Mrs. Bradley— that I was following up on Sturgis's interviews. She's black, they all are, it didn't hurt, believe me. And guess what? I talked to a fellow Sturgis hadn't spoken to because he was out that day. Lived right next door to Myers. Closest thing Myers had to a friend.”

  “Closest thing?” said Daniel. “Myers didn't have real friends?”

  “The picture I got was that Myers was hard to like, full of attitude. Didn't hang out with the others, mostly stayed in his room reading braille and listening to jazz. This particular fellow likes jazz, too, so he and Myers had that in common. He's a paraplegic in a wheelchair, says Myers was always after him to look into different exercises, vitamins, alternative remedies, try to rehab himself. The guy had been shot in the spine, said, “What the hell did he expect me to do, grow a new backbone?' But he tolerated Myers because even though Myers could be a pain he really seemed to care. He also said Myers had been talking about going to school to become a psychologist. Anyway, the main thing I got out of this guy was that Myers didn't like the trade school one bit. On the contrary: He hated it, was planning to write some article about it as soon as he graduated.”

  “An exposÉ?”

  “That's what it sounded like, Myers never gave him specifics. It's probably nothing but it does give us a victim with higher-than-average enemy potential. I figure the next step is, find out if there was anyone at the school who had an especially hostile relationship with Myers. Which makes sense on another level, because whoever got him into that alley probably also knew the neighborhood.”

  “The director said there was no one Myers had problems with.”

  “Maybe she didn't know or maybe she's lying to keep the school out of the spotlight. Heck, for all we know this Wilson Tenney got a job at the school and ran into Myers. As a custodian. Let's say he stole stuff and Myers found out. Here's Tenney, already killed three people— nonwhite people— and Myers was an abrasive black guy mouths off to him one time too many, threatens to blow the whistle.”

  Daniel said nothing.

  “It's wild but it's plausible,” said Gene. “You agree it should be looked into?”

  “I'll look into it.”

  Gene shifted around again. “I've got time, just sitting around. I could go over to the school as one of those kindly retired gents looking to volunteer—”

  “Thanks, but I'll do it, Gene.”

  “You're sure?”

  “I'm sure. I've got the perfect equipment.” Daniel lifted his bad hand.

  Gene's mouth closed. Then he said, “How're you going to pull it off without putting Sturgis's nose out of joint?”

  “I'll find a way.”

  Gene sighed. “Okay, just call me if you change your mind.”

  “Believe me, I will. And Gene—”