by Howard Fast
“The thing that gets me,” McNulty said, showing that he was no dummy, “is that each time it happened in a restaurant—and with Alan, the Israeli guy, it happened a few weeks later. But if something specific was put in their food, something that would trigger this medicine, then whoever our mass killer is, he must have money, power, influence, and a damn important motive.”
“He’s motivated,” I agreed. “Even if he’s totally demented, he’s motivated.”
“All right, Harry, if there is a shred of truth in this crazy business, then Green committed a crime in Beverly Hills. I’ll talk to the captain, and tomorrow you and I will poke around and we’ll see what we can find. Meanwhile, let’s eat.”
His wife, Hanna, was a doll. She said that she’d pick up Fran the following day, and while we were poking around, she’d show her some of the sights of Los Angeles, which were not many at all, but that was nothing to deter Fran. The next morning I left Fran girding and polishing herself for the sights of Los Angeles, while I settled myself next to McNulty in his prowl car, admiring the repeating shotgun clamped to the roof and the quality of upholstery in these nifty little cars that the City of Beverly Hills provided for their finest.
“We’ll stop at the station house,” McNulty said. “I just wanted to be absolutely sure that there was no Dr. Green, so I left one of our clerks calling every Dr. Green in the phone book. You told me Alan went to an office in Beverly Hills, so Doris will see whether one of them has a Beverly Hills office. It doesn’t mean much, but it clears our starting point.”
I sat in the car at the back of a great mass of a building, a combination of baroque and Renaissance architecture, that was the Beverly Hills city hall, courtroom, and police station, punctuated all about with palms and other improbable trees.
McNulty came out shaking his head. “Nothing.”
“Next stop?”
“They have a lot of these functions around town for Israeli VIPs—fund-raising. Don’t forget, this is where the money is. If they want to pick up a quick million for Reagan, here’s where they go. New hospital, here. You name it. Anyway, most of the Israeli things are coordinated by the United Jewish Appeal. They’re over on Wilshire Boulevard, and there’s a Mrs. Levinson who runs things. The big names around it are just big names. She runs things.”
He was not exaggerating. Everything that was happening in those offices on Wilshire Boulevard, which was like Sixth Avenue, only a little classier, spun around Mrs. Levinson, a tall, large-bosomed woman with flaming red hair that was not dyed, since her eyebrows and lashes flamed with the hair. She embraced McNulty, kissed him and said to me, “Just took at him. He’s beautiful. He could be my son.”
McNulty blushed and stammered.
“See? He’s a nice boy, and I embarrassed him. But he helps me. When I need help, I call him. Who are you?”
I told her. She nodded, the simple nod stating that my calling was improper for a Jewish boy. She would have preferred Dr. Golding. She then warned off the people in the office who were besieging her, closed the door to her private office, instructed her secretary that there were to be no calls for the next half hour, and asked us what she could do for us. I glanced at McNulty, who nodded.
“There was a party for Asher Alan a few weeks ago.”
“Of course. Of course. At the home of Peter Senter, the director. I shouldn’t have been involved, because it was not exactly a UJA party. That’s United Jewish Appeal,” she explained to me, reasoning that a Jew who became a cop instead of a physician would not know that UJA stood for United Jewish Appeal. I felt like begging her to understand that my family had barely enough money to eat, much less send me to medical school, but that my brother was a full professor. I let it pass.
“It was a party to raise money for the Jerusalem Fund. A lot of people confuse the two different funds, even some of them who were there. Myself, I don’t push one thing against the other, and just between you and me, at the UJA we’re top-heavy with organization. With the Jerusalem Fund, every dollar goes to the rebuilding of the holy city, also, the man who does it there, he’s absolutely a saint. That’s Teddy Kollek. You know who he is?”
“The mayor of Jerusalem,” McNulty said.
“So you know something, good.” She loved McNulty, but she could not forgive me for being a cop.
“Asher Alan is also a saint, he should rest in peace. I loved the man. So when the Jerusalem Fund was the object, I didn’t turn my back.”
“Do you think,” McNulty asked, “that if we went to Mr. Senter, he could tell us something about the party?”
“No, because he was in Canada directing a picture when the party took place. He has a very large house. That’s important when you give a fund-raising party, and he’s not Jewish, which always helps to broaden things, and he once met Asher Alan and fell in love with him, so he let us use his house. What do you want him to tell you about the party?”
“People who were there, some of the guests, who they were …” I was cautious. I certainly did not want Mrs. Levinson on the track of anything that concerned us.
“So. You don’t want Mr. Senter. Absolutely not. Who you want is Rosie Forer, Dr. Forer’s wife. She’s an encyclopedic yenta—gossip, Lieutenant Golding. Yiddish.” I nodded weakly, and Mrs. Levinson went on, “I am not putting her down. She’s a good friend. But you want to know what color dress somebody there wore and how much her diamond bracelet probably cost, ask Rosie. She will tell you. Wait, I’ll call her and make an appointment for you.”
Afterward, I tried to describe to some friends in the East what that part of Beverly Hills which they call “The Flats” is like. It has nothing to do with the eastern concept of a flat as an apartment. It’s simply a flat area of the town, stretching between Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, and filled with unbelievable houses, some of which you could buy for as little as a million dollars. Dr. Forer’s house was a Spanish Colonial, pink-colored, with a swimming pool and a tennis court in the very large backyard. Rosie Forer, a pretty little woman with a small, piping voice, sat us down alongside the pool, under striped umbrellas, and served us iced tea and delicious cucumber sandwiches, followed by a tray of small pastries. Since it was already past eleven, McNulty and I had an excellent substitute for lunch while we talked.
“I could have told you that your Dr. Green was no doctor at all,” Rosie Forer began. “Well, I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t want to interfere. Out here we don’t simply have doctors who go to medical school and get a degree and go on to become interns, etcetera and etcetera, as my husband did. No indeed. That’s what they have where sanity prevails and where the sun tires of shining once in a while. Here we have naturopaths and vegopaths and holistic healers and hands healers and aura healers and gurus and yogis and heaven knows what else, not to mention tennis and astrology.” She had a sense of humor. “So I couldn’t just walk up to Asher Alan, poor soul, whom I revered, and tell him that Dr. Green was a great big phony. Could I?”
“No, I guess not.”
“I wanted so much to say a few words to Asher Alan, or at least to hear what he was saying, but there was no way to stop this Dr. Green. Well, I mean there simply is no reputable physician in Beverly Hills or in West Los Angeles I don’t know—well, that is a bit of an exaggeration—”
“But you did see him?”
“Asher Alan?”
“No, I mean Dr. Green.”
“Of course I saw him. There was a circle of people around them, but I pushed through and listened for a while, and then I went to get my husband and see whether he had ever seen this Dr. Green anywhere. By that time, Green had disappeared.”
“You must have seen on TV how a police artist works?”
“Oh, yes indeed.”
“Do you think you could guide a police artist to a portrait of Green?”
She nodded eagerly, but McNulty said, “We don’t have a police artist as such, Lieutenant. Not enough business in a place like this, but we have an alternative that wo
rks pretty well—”
“And,” Rosie Forer broke in, “something else.”
“What else?”
“I can tell you what street his office is on. Camden.”
“You say he actually had an office? You said you were certain he wasn’t a doctor.”
“And if he wasn’t a doctor, he can’t have an office? I heard him tell it to Mr. Alan.”
“Did you get the number?”
“No.”
“A lot of doctors on Camden,” McNulty said.
“How long is Camden?”
“The office part? One block.”
“Well, let’s start.”
“We need a picture of him first,” McNulty said.
The three of us got into McNulty’s Ford, Rosie delighted to be riding in a police prowl car, and we drove over a twisting, narrow road into what McNulty called “the Valley,” properly the San Fernando Valley, which is to Los Angeles what Queens and Nassau are to New York. The pass that led into the Valley was called Coldwater Canyon, and at the bottom of the low mountain we had crossed, the road cut through a busy boulevard called Ventura. All of this, curiously enough, took us only a few miles from Beverly Hills, even after we had turned right on Ventura Boulevard and had come to a sprawling old studio, its pink stucco walls cracked and decaying in the hot sun. The sign over the gate said: LAVARA ANIMATION.
Driving there, McNulty explained that while a small police force like the Beverly Hills had no reason to keep a staff artist, they did have the artist of a much larger Los Angeles police force available. That meant red tape. McNulty had discovered that the animation artists at any of the major animation studios were probably more skilled than any police artists in the country. “Not the animators who work on the cells,” McNulty said, leaving us to guess what cells were, “but the originating artists, those who create the characters and set the style.” In this case, the artist was an American-born Korean, Jack Park by name, who shook McNulty’s hand enthusiastically, and ushered us into his studio, a large room with a skylight, the walls covered with watercolors and pastel drawings. The place was furnished with two light tables, an easel, and three tilt-top drawing tables. Everywhere, paints, inks, brushes, pens and pencils.
“It’s a busy day,” Park said to McNulty. “I can spare a half hour, not much more.”
“Let’s get to it.”
Park drew two folding chairs together and asked Rosie to sit down next to him. “We’ll work very quickly, Mrs.—?”
“Forer.”
“Mrs. Forer. Best that way. Now just watch me draw. The human head can be placed in three shapes, round”—he drew a near perfect circle—“long, or between the two, a sort of egg shape. Which?”
“The egg shape, but maybe narrower.”
Park tore off the top sheet of his pad and his heavy black pencil created another shape.
“This?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Hair?”
“Dark.”
“Heavy or balding?”
“Heavy.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-eight, forty.”
“Nose?”
“Straight.”
“Like this?”
“A little heavier.”
“Mouth?”
“Funny. Like a woman’s.”
“Cleft on the upper lip? Like this?”
“Perfect.”
They were both marvelous. I had never seen anyone use a pencil the way Jack Park did. Our New York City police artists use transparencies which they shift about, predesigned parts of the human face printed on plastic. Park used his pencil. Sheet after sheet was ripped off the pad, and each time another version of the face appeared, and Rosie Forer was right with him. I could understand why she had earned her reputation as the queen of yentas. Nothing missed her eye, nothing was forgotten. Park came to a point where he and Rosie were both satisfied with a line drawing, after which he filled it in, shading and highlighting the planes of the face, deepening the drawing, fleshing it out.
“It’s him,” Rosie said, satisfied at last, “in the flesh,” a picture of a very ordinary face with a black mustache, a rather good-looking face of a man who might once have aspired to be an actor, not a distinguished face, but not very ordinary either.
“What does he charge for that?” I asked as we drove back to Beverly Hills.
“One hundred dollars. Thirty-two minutes. Not bad at the price. The city will kick, but they’ll pay. For him, it’s a public service. The studio pays him two thousand a week—nice work if you can get it.”
Rosie Forer protested when we dropped her off at her house. She felt she was entitled to see where the investigation led. After we left her, McNulty said that if Rosie came along, we might as well put it in the press. I felt that we might have to. Park had given us two photocopies of his drawing, and McNulty suggested that we each take one side of the street and give it a quick run. You must remember that we are not talking in New York terms. Running a picture through a street in New York could take a couple of cops a long time, but this was not New York. The single business block of Camden could have been covered by a good worker in a few hours. On our part, we were lucky. McNulty chose a four-story white brick medical building as his starting point and he drew blood. The janitor recognized the picture. McNulty saw me come out of my first building, and he called me across the street to join him. He was standing with the janitor, who led us into the building and up to the second floor. There was a door with a bright brass plate, and the plate read, HERBERT GREEN M.D. The janitor opened the door and led us into the waiting room—old-fashioned but very nice. We prowled through an office and an examining room, the walls of both resplendent with Dr. Green’s framed achievements.
The janitor was a Mexican. His name was Pedro Gonzales. I asked him when Dr. Green would be in the office.
“Ah-hah, that’s a question, huh? Now look. I got a good job here in Beverly Hills. Family man—me—right, all papers. You want to see my papers?” McNulty shook his head. “All right. My English, pretty good, no? I live thirty years in Los Angeles. I tell you about this office. This is Dr. Goldstein’s office. Old man, but damn good doctor. Three week ago, he die. His son live in San Francisco, he tell me, leave my papa’s place the way it is. Rent paid. I come down next month clear things up. Okay. Then this guy Dr. Green come along, he tell me I need office one week, just the way it is. I’m doctor from Chicago University, need a place to examine one, two rich patients. Old friend the old man, Goldstein. But you listen, Sergeant, first I telephone Dr. Goldstein’s boy in San Francisco. All right I rent office one week, one patient? Sure, he says, go ahead, but keep an eye on papa’s stuff. So Green pays me five hundred dollars and I rent him office one week. Only I don’t believe he’s doctor from Chicago.”
“Why not?”
“Because Sally Stisson, nice girl, works for Dr. Konetz, says Dr. Green is living in same condo as her girl friend.”
McNulty and I looked at each other, and he whispered to the janitor, “Where?”
“Up the other end of the Valley, just past San Fernando. You wait here, I get address from Miss Stisson.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked McNulty.
“It happens, you get lucky, you get unlucky. It happens.”
“It also doesn’t happen. It’s too easy. Why didn’t he cover himself?” I didn’t like it. It was too quick, too smooth.
“Why should he? He didn’t know you’d come highballing out here to bust him for killing some Israeli politician. Without your wife’s nose for something, the way you tell it to me, nobody would have picked up any of the pieces. And even if we bust him, what’s the charge? Writing a phony prescription? We’d have to prove that he wrote it. Since the prescription had a phony address and phone number, how do you trace it to here? Practicing medicine without a license? But who says he ever practiced it, and if you don’t use them to defraud, printing fake diplomas and honors is a gag, not a crime. Every carnival does it.
So why should he worry about covering up his tracks? What has he got to cover up? He can say the whole thing’s a practical joke. It looks like one.”
“I’ll think of something.”
“Sure, sure, I’m not saying to walk away from it. After looking at that office, I’m ready to go along with you. At least a little way. So we’ll find him and push him around a little and talk about a nice, clean premeditated murder rap; and then if he’s not a total idiot, we’ll walk away no smarter than we came.”
It was about twenty miles from where we were in Beverly Hills to San Fernando, most of it through uninspiring flat country, carpeted with tract houses. The condo we were looking for was on the edge of the town of San Fernando. It was typical “Valley” condominium construction, according to McNulty, two stories high, oblong in shape, and enclosing a swimming pool. The pool, unoccupied, was surrounded on three sides by apartments. On the fourth side, a path ran through a lush growth of tropical plants. Since there was no indication of a concierge, we walked into the place and paused where a pretty young woman in a bikini lay on a lounge sunning herself. She was alone on the terrace that surrounded the pool. She smiled at us—while I recalled some of the endless flow of jokes about Valley girls. McNulty shrugged, as if to say, Why not? There are no rules or road signs in Wonderland. He unfolded the picture of Dr. Green and showed it to her.
“Fuzz,” she said, with neither approval nor disapproval. “What did poor Smitty do? Rape someone?”
“Smitty?”
“Bert Smith. He’s a dodo. Like he’s on uppers five times a day. You fellers are cute.”
“He lives here?” McNulty asked.
“Second door.” She pointed. “Apartment D. You going to bust him?”
“Is he there now?”
“Think so. He came in about ten minutes ago.”
“What does Smitty do for a living?” I asked her.
“Oh, this and that. I’m in G.”
McNulty knocked at the door of apartment D after the chimes produced no effect. The knocking produced no effect either. McNulty tried the door. It was open and we went inside, where there was a small living room, a tiny closet of a kitchen, and a door to a bedroom. We went into the bedroom, and there was a man sprawled on his back on the floor next to the bed. There was no question about his being the man in Park’s pencil drawing. The only way in which his face differed radically from the face on the drawing was that the real Dr. Green or Smitty had a hole in the center of his forehead and was quite dead. The hole might have come from the same pistol as was used on Sanchez and Fitzpatrick. I couldn’t tell just by looking at it.