The Golem of Paris

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Hey. Thanks. Wow. That was fast.”

  “You’re a cop.”

  “Yeah. I—”

  “Buy me dinner.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Kings Road Café, twenty minutes. What do you drive?”

  “An Accord,” Jacob said.

  “What year?”

  “Two thousand two.”

  “Make it thirty minutes, then,” Adler said, and hung up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The restaurant was dark, crowded with endomorphs in skinny jeans. Among them, Adler constituted a different species: motorhead meets egghead. He took off a Bugatti baseball cap to reveal a shaven scalp; a wide jaw widened out to a muscular neck, widened further to massive shoulders, his chest busting out of a blue sport shirt with a Porsche logo on the breast pocket. He adjusted tiny rimless eyeglasses, fiddled with a bow tie as he contemplated the menu for three and a half seconds.

  “Protein Power,” he said. “Over easy. Side of sausage. Triple espresso.”

  The waitress looked at Jacob.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “You’re paying,” Adler confirmed.

  “I said I would.”

  “Okay.” The journalist reached into a battered messenger bag (LEXUS) and took out a stack of glossy Gerhardt pamphlets. “Which model?”

  “Eh—it came out in 2004, so—”

  “The Falke S,” Adler said, and he began shuffling through the pile for the correct document. Even before he’d found it, he was rattling off stats: 9.0 liter W16 engine (pointing to the cap on the table: “that’s one liter bigger than the Veyron”), five turbochargers, 1,100 horsepower at 8,300 RPM with a redline at 8,500, giving you a zero-to-60 of 2.34 seconds and a top speed of 253 MPH.

  “That’s assuming you wouldn’t achieve liftoff or have your DNA recombine, so officially they limit it to two twenty-five.”

  “Awesome,” Jacob said. “What I wanted to ask you was—”

  “Pre-preg carbon fiber Kevlar hybrid body, shaving a solid five kilos off the Model G, which is like performing lipo on an Ethiopian child. They had to use solid-state electronics throughout because during the initial testing it shook so fucking much the soldering broke apart. I sat in one, once. I thought I was going to come.”

  “Did you?” Jacob said.

  “Custom boar-skin interior,” Adler said. “Hand-stitched. I restrained myself.”

  Jacob asked about the premiere event. Adler recalled it without hesitation:

  “I wasn’t invited.”

  Jacob’s heart sank.

  Adler went on, cheerily peeved. “Assholes. I’m free publicity. I’m not ashamed to admit it. That’s why I’m there. They allow me to live out a fantasy and I give them a write-up. Everybody wins. Gerhardt, they make a great car, but they’re a bunch of pricks. I think they wanted to up the cachet factor by being hush-hush.”

  “That’s not standard practice.”

  “Hell no. Most manufacturers will rent out the Petersen, bring in a band, girls, food, champagne. Not this time. I had to drive way the hell out to an industrial park in East L.A. Unmarked building, security.”

  “You weren’t invited and you went anyway,” Jacob said.

  “Crissake, I’m still a reporter. I got a master’s from USC Journalism. First time in my career I can actually get a scoop. There was chatter on the message boards about when and where it was going to go down, so I took my chances.”

  “Did you get in?”

  “They wouldn’t even give me a T-shirt. Buncha Nazis.”

  Jacob decided that the dinner comp wasn’t that unreasonable a request after all: the guy had gotten used to not paying.

  Adler was shaking his head. “It was gonna be my Pulitzer moment.”

  The waitress brought his espresso. He threw it back and asked for another.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I found the whole thing incredibly obnoxious. You buy a million-dollar car, that’s cachet aplenty, stop pussying around.”

  “Who’s the clientele for something like that?”

  “The Gulfstream–megayacht–private island crowd. Toss in a few more billion for petty cash. There’s this Saudi who has four hundred cars, every single one has a gold-plated bidet.”

  Jacob said, “Not for use while driving.”

  Adler laughed. “Nobody drives these things. The point is to own a toy nobody else has and then say, ‘Look at me, I don’t give a shit.’ The Falke S, they made eighty, to celebrate old man Gerhardt’s eightieth birthday. Snapped up in preproduction.”

  “What’s the point of the party, if not to promote?”

  “Mutual congratulation,” Adler said. Contemplatively: “It’s a circle jerk, really.”

  “Where’re the cars going?”

  “A lot of them end up in the Middle East. Wouldn’t surprise me if bidet guy was there that night. Or one of his cousins. China, once upon a time, although they don’t have the cash for it these days. Here in the States? Anywhere there’s that level of dough—Beverly Hills, New York, Greenwich, Florida. And Russians. Oh my God, Russians can’t get enough of that shit. They armor-plate them, which if you ask me is a fucking travesty.”

  “The company’s based in Stuttgart,” Jacob said. “Why have the party here?”

  “There were rumors about them building a more affordable ‘green’ car—think seven-figure plug-in. They changed their mind later, but it was a live topic back then, so they timed the party to coincide with the L.A. Auto Show. Everyone who counts was in town.”

  Jacob pictured it: dozens of alpha males, paddling in a tank of pure testosterone.

  “Tell me about the women at these events,” he said.

  “There are no women.”

  “You said—”

  “I said girls. What do you want to know?”

  “They hang out and talk to the buyers.”

  “Sure.”

  “Go home with them?”

  Adler pitched forward, alert. “That’s who got killed? One of the honeys?”

  “Can’t get into that.”

  “I’m still looking for that scoop.”

  “I’ll do my best. You think you’d be able to find out who owns a Falke S?”

  “Doubtful. I’ll give it a shot, though. And you’d only be talking original buyers, right? Which could get complicated. Stuff at that level changes hands all the time.”

  “Where?”

  “Sometimes at auction. I read the catalogs from Gooding and RM regularly and can’t remember one coming up. So I’d have to say private sales. No record. No taxes.”

  “Once the car was registered, they’d have to pay—”

  “No no no no. You don’t get it. Why spend the extra hundred fifty bucks to register something that never leaves your private museum?”

  Dinner arrived: a grilled chicken breast, two quivering eggs, a scoop of cottage cheese, the sausage on a separate plate.

  Jacob said, “So you’ll try to find out? About the buyers.”

  “Why the hell not? Nice to apply my talents to a mission of substance.” Adler stabbed a sausage, grinning as he chewed. “Eat the rich, right?”

  • • •

  AROUND TWO A.M., Jacob felt his eyes drying out and decided to call it quits. He’d thrown as much as he could at the wall; now it was a matter of seeing what stuck.

  He opened a kitchen cabinet, alarmed to discover himself fresh out of liquor.

  He checked the recycling bin. Four empties.

  How long since you went to a meeting?

  Talked to your sponsor?

  He put on sneakers and a lightweight jacket.

  Outside he paused to admire the insects mobbing the street lamp.

  “Evening, ladies.”

  As he walked, he thought about Marquessa, a
human objet, circled by men unaccustomed to hearing no. Her brief life a line that shot up optimistically, only to plummet to zero.

  There were gaps, too. TJ the biggest of all.

  Why the boy?

  I can’t imagine anyone who’d want to hurt that woman.

  Jorge Alvarez had said that in an offhand way. Turning the corner onto Airdrome, it occurred to Jacob that the words might contain a deeper truth.

  Maybe nobody wanted to hurt the woman.

  So far, he’d understood Marquessa as the target, TJ as collateral damage.

  The opposite was equally possible.

  In a certain way, it made more sense. Anyone who’d slaughter a child, mutilate him, and prop him across from his mother—that wasn’t the tantrum of a guy denied game, even if that guy was an egomaniac. Jacob had studied enough homicides to recognize the patience underscoring the depravity, the disquieting overlap of rage and devotion.

  He was nearing 7-Eleven when a loud report broke his train of thought, the telltale skinny pop of a Saturday night special.

  He took off toward Robertson in a sprint.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The robbery was in progress.

  From half a block away, he could see the green Mazda parked parallel to the 7-Eleven storefront, its headlights on. As he ran, he ordered priorities: Henry; Henry could be dead, he could be shot but alive, he could have fired the shot himself.

  Jacob felt on his hip for a gun he did not have. He didn’t take it with him every time he went out for booze. He went out for booze a lot.

  He kept running.

  Reaching the eastern side of Robertson, he saw the counter untended under bright lights, the door to the boiler room wide open. They kept the safe back there.

  The Mazda honked a frantic tattoo. He’d been spotted.

  He barreled into the crosswalk, shouting police don’t move don’t move at a man with a bandana over his face who busted through the front doors swinging a plastic shopping bag with the orange and green 7-Eleven logo. The guy threw himself into the car and the tires spun and the worst part for Jacob was knowing that he’d failed; he’d seen it coming for days, just as it was playing out in drip-time, the streetlight winking in the side mirror and the scrape of the fender as the Mazda lurched over the sidewalk and slammed into the street, fishtailing on the asphalt; the bones of his feet pounding in sneakers and the rattle of untrained lungs; his upper lip, buzzing, crescendo.

  A piece of the night sky tore loose.

  Black light, jagged, intent. It rocketed down, punching the driver’s door.

  Steel buckled like a sucked-in cheek. Four tires lifted. The car rolled and skipped sideways, turning a half-dozen revolutions before landing on its roof, seesawing in a pool of shattered glass, tortured metal, the hiss and pop of ruptured lines.

  Sounds of human pain leaked feebly through gape-mouthed window frames.

  Stunned, Jacob scanned the sky for the source of the assault.

  Nothing.

  But he knew, and he felt a stab of gratitude, before he remembered Henry and ran into the store.

  • • •

  HE FOUND HIM in the boiler room, wrists zip-tied to a steam pipe beside the open safe, blood trickling from his ear.

  “Are you okay? Are you shot?”

  “He hit me,” Henry said. He sounded drunk.

  While dialing 911, Jacob did a quick check for entry wounds, finding none. He gave the dispatcher his badge number and asked for an ambulance and a black-and-white, then went behind the counter to fetch a pair of scissors and a cup of ice. One of the fridges had a hole blown it, blue Gatorade dripping down the interior glass.

  “I heard a shot.” He knelt to cut Henry free, pressed the ice to his head. “The drink case? Is that what I heard?”

  “My father’s going to shit himself,” Henry said.

  “Stay here,” Jacob said. “Don’t try to stand up.”

  He ran out to the street.

  The Mazda had stopped rocking. Jacob approached in a wide, careful arc.

  “Police,” he said. “Get out of the vehicle. Hands where I can see them.”

  No response; no movement. He crouched level with the windshield. It was streaked with blood, broken but hanging in place, the safety glass distended.

  “Are you okay in there?”

  Fire Station 58 was two blocks north. Already he could hear the siren. He crab-walked around to the driver’s side, holding his cell phone out with both hands.

  “I’m going to approach your vehicle,” he called. “I don’t want you to move. If you move, I will shoot you. Do you understand? Don’t move. I’m coming. Here I come.”

  The bravado of Mr. No-Weapon. He scooted forward rapidly.

  Inside the car, a mess of limbs, bloody money, glass.

  He tucked his phone in his pocket and intercepted the arriving EMTs.

  “These are the bad guys. They don’t look too hot. The good guy’s inside, he got whaled on a bit.”

  One EMT broke off to follow Jacob toward the store, glancing back at the overturned car. “The fuck happened?”

  Jacob shook his head.

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “Just the result.”

  Jacob led the EMT to the boiler room and watched him check Henry’s pupillary response. Normal. He patted Henry on the knee and went out to await the squad car.

  • • •

  BY TEN A.M., he was back at his desk in the archive, doing his duty.

  “Morning, Detective.”

  The arc lights had yet to come up to full strength. Commander Mike Mallick’s starched shirt shone dully as he came forward and bent to examine Jacob’s stack of files.

  “I would’ve thought you’d be further along than this by now.” Mallick closed a folder and straightened up. “Happy to see me?”

  “I’m always happy to see you, sir.”

  “Alas, I can’t say the same, today.”

  Jacob had expected a visit; just not so soon. “I take it you saw the incident report.”

  “Everything you do ends up on my desk.”

  “I meant to call you,” Jacob said.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t see how it would help. It’s over. There’s no emergency.”

  “The emergency, Detective, is that someone—although there seems to be a bit of controversy over whom—is bowling with cars.”

  “I apologize, sir. I should have called you sooner.”

  “Yes, you should’ve. Because now we’ve got a story problem. You told the EMTs you hadn’t seen anything. Then you told the responding officers that it was a hit-and-run.”

  “How else would you describe it?” Jacob said.

  “I would describe it as a clusterfuck. We have two lowlifes in the hospital who might not live, and if they do, they’re going to swear up and down that there was no other car in the vicinity.”

  Jacob had never heard Mallick use profanity. “They were fleeing the scene of a robbery, sir. Not much credibility.”

  “That doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”

  “No, sir. Of course not. All I mean is, I saw the shape they were in. There’s no way they’ll remember anything but impact.”

  “What if she’d hit another vehicle? What if she’d hit a pedestrian?”

  “The road was clear—”

  “What about the woman pumping gas on the other side of Airdrome?”

  Jacob paused. “I didn’t notice that, sir.”

  “A piano teacher. With superb credibility.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Mallick said. “In fact, she was so fine that she was able to provide a detailed statement. She said the car started rolling”—he went hand over hand, and for a moment Jacob had an image of him, leading
a conga line—“like it was hit by a missile. But she didn’t see a missile. She didn’t see a flame. She didn’t see an explosion. She said—this is a quote—‘It just jumped up in the air and went crazy.’”

  Jacob had to admit that it was an accurate description.

  “You don’t think that’s going to raise some questions?” Mallick said.

  “Look,” Jacob said, “it was dark, there’s—”

  “Forget her. What she does or does not say is secondary. What’s crucial now is preventing a repeat performance. This can never, ever happen again. Clear?”

  “I can’t control her, sir.”

  “You promised me you would not let her get away again.”

  He hadn’t; he had been careful never to make that promise. “There was nothing I could do. It was over in less than a second.”

  “I want you to describe what you saw,” Mallick said. “Everything. Don’t skimp.”

  As Jacob talked, the Commander’s face grew more and more deeply furrowed with distress. He had perched on the edge of the desk, long neck wilting.

  “Before it happened,” he said, “you weren’t in manifest danger?”

  “Not immediately, no. The threat wasn’t toward me. If I were you, sir, I’d think that’s cause for optimism. She’s taking chances.”

  Mallick shot him a withering look. “She chose to show herself. Why?”

  “They were getting away.”

  “How many times a day does someone get away with something awful and she doesn’t do a thing about it? She did it for you. You were angry. She saw a way to help.”

  “How would she know what I’m feeling?”

  “How do you think? You’re like a goddamned Roman candle to her.”

  His aura.

  The liminal waves of color that he had perceived surrounding others, that had his doctor referring him to a shrink. They’d begun after Mai transfused him and faded as his body healed. “Sir? Can you see it, too?”

  “Wise up, Detective. If I could, do you think I ever would’ve agreed to take surveillance off you?”

  Mallick began to pace. “She’s taking risks because she can. Every day she’s free, she gets stronger.”

  “Until?”

  “I have no idea. She’s never been out of custody this long before.”