Crime Scene

by Jonathan Kellerman

  With me hobbling through rehab, and Luke headed off to prison, her division of resources must have seemed to her beyond neglectful. Criminal.

  When I enrolled in the police academy, she became fixated on the idea that I could use my newfound knowledge and position to help Luke. She was wrong, of course. His fate was out of my hands. But what truly got to her was realizing that, even if I’d had leverage, I wouldn’t have used it. Not for him.

  I was embarking on a career as an officer of the law. My duty was to the community—to protect decent folks from outliers like my brother.

  Those were the days when Christmas stumbled and fell, and Thanksgiving, too, and birthdays devolved from dinner to a phone call.

  Once I was at the Coroner’s, I softened to her a bit, chastened by death and what it does to people. But there was still nothing I could do to pry Luke free any faster. And I don’t think I’m alone in struggling to be as generous with my family as I am with strangers.

  The biggest sticking point remains my spotty visiting record. Like most state prisons, Pleasant Valley is open to the public on weekends. Usually I’m working, a built-in excuse. I manage to think up others for those rare instances when I am free.

  If nothing else, there’s the drive, which is abysmal: three hours, more with traffic.

  My mom goes twice a month, and every so often she’ll call and invite me to join her. Already knowing the answer, she plays up her disbelief when I say no. But her hurt, her regret, her continuing sense of failure—those are genuine.

  Now, sitting in my car outside my parents’ house, I gazed down the block at a ladder of windows brimming with milky cheer. LED icicles strung from the gutters dripped into the void. On the passenger seat, the take-out bag crinkled, its contents breathing sweetly.

  The majority of the surrounding houses had been redone, ranch homes leveled, replaced by McMini-Mansions pushing at the margins of their lots. The house where I’d grown up remained the same: fifteen hundred square feet of lumpy tan stucco, a sun-melted caramel fronted by succulents and weird red gravel, like a transplanted piece of Mars. Thirty-year mortgage, manageable on the combined salary of a public school teacher and an office manager. With the housing market back up, it might be worth it for them to sell, downsize, take early retirement. I’d raised the point before and met breezy dismissal.

  Why in the world would they leave?

  If it was worth X now, it would be worth more in five years.

  Luke could have his old room, once he got out.

  I stepped from the car, carrying the bag of takeout on two fingers and humming “The Little Drummer Boy.”

  —

  THE EVENING WENT better than expected. Mom was in a decent mood. Following her cues, my father relaxed, rubbing at his sunken stomach as he discussed his current crop of sixth graders with a mix of fondness and despair. Each new incoming class demanded an increasing degree of vigilance on his part. The world had succumbed to phones. You couldn’t confiscate the damn things fast enough. The dumb kids disseminated pictures of their genitals. The smart kids fact-checked him in real time, correcting him with a smirk. It was enough to break a lesser man.

  He laughed, his legs scribbling restlessly beneath the table. There was a patch worn in the carpet by his heels, dragging over the same spot. He coped with stress by breaking it down into more manageable forms: anxiety about his pension, his bad back, the electricity bill. Over the years I’d watched him turn into an old man.

  A baseball player in his youth, he was by his own admission never very good. It was from my mother—a collegiate long jumper—and her northern European forebears that Luke and I got our height and wiry strength.

  We ate moo shu pork and chicken with broccoli and fried rice. We cracked our fortune cookies and read them aloud.

  “ ‘Today’s questions yield tomorrow’s answers,’ ” I said.

  “What questions do you have today?” my father asked.

  I smiled. “How much time do you have?”

  He chuckled and went into the kitchen with the plates.

  My mother said, “I’m glad you decided to join us.”

  “Sorry to spring it on you.”

  “You’re here now,” she said. Then: “I meant to call you last week.”

  Seeing where this was going, I said, “I had work. I wouldn’t’ve been able to come.”

  She shook her head, dry blond and gray, a shivering haystack. “I’m not going to ask when was the last time you went.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know when was it?”

  “You just said you’re not going to ask.”

  “More than two years,” she said.

  “There you go,” I said. “You answered your own question.”

  “I thought maybe you didn’t realize how long it’s been.”

  Keeping my voice even required a supreme effort. “How’s he doing?”

  “The same.”

  “Did he ask you for commissary money?”

  “They feed them like slaves, Clay. He lives on ramen. It’s the only way for him not to starve to death.”

  “Ramen is currency, there. You know that, right? He trades it for drugs.”

  “Stop.”

  “Did he look well nourished to you?”

  She spread tight, pale hands. “I don’t want to hear it, please.”

  In the kitchen, the dishwasher gurgled to life.

  “He has a girlfriend,” my mother said.

  It took me a second to process. “Luke?”

  “She started writing to him. Her name is Andrea. He showed me her picture. She lives in Salinas.”

  “Pen pal, huh.”

  “She’s been to see him,” my mother said. “Twice.”

  I resented the implicit comparison. “And we’re sure this isn’t some sort of scam?”

  “I don’t see what she could possibly expect to get out of him,” she said.

  “I’m trying to figure out why a woman would write to him out of nowhere.”

  “People are lonely,” she said. “He’s lonely. It makes him happy.”

  “Good for him.”

  She tilted her head. “Why are you so angry at him?”

  I said, “Why aren’t you?”

  She clasped her hands, as if in prayer. “He’s going to get out, you know.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “And? What’s going to happen then? Because soon—let me finish, please. Sooner than you realize, he’ll get out, and you won’t have been to visit him. You’ll both know it. That’s going to be hanging between the two of you.”

  I brushed at crumbs on the tablecloth.

  “He’s still your brother,” she said. “That’s never going away.”

  That was the problem.

  Family. It’s an incurable disease.

  CHAPTER 34

  Lydia Delavigne—Rennert’s ex-wife; Tatiana’s mother—lived on the thirty-first floor of a newly built high-rise in San Francisco, a torqued platinum phallus blocks from the Embarcadero.

  I left my car with the valet, made myself known to the concierge. While he called up to her “suite” I answered another email from Amy, confirming our plans for that evening.

  The concierge said, “You can go up.”

  I headed for the elevator bank.

  A high-speed car shot into the sky, spat me out into a silent corridor carpeted in near-black blue and painted barely-above-white gray.

  A woman was waiting in the doorway to 3109. She was thin, her spine arrow-straight, making the most of her small stature. Black hair tied in a tight bun; ivory skin, with smoky nuances, same as Tatiana. She wore black leggings, navy shoes with kitten heels, a billowing gray silk tunic patterned with deep-blue butterflies.

  Color-coordinated with the hallway.

  “Behold,” she said, “the man fucking my daughter.”

  What can you say to that other than nothing?

  She didn’t seem bothered. It was more like she was assigning me a
classification.

  She went inside, leaving me to follow.

  She kicked off her shoes in the entry hall and padded ahead.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” she said.

  Her apartment evoked The Future, circa 1975: a single room, open, vaulted, and finished in white from top to bottom—surfaces, fixtures, and furnishings. It made for disorienting effect, washing away depth and compressing space. Steps led down to a sunken sitting area with two white sofas, a lustrous white coffee table, piles of white pillows on a stitched cowhide rug.

  In its immensity, its blankness, the place felt like a photographic and philosophical negative to Walter Rennert’s attic. Their marriage must’ve been interesting.

  “Tea?” she said, moving toward the kitchen area, a speed kettle already piping.

  “Yes, please.” I faced the eastern wall, a solid sheet of glass overlooking the Financial District, skyscrapers reduced to ash by a scouring midwinter sun. “Nice view.”

  “On a clear day you can see forever.”

  “How many clear days do you get a year?”

  “Not a one,” she said gaily. “But who wants to see forever? That sounds hideous.”

  She brought a tray down to the sitting area and placed it on the table, curling up against the sofa arm, her legs folded beneath her. She had tiny hands; tiny, delicate fingers. They barely reached around her mug. The veins in her neck and wrists were Delft blue. The resemblance to Tatiana was so striking that her comment about sex began to bother me.

  She sidled closer, allowing the tunic to ride up. My chest got tight.

  She said, “Beauty is editing.”

  I took a gulp, scalding the roof of my mouth. “Tatiana said the same thing.”

  Lydia halted her advance. “Did she.”

  “She said she’s a minimalist at heart.”

  “I’m sure she would never admit that to me.”

  “She doesn’t seem to have a problem admitting things to you.”

  “Who else should she tell, if not her mother?”

  “Is she required to tell anyone?”

  “Oh but yes,” she said. “Otherwise it might never have happened. We talk, we share our experiences, so that we exist.”

  She lolled back, inspecting me. “You know, she said you were a big boy, but hearing and seeing are not the same. Don’t worry, she didn’t go into excessive detail. Look, you’re blushing, how perfectly charming.”

  “How’s it going for her in Portland?”

  “If you’re fishing to find out whether she returned, she did. A few days ago.”

  I set the mug aside. “Does she know I’m here?”

  “Not yet. Should we make it our little secret?”

  “No need,” I said. “If you speak to her, send my best.”

  “If I speak to her before you do, I will,” Lydia said. She mirrored me, putting down her own mug. “I birthed a free spirit, I honored that as I raised her, allowing her to be who she wanted to be. Watching her evolve was lovely. She’s always been so much like me. Though by her age, I’d accomplished what I’d set out to accomplish.”

  Her arms had begun to twine toward the ceiling. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or simply a reflex—the world her stage.

  “Yet despite that”—she wilted—“a critical piece of my psyche remained unfinished: I wasn’t free. It had of course to do with my own mother. She was such a terrible scold. Art to her was a competition. I wasn’t going to make that mistake with my child.”

  She smiled. “I know you must miss Tatiana, how could you not? But it’s for the best. You’re an authority figure by nature. You can boss her around but it will never work.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of trying.”

  “Oh, don’t say that, don’t ever say that. What else have we, but our dreams?”

  Said the woman in the eight-million-dollar apartment.

  “So,” she said, “young, strapping Mr. Edison, what can I do for you? I know you didn’t come here to talk about her. Or did you?” She leaned in. “I do hope you aren’t going to ask me to carry a message to her.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Good, because I’m enjoined against that. By the rules of rational parenting: we all must make our own choices. Although if you give up that easily, then you don’t deserve her.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  Having won her point, she smiled again, though I detected a certain disappointment that I hadn’t fought back. “Tell me, then, what are we going to talk about?”

  “Dr. Rennert,” I said.

  “Ah,” she said.

  “I understand you two kept in touch after the divorce.”

  “Naturally. We’re connected on a cellular level. Our living styles became incompatible but that doesn’t mean he ceased to adore me and I, him. The same applies to everyone I’ve loved. The web of intimacy, sticky and ever-expanding.”

  She pursed her lips, kissed air, looking as satisfied as though she’d made contact with flesh. “I don’t believe we’re meant as a species to be monogamous.”

  “Right.”

  “Nobody is perfect,” she said. “And thank goodness, perfect is boring. Walter wasn’t perfect, though he would’ve liked people to think he was. Do you believe—do you expect me to believe—that he didn’t take his fair share of comfort in the arms of others? I don’t begrudge anyone the pursuit of happiness.”

  “It’s his connection to Julian Triplett that interests me.”

  Another disappointed nod. “If we must.”

  “You’ve been expecting this conversation,” I said.

  “At some point, perhaps. I didn’t expect to be having it with you.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Tatiana, if she took the time to find out. Has she?”

  “Not in detail.”

  “You’ve tried to discuss it with her,” she said. “She got angry. Yes?”

  I stared.

  Lydia Delavigne said, “A mother knows. She idolized Walter. And idealized him. And he encouraged it.”

  “Aside from you, did he tell anyone else about his relationship with Triplett?”

  “Oh no. He was afraid of more scandal. For himself and for the boy.” She smiled. “I’m extraordinarily discreet. It’s one of my best qualities.”

  “Clearly.”

  “That’s very sweet of you to say,” she said. “May I ask what led you to investigate?”

  “The rocking chair.”

  She shuddered. “That thing. It put a nobler face on what was essentially charity. You know, teach a man to fish, versus give him a hunk of halibut. Walter tried to convince me to buy one, as well. I said let’s not get carried away.”

  I said, “How did it start between them?”

  She sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s much harm in telling you, now that he’s gone…He wrote the boy a letter.”

  “While Triplett was in prison?”

  “I warned him not to. I thought it was unhealthy. But he got into one of his righteous funks.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Oh, don’t quiz me, it’s boring. Three or four years after the fact? We were still married. I remember Walter’s excitement when he got the reply. What do you know, but it was quite articulate, too, once you got past the atrocious spelling and grammar. They corresponded for a while. Eventually Walter went to visit him, where they kept him.”

  “How many times?”

  “More than once. I wasn’t keeping count. The boy had no one.”

  “He had a sister.”

  “Well, all I know is that Walter felt he had a moral obligation.”

  “To do what.”

  Her answer surprised me. “I suppose you could say he viewed it as a personal research project,” she said. “An attempt to grapple with the same question he always grappled with. How does it happen that a person can come to commit such a horrible act?”

  I said, “Triplett was a case study?”

  “You make it s
ound so sterile…No. It was never Walter’s intention to exploit. And he never could have published it, that would have been impossible.”

  “Then what was he trying to accomplish?”

  “He was curious,” she said. “One of his best qualities.”

  She took a sip of tea. “Walter was very badly beaten as a child. Did you know that?”

  I shook my head.

  “His own father was a wicked man. Creative, but horrible. That’s not accidental. True cruelty is its own form of genius. He owned property all over San Francisco.”

  “That’s where the money comes from.”

  “You didn’t think Walter got rich in a lab, did you? The house he grew up in—it’s still there, in Pacific Heights. Landmarked. Some twenty-five-year-old computer person lives there now…Walter showed me pictures once. There’s a grand marble foyer, and a pair of staircases, shaped like this.”

  She traced a female form.

  “When Randolph—that was his father—when he wanted to punish Walter, he would make him run up one side and down the other, for hours on end. If he slowed down, or tripped, Randolph would whip him.”

  I said, “Does Tatiana know about this?”

  “Certainly not. And you’re not to tell her. I’m only telling you so that you’ll understand why Walter was so drawn to darkness. It mesmerized him. It wasn’t simple voyeurism. He genuinely wanted to understand. That’s how it started, at any rate. With time, I think he came to view the boy as a kind of ward.”

  “When did Walter start supplying him meds?”

  “After his release. Practically from day one. It was the right thing to do. They just punted him out and locked the gate behind. Shameful, but predictable.”

  “Did he give him anything else? Money?”

  “It’s certainly possible. By then I had moved out. I didn’t keep close tabs.”

  “I’m trying to figure out how Walter felt comfortable hanging out with a convicted murderer. Having him over to the house.”