Mystery: An Alex Delaware Novel

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Milo said, “Why’s he easier?”

  “Because women are complex.” Shimoff climbed onto his stool, faced a blank piece of white Bristol board, flexed his neck as if preparing for a wrestling match. To Robin: “Even though we’re just doing the face, tell me how tall he is.”

  Robin said, “Six one or two. Heavily built, but not fat.”

  “Football, not sumo,” said Shimoff.

  “Not a tackle. Maybe a halfback. Thirty to thirty-five years old, he could be of Nordic or Germanic extraction—”

  “Could be or probably?”

  She thought. “There could be some Celtic in there—Scottish or Irish. Or maybe Dutch. But if I had to bet, I’d say Nordic. Definitely nothing Mediterranean and that includes northern Italian.”

  “You drew the hair light. We talking blond?”

  “It was at night. What I saw was pale.”

  Shimoff touched his own steely coif. “Plenty of good-looking silver dudes. But you’d bet on blond, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Eye color?”

  “Couldn’t tell.”

  “He’s blond, we’ll go with anonymous pale.” Scanning her sketch. “The eyes, you got them as kind of piggy.”

  “They were piggy,” said Robin. “But wide-set, maybe even wider than I drew them. Squinty, which could’ve been him trying to look tough, or they really are squinty. One thing I remember now that I didn’t include is he had a heavy brow—a shelf right here. Low hairline, too. His hair didn’t stay down like yours, it stuck up.”

  “Mousse or gel?” said Shimoff.

  “Quite possibly. No sideburns, he clipped them way up here. Pug nose, possibly even smaller than I showed.”

  “Possibly broken?” said Shimoff. “Fits with the football build.”

  “Good point,” she said.

  “Pug as well as high-bridged.”

  “Not as high as Milo’s but definitely on the high side.”

  Milo measured the space between his nose and upper lip with two fingers. Shrugged.

  Robin said, “His ears were really close-set.” She frowned. “I keep remembering things I omitted. He had no lobes. And they were a little pointy at the top. Right here. Elfin, I guess. But there was nothing cute about him. The lips I got pretty accurately: the upper really was this thin. Almost invisible and the lower was full.”

  Shimoff picked up a pencil. “Wish they were all this easy.”

  He worked slowly, meticulously, stepping back from the drawing to take in a long view, rarely erasing. Forty minutes later, two likenesses had materialized. To my eye, stunningly accurate.

  Robin said, “What do you think, Alex?”

  “Perfect.”

  She studied the drawings. “I’d lift her eyebrow a bit on the right side. And his neck could be a little thicker, so there’s a bulge where it feeds into his collar.”

  Shimoff tinkered, sat back, appraised his work. “Beautiful girl. Now back to Picasso.”

  Milo said, “Picasso looks finished to me.”

  Shimoff smiled. “You are spared the pain, Lieutenant.”

  “Of what?”

  “Being an artist.”

  Milo called LAPD Public Affairs from the Seville, put the phone on speaker.

  “Got a couple artist renderings I need on the media A-sap. A Jane Doe 187 and a possible suspect.”

  The P.A. officer said, “One second,” in a voice that said nothing mattered less.

  For the next four minutes a public service announcement on domestic violence took the place of live speech.

  A new voice said, “Hi, Lieutenant Sturgis. This is Captain Emma Roldan from the chief’s office.”

  “I was just on the phone with—”

  “Public Affairs,” said Roldan. “They passed along your request, it will be prioritized appropriately. You should be notified as to its disposition by noon tomorrow.”

  “All I asked was for a couple of drawings to be—”

  “We’ll do our best, Lieutenant. Good night.”

  “Anyone else calls P.A., P.A. handles it. I call P.A., you handle it.”

  “Chief’s standing orders,” said Roldan. “You get extraspecial treatment.”

  The next morning at ten thirty, just as I set out for Gretchen Stengel’s place, Milo called in.

  “Princess’s face will be flashed on the news tonight but no dice on Black Suit. I have failed to establish sufficient cause linking the two of them and unnecessary exposure of an innocent individual could have dire legal consequences. Let’s hope she pulls up some tips. One thing for sure, she ain’t royalty. If Homeland Security can be believed.”

  “No princesses on holiday in SoCal?”

  “Just the ones born in B.H. and Bel Air. They did send me passport photos of young women loosely matching the description, I followed up and everyone’s alive. I faxed Shimoff’s drawing of Black Suit to the security companies. Nada. All this futility’s making me hungry. You up for lunch?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “I’ve got an appointment at eleven.”

  “Seeing patients again?”

  I hummed.

  “Got it,” he said. “Much as I enjoy your company, the gastrointestinal tract will not hold out, so we go our respective ways. Sayonara.”

  ittle Santa Monica Boulevard turns into Burton Way past Crescent, so cruising by the Fauborg on the way to Gretchen’s was preordained.

  Two jagged crumbling stories stood where there’d once been four. A skyscraping crane hovered above the ruins, a steel mantis poised to strike. The colossal machine idled as hard hats purchased nutrition from a roach coach. A man wearing an orange Supervisor vest noticed me as he chewed his burrito.

  “Do something for you?”

  “Just looking. I was here the other night.”

  “What was it, some kind of old-age home?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Real piece a shit,” he said. “Going down like paper.”

  Gretchen’s building was four intact stories of sage-green, neo-Italianate exuberance dressed up by gnarled olive trees planted in gravel. Il Trevi in gilt topped the sales sign out front. Fifteen luxury two- and three-bath units (All Sold! See Our Sister Project on Third Street!), the apartments rimmed an atrium fenced with iron but open to street view. A stone fountain burbled.

  I was buzzed up to Gretchen’s top-floor unit without comment. She waited in her doorway, wearing a pink housecoat and fuzzy white mules and breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank on wheels. A plastic tube dangled from her nostrils. She pulled it out and it hissed like a snake. Showing me brown, eroded teeth, she gripped my hand between both of hers and squeezed.

  Her skin was cold and papery. The housecoat billowed on a wasted frame but her face was bloated. What remained of her hair was white lint.

  I’d researched her last night. Despite the passage of time, she pulled up more hits than ten years’ worth of Nobel Prize winners. Various bios listed various birth dates but each put her at barely into middle age. She looked seventy-five.

  “Beauty fades,” she said, “but obnoxious lingers. Come on in.”

  Her living room was twice the size of Alex Shimoff’s but ten times as many toys piled in the center gave it the same cramped feel.

  Walking three steps to the nearest couch winded her. She stopped to reinsert the air line.

  She eased herself down on the sofa. I pulled a facing chair three feet away.

  “House call from a shrink, this has to be a first. Or maybe I’m being my old narcissistic self and you do this for everyone.”

  I smiled.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Give that blank, neutral shrink smile and make me sweat for every damn sentence. I’m working against a bit of a deadline.” A sharp, white knuckle rapped the side of the tank. “Pun intended.”

  I said, “No, I don’t do it for everyone.”

  She clapped her hands. “So I yam special!”

  Where the
room wasn’t snowed by toys it was bland furniture, generic rugs, floral prints on the walls where crayon drawings weren’t taped. Drawn drapes turned the space a gray one shade darker than Gretchen’s complexion.

  “Chad’s artistic,” she said. “Smart, too, I lucked out in the sperm department. They used to use med students as donors, now, who knows? All I learned about my personal masturbator is that he’s of English-German descent, taller than average, and free of genetic diseases. For the first year I kept imagining him—different hims, actually, the images started flipping like cards. What I ended up with was Brad Pitt mixed with Albert Einstein. Then Chad started talking and became a real person and it was just the two of us, I stopped thinking about my silent partner.”

  She scanned a couple of drawings. “What do you think of Chad’s artwork? I’ll put money you don’t find anything neurotic or psychotic in them.”

  The drawings were age-appropriate for a six-year-old boy. Many bore Mommy I love yous.

  “Brilliant, huh?” said Gretchen.

  “Excellent.”

  “We started with crayons, then he was too good for crayons so I got him these incredible pencils from Japan. That’s what he used on that peacock—over in the corner. Go look.”

  Searching for that drawing put her kitchenette in view. Cans of spaghetti, boxes of cookies, bags of chips. The refrigerator was veneered with photos of her and a round-faced, dark-haired boy. In the early ones, Gretchen still looked like Gretchen.

  The peacock battled with a dinosaur. From the blood and the feathers, score one for the reptile team.

  “Vivid,” I said.

  “You messed up your line. You were supposed to say, What an excellent mom you are, Gretchen, to produce the next Michelangelo.”

  “You’re doing great as a mom, Gretch—”

  “Because it’s all about me me me,” she said. “I’m a me-ist, that’s always been my diagnosis. ‘Narcissistic personality disorder with histrionic elements.’ Oh, yeah, ‘exacerbated by substance abuse.’ You agree?”

  “I’m not here to diagnose you.”

  “That’s what the shrink my defense team hired said I was. Narcissistic and a junkie. The key was to make me look intensely screwed up so I could avoid responsibility. I wasn’t supposed to read the report but I insisted they show it to me because I was paying for it. It makes sense to you?”

  “Legally, it was yours—”

  “Not that,” she said. “What the turkey wrote about me. ‘Narcissism, histrionic, dope.’ That fit your diagnosis?”

  “Let’s talk about Chad.”

  Her eyes fluttered. She fiddled with the air hose. “Just tell me this: How narcissistic am I if I devote the last six years of my life to my child? How histrionic am I if I never show him anything but a calm, happy face? How big of a dope fiend am I if I’ve been clean and sober for seven fucking years?”

  “Good point.”

  “But I’m stuck with that damn diagnosis. In my head—like that bastard passed a sentence on me. Like it’s my eye color and I’m stuck with it.”

  She cleared her throat, coughed, swooned, adjusted a valve on the air tank. “I wanted to kill that shrink. Judging me. Now I’d be happy if what he put down was my only diagnosis.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, yeah, up and down goes the head,” she said. “Been to a lot of you guys, my parents didn’t give up on me till I was fourteen. I have to tell you, most of your colleagues were losers. So how could I respect their opinions? Know why I picked you? It wasn’t because I remembered you from when your gay buddy hassled me. I mean I did remember, but that wasn’t the point. Know what it was?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “A woman I used to do yoga with, one of the few people who still has the balls to keep visiting me, referred you. Marie Blunt.”

  Marie, now an A-level interior designer, had once been a showgirl. The court had asked me to evaluate her kids for custody. The showgirl years had come out, but nothing more. Now I wondered if she’d dabbled in Gretchen’s world.

  “Silent treatment, Doc. Yeah, yeah, you can’t admit you know her, I get it. But I’m sure we can both agree Marie’s a saint. Even her idiot ex recognizes that now, but she’s too smart to take him back. She said when the court hired you to do her child custody, she freaked out because he had all the money, she was scared you’d be corrupt like everyone else and take his side. Instead, you were fair and managed to get both of them not to victimize the kids. No mean feat, considering the ex is a total rat-bastard.”

  I crossed my legs.

  She said, “Nonverbal signal to annoying patient: Quit avoiding what we’re here for. Fine—oh, yeah, let me get you your money up front. I’m sure you don’t mind cash, do you? I’m a cash gal from way back.” Winking. “Old habits and all that.”

  “Let’s deal with that later,” I said.

  “No, let’s deal with it now.” Hard voice. So was her smile. “I want to make sure I don’t forget.” She touched the side of her head. “I forget a lot, could be tumors migrating into the old noggin, huh? Or maybe there’s just not much worth remembering in the first place? What’s your take on my encroaching senility, Doc?”

  “It’s—”

  “Yeah, yeah, you don’t know me well enough. Okay, payment with a smile coming up.”

  Rising with effort, she hobbled through a doorway, was gone for several minutes, came back with a thick, bright red envelope that she thrust at me.

  Unless it was packed with singles, way too thick to comprise a session’s worth. I put it on an end table. “In terms of Chad—”

  “I told you, this is all about little old narcissistic addictive me. Count the moolah, make sure I’m not shorting you.”

  I opened the envelope, flipped through a collection of fifties. Enough for twenty sessions. “This is way too much, Gretchen. Let’s go session by session.”

  “What, you think I’m going to kick tomorrow?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s the way I do business.”

  “Well, let’s do it differently—be flexible, you know? If we go session by session, you can leave whenever you want. My situation, I need a commitment.”

  “I’m committed to helping you. How you pay me won’t make a difference.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  I didn’t respond.

  She said, “You’re different from anyone else? Then why the cashmere blazer and the English slacks and those cute loafers, what are they, Ferragamo?”

  “I like stuff as much as the next guy, Gretchen. And that’s irrelevant. I’m here for Chad and you don’t need to buy me in advance.” Taking a session’s worth of cash out of the envelope, I resealed it, placed it beside her.

  “I don’t believe you. You want to feel free to leave.”

  “If that was the issue, I could refund unused dough and book on you at any time. Now, how about we stop wasting time and talk about Chad?”

  She stared at me. Gasped. Let out a strangled laugh.

  “Jesus, I got myself a serious one.”

  The urge to prattle never left her but I kept steering her back to a structured history. Starting with Chad’s birth and continuing into the toddler years, preschool, and the boy’s current placement in one of the most expensive grade schools in the city, an intimate place originally based on psychoanalytic theory but now eclectic. I’d lectured there a few times, thought it was overpriced, no better than any school, but not harmful. If need be, the director could be counted on.

  No need for that now, but it might be interesting to see how Dr. Lisette Auerbach’s impressions gibed with Gretchen’s description of Chad as a meld of Louis Pasteur, Leonardo da Vinci, and Saint George.

  Despite her troubled past and her foreshortened future, Gretchen could’ve been any proud, nervous, overprotective, overindulgent Westside mom.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, “he’s a killer athlete, too. Soccer and basketball. Mr. Cup in Hand must’ve been some kind of stud. Brad and Albert and Pelé.” />
  I said, “You contributed half of Chad’s chromosomes. You also created his environment.”

  “Three cheers for me. I’m just hoping some of those chromosomes don’t mess him up. Like my ADD, my propensity to—”

  “Gretchen, what specifically are you concerned about?”

  “What do you think?” she shouted. “What to tell him.”

  “What have you told him so far?”

  “That I’m sick.”

  “Did you name the sickness?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “When kids don’t have facts they sometimes supply their own.”

  “And?”

  “Their fantasies can be worse than reality.”

  “What can be worse than the fact that I’ve got fucking cancer and am going to screw him up royal by abandoning him?”

  “What measures have you taken for his care?”

  “What a way with words you have,” she said.

  “Have you planned?”

  “Hell, yes. My plan is my sister. I have two of them. Katrine’s a bigger asshole than me, total washout, but Bunny’s solid-gold. Maybe being the middle child helped her avoid family shit in some way. Whatever made her who she is, she’s great and she’s taking Chad.”

  “Where does Bunny live?”

  “Berkeley. Her husband’s a physics professor, she teaches English, both her kids are off in college. Chad always likes visiting her and Leonard, they’ve got a funky house in the Berkeley Hills, nice view of the Bay. Got a great dog, mutt named Waldo, Chad loves him, too.”

  She sniffed. Caressed her oxygen tank. “From their backyard you can see the Golden Gate Bridge.” She teared up. “Bunny will be a great mom for Chad. Better than me.”

  “Have you talked to Chad about living with Bunny and Leonard?”

  “Why would I even bring that up? It would freak him out!”

  “You think he’s unaware of how ill you are?”

  “I think he doesn’t pay much attention as long as he gets his attention.”

  I stayed silent.

  “You think I’m full of shit.”

  I got up and touched the tank. “This isn’t hard to miss, Gretchen.”