Billy Straight: A Novel (Petra Connor)

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Detective Connor, Vivian,” the doctor singsonged scoldingly.

  Vivian Boehlinger’s expression said, So what the hell am I supposed to do about it?

  She said, “Pleased to meet you,” and profferred an icy hand.

  Petra smiled. “And this is Detective Fournier—”

  “We’ve already met Detective Fournier,” said Dr. Boehlinger. “Where’s the third one—Bishop?”

  “Out in the field,” said Petra.

  “Out in the field—sounds like he’s planting vegetables.”

  “Actually, sir,” said Fournier, “it’s kind of like that. We cultivate leads—”

  “Wonderful,” said Boehlinger. “You know what a metaphor is. Now eliminate the chatter and tell us what you’ve cultivated about Ramsey.”

  Mrs. Boehlinger stared, turned, showed him her back once more. He didn’t notice. “Well?”

  A detective named Bernstein stepped into the hall, coffee cup in hand, started forward, returned to the squad room.

  “Let’s talk somewhere private,” said Petra.

  All three interrogation rooms were horrible—smaller than jail cells, no windows, the obvious wall of one-way mirror that most of the idiots brought in for questioning took early note of, then promptly forgot.

  Bad smell in all three: sweat, pomade, cheap perfume, tobacco, hormones.

  She chose Interrogation One because it had three chairs instead of two. Fournier fetched a fourth and they crowded around a tiny metal table. Forced intimacy. Mrs. Boehlinger kept looking at her nails, her knees, her shoes, anywhere but at another human being. The surgeon looked ready to slice flesh.

  Petra shut the door and let in some claustrophobia. Mrs. B. was picking at her knit skirt. Boehlinger was trying to stare down Fournier.

  Trying to dominate. To what end? Force of habit?

  She remembered what Ramsey had told her about both parents trying to run Lisa’s life. “Let me start by saying how sorry we are for your loss. We’re doing everything in our power to find Lisa’s killer—”

  Mention of her daughter made Mrs. B. weep. The doctor made no effort to comfort her. “We know who the killer is.”

  “If there’s anything you can tell us to substantiate that, sir—”

  “He beat her up, she left him. What more do you need?”

  “Unfortunately—”

  “This boy, the potential witness,” said Boehlinger. “I’m sure there’ve been responses to our reward.”

  “A few calls have come in,” said Petra.

  “And?”

  “We haven’t gotten to them yet, sir. Been following up other leads.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Boehlinger’s hand slammed the table. His wife jumped, but she didn’t look at him. “I dip into my own damn pocket, do your job for you, and you don’t have the decency to follow up—”

  “We will, sir,” said Petra. “Soon as we’re free to do so.”

  “Why aren’t you free?”

  “We’re here, sir,” said Fournier.

  Boehlinger’s hand rose again, and for a second Petra thought he’d try to strike Wil. But the fist froze in midair. Slight tremor. Surgeon past his prime, or the stress?

  “We’re delaying you? We’re the problem—”

  “No, sir,” said Fournier. “We appreciate all your—”

  The hand slammed again. “You,” he said very softly, “are a very rude man. You’re both rude.”

  “John!”

  “Typical,” said Boehlinger, glaring at Petra and Fournier in turn. “Civil servants. So you know nothing about this boy. Priceless, just priceless. Affirmative action at its finest—I believe we’re going to have to take this one step further, Vivian. Hire our own—”

  “Stop it, John. Please.”

  Boehlinger laughed derisively. “We will most definitely hire our own investigator, because these two obviously aren’t—”

  “Shut up, John!”

  The shriek filled the room. Boehlinger turned white and clawed the tabletop. His fingers failed to find purchase and his hands flattened. Without facing his wife, he said, “Vivian, I’d appreciate it if you—”

  “Just shut up, John! Shutup shutup shut up!”

  Now it was her turn to raise a hand. It sailed through the air like a flesh airplane, landed on her bosom, over her heart. She ran out of the room, swinging the door open, not bothering to close it.

  Fournier’s eyes begged for Petra to follow. Even Dr. Bile was preferable to a grieving mother.

  Petra caught up with her at the end of the hall, in the stairwell, sitting on the top step, forehead to the wall, the champagne puff bobbing with each sob.

  “Ma’am—”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “No need to apologize, ma’am.”

  “I’m very sorry, very very very sorry!”

  Petra sat down next to the woman and chanced putting her arm around the heaving shoulders. Beneath the knit fabric were small bones. Petra smelled makeup, breath mints, Chanel No. 5. “Let’s find somewhere to go.”

  Vivian Boehlinger straightened and pointed at the interrogation rooms. “Not with him!”

  “No,” said Petra. “By ourselves.”

  No one was in the vending machine room, so she guided the woman in and closed the door. No lock. She placed a chair against it, sat down, motioning for Vivian Boehlinger to choose one near the folding table that served as the D’s snack center.

  “Coffee?”

  “No thank you.” Subdued voice now, that post-tantrum shame/fatigue. Small hands folded in a black-knit lap. Under the fluorescence, Petra could see hints of deep facial lines, muted expertly by makeup. The eyes were tormented, devoid of hope. So disturbing in contrast—everything else about the woman was so well put together.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  “It’s really okay, ma’am. Situations like this—”

  “When all this is over, I’m going to leave him.”

  Petra didn’t speak.

  Vivian Boehlinger said, “I was going to do it this year. Now I’ll have to wait. Thirty-six years of marriage, what a joke.” She shook her head, made a terrible sound, more parrot squawk than laugh.

  “He has affairs with sluts,” she went on. “Thinks I’m stupid and don’t know.” Another bird sound. It made Petra’s flesh crawl. “Cheap, slutty affairs. And now Lisa’s gone.”

  Odd juxtaposition, but maybe not. Tabulating her miseries. Petra waited for her to take it further, but all she said was “My Lisa, my pretty Lisa.”

  Several more minutes of silence, then: “Ma’am, do you think Cart Ramsey did it?”

  “I don’t know.” Quick answer. She’d thought about it. She gave a pitiful shrug and sniffed. Petra fetched a paper napkin. Dab, dab.

  “Thank you. You’re very sweet. I don’t know what to think.” She sat up straighter, higher. “John thinks he can buy everything. He offered Lisa money not to marry Carter and, when that didn’t work, even more money to divorce him. So idiotic—Lisa was going to divorce Carter anyway. She told me. If John had ever communicated with her, he could have saved himself the offer. Which is all it was. Lisa divorced Carter, but did John keep his end of the bargain?”

  A scary smile spread across the thin lips. Lipstick and liner had been used to extend the coral borders and radically change the mouth’s contours. Without her morning routine, this woman would be unrecognizable.

  “He didn’t pay up?” said Petra.

  “Of course not. He didn’t give Lisa one dime. Said he hadn’t been serious, it was for Lisa’s own good anyway, she had nothing to complain about. Lisa didn’t care, she knew who she was dealing with. But still. Don’t you think that’s terrible?”

  “How much did he offer Lisa?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars. So now he comes up with half?” She shook her head. “Don’t expect him to pay any reward, Detective. I feel sorry for anyone who thinks they’re going to get paid by John—do I think Carter did it? I don’t know. T
o me, he always seemed civil. Then Lisa told me he hit her, so I don’t know.”

  “How many times did she say he hit her, ma’am?”

  “Just the once. They had a tiff, Carter lost control and hit her. More than a slap—her eye was blackened and her lip was split.”

  “Just once,” said Petra.

  “Once was too much for Lisa.” That sounded boastful. Daughter asserting herself in a way mother never could? “She told me she wouldn’t tolerate it. And I agreed with her. For all the things her father did over thirty-six years, he never laid a hand on me. If he had, who knows what I’d have done.” She lifted her purse, hefted it like a weapon. “Of course, I didn’t know Lisa was going to go on television. If she’d told me about that, I probably would have advised against it.”

  “Too public?”

  “Tasteless. But I’d have been wrong. Why keep it all inside? What’s the point of being quiet and pretty and tasteful?”

  She cried some more, dabbed. “Do I think Carter did it? Why not? He’s a man. They’re responsible for all the violence in the world, aren’t they? Am I as sure as John? No. Because no one’s ever as sure as John.”

  She got up. “I know you’re trying your best, Detective. John wants blood, but I only want . . . something I’ll never get—my little girl back. Now, if you’d be so kind as to call me a cab.”

  “Certainly, ma’am.” Petra stayed with her, holding the door. “Here’s my card. If you think of something, anything, please let me know.”

  The two of them returned to the hallway. The door to Interrogation One was still closed.

  “Your poor black friend,” said Vivian Boehlinger. “John’s prejudiced—I really despise him.”

  “I’ll call that cab,” said Petra. “Where to?”

  “The Beverly Wilshire. He’s staying at the Biltmore.”

  Barely after 9 A.M. and she was exhausted; the time spent with the Boehlingers had sapped her energies. Poor Wil was still in there.

  What a pair, even allowing for tragedy. No marital role model for Lisa. How much free will did any of us have?

  The message stack had grown; four more tips on the boy. She dreaded Dr. B.’s follow-up calls.

  In some cases, you bonded with the victim’s family. Here she was, wanting to punch Dr. B.’s lights out, creeped out by Mrs. B.’s avian laugh. Not good at all. And Stu still hadn’t arrived. Obviously, he didn’t give a damn anymore. Which didn’t fit a career opportunity thing. So maybe it was marital.

  She did some fruitless follow-up with Missing Persons on Flores, was putting down the phone when Stu said, “Good morning.”

  Freshly shaved, every hair in place. He wore a beautiful slate-gray gabardine suit, pearl-gray shirt, smoke-and-red paisley tie. So perfectly composed.

  It pissed her off.

  “Is it?” she said.

  He turned around and left the squad room.

  CHAPTER

  39

  Sam Ganzer didn’t park the Lincoln carefully. The twenty-year-old land yacht was too wide for each of the spaces behind the shul, so he used both of them.

  Who was there to complain? The synagogue, once a social center for Venice’s Jews, had been reduced to a weekend facility, Sam’s maintenance calls the only thing that opened its doors before Friday night.

  Even on the weekend it was sometimes hard to get ten men together for a minyan. Beth Torah wasn’t Orthodox enough for the yarmulke-clad yuppies who’d gentrified Venice, so they started their own congregation a few blocks away, brought a bearded fanatic rabbi from New York, installed a partition between the men and the women. The old, mostly left-wing crowd who patronized the shul wouldn’t hear of it.

  That had been five years ago. Now most of the regulars had died off. Eventually, Sam knew, Beth Torah would close down, the property sold. Maybe the yuppies would reclaim it, which would be better than yet another cheap business added to the dozens that lined Ocean Front Walk. Sam didn’t mind the yuppies as much as some of the old socialists did. He had a deep-rooted distrust of authority but was, at heart, a businessman. Meanwhile, he’d park any damn way he pleased.

  He felt he’d live forever. For seventy-one, his body was working okay. His brother Emil, living down in Irvine, not religious at all, was seventy-six. Good stock: generations of thickset, robust metalsmiths and carpenters honed by bone-numbing Ukrainian winters.

  It had taken pure evil to cut down most of the Ganzer tree.

  Mother, father, three younger brothers, two sisters shipped off to Sobibor, never seen again. Avram, Mottel, Baruch, Malkah, Sheindel. Had they made it to America, what would their names have been? Sam’s best guess was Abe, Mort, Bernie, Marilyn, Shirley. Last week, he’d raised the question with Emil, who didn’t want to talk about it.

  All in all, forty-five Ganzers and Leibovics had been rounded up by the Ukrainian police and handed over to the occupying nazi scum. Sam and Emil, muscular young men—Emil a lightweight boxing champ at the Kovol gymnasium—were spared and enslaved as forced laborers. Eighteen-hour workdays on thin soup and sawdust bread. Midnight escape through the snow, living in the forest on leaves and nuts, nearly starving till they’d been taken in by a saintly Catholic woman. When her son came back from the war, he wanted to turn them over; the Ganzer brothers ran again, walking till the brink of death, finally making it to Shanghai. The Chinese had been decent. Sam sometimes wondered what it would have been like to stay, marry one of those gorgeous porcelain girls. Instead, liberation, Canada, Detroit, L.A.

  For years he hadn’t thought about any of that crap. Lately, the memories had been returning, uninvited. Probably some kind of brain damage. His body was strong, but names, places were fading, he’d walk into a room, forget why. The ancient stuff, though, was as clear as day. All that anger—he could feel it pounding in his ears, bad for the blood pressure.

  He turned off the Lincoln’s engine, got out. On Friday night and Saturday, he assumed sexton’s duties, had since Mr. Ginzburg died. With the unpaid position came maintenance obligations. Why not? What else did he have to do besides play the mandolin and sit outside his house getting too much sun—he’d already had four precancerous lesions cut off his face and one on his bald spot. Had to wear a stupid cap, like an old guy.

  He took the hat off, tossed it into the Lincoln, locked up, enjoyed another look at how he’d parked. Better than leaving room for some drug addict to slump in a stolen car and inject himself. That had happened more than once. This neighborhood, always a little nuts, had become a crazy mix of gawking tourists on weekends, lowlifes crawling out of the woodwork at night.

  Most of Ocean Front was one big gyp-joint now. Fly-by-nights selling cheap junk, weekends so jammed you couldn’t take two steps without bumping into some yutz.

  For forty years Sam and Emil sold hardware and plumbing fixtures from their store on Lincoln Boulevard, things you could use. Both of them knowing how to install as well as sell, pipe a house from scratch. You got to be handy, living on your own, never depending on anyone else. Leaving Shanghai, he’d vowed never to depend on anyone else. Maybe that’s why he’d never married. Though the ladies loved him. He’d had his good times. Even now he once in a while got between the covers with soft-skinned grandmothers ashamed of what age had done to their bodies. Sam knew how to make them feel young and gorgeous.

  He felt for the shul key in his pocket, found it, opened the back door. Not noticing the screen from the bathroom window lying on the ground, because it was partially blocked by his right front tire.

  Moments after he got inside, he knew someone had broken in.

  The silver-plated pushke was sitting atop the platform where the Torah was read, shiny against the blue velvet coverlet, right out in the open. The charity box hadn’t been used since Friday night, when it was passed around before services. Sam had put it away, personally, in a cabinet beneath the bookcases. Just a cheap combination lock, no reason to make a big deal—all it contained was a few dollars in coins.

  But som
eone had tried anyway. And, look—food had been taken out of the same cabinet. Snack stuff for the handful of Saturday-morning regulars. Tam Tam crackers and a pink box from a bakery on Fairfax—sugarcoated kichlen shaped like bow ties. Sam had bought them last week. No preservatives, had to be stale; he’d forgotten to get rid of them.

  Crumbs on blue velvet. A quarter and a dime had fallen out of the pushke. Hungry thief. What else had he taken?

  The only things of value to a junkie were the silver finials and breastplates that graced the three Torahs in the ark. Sam started toward the carved walnut case, ready to draw back the blue velvet curtain, afraid of what he’d find.

  Then he stopped himself, raised his heavy arms instinctively. Maybe the crook was still here. All he needed was some junkie jumping out at him.

  No one did. Silence; no movement at all.

  He stood there and looked around.

  The shul was four rooms—small entry hall in front, gents’ and ladies’ lavs at the back; in between, the main sanctuary—rows of walnut pews, seating for 150.

  A double-sided dead bolt protected the front door—you couldn’t get in or out without a key. Same for the back. So how . . .

  He waited a few more minutes, convinced himself he was alone, but made sure by inspecting. Then out to the front room. Still locked; no damage to the door.

  In back was where he found it, the window in the ladies’ lav. Closed, but the screen was off—there it was, down near his tire. Some white chips on the sill where dry paint had flaked off.

  Closing the window after he’d left? Considerate thief?

  He returned to the sanctuary, opened the ark, examined the Torahs. All the silver in place. The bottle-shaped pushke hadn’t been emptied either, and the lock didn’t show a scratch. Only Sam and Mr. Kravitz knew the combination, and they took turns emptying the weekly take and delivering it to the Hadassah thrift shop on Broadway. Once upon a time Congregation Beth Torah had proudly contributed fifty dollars a week to the poor; now it was down to ten, twelve. Embarrassing, so Sam augmented it with twenty of his own. What Kravitz did, he had no idea; the guy was a bit of a cheapskate.