The Golem of Hollywood

by Jonathan Kellerman

  You’d expect a body dump to be chosen with secrecy in mind. The staging reeked of exhibitionism, though, and those two facts in combination hinted at a desire for a specific audience.

  Who owned this place?

  Who knew about it?

  He checked the sat phone for a missed call from Hammett. Frowned. No reception. These things were supposed to work anywhere.

  He walked around, waving the phone, one bar dancing in and out. He managed to pin it down outside the master. He waited for a message icon to appear, but there was nothing.

  The air was surprisingly free of death funk, and on the whole, he noticed that he felt less creeped out than he would have thought. Jacob was no mystic, but he did believe that people were drawn toward spaces that reflected their personalities, and that the soul of a residence and the soul inhabiting it grew progressively overlapped over time.

  Here, he sensed a kind of serenity, verging on Zen calm. It would be a good place to write, or draw, or sculpt—an atelier in the sky, ideal for the rare artist who could afford it.

  Or someone with money, posturing as an artist.

  In Jacob’s experience, the vast majority of bad guys took the path of least resistance. That was what made them bad guys: an overwhelming need to do whatever they wanted while expending as little energy as possible. Most criminality was a pathological form of laziness.

  This guy, though. He had a sense of style. Repulsive, but distinct. Maybe he truly was different, or thought he was. There was a second variety of criminal, less common but flashier. The Rippers, the Ed Geins, the BTKs. They went the extra mile to make the papers. A notable subtype being the Hitlers and the Stalins and the Pol Pots.

  Both types were dangerous. The first because they were careless, the second because they were careful.

  Jacob wandered into the studio and stood before the east-facing window, thinking about the house he’d grown up in, the corner of the garage taken over by twenty-five-pound boxes of clay, jars of paint and glaze, a small electric kiln, a drying rack hidden behind a drop cloth. The wonky three-legged stool she sat on. No potter’s wheel. Bina Lev had worked freehand.

  He had a vague notion of a youthful flirtation with the avant-garde. No physical evidence of that period remained, though, and by the time he got old enough to conceive of his mother as an individual with ambitions, hers had imploded. The woman he knew strictly produced ritual objects—goblets for holding the Sabbath wine, menorahs, spice boxes for the havdalah ceremony. She hauled them to weekend fairs, sold them on consignment at local Judaica stores. You couldn’t exactly call it pragmatic, her choice to forsake art for craft. It wasn’t like she made any money. And there was bitter irony for Jacob in learning that these items were now considered collectible in some circles, owing to their scarcity.

  The Internet would have served her well. Poor timing.

  Poor timing, all around.

  Shortly after her funeral, Sam, nearly comatose with grief, decided to put the house up for sale. It was a simple enough matter getting rid of the furniture, but he begged off cleaning out the garage. Jacob stepped in. He was used to feeling like the sole adult.

  He bought a roll of contractor bags and went about the business with methodical rage, half-finished candelabra thrown in indiscriminately alongside unopened cases of Amaco Low Fire Lead-Free. He disjointed the drying rack and gave the pieces to his neighbor, who had a working fireplace. A pawnbroker offered him thirty dollars for the kiln, a sum so meager that it brought remorse down on him like a bootheel.

  Fifty with the tools.

  Jacob said no, thanks, he’d decided to keep those.

  He took his thirty bucks and went back to the garage, combing through the bags in search of anything worth salvaging. He’d done an unfortunately thorough job of venting his anger: mostly it was shards and dust.

  A few items swathed in newspaper had survived. A couple of coffee mugs. A double-handled cup for washing hands. A mezuzah. A lidded jar with strong, thin walls whose exact function he could not determine. He placed them carefully in a duffel bag lined with towels.

  One well-padded bundle turned out to be several dozen smaller pieces, individually wrapped. Curious, he pulled away a corner of the paper and was startled by the appearance of a tiny, alien face. He unwrapped the rest of the pieces and discovered more of the same.

  He had long assumed that his mother’s switch to plates and cups had something to do with Judaism’s disapproval of depictions of the human form—an outgrowth of the ban on idolatry.

  Or maybe she had given herself an out, on a technicality: certainly, the things in his hands weren’t human in any conventional sense. Gray, mottled with black and dark green, strongly organic, they shimmered, and their limbs writhed as though to escape.

  Bina had invited people to handle her creations. Even the simplest pieces responded to touch.

  These appeared to resent it.

  Surrounded by junk on the floor of the broiling garage, his hair sticking up, he’d stared at the figurines, wondering if and how he’d misjudged her.

  He wrapped them up and put them in the duffel.

  He’d borne this sad legacy through two marriages and countless apartments, nailing up the mezuzah, putting the washing cup by the kitchen sink, filling the jar with sugar. He took his coffee black, but it gave him something pleasant to offer a lady friend in the morning. They oohed and aahed at his good taste.

  The potter’s tools he displayed in the bookcase: they were objects of beauty in themselves, their smooth wooden handles glowing from within. He could look at them and be reminded that life was fragile and strange and brief. For some reason, that made him feel good.

  The figurines creeped Renee out so badly that he’d moved them to a safe deposit box.

  Probably not worth the monthly rental. Anyway, nobody around to protest now, and as he peered down into the pleated canyon, he thought that he ought to go retrieve them.

  A black hand smacked the glass.

  He crashed backward, Glock up, shouting orders at an empty room.

  Silence.

  The thing that had made the noise—it was outside, clinging to the window.

  Squat, domelike. Black segmented underbelly. Flittering wings tonguing the glass.

  He shook his head and laughed at himself. He’d almost put two bullets in a bug. Twenty hours without sleep or proper nutrition could do that to you.

  He holstered his gun, left the house, and jogged to the Honda. He reached down and grasped one of the liquor bottles. He took a few sips, leaving himself just shy of impairment, just enough control to get home, drink more, and fall asleep.

  —

  THAT NIGHT, he dreamt of an endless garden, lush and dripping. At its crowning center stood Mai. She was naked, her arms open to him. He stretched for her but he could not reach her, and the chasm between them ached, for he understood that on the other side lay a homecoming.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Up early, wired, Jacob hacked away at the keyboard, nursing a cup of spiked coffee and neglecting an Eggo waffle.

  The murder house belonged to a trust, which belonged to another trust, which belonged to a holding company in the Cayman Islands, which belonged to a shell corporation in Dubai, which belonged to another holding company in Singapore, for which he found a number.

  He calculated the time difference, debated whether there was any point calling in the middle of the night, decided it was worth a try to see if the number even worked.

  A woman answered in accented English, and a tortuous series of questions revealed that he was speaking not to the holding company but to an answering service whose sole reason for being was to divert nosy callers from obtaining information about the holding company. He was in the midst of conjuring his most persuasive self when the sat phone jumped: Officer Chris Hammett.

  Jacob hung up on Singapore with
out saying good-bye.

  Hammett sounded young and bewildered. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, Detective. I was kind of—I got held up.”

  “Not a problem. How’re you doing?”

  “Honestly?” Hammett exhaled. “Still kind of freaked out.”

  “I don’t blame you. I saw it.”

  “I mean, seriously. That is some fucked-up shit.”

  “No kidding. You mind telling me how it went down?”

  “All right, well, I got up there about midnight—”

  “Before that,” Jacob said. “Where were you when the call came in?”

  “Down Cahuenga, near Franklin. Dispatch said they got a woman calling in to report something suspicious.”

  “A woman?”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Just that there was something needed attention at that address.”

  “Name?”

  “Nope. Said get someone to get on up there and check it out. I was closest.” Hammett paused. “I’ll be straight with you, sir: it took me a while. The signs’re for shit and I almost ran off the road. I didn’t get there till maybe an hour later.”

  Jacob’s annoyance was tempered by sympathy as he imagined himself trying to find the house for the first time at night. “And when you did?”

  “I didn’t hear nothing or see anything out of the ordinary. The door was open a couple inches. I poked my head in and shined my light down the hall, and there it was.”

  “The head.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hammett described his search of the house and his discovery of the letters in the kitchen counter. “I called in and my captain had me send over a picture. I guess he must’ve kicked it up the chain, cause pretty soon after that, the crypt doctor showed up. She said she’d take it from there.”

  “Anything else you think might be relevant?”

  “No, sir. But—question for you?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Is this, like, something I need to be concerned about?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Yesterday when I came in the station there was some guys waiting to talk to me from some department I never heard of.”

  “Special Projects,” Jacob said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Big guys.”

  “Like, circus big.”

  “Mel Subach. Or Paul Schott.”

  “Actually, it was both of them. Schott did the talking, though. He took me aside and implied that it was in my interests to keep what I’d seen on the DL. That’s why it took me a while to get back to you, sir. I didn’t want to overreach. I called him up and asked about you and he said go ahead, just after that, pretend it never happened. Don’t get me wrong, I can sit on it.”

  “Thanks,” Jacob said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Anytime. I hope you get him.”

  “Your mouth to God’s ears,” said Jacob.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Have a nice day, Officer.”

  —

  JACOB E-MAILED MALLICK to update him, adding that he was having trouble with the credit card he had been issued. He e-mailed 911 dispatch to request a copy of the call, got dressed, and headed down to his car. While backing out, he noticed that the window treatment van hadn’t moved since yesterday evening.

  —

  BY NINE A.M. he was back at the scene, walking the grounds with a topo map printed off Google. He’d brought his new camera. It had a nice hefty zoom lens, as close as he was going to get to the bottom of the canyon without a pickaxe and crampons and a whole lot of rope and determination.

  He went inside the house to rephotograph it, starting with the letters burnt into the kitchen counter.

  They were gone.

  For a moment, he did not move. Then he turned around, thinking he’d misremembered their location.

  The rest of the countertops were clean.

  The original photos were on his personal cell—the useless one, back in his apartment. He estimated where the mark had been, bent close to inspect the spot, taking care not to touch it. He couldn’t see evidence of sanding or scraping or erasing, not there or anywhere else.

  Maybe Divya Das’s swab had caused the mark to degrade. But that was only possible if it was superficial, and what he remembered seeing was incised into the surface of the wood. Restoring a perfectly even surface would require replacing the entire countertop.

  Message delivered, they’d come back to remove the evidence?

  He straightened up, acutely aware of the stillness.

  He shut the camera off and put it in his pocket, drew the Glock, crept through the living room, the master, the studio.

  Deserted.

  Outside to recheck the perimeter.

  He was alone.

  He fetched his fingerprint kit out of the trunk of the Honda and went back to the kitchen. He snapped a host of photos of the now-pristine countertops, then dusted, coming up blank.

  The good news was that if someone had been here doing renovations while he slept, Claire Mason’s security system would have caught them. He left the house and drove back down the hill.

  “You’re back,” she squawked through her intercom.

  “Couldn’t stay away.”

  The gate motor growled to life.

  In daylight he could appreciate the scope of the property. It was an ode to human ingenuity, an oasis of modernity in that barren, prehistoric setting: three-car garage, electric blue pool, desert landscaping, weathered brick paths branching through terrain artificially gentled and tufted. Stark steel I-beam sculpture, patinated to match the front gate. The peaked glass brow of a greenhouse poked up from behind a neat grove of fruit trees. He wondered what she wanted with so much homegrown produce. Given what he knew of her, he could easily figure her for an end-of-the-worlder, preparing for the worst, erecting walls to keep out the ravenous hordes that would inevitably turn up in times of shortage, licking their lips, ready to feast upon the rich.

  She met him wearing the same flannel bathrobe, and he suffered through another giganto helping of tea.

  “Twice in twelve hours,” she said. “How can you tell me I shouldn’t be concerned?”

  “Due diligence,” he said. He gestured to the view. “Lovely place you have here.”

  “It’s a rental,” she said.

  In the security room she played back the previous night’s footage—static, except for the arrival and departure of Jacob’s car.

  “Is there another way up? Fire road, or something that’s not showing up on my map?”

  “The area to the north is public land. You get oddballs coming through. Hikers. That’s why I have the cameras.”

  “Right,” he said. That, and cause you’re bonkers.

  Having her on duty was like running a twenty-four-hour stakeout: he left his card with her, asking that she contact him if she saw anyone go up the hill.

  For the next two hours, he tooled around Griffith Park, failing to find any way to access the canyon. A brief consult with a park ranger confirmed as much. Unless Jacob could convince Special Projects to call in a rappel team, a body down there was staying put for the foreseeable future.

  —

  ALL THOSE TRUSTS and blinds and holding companies stank of money. Keywording the Castle Court address pulled up nothing, not even the expected Zillow or other real estate sites. An afternoon at the desk brought Jacob to the home page of a USC professor interested in the social history of the Southern California upper class. The prof had undertaken to scan in decades of Blue Books, getting as far back as 1926 and as far forward as 1973. OCR made the directory searchable.

  Jacob found what he needed in the 1941 edition.

  The house belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. Herman Pernath. M
ister was a principal architect at a firm that bore his name. The couple had two children, Edith, sixteen, and Frederick, fourteen.

  The L.A. Times archive yielded obituaries for Herman in 1972, his wife two years before that. Daughter Edith Merriman, née Pernath, had died in 2004.

  A search for Fred Pernath brought up an Internet Movie Database entry with scores of special effects credits, the sort of Z-grade gorefests Jacob figured didn’t get made anymore. But there were titles as recent as three years ago, indicating that Pernath was alive and well, and another search yielded a phone number and an address in Hancock Park.

  Jacob called him on the sat phone, explained who he was, and asked if he could find out more about the house on Castle Court.

  “What’s there to find out?”

  “Have you been there recently?”

  Pernath’s laugh was wooden. “Not since it became mine.”

  “When was that?”

  “What’s this regarding, Detective?”

  “It’s an ongoing investigation,” Jacob said. “Who else has access to the house?”

  “How was it you found me?”

  Jacob didn’t like people who answered questions with questions. They reminded him of his grade-school rabbis. “Look, Mr. Pernath—”

  “You want to talk to me, you can come here.”

  “A phone conversation would be fine,” Jacob said.

  “Not to me,” Pernath said, and he hung up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Fred Pernath lived on June Street, north of Beverly Boulevard, in a stately Georgian at odds with the Neutra-like stylings of Castle Court. Jacob did detect a certain similarity in the lack of upkeep. Every other home on the block had been landscaped, repainted, reroofed. Pernath’s gutters sagged; brown smeared the front lawn.

  One look at the man himself went a long way toward ruling him out as a suspect. He was pigeon-chested and emaciated, leaning on a cane whose tip squeaked against the hardwood as he beckoned Jacob in and hobbled off into the gloom.

  Like its exterior, the house’s overflowing interior stood in contrast to the emptiness of Castle Court. Jacob didn’t see any severed heads, but he might well have missed them, lost among the quivering electric sconces, the still lifes in carved gilt frames, the Chinese vases sprouting dusty silk flowers. Ornate, polished furniture impeded easy passage—reverse feng shui—every space remotely horizontal clustered with gewgaws.