The Golem of Hollywood

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Good for you, Patty.

  Jacob didn’t think it coincidental that the killers had next chosen to break pattern. By then the story was front-page news. They could no longer take stealth for granted.

  So while the first four murders had occurred between midnight and three a.m., Laura Lesser died around ten in the morning after coming off a graveyard shift at the VA. Sitting in her den in pajamas, watching television, eating breakfast.

  Jacob pictured her leaping up at the sight of two men.

  Dropping her grapefruit juice.

  A bowl of cereal had survived unscathed on the arm of the sofa.

  Howie O’Connor had diligently recorded that its contents had turned to mush.

  Alarmed by Laura’s absence at work, her best friend and coworker dropped by, peeking in windows when her knocks went unanswered. The house had a second bedroom Laura used as a walk-in closet; piles of shoes had been kicked aside to make space for her body.

  Shortly thereafter the city had gone into lockdown.

  Four months of peace.

  When the killers resumed, it was with a return to form, a nighttime break-in, gore and damage confined to Janet Stein’s bedroom.

  The following morning, Denise Stein let herself into the apartment with her duplicate key. She often crashed on her sister’s futon when things got rough for her at home. The two of them had made plans to go shopping for jeans; seeing the bedroom door closed, Denise assumed Janet to still be asleep. She helped herself to a Coke, waiting half an hour before growing impatient enough to enter without knocking.

  An already troubled young woman, walking into that.

  What the hell was he going to say to her?

  The seventh murder was mildly anomalous. Inez Delgado was the second victim whose body did not yield semen samples; her wrists showed no evidence of rope abrasions; and while she’d been found in her bedroom, the rest of her house had been trashed, too.

  Jacob’s initial impression was that she’d attempted to escape, knocking things over before fleeing back to the bedroom to try and lock herself inside.

  Differences in the wound and spatter patterns put the lie to this. Inez had been stabbed in the abdomen fifteen times, painting the bathroom with blood and bile. Smear marks ran from there, down the hall, to the foot of her bed, where the relative lack of pooling around her throat led the coroner to suggest that it had been slit postmortem.

  A need for consistency? Six cut throats demanded a seventh?

  Katherine Ann Clayton was missing for a week before an upstairs neighbor called the landlord to complain about a smell.

  Sherri Levesque, a single mother, had dropped her five-year-old at his grandparents’ for the weekend.

  Jacob’s coffee machine clicked on.

  Despite having worked through the night, despite having had minimal sleep in three days, he felt wired. That alarmed him; the only person he knew who could work uninterrupted for days on end was his mother, in the midst of a manic high.

  There was no blood test for bipolar. No definitive genetic marker.

  He tiptoed around folders and bottles to his bedroom and set an eight-thirty alarm.

  Stripping naked, he slid between tangled sheets, stared at the popcorn ceiling.

  Wide, wide, wide awake.

  He couldn’t disentangle how much of his agitation had to do with the crime scene photos, how much had to do with the physical side effects of being awake for so long, and how much stemmed from the anxiety of knowing he’d been awake for so long.

  He sat up. Time for a nightcap.

  Morningcap.

  Whatever works.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Denise and Janet Stein’s parents lived in Holmby Hills, their Dutch Colonial manse set back behind pittosporum hedges. Jacob rang the intercom. The maid came on to inform him that nobody was home.

  “Try the club.”

  He turned to face a woman with pink flotation-device lips, pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, a Yorkshire terrier on a pink leash with a pink Swarovski-studded collar.

  “They’re there every afternoon,” the woman said.

  The dog crouched to lay a turd on the Steins’ front lawn.

  “It’s Denise I’m looking for,” he said.

  The woman smiled abundantly. “I’m sure they can tell you where she is.”

  The club, it emerged, was the Greencrest Country Club, two miles west on Wilshire. Jacob thanked her. As he drove off, he glanced in his rearview, calculating what percentage of the woman was biodegradable and frowning to see that she’d left without picking up after her dog.

  —

  HIS BADGE COULDN’T GET him through the gate.

  He called Abe Teitelbaum.

  “Yakov Meir, my wayward boy. How are you?”

  “Hey, Abe. Still fighting the good fight. Yourself?”

  “Putting up no resistance whatsoever. And your father the lamed-vavnik?”

  “Anyone who thinks he’s a lamed-vavnik is by definition not a lamed-vavnik.”

  “I didn’t say he thinks it,” Abe said. “I think it. And I don’t think, I know. What gives?”

  Jacob conveyed his predicament.

  “Time me,” Abe said.

  While Jacob listened to hold music, he observed a remarkable change come over the fellow in the security booth. He reached lazily to answer the desk phone—then bolted from his chair, peering through the smoked glass, stricken with the fear of God.

  Jacob smiled and waved.

  At the count of eighty-one, the barrier arm went up.

  Abe came back on the line. “Am I having any effect?”

  “Like Moshe at the Red Sea,” Jacob said.

  “Peachy. Have a drink. Put it on my tab.”

  Greencrest had been founded by Jews denied membership in the city’s venerable gentile country clubs. Candids of studio founders and comedians bygone plastered the walls. Policies had eased up in the seventies, but the dining room retained a distinctly synagogue-y vibe, populated by unsomber men and women who laughed heartily, ate with gusto, dressed well. Like the oak coffering the ceiling, they showed evidence of polish applied and admirably reapplied.

  The manager who met Jacob at the door discreetly inclined his head toward a booth, where a woman in expensive knitwear sat drinking alone. “Please make it quick,” he said.

  Otherwise chicly made-up, Rhoda Stein had missed a spot at the base of her throat. The flamingo flush told Jacob that the colossal piña colada in front of her wasn’t her first of the day.

  She looked him up and down and said, “I gave at the office.”

  He smiled. “Jacob Lev, LAPD. May I?”

  She waved indifferently.

  He sat. “Is your husband around?”

  “Sauna. Sweating out the toxins.” Her swig left lipstick on the rim of the glass. “You must be new. I’ve never seen you before.”

  He nodded.

  “Younger every year, they get.” She dabbed her mouth with a starched napkin, leaving another smudge. “Well. What is it this time?”

  Jacob said, “It’s about Denise.”

  Rhoda Stein started visibly. “You mean Janet.”

  “Denise,” he said. “I need to get in touch with her.”

  She stared at him.

  From beyond a plate glass window, the plink of a driving range.

  He said, “I know you’ve gone through a lot. I can’t begin to imagine it. I want you to know that I’m a hundred percent committed to getting justice for Janet. And right now, the best way for you to help me achieve that is by helping me speak to Denise.”

  “I like that,” Rhoda Stein said. “‘Justice for Janet.’”

  He waited.

  “We started a foundation in her name. To promote literacy. Maybe we should’ve called it that instead. ‘J
ustice for Janet.’ Catchy. Not very optimistic, though. What do you think?”

  He said, “I think this must be difficult for you.”

  “How’d you get past the guard?”

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “Nor should it be,” she said. “That’s the point of a club: to keep the world out. Check your cares at the door, share a joke, a nice meal. Arturo makes a great piña colada, real fruit juice, not like some vulgar premixed resort swill. Care to try?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She drank, dabbed, said, “You want to talk to Denise.”

  “I’m curious to know what she’s been up to lately.”

  Rhoda nodded, nodded, kept nodding. She took another healthy swig and peered into her glass, sighing as though disappointed to find it half full.

  “Such a shame to waste it,” she said.

  She threw the drink in his face, dabbed her lips, dropped her napkin on the table, stood up, and tottered away.

  Jacob sat, stunned, his chin dripping.

  But not for long. In the storied history of the Greencrest Country Club, enough drinks had been thrown in enough faces that a protocol existed. Within ninety seconds, a phalanx of tuxedoed men advanced, waving rags. They wiped down the tabletop and seats, removed the offending glass, handed Jacob a clean napkin and a glass of seltzer for his shirt.

  As for the other club members, they’d seen it all before, too. They paused but briefly before returning to their eating and yakking.

  “Hey. Pal.”

  A wizened man in a cashmere blazer had taken the toothpick out of his mouth and was beckoning him toward a nearby booth.

  Jacob approached, mopping his neck.

  The man said, “Listen, kid, leave her alone, wouldja? She’s been through hell.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Jacob said. “I’m trying to help her.”

  The man’s lunch companion hunched behind amber sunglasses that reminded Jacob of his father’s. He said, “She’s heard that a million times.”

  “This is different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I need to talk to her daughter,” Jacob said.

  “Her daughter’s dead.”

  “Not that one. The other one.”

  The men exchanged a look. Moron.

  “Kid,” the first guy said, “they’re both dead.”

  The manager’s voice drifted from the lobby. Ask him to leave, please.

  Jacob said, “Shit.”

  The second guy nodded. “She hung herself a couple years back.”

  “Shit . . .”

  “Yeah,” the first guy said. “Shit.”

  Footsteps.

  “Excuse me,” Jacob said.

  He ducked out, jogging down a musty corridor that gave onto a breezeway. Signs pointed the way to the golf shop, fitness center, Founder’s Lounge. Rhoda Stein was nowhere to be seen.

  The smiling woman behind the fitness center desk handed him a sign-in sheet.

  He wrote Abe Teitelbaum. “Sauna?”

  “Basement level,” she said. “Enjoy.”

  Jacob trod carefully on the slick tile, averting his gaze from furred potbellies and pendulous scrota. Nobody—no body—younger than seventy. What would happen to the roster when the Greatest Generation died out? They’d have to start running promotional discounts.

  The sauna was deserted except for one man sitting motionless on the highest tier, head back, eyes closed, perspiration coursing down his torso while around him steam swirled and sank. He evoked some mountaintop Jewish Buddha.

  “Mr. Stein?” Jacob said.

  The guy didn’t open his eyes. “Yeah?”

  “Jacob Lev. I need to apologize to you.”

  “I forgive you.”

  “You haven’t heard what I had to say yet.”

  Stein shrugged. “Life’s too short for grudges.”

  Jacob’s shirt, already glued to his front with piña colada, was beginning to stick to his back with sweat. “I upset your wife.”

  Now Stein peered at him through the mist. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I—I made a serious mistake.”

  “What mistake.”

  Jacob hesitated, then told him.

  Stein burst out laughing. “That’s goddamned awful.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, listen: that’s more or less the worst thing I ever heard. And trust me, I’ve heard some winners. Did she take em?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “My wife. Your balls. Did she take em.”

  Jacob shook his head. “I guess I got lucky.”

  “You got that right, amigo,” Stein said. “So? Why’re you talking to me?”

  “I—”

  “Ahhhh I get it: you want to try and top yourself. Well, hunh. Dunno, I can’t think of anything. Lessee. Okay, how about, how bout this: ‘Hey, Eddie, Detective’—what is it, again?”

  “Lev.”

  “‘Detective Lev here. Good news, I got a lead on your daughters, turns out they’re both alive. Denise’s turning tricks at a truck stop in Barstow. And Janet, she works as a press secretary for Hezbollah. Just kidding, they’re still dead as Christ.’” Stein smiled. “How’d I do?”

  “Look—”

  “Don’t spare my feelings. Be honest. One to ten.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I really am. I feel like an asshole—”

  “Trust that feeling.”

  “—but your wife ran off before I could say anything, and I don’t know where she went.”

  “That’s easy,” Stein said. “To get a refill.”

  Jacob said, “I just want to tell her I’m sorry.”

  Eddie Stein wiped his face and stood up. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Standing before an open locker, Stein said, “Don’t let me catch you ogling my manhood. Jealousy’s a negative emotion.”

  “No, sir.”

  “People have been known to try. Its reputation precedes it. Although,” Stein said, toweling his stomach, “come to think, I can’t say anything precedes it. It’s always the first one in the room.”

  Now Jacob really did want to look. Stein wasn’t lying.

  “Don’t think I don’t see you, Lev.”

  Jacob faced the opposite wall.

  “Mind if I ask what you want with my dead kid?”

  Jacob made a judgment call. “We found one of the guys.”

  Behind him, the whisk of terry cloth on flesh cut off. “Found who?”

  “One of the guys who killed Janet. He’s dead.”

  Silence. Jacob worried that he’d given Stein a coronary. “I’m going to turn around,” he said. “You can cover up.”

  But Eddie didn’t cover up. He was standing with the limp towel in his limp hand, his face streaming to match his still-streaming chest.

  Jacob said, “Do you need a doctor?”

  “No, you schmuck, I need a tissue.”

  Jacob pulled one from the dispenser. “I’m sorry to tell you like this.”

  “Sorry? What the fuck are you sorry for? That’s the best news I heard since the little blue pill went generic.” He looked at Jacob. “He’s dead? What happened to him?”

  “Somebody cut his head off,” Jacob said.

  Eddie barked a laugh. “Fantastic. Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eddie nodded musingly. Then he seemed to recall that he was naked and pulled the towel around his waist. “I said no peeksies and I meant it. Go wait in the hall.”

  A few minutes later he emerged in fitted plaid slacks, a bright blue Izod shirt, and cream-colored calfskin loafers. His white hair was gelled back to his scalp.

  “Tell me if I’m reading this correctly,” he said, punching the elevator butt
on. “You found this son of a bitch with his head chopped off and you got to thinking Denise did it.”

  “I wanted to talk to her,” Jacob said feebly.

  “And I’m Alfred, Lord Tennyson.” Stein shook his head. “Well, based on my extensive experience with LAPD, you’re par for the course. Par being retarded.”

  The elevator juddered, dinged, opened on the manager flanked by two security guards.

  “Sir, you’ll have to please come with us.”

  “Shut up,” Eddie said, pushing through the men as through a bead curtain. “He’s my guest.”

  —

  THEY FOUND RHODA in the main building, at the second-floor bar, a new drink in front of her. Nearly empty.

  “Do I know my wife or what,” Eddie said.

  She saw them approaching and flagged the bartender, pointing to her cocktail. “Another,” she said. “Make it thick.”

  “Hang on, Arturo,” Eddie said. To Jacob: “Tell her.”

  Jacob told her.

  She didn’t cry. She didn’t react at all. She said, “Arturo. I’m getting thirsty.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “I apologize,” Jacob said. “From the bottom of my heart.”

  Rhoda nodded once.

  “Who told you Denise was alive?” Eddie asked.

  “I went to your house,” Jacob said. “I talked to a woman.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Big lips. Tracksuit. Dog on a pink leash.”

  “Nancy,” Rhoda said.

  “I thought she was your neighbor,” Jacob said.

  “She is,” Eddie said. “She’s also Queen of the Cunts.”

  Rhoda clucked her tongue. “She claims we blocked her view when we added on.”

  “View of what?”

  “Exactly,” Rhoda said.

  A silence.

  Eddie said, “I don’t know what else we can tell you, Detective. But you find out who did it, you let me know. I want to send him a Rosh Hashana card.”

  Rounding the top of the stairs, Jacob saw the two of them huddled together, their arms around each other, two soft old bodies trembling. Laughing or crying, it was impossible to tell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO