The Golem of Hollywood

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Some folks around here seem to think that Reggie was involved in her death.”

  “Only a fool believes everything he’s told.”

  “That’s a no, then.”

  “I don’t reckon I like the way you’re talking to me,” Heap said. “You inform me my son has been murdered, and in the next breath you’re regurgitating slander for which not a single shred of evidence has ever been produced.”

  Now he wanted to claim him as his son? “I apologize. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You upset me insofar as your willingness to accept the conjectures of imbeciles as fact demonstrates you to be easily misled. You said he was found in Prague. Why are you here? Why am I talking to an American? Was there nobody else available? Has it truly come to this?”

  “Help set me straight,” Jacob said.

  “Pearls before swine,” Heap said.

  “You don’t know where he was traveling.”

  “I told you, no.”

  “But he was traveling a lot.”

  “I suppose,” Heap said.

  “With what money?”

  “Helen laid aside a sum for him to collect on the first of every month. Mind you, that didn’t stop him from ringing me up on the fifteenth, groveling for more.”

  “Did the money go into his bank account?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Which bank?”

  “Barclay’s. What business is it of yours?”

  “I could contact them and find out where the withdrawals were made.”

  “Why are you so concerned with where he’s been? You know where he was murdered. Go there.”

  “You mentioned a job—”

  “I don’t believe I did. As a matter of fact, I was quite clear that there was none.”

  “You said he played office boy.”

  “I refuse to dignify that as more than it was: a cheap stalling tactic.”

  “Be that as it may, I’d like to know who he worked for, and where.”

  “An architect,” Heap said. “A former tutor of his at school.”

  “Name?”

  “James, George, something royal. The selfsame worthless poofter who had years earlier convinced him to lay aside his studies and take up doodling.”

  “It was my impression that Reggie had some talent as an artist.”

  A glimmer of pride; it rapidly curdled. “So said my wife.”

  Jacob indicated the framed certificate. “At least a couple others must’ve agreed.”

  “Ah yes, achievement of a lifetime, as he’d have you believe. And never let her forget it, whenever he ran short of dosh.”

  “Do you have any of his work?”

  “Connoisseur of the finer things, are we?”

  “Humor me.”

  “That’s all I’ve bloody done for the last half hour,” Heap said. He nosed at the bed. “Under there.”

  Jacob knelt and drew out a pair of portfolio boxes, along with a bag of stubby charcoals, some fine-tipped artist’s pens, a sketch pad.

  He opened the first box on the bed.

  Heavy, creamy paper carried ink beautifully, maintaining the surgical crispness of Reggie Heap’s vision.

  He could draw. No doubt about that. There were the aforementioned bowls of fruit; stark countryside landscapes. They had a mechanical quality, like photographic tracings.

  “Hung them all over the house, she did,” Heap said. “I took them down, I couldn’t stand to look at them.”

  Most of the drawings were signed and dated; they had been thrown together without regard for chronology. Jacob saw work as recent as 2006 and as old as 1983.

  “You kept them,” he said.

  “To get rid of them would have required effort.”

  “More effort than taking them down and putting them in boxes?”

  “What’s your damned point.”

  That you were prouder of him than you want to admit. Which is both endearing and disturbing. “Which one did he win the prize for?”

  “None of these. The bloody Art Society kept it. Helen offered them a thousand pounds but they said it was the terms of the competition.”

  The art got more interesting with the second box, which contained nude studies and facial portraits. The women were arrestingly frenzied, Reggie’s id outstripping his hand. Jacob could virtually hear the panting that had accompanied their creation.

  By contrast, the men were controlled, heroic, formidable.

  “Recognize any of these people?” Jacob said. “Anyone I could talk to?”

  “I presume they were his friends.”

  “From?”

  “I don’t bloody know. Doodlers. Reprobates.”

  “Did he mention anyone by name?”

  “If he had, I would have labored to forget them.”

  “Girlfriends?”

  Heap snorted.

  “I ask because I’m trying to find out what kind of people he was associating with.”

  “Not the kind who’d kill him,” Heap said.

  You’d be surprised.

  Two-thirds of the way through, Jacob stopped and flipped back several pages.

  He’d nearly missed it.

  He wasn’t paying attention. He was thinking about the nudes and what they said about Reggie’s relationship to women.

  He was thinking about his own father’s visage in clay, his mother’s hands working.

  The intervening years had also done their part: the drawing was dated December 1986.

  He was trying to avoid concocting imaginary connections. Above all, he was trying to stay clearheaded and do his job.

  Yes. The job.

  And here was the payoff.

  Jacob flipped slowly to the next page. There it was again. And again. What he had mistaken for a careless mark repeated itself on five consecutive pages—a scar on the chin.

  Five angles.

  The same man.

  Mr. Head.

  Through static, he heard Heap say, “That’s one of them.”

  “Who.”

  “The doodlers. He came to stay a Christmas. Helen’s idea.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A school friend. Buggered if I can remember his name.”

  Jacob said, “Can I borrow these?”

  Heap stared at him. “He’s the one that you’re after.”

  “I don’t know,” Jacob said. “But it’d be helpful if I could find out.”

  Heap snatched up a few of the drawings, flung them at Jacob. “The rest of them you can put back where you found.” He turned to go. “Ten minutes. Then off with you, or I’ll summon the police and have you arrested for trespassing.”

  Jacob carefully rolled up the drawings of Mr. Head, securing them with a rubber band he found in the desk. He cleared the rest of the mess off the bed, then poked his head into the hallway.

  Hearing movement from a lower floor, he hurried to search the bureau, looking for old socks or underwear, anything that might cough up a piece of DNA.

  Zip.

  Downstairs, a gigantic boom, followed by crumbling plaster.

  Exit music.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  He arrived in Oxford too late for anything but a chip shop dinner. Outside, roving packs of townies warbled football anthems and amiably chucked bottles at undergraduates.

  The Black Swan hostel had no private rooms. Jacob opted to share a triple, taking care not to wake his roommates, a pair of backpackers, asleep with their arms around their bags, proxy lovers made of ripstop nylon.

  He stashed his own bag under his bed, removing first his passport and the drawings of Mr. Head.

  Downstairs in the common room, smelly, dented beanbag chairs surrounded an abandoned game of Scrabble. A German neo-hippie covered “T
ouch of Grey” on a pawnshop guitar while his inamorata attempted to retighten her electric-blue cornrows, a hand mirror clamped between her knees.

  In an act of divine benevolence, the front desk adjoined a fully stocked bar.

  Armed with his seventh pint of the day and an Internet passcode, Jacob swung by the wire rack to take a street map, then sat down at the computer kiosk.

  There were fewer than a dozen local architects. Of those, four were women. Of the men, two had vaguely kingly names: Charles MacIldowney and John Russell Nance. He clicked on Nance’s CV first, assuming John was more readily confused with James. But it was Mac-Ildowney—BArch (Manc.), DPhil (Oxon.), RIBA—who had lectured in the history of architecture at Oxford. Jacob marked the location of his office on the map.

  The song ended.

  Jacob applauded.

  The hippie smiled drowsily and raised a V.

  After mapping a few more stops, Jacob set aside the mouse pad and spread out the drawings.

  Mr. Head, in the prime of life. A fellow artist. A fellow traveler.

  Meeting Reggie Heap.

  Discovering a common interest.

  Really. You don’t say.

  Okay, okay, but:

  Tell me:

  Rape.

  Front?

  Back?

  Which do you prefer?

  Back?

  Really.

  How convenient.

  Because it just so happens that I am, one hundred percent, a front man.

  Heap and Head!

  World’s worst buddy sitcom. He could picture the logo, the p and d spinning, a delirious visual pun.

  The timeline fit. Reggie, born in 1966, would’ve graduated in 1987 or 1988.

  What brought a pair of Englishmen to L.A.?

  Had they been all around this great big world and seen all kinds of girls?

  Did they wish they all could be California girls?

  Or: Mr. Head wasn’t English. A visiting student; an exchange program.

  Cream of our crop in return for yours. Reinforce the Special Relationship.

  Inviting Reggie back to the States to continue their collaboration.

  You’re gonna love the weather.

  Reggie, appealing to his generous mother for a graduation present.

  There’s this amazing program . . .

  The unique synergy of two lesser malignancies—each man validating and goading the other, twisting him into something exponentially worse.

  The Lennon and McCartney of evil.

  The long hiatus—what accounted for it? Jacob could not connect either man, either directly or implicitly, to any crimes between 1988 and 2005, when Dani Forrester bled out in her overfinanced condo.

  And there was a wider world to wonder about. What mischief had Heap the Younger wrought while out broadening his horizons?

  What about New York? Miami? New Orleans?

  How long had they been at it?

  Like artists, psychopaths were temperamental.

  Collaborations of either kind rarely lasted a lifetime or spanned the globe.

  Heap and Head could’ve started out as partners before venturing into side projects.

  Side projects that had blossomed into full-fledged solo careers?

  Then: once a year, a hop across the pond, get the band back together?

  Heap and Head: the U.S. Reunion Tour!

  The Las Vegas Strip . . . Bourbon Street . . .

  And coming soon to a ground-floor apartment near you!

  He shuddered to think of the shower of red tape triggered by requesting a copy of Reggie’s passport.

  It felt wonderful to have facts, however few, at his disposal. He quashed his excitement, as concerned with controlling the fluctuations in his mood as he was with making a mistake.

  Let’s not get a Head of ourselves, mmmmmmmm?

  Even if he did definitively ID H&H as the Creeper, that still left open the question of who’d killed them. They couldn’t very well have decapitated each other, separated by twelve months and six thousand miles.

  Psychopath vs. Psychopath was out.

  Vengeful party looking better by the minute.

  But: how did VP know?

  How did he (she) find them?

  Whose voice on the tape?

  How did it fit with Special Projects?

  It was 2:13 a.m. The hippies had passed out and were sawing wood. Jacob went upstairs. For the first time in a long time, his dreams were in full color.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  With a decent night’s sleep under his belt, he had gained some mental traction. In the hostel’s cafeteria he loaded up a tray with meats ’n’ grease and sequestered himself at the end of the communal table, away from a gaggle of Canadians chirping over their idealized itinerary: punting on the Thames, followed by lunch at an authentic pub, Blackwell’s Literary Walking Tour, a visit to the Bodleian . . .

  Jacob’s own itinerary was themed Rational Cop. First stop: the Thames Valley Police’s St. Aldates station.

  He meandered along the river path under the caress of willow trees. Waterfowl busy in the marsh grass rose up at his approach to demand bread in shrill addict’s tones. He spotted a narrow red streak across gray water: a boat, eight oarsmen, a coxswain politely urging them toward the bridge.

  The station was decidedly inconspicuous, three tan stories that played down the possibility of crime in a town so picturesque. If not for a modest white sign and two glass cases containing bulletin boards with information about community watch, he could have been walking into the registrar’s office.

  The constable on duty jotted down Jacob’s badge number and led him to a cheerless conference room.

  In five minutes, he’d finished his tea; after twenty, he stood up to wait in the hallway. He assumed the locals were establishing his bona fides with LAPD. He could speed up the process by giving them a direct number.

  Mallick? Or his ex-boss at Traffic, Captain Chen?

  Who was less likely to make Jacob sound like an imposter?

  He hadn’t yet decided when a woman with a pert blond bob appeared.

  “Good morning, Detective. Inspector Norton.”

  “Good morning. Everything check out?”

  A flicker of a smile. “To what do we owe the privilege of your visit?”

  He showed her the photos he’d taken of young Reggie Heap; showed her the drawing of Mr. Head; told her, in general terms, what he wanted: local homicides, unsolved, 1983ish to 1988. Bonus points if they fit the Creeper MO.

  “It doesn’t have to match up in every respect. The method could have evolved.”

  “That’s well before my time, sir.”

  “Of course,” he said. “You’re far, far too young to have firsthand knowledge.”

  “Of course I am. In 1983, I was a mere child.”

  “I can’t imagine you were even born then.”

  “It’s possible I was. Not much before, of course.”

  “Of course not. Might there be someone else? A wise elder?”

  She said, “Let’s try Branch.”

  Branch was about fifty, with a shaven scalp and a toothbrush mustache. He recognized neither the drawing nor the name Reggie Heap.

  “He was a student,” Jacob said.

  “Those days, the university had their own force,” Branch said. “The Bulldogs.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “They were disbanded for budgetary reasons,” Norton said. “Ten years ago, roughly.”

  “Any of them still around?”

  “Sure,” Branch said. “Good luck getting em to talk to you.”

  “What you’d expect,” Norton said, “given the university’s standing as an incubator of only the nation’s finest young men and women.”


  Jacob said, “I’d expect a tendency to keep problems in-house.”

  “You’d expect correctly, sir.”

  “Still, is there someone you could contact on my behalf?”

  Branch shook his head. “Won’t matter.”

  “What you’d expect in a locality such as ours,” Norton said, “notorious for its lengthy history of town-gown conflict.”

  “Departmental bad blood,” Jacob said.

  “Once again, Detective, your expectations prove exceedingly reasonable.”

  “I’ll put my brain to it,” Branch said. “Whatever that’s worth.”

  That sounded like lip service, but Jacob thanked him anyway.

  Norton accompanied him to the street.

  “Sorry we couldn’t be more helpful.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Shame,” she said. “I’d have thought Branch would be more enthusiastic. It’s not every day we get someone dropping round about a murder.” She paused. “Though I will say, we’re quite good at breaking up raves.”

  He smiled.

  She said, “May I ask how you plan to proceed?”

  “Identify the architect. Go to his college. Maybe someone remembers him.”

  “And if that line of inquiry fails to bear fruit?”

  “There’s always punting on the Thames,” he said. “Inspector Norton?”

  “Yes, Detective Lev?”

  “I expect that you, with local policing authority, would command more respect than I would, and furthermore, since I don’t see any raves in progress, I expect that you might be interested in accompanying me on my rounds, after which I expect that you’d enjoy lunch, gratis, courtesy of LAPD.”

  She hooked her hair behind her ears. “Detective Lev, your expectations grow more lofty by the moment.”

  “Inspector Norton, that’s the American way.”

  —

  IT WAS A BRIEF STROLL down St. Aldates to Christ Church. Spring rain had brought a lively resurgence of the meadows. At mid-morning, the joggers were mostly gone and the picnickers not yet arrived.

  Norton’s first name was Priscilla. She asked where he was staying.

  “YHA, near the train station.”

  “How delightful.”

  “Don’t knock it. Fifteen pounds includes a full English breakfast.”

  “Good God, what a nightmare.”