by Twisted
His mother kept an immaculate flat and his building was no worse than any others in the neighborhood. But bad enough. Sometimes homeless guys wandered in and used the entry hall for a toilet. When Isaac walked the squeaky stairs up to his family’s third-floor space, he avoided touching the brown-painted handrail. Painted so often, it felt gelatinous. Sometimes it was gelatinous. Wads of gum stuck to the wood. And worse.
For a brief time, as an undergrad, his head filled with biology and organic chemistry, he’d taken to wearing plastic gloves when entering the building. Careful to shed and hide them before entering Mama’s domain.
The noise, the smells. Generally, he could shut it all out.
This morning, leaving for campus, he’d noticed that the front facade was looking especially shabby.
Most nights, he could forget all that, let his mind drift to the stately trees and brick loveliness of USC, the old-paper fragrance of Doheny Library.
His other life.
The life he’d have one day. Maybe.
Who was he kidding? Petra was smart, she had to know the Gomez family didn’t live in a mansion.
Still, there was something about her actually seeing his home base that repelled him.
So he walked.
A quick right turn at the late-night liquor store favored by old winos, then down dark side streets, past alleys, the usual sprinkle of lolling street people and addicts.
Passive in their misery. A few of them, he talked to. Sometimes he gave them lunch leftovers. Mom always packed too much anyway.
Mostly he ignored them and they returned the favor.
He’d been doing it for years, never had a problem.
Tonight he had a problem.
He was unaware of them till they started laughing.
A hoarse, high-pitched hooting, behind him. Close behind. When had they started following him? Had he been that spaced-out?
Lost in thought: Marta Doebbler. Kurt Doebbler.
June 28 getting closer.
Petra. Those dark eyes. The way she’d taken on that enormous steak. Attacking it . . . slender hands, but strong. Aggressive in such a feminine way.
More laughter behind him. Closer. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw them clearly as they passed under a streetlamp.
Three of them. A loose-limbed, giggly entourage, maybe twenty feet from his back.
Chattering. Pointing and bumping into one another. Laughing some more. Mexican-accented Spanish interspersed with rude English “Fuck,” the operative word—the all-purpose noun/verb/adjective.
He picked up his pace, hazarded another quick look back.
From the round outlines of their heads, shaved domes. Not tall. Baggy clothes.
One of them drove a fist toward the sky and howled. Soprano howl, like a girl.
Maybe it had nothing to do with him. Maybe they just happened to be walking the same street.
They shuffled and bumped into one another some more. Young voices. Slurred. Punk kids. High on something.
Two more blocks till home. He turned.
They stayed with him.
He walked faster.
One of them shouted, “Yo. Maricon.”
Branding him queer.
All these years, despite the rotten neighborhood, he’d never had to deal with this before. Generally, he was home by eight. But tonight it was well after ten. He and Petra had returned to the station late and he’d hung around some more. Pretending not to pay attention as she worked at her desk.
Pretending to work, himself. Just wanting to be there. For the ambience.
Petra.
The day had shot by so quickly. Tagging along, observing her, listening. Picking up the nuances of detective work, the things no book could communicate. Offering opinions when she asked—and she’d asked a lot more frequently than he’d expected.
Was she just being nice to him or did she really think he had something to offer?
It had to be the latter; Petra didn’t suffer fools.
“Yo, you, maricon—hey faggot, whuh time izzit?”
Isaac kept walking.
One more block.
Dinner, dessert, espresso—he’d never had coffee like that. Even the Faculty Club, when Dr. Gompertz sometimes treated him to lunch, didn’t have coffee like that.
“Hey, you, puto, why you move you ass so fast?”
He began to jog and heard them shouting and whooping and running after him. He picked up speed, was drenched by a sudden, clammy, full-body sweat.
Thank God Petra wasn’t here to see this.
Something hit him from behind, low in his back. Hard boot to the kidneys. Pain shot through him, he buckled yet managed to stay on his feet, but his rhythm had been disrupted, and by the time his legs were ready to move someone was yanking at his briefcase.
His notes. His laptop. He held on but another hand clawed at his neck and as he stepped away from the blow, the case flew out of his hand.
The clasp opened, papers scattered. The computer, heavy, remained inside.
His handwritten calculations lay static, in the curb. Pages of multiple regression analyses of subethnic populations in high-crime regions. He hadn’t had time to enter any of it into his hard drive, stupid stupid! If he lost it, it meant hours down the—
A fist—hard, sharp knuckles—grazed the side of his head. He teetered and tripped backward.
Regained his balance and backed away and faced them.
Even younger than he’d thought. Fourteen, fifteen. Small, ghetto-stunted kids, two skinny, one a bit chunky. Same age as cousin Samuelito. But Sammy was a good, churchgoing boy and these three were shaved-head, baggy-pants scum.
The fact that they were kids was meager comfort. Adolescents could be the most dangerous sociopaths. Poor impulse control, insufficiently developed conscience. He’d read that if you didn’t change their behavior by twelve . . .
They were surrounding him, a trio of malignant dwarfs shuffling and cursing and giggling. He moved, trying to keep his back clear. The spot on his cheek where he’d been punched smarted and grew hot.
The heaviest of the three planted his feet and held up his fists. Small hands and knuckles. Like something out of Oliver Twist.
A night breeze coursed through the street and sheets of calculations billowed.
The heaviest one said, “Gimme your fuckin’ mawney, puto.” Nasal, barely pubescent voice.
Individually, he could pound each of them to oblivion. But together . . . as he weighed his alternatives, one of the others, the smallest, flicked his wrist and flashed something metallic.
Oh God, a gun?
No, a knife. Flat in an open palm. The kid rotated his hand in small arcs. “I cut you, puto.”
Isaac backed away some more. Another gust of breeze; one of his sheets blew a few feet up the block.
The heaviest one said, “Gimme the fuckin’ mawney you wanna fuckin’ get cut?” His voice squeaked and cracked.
Gutted by an idiot with no pubic hair . . . the little one with the blade danced closer. Stepped into the light and Isaac saw the weapon clearly. Pocketknife, cheap thing, dark plastic handle, maybe a two-inch fold-out blade. The kid’s wrist was thin, fragile. He smelled bad, all three of them did. Unwashed clothes and weed and jumbled hormones.
Jumpy little sociopaths. Not a good situation. The thought of that stupid little blade entering his flesh enraged him.
He drew out his LAPD authorized visitors badge and said, “Police, assholes. You walked right into a stakeout.”
Hoping they watched TV. Hoping they were that stupid.
A nanosecond of silence.
A hoarse “Huh?”
“Police, motherfuckers,” he repeated, louder, reaching down in his chest to produce his lowest baritone growl. Reaching into another pocket, he drew out his pen case because it was dark and around the right size. He pressed it to his mouth, said, “This is Officer Gomez calling for backup. I’ve got three juvenile two-eleven suspects. Probable narcotics violation as
well. I’ll hold them here.”
“Fuck,” said the heavy one, sounding breathless.
Isaac realized he hadn’t even called in an address. Could they be that stupid?
Skinny looked at his knife. Grim little urchin face. Deliberating.
The second one, the one who hadn’t spoken or done anything, edged away.
Isaac said, “Where you going, shit-face?”
The kid took off and ran.
And then there were two. Better odds. Even with the blade he might be able to escape with just a flesh wound.
Chunky was bouncing on his feet. Skinny had edged back but made no move to leave. The dangerous one, not enough fear in his chemistry. And he had to be the one with the knife.
That was why he had the knife.
Isaac brought out his pen case again. Held it this time, in an outstretched arm. Walked toward Skinny pointing the stupid thing and ordered, “Drop that fucking nail-file, junior, and get the fuck down on the ground before I shoot your ass. Do it!”
Chunky turned heel and ran.
Skinny kept contemplating the odds. Threw the knife at Isaac.
The blade whizzed by his face, just short of his left eye.
He said, “You’re toast, motherfucker,” and the kid bolted.
He stood there in the silence. Putrid silence; they’d left behind their stink.
Waiting until he was sure they were gone before he began breathing normally. He went to retrieve his briefcase. Collected the errant paper, stuffed the rest of it back in. Then he sprinted the block to his building, ran around to the side, chest tight, stomach churning, chilled by the post-adrenaline shakes.
He leaned against the stucco, feet ankle-high in the weeds that grew there. Dry-heaving, he thought that would be it.
It wasn’t. He vomited until the bile burned his throat.
When all his dinner was gone, he spit and headed toward his building.
Tomorrow, before he took the bus to the Hollywood station, he’d visit Jaramillo.
Once upon a time, before the Burton Academy, before all the strange, wondrous, terrifying turns his life had taken, he and Jaramillo had been friends.
Maybe that would count for something.
CHAPTER
17
Kurt Doebbler’s weirdness stuck in Petra’s head and after a few more days of nothing on Paradiso, she found herself thinking about him.
It was just after noon; no sign of Isaac.
No word from Eric. And the mellow-voiced Dr. Robert Katzman hadn’t called her back.
Why hadn’t Doebbler complained about Ballou’s drunken incompetence?
The more she thought about how shoddily the case had been worked, the less confident she felt about the integrity of the original file.
Like the blood scraped from Marta Doebbler’s car—O negative. And Doebbler was O positive. According to Ballou.
How much was that worth?
She paged through the file, finally found a note of the sample in a small-print coroner’s addendum.
She decided to track it down.
The coroner’s clerk was sure he had it. Till he didn’t. He transferred her to a coroner’s investigator, a young-sounding guy named Ballard.
“Hmm,” he said. “I guess it could be in the bio division of your evidence room. Over at Parker.”
My evidence room.
Petra said, “You guess.”
“Well,” said Ballard, “it’s not marked as leaving here, but it’s not here, so it must’ve gone somewhere, right?”
“Unless it’s lost.”
“For your sake, I hope it isn’t. Parker had some evidence problems a while back, remember? Lost samples, spoilage.”
She hadn’t heard about that. Yet another snafu that had somehow evaded the evening news.
“Anywhere else it could be?” she said.
“Can’t think of any. Unless it was sent up to Cellmark for DNA analysis. But even then, we’d keep some here and mail them a sample. Unless there wasn’t enough to be divided up—yeah, that could be it . . . okay, here it is. Two centimeters by one and a half. That’s about three-quarters of an inch by half an inch. Says here it was attached to a square of vinyl auto upholstery. Meaning it was thin, all we probably got were a few flakes. I guess it’s possible Cellmark got the whole thing. Why do you want it?”
“For fun,” she said, and hung up and phoned Sacramento.
The Department of Justice lab had no record of receiving any bio sample from Marta Doebbler’s murder. Parker Center’s Evidence Room hadn’t logged it in.
Big-time screw-up, but get anyone to admit it.
Time to take a closer look at the other June murders.
In Geraldo Solis’s murder book she found an interesting notation by Detective Jack Hustaad: According to Solis’s daughter, the old man had been expecting a cable repairman the day he’d been bludgeoned.
No sign Hustaad had followed up.
She phoned Wilshire Division and learned that, unlike the Hollywood cases, Solis had been transferred after Hustaad’s suicide. But not until two years after the murder had gone down. Hustaad must’ve held on to the file all that time, including a three-month lapse between his medical leave for cancer treatment and his suicide. A week after Hustaad’s funeral, Solis had been passed to a DI named Scott Weber.
Weber was still at Wilshire and Petra reached him at his desk.
He said, “I never got anywhere on it. How come you’re asking?”
She told him about a possible cold-case similarity, talked about the wound pattern on Marta Doebbler, made no mention of the other murders or June 28. Weber wanted to hear more but when she gave him a few details, he lost interest.
“Don’t see any match,” he said. “People get hit on the head.”
Not that often fatally. According to my expert.
“True,” she said.
“What do you figure for the weapon on yours?”
“Some kind of pipe.”
“Same here,” said Weber. “Any physical evidence on yours?”
Just a missing blood sample. “Not so far.”
Why was she being evasive with another detective? Because she still wasn’t comfortable with all this.
“Anyway,” said Weber.
“One question. There was a note about a cable repairman—”
“You have a copy of the file?”
“One of our interns, doing research, pulled it and made a copy.”
“From here?” said Weber.
“I think from the duplicate at Parker.”
“Oh . . . yeah, it could be duped, being cold and all that.”
“The cable call,” she prompted.
“There was a cable call on yours?” said Weber.
“No, I was just wondering if that led anywhere, but obviously—”
“You’re wondering if I followed up on it.” Weber laughed, but the sound wasn’t friendly. “I did. Even though it was two freakin’ years later. Solis’s cable company had no record of any visit. I talked to the daughter, turns out she maybe remembered something about the old man maybe saying something. Turns out no one saw any cable truck near the house. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Petra. “Sorry if I—”
“I couldn’t get anywhere on it,” said Weber. “It’s in the icebox.”
No cable appointment. Did that mean a phony call had led Geraldo Solis to expect a visitor? If so, that could be a match to the phone booth call that had lured Marta Doebbler from the theater.
Cable appointment at midnight?
Petra recalled an incident in her own life that had spooked her. Two years ago, in the midst of a one-week vacation, a doorbell ring at eleven P.M. had jolted her out of bed. Some joker claiming to be a UPS deliveryman. She’d told him to go away, he’d persisted, said he needed a signature on a package. She’d grabbed her gun, tossed on a robe, and cracked the door. Found a haggard, brown-clad zombie. Actual UPS guy, with an actual package. Cookies from one of her sisters-in-
law.
“Running late,” he’d explained. Twitching and tapping his foot. Not even noticing the nine-millimeter held down against her right flank.
She knew delivery services put their drivers under pressure but this guy looked ready to blow.
So it was possible. A bad guy calls Geraldo Solis with the cable story, shows up late, Solis opens his door. No cable truck in the neighborhood didn’t mean a thing. At that hour, in Solis’s quiet, residential neighborhood, who’d be looking?
Geraldo Solis’s daughter’s address and phone number were duly listed in the murder book. Maria Solis Murphy, age thirty-nine, Covina. A DMV check put her current residence in the city. Right here in Hollywood, Russell Street off Los Feliz.
Her work number matched an extension for Food Services at Kaiser Permanente Hospital. Also Hollywood, an easy stroll from Russell.
She was on shift, came to the phone, arranged to meet Petra in front of the hospital in twenty minutes. By the time Petra arrived, she was there.
Hard-body type, pretty, with very short dark hair tipped blond, wearing a pale blue dress, white socks, and tennies. Three filament hoops in one ear, a diamond chip and a gold stud in the other. Tattoo of a rose on her left ankle. Kind of punk for a woman of nearly forty—a woman with a gold wedding band on her ring finger—but Maria Murphy had an unlined face and an aerobic bounce in her step. Put her in the right duds and she could’ve passed for mid-twenties.
Her badge said M. Murphy, MS, Registered Dietician. Very hard body. Boyish hips. The benefits of vitamins?
She said, “Detective?” in a husky voice.
“Ms. Murphy.”
“If you don’t mind, I could use a little stretch. Been kind of cooped up.”
They walked west on Sunset, past the hospital, fast-food joints, the prosthetic outfitters, after-care specialists, and linen suppliers that attach themselves to hospitals. Western Peds, where Sandra Leon had been treated for leukemia, was a couple of blocks east. What was with that doctor, Katzman.
Maria Murphy said, “I’m very grateful you’re reopening my dad’s case.”
“It’s not exactly like that, Ms. Murphy. I’m a Hollywood detective and I picked up a case that could conceivably bear some similarities to your father’s. But it’s not a dramatic match—we’re talking small details, ma’am.”
