Double Homicide

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Somewhere along the way, his father had changed, but Darrel’s army-brat upbringing stuck with him. Give him a burger and plain old fries in politically neutral surroundings.

  Katz reached dispatch. The office had been moved out of Santa Fe PD to the county building on Highway 14—police, fire, city, county, everything integrated—and most of the dispatchers were no longer familiar voices. But this time was different: Katz smiled and said, “Hey, Loretta, what’s up?”

  Then his face grew serious, and the big copper-wire mustache drooped. “Oh . . . Yeah, sure . . . Where? . . . You’re kidding.”

  He hung up. “Guess what, Big D?”

  Darrel chomped on his burger, swallowed. “Serial killer.”

  “Half correct,” said Katz. “Just a killer. Blunt-force homicide on Canyon.”

  Canyon Road was very high-rent, just east of the Plaza in the Historic District, a narrow, leafy, quiet, pretty place lined with gated compounds and galleries and expensive cafés. The hub of Santa Fe’s art scene.

  Darrel’s pulse rate quickened from forty to fifty. “Private residence, right? Not a gallery at this hour.”

  “Oh, a gallery, amigo,” said Katz, standing and sliding into the ratty gray coat. “Very much a gallery. The d.b.’s Larry Olafson.”

  2

  Hands encased in buckskin gloves, Two Moons drove, gripping the wheel as the car coasted down Paseo de Peralta, the main street that horseshoed around the city center. Snowdrifts lay across the piñon branches and juniper brush, but the road was clear. It was three weeks before Christmas, and the farolitos with their muted sepia candlelight rested on rooftops all over the town. As usual, the trees in the Plaza had been strung with multicolored lights. Still plenty of time, Darrel figured, to head over to the outlets and buy presents for Kristin and the girls—if he could ever get some time off.

  And now this.

  Of all people.

  Lawrence Leonard Olafson had hit Santa Fe ten years ago like one of those sudden summer storms that shatter the sky in midafternoon and turn the desert air electric.

  Unlike a summer downpour, Olafson had stuck around.

  The son of a teacher and a bookkeeper, he’d attended Princeton on scholarship, graduated with a BA in finance and a minor in art history, and surprised everyone by eschewing Wall Street. Instead, he’d taken an entry-level scut job at Sotheby’s—gofering for a haughty American Paintings specialist. Learning what sold and what didn’t, learning that art collecting could be a disease for some, a pathetic attempt to social-climb for others. Kissing butt and fetching coffee and making the right kind of friends and moving up quickly. Three years later, he was department head. A year after that, he negotiated a better deal at Christie’s and took a bevy of rich clients with him. Another eighteen months and he was managing a white-glove gallery on upper Madison, selling European as well as American. Cementing more connections.

  By age thirty, he owned his own place in the Fuller Building on West 57th, a high-ceilinged, softly lit vault where he peddled Sargents and Hassams and Friesekes and Heades and third-rate Flemish florals to Old Money and Slightly Newer Money Pretending to Be Old Money.

  Within three years, he’d opened his second venture: Olafson South, on 21st Street in Chelsea, heralded by a soiree covered in the Voice. Lou Reed music, sunken-eyed Euro-trash, prep school arrivistes, and neo-moneyed dot-commers vying for cutting-edge contemporary pictures.

  Juggling both locations, Olafson made a fortune, married a corporate attorney, had a couple of kids, and bought a ten-room, park-view co-op on Fifth and 79th. Solidified yet more connections.

  Despite a few rough patches.

  Like the trio of Albert Bierstadt Yosemite paintings sold to a Munich banking heir that was most likely the work of a lesser painter—the experts’ best guess was Hermann Herzog. Or the unsigned Richard Miller garden scene unearthed at an Indianapolis estate sale and flipped overnight to a Chicago pharmaceuticals heir who displayed it in his Michigan Avenue penthouse with great hubris until the painting’s provenance was shown to reek.

  There’d been a few more misadventures over the years, but each incident was tucked safely away from the media because the purchasers didn’t want to look stupid. Besides, Olafson had been quick to take the paintings back and make full restitution, offering sincere apologies and claiming honest error.

  Everything was going swimmingly until middle age took root, a time when everyone who was anyone in New York went through some kind of life-enhancing, soul-altering major spiritual change. At forty-eight, Olafson found himself divorced, estranged from his children, restless, and ready to conquer new vistas. Something quieter, and though he’d never abandon New York, Olafson had begun to crave a clear contrast to the New York pace. The Hamptons didn’t cut it.

  Like any serious art person, he’d spent time in Santa Fe, browsing and buying and dining at Geronimo. Picking up a few minor O’Keeffes and a Henning that he turned over within days. Enjoying the food and the ambience and the sunlight, but bemoaning the lack of a seriously good hotel.

  It would be nice to have his own spread. Bargain real estate prices clinched the deal: For one-third of what he’d paid for his co-op ten years ago, he could get an estate.

  He bought himself a six-thousand-square-foot heap of adobe on five acres in Los Caminitos, north of Tesuque, with low-maintenance landscape and a rooftop-deck view of Colorado. Decorating all thirteen rooms with finesse, he set about filling the diamond plaster walls with art: a few Taos masters and two O’Keeffe drawings brought from Connecticut to get the tongues wagging. Mostly, he went in a new direction: neophyte contemporary Southwest painters and sculptors who’d sell their souls for representation.

  Strategic donations to the right charities combined with lavish parties at the mansion cemented his social position. Within a year, he was in.

  His physical presence didn’t hurt, either. Olafson had known since high school that his size and his stentorian voice were God-given resources to be exploited. Six-three, lean, and broad-shouldered, he’d always been thought of as handsome. Even recently, with his hair gone but for a white fringe and a ponytail, he cut a fine figure. A cropped, snowy beard gave him the look of confidence. Opening night at the opera, he circulated among the rich in his black silk suit, collarless white silk shirt fastened at the neck by a turquoise stud, custom ostrich-leg clogs worn without socks, a young brunette on his arm, though the whispering class asserted this was pretense. For serious company, it was rumored, the art dealer preferred the lithe young men he hired as “groundskeepers.”

  Santa Fe had always been a liberal town in a conservative state, and Olafson fit right in. He threw money at an assortment of causes, some popular, others less so. Recently, less so had dominated: Olafson had made the papers after joining the board of an environmental group named ForestHaven and spearheading a series of lawsuits against small ranchers grazing on federal land.

  That particular cause had generated lots of acrimony; the papers ran a couple of mom-and-pop-struggling-to-make-ends-meet heart-tugging articles. When asked to comment, Olafson had come across arrogant and unsympathetic.

  Steve Katz brought up the story as he and Two Moons drove to the scene.

  “Yeah, I remember,” said Darrel. “I’d be pissed, too.”

  Katz laughed. “No sympathy for the sanctity of the land, chief?”

  Darrel motioned at the windshield. “The land looks just fine to me, rabbi. My sympathy is with regular folk working for a living.”

  “You don’t think Olafson worked for a living?” said Katz.

  “Doesn’t matter what I think or what you think,” Two Moons snorted. “Our job is to figure out who bashed his head in.”

  Olafson Southwest sat atop a sloping lot on the upper end of Canyon, well past the gourmet aroma streaming from Geronimo and the U-pay outdoor parking lot run by the city to capitalize on tourists’ SUVs. The property was large and tree-shaded, with gravel paths and a fountain and a hand-fashioned copper gate.
In back was an adobe guesthouse, but the building was dark and locked, and no one was able to tell Katz and Two Moons if anyone actually lived there.

  The gallery was divided into four whitewashed wings and a large rear room filled with paintings and drawings in vertical racks—what looked to be hundreds of pieces of art. The detectives drifted back. All that pale plaster and the bleached floors and the halogen lights positioned between the hand-hewn vigas lining the ceiling created a weird pseudo-daylight. Katz felt his pupils constrict so hard his eyes hurt. No sense browsing. The main attraction was in room number two. The body was laid out where it had fallen, stretched across the bleached pine floor.

  A big, nasty still life.

  Larry Olafson lay on his stomach, right arm curled beneath him, the left splayed and open-fingered. Two rings on the hand, a diamond and a sapphire, and a gorgeous gold Breguet watch on the wrist. Olafson wore an oatmeal-colored woolen shirt, a calfskin vest the color of peanut butter, and black flannel slacks. Blood splotched all three garments and had trickled onto the floor. Buckskin demi-boots covered the feet.

  A few feet away was a piece of sculpture: a huge chrome screw on a black wooden base. Katz inspected the label: Perseverance. An artist named Miles D’Angelo. Two other works by the same guy: a massive screwdriver and a bolt the size of a truck tire. Behind those, an empty pedestal: Force.

  Katz’s ex-wife had figured herself for a sculptor, but it had been a while since he’d talked to Valerie or any of her new friends, and he’d never heard of D’Angelo.

  He and Darrel got close to the body, and they both inspected what had once been the back of Larry Olafson’s head.

  Tan, hairless skin had been turned to mush. Blood and brain tissue crusted the white fringe and the ponytail. Stiffening the hair, turning it deep red, a blood henna job. A few specks of blood, a light spray, had made it to a nearby wall, to Olafson’s right. Serious impact. The air was coppery.

  All of Olafson’s untouched jewelry said robbery was doubtful.

  Then Katz berated himself for limited thinking. Olafson trucked in high-end art. There were all kinds of robbery.

  That empty pedestal . . .

  The coroner, Dr. Ruiz, had stuck a thermometer in the liver. He looked at the detectives, then sheathed his instrument and inspected the wound. “Two, three hours tops.”

  Two Moons turned to the uniform who’d greeted them at the scene. She was a rookie named Debbie Santana, a former Los Alamos clerk on the job less than a year. This was her first d.b. and she looked okay. Maybe working with nuclear stuff was scarier. Darrel asked her who had called it in.

  “Olafson’s houseboy,” Debbie replied. “He came by half an hour ago to pick up the boss. Apparently, Olafson was working late, meeting a client. He and the houseboy— Sammy Reed—were supposed to have dinner at ten, over at Osteria.”

  “Client have a name?”

  Debbie shook her head. “Reed says he doesn’t know. He’s pretty hysterical, can’t stop crying. He says he found the door locked, used his key, called out Olafson’s name. When no one answered, he walked in and found it. No signs of forced entry. I guess that fits his story.”

  “Where’s Reed now?”

  “In the cruiser. Randolph Loring’s watching him.”

  Katz said, “So it went down between eight and ten.”

  “Approximately,” said Dr. Ruiz. “Stretch it on the front end to seven-thirty.”

  Two Moons left the room and returned a moment later. “The door says the gallery’s open till six. Olafson must’ve thought the client was serious to stay two hours late.”

  “Or he got conned,” said Katz.

  “Either way, if he thought there was serious money involved, he’d stay as late as it took.” Darrel bit hard on his lower lip. “That guy loved his money.”

  The hostility in the remark was out of place. Santana and Ruiz stared at Two Moons. He ignored the scrutiny and began checking out the paintings on the wall. A series of blue-gray abstractions. “What do you think of these, Steve?”

  “They’re okay,” said Katz. He was still kneeling by the body. A little surprised by the hostility but not shocked. For the last few days, Darrel had been grumpy. It would pass. It always did.

  He asked Dr. Ruiz about the bloodstains.

  Ruiz said, “I’m no spatter expert, but there’s no blood in any of the other rooms, so it’s pretty obvious he got hit right here. Cracked right across the occiput—back of his head—over to the right. Looks like one blow. I don’t see any signs of struggle. He got whacked and he crumpled.”

  “He’s a tall guy,” said Katz. “Was it an upward or a downward blow?”

  “More like straight across.”

  “So we’re talking about another big man.”

  “That seems logical,” said Ruiz, “but I can tell you more after I cut him open.”

  “Any guesses about the weapon?” said Katz.

  Ruiz thought a moment. “What I can say at this point is it was something big and heavy with rounded edges.” He got down next to Katz and pointed at the pulpy wound site. “Look over here. One furrow but it went extremely deep. The impact shattered bone. There are no small fragments on visual, like you’d get with a sharp-edged instrument. No cut marks, period. Whatever was used inflicted damage over a comparatively wide surface and pushed the fragments down into the brain. Serious heft.”

  “Like a crowbar?”

  “Larger. We’re talking tremendous force.”

  “Lots of anger,” said Darrel.

  Ruiz got up and stretched. Touched his knee and winced.

  “Sore, Doc?”

  “Middle age sucks.”

  Katz smiled and cocked his head at the empty pedestal.

  “I saw that,” said Ruiz. “Could be. If it’s like the others weightwise.”

  Darrel said, “Carrying away something that heavy would be tough. And there’s no blood trail.”

  “If it’s chrome,” said Ruiz, “the blood might not have adhered in any degree—might’ve dripped off soon after impact. Or your murderer wiped it and took it with him.”

  “Souvenir?” said Darrel.

  Ruiz smiled. “Maybe he’s an art lover.”

  Katz smiled back. “Or he was hyped up, adrenalized, took it with him, and dropped it somewhere nearby.”

  Darrel checked his watch. “Time to search.”

  Katz said, “It’s pretty dark out there, and I didn’t see any outdoor lights near the guesthouse.”

  “No problem,” Two Moons countered. “Let’s cordon the entire property, get some night spots, block off upper Canyon.”

  Ruiz grinned. “You block off upper Canyon, you’d best finish early.”

  Wiseass smile, Katz noticed, which could be Ruiz’s way when dealing with a body. A small, round, highly intelligent man, the Hispaniola-born son of a plasterer, David Ruiz had gone to UNM on scholarship, earned an MD from Johns Hopkins, served a forensic-path residency at New York Hospital. He’d spent a couple of years with Dr. Michael Baden in the New York ME’s office. He and Katz had traded lots of New York war stories. The Santa Fe job had brought Ruiz back to his home state. He lived outside the city limits, on a ranchero near Galisteo, with horses and cows, dogs and cats, a couple of llamas. He had a wife who liked animals and a whole bunch of kids.

  “Nine by the latest,” Ruiz continued. “That’s when the tourists start coming. Blocking off Canyon will turn you into civic impediments.”

  Two Moons spoke in his laconic voice. “And here I was thinking I was a civil servant.”

  “Consider this,” said Ruiz. “A few hours ago, Olafson was an important man. Now he’s an impediment.”

  The detectives had the techs dust for prints all over the gallery and in Olafson’s rear office. Tons of latents showed up immediately, which was almost as bad as a blank screen. When everything had been photographed, they gloved up and checked out the art dealer’s desk. In a top drawer, Katz found Olafson’s Palm Pilot. Lots of names, a few he recogniz
ed. Including Valerie’s. That surprised him. As far as he knew, she’d given up her art dreams, had reached a medium level of contentment working at the Sarah Levy Gallery over in the Plaza, selling high-end Pueblo pottery.

  “These are people with real talent, Steve,” she’d told him when he’d dropped by. “At least I’m smart enough to know the difference.”

  Katz had thought he spied moisture in the corners of her eyes. But maybe he was wrong. When it came to Valerie, he’d been wrong a lot.

  Checking his gloves for pinholes and wrinkles, he scrolled through more names on the Pilot.

  Two Moons said, “Too much stuff. This is going to be one of those. Let’s tag and bag and we’ll go through it later. Meanwhile, how about the houseboy?”

  Sammy Reed was twenty-four, delicate, black, and still weeping.

  “I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it.”

  He asked to get out and stretch, and the detectives said sure. Reed wore a too big herringbone tweed overcoat with a black velvet collar that looked vintage. Black jeans, black Doc Martens, diamond chip in his right earlobe. As he flexed his arms and legs, they checked out his size.

  Five-six in his Docs, maybe one twenty.

  In the car once more, Two Moons and Katz flanked him in the backseat. The heater hummed intermittently, and the temperature hovered between chilly and passable. Reed sniffled and denied knowing whom “Larry” was staying late to meet. Olafson didn’t discuss business details with him. His houseboy duties consisted of keeping the mansion neat and clean, doing some light cooking, taking care of the pond and the pool and Larry’s borzoi.

  “She’s going to be heartbroken,” he said. “Shattered.” As if to illustrate, Reed cried some more.

  Darrel handed him a tissue. “The dog.”

  “Anastasia. She’s six. Borzois don’t live that long. Now that Larry’s gone . . . I can’t believe I just said that. Gone. Ohmigod.”