Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 12 - Survival of the Fittest

by Survival Of The Fittest(Lit)

  'Okay,' said Milo. 'Make it a really sad story. Tug at their heartstrings. But watch your back. I don't need any goddamn international incident.'

  Thursday. I'd slept fitfully but was awake at six, ahead of Robin for a change. Lying flat on my back, I watched her doze and thought about being Andrew Desmond.

  At six-thirty she awoke and looked at me.

  Her eyes were puffy. I kissed them. She lay there.

  'Today,' she said.

  'Just a bookstore visit,' I said. 'Shouldn't take long.'

  'Hopefully not. When's he getting here?'

  'Nine.'

  She touched my hair, rolled away from me.

  We both got out of bed. She put on a robe, tugged the sash tight, and stood there for a moment.

  I stood behind her and held her shoulders. 'I'll be fine.'

  'I know you will.' She turned sharply, kissed me hard on the cheek, almost an assault. Then she went into the bathroom and locked the door.

  Yesterday, we'd made love twice. The second time, she said, 'I feel like an adulterer.'

  Daniel arrived at nine and sat me down in the kitchen. Covering me with a black barber's sheet, he snipped my hair with scissors, then used electric clippers to reduce it to a Marine-recruit buzz.

  'You're a barber, too?'

  "The Army,' he said. 'You learn all kinds of things. Not that I'm ready to open a salon.'

  He gave me a hand mirror.

  Silver glints peppered my scalp; gray hair unearthed.

  Bumps on my cranium that I'd never known about.

  I looked ten years older, ten pounds thinner.

  The haircut and the beard gave me the appearance of an Islamic radical.

  I put on the tinted glasses. Scowled.

  'Smile,' said a voice from the door.

  Robin stood there.

  I grinned at her.

  'Okay, it's still you,' she said. But she didn't smile back.

  Daniel set up a professional Polaroid camera on a tripod, took three dozen shots, left, and returned an hour later with Andrew Desmond's California driver's license. To my eyes, indistinguishable from the real thing.

  I added it to the rest of the fake ID now occupying my wallet. 'Hopefully I won't get stopped by a cop.'

  'If you do, it's okay,' he said. 'We've managed to enter the serial number into the system. Your graduate school's the Pacific Insight Institute. Have you heard of it?'

  'No.'

  'It closed down years ago. Master's degrees and Ph.D.'s in education and psychology. Headquarters was a one-room

  office in Westwood Village. Fifty-three graduates. To our knowledge, none passed the state licensing exams.'

  'So they went to work as psychic friends and made twice the money,' I said.

  'Could be. Access to the spirits often pays off. So do diploma mills, apparently. Tuition was nineteen thousand dollars per year.'

  'Couldn't buy licensure. Is that why it closed down?'

  He shrugged. 'Enrollment dropped each year. The former dean sells insurance in Oregon. His degree was self-granted. For the first year, Pacific was actually able to obtain partial federal loans, but that ended when the government clamped down on diploma mills.'

  'You've done quite a bit of research.'

  'More than we intended,' he said. 'Because while finding a place for you, I learned that the Loomis Institute was involved in funding similar schools. Two in Florida and one in the Virgin Islands. Another possible profit-making scheme while claiming tax-free status, though all we know so far is Loomis awarded grants to these places.'

  'Where'd you find this out?'

  'A book written in response to The Brain Drain. One good thing that did come my way through the Internet. A collection of essays. The one that caught my eye was by a professor at Cole University in Mississippi whose field of study was diploma mills. He found out the Bahamian school had links to Loomis and may have really been a way to fund eugenics research.'

  'A book,' I said. 'Twisted Science?

  'That's the one. You've read it?'

  'I checked it out but never got around to reading it, figured why waste time on something I agree with. What's this professor's name?'

  'Bernard Eustace.'

  'I assume you've contacted him.'

  His gold eyes were steady. 'We tried. He died fourteen months ago.'

  'How?'

  'Auto accident. He was visiting his parents in Mississippi, drove off the road late at night.'

  'Jesus,' I said.

  'It's recorded as an accident, Alex. Maybe it was. Milo and I agree that digging further right now is too risky because the crash site is rural, any questions from out-of-town police will be conspicuous.'

  The fingers of his good hand had bowed, tips pressing into the tabletop.

  'Mississippi,' I said. 'Was Eustace black?'

  'White. A historian, not a psychologist. We may eventually talk to his wife, but right now, following Farley Sanger and your meeting Zena Lambert seem more useful. Are you ready?'

  'Yes. Where's Milo?'

  'He'll be following you but we thought it better that you didn't know where he was. That way you'd be less likely to look his way accidentally. I'm sure you don't doubt his protectiveness.'

  'Not a shred of doubt,' I said.

  Before I left, I stopped in to see Robin again. The shop was quiet, all machines switched off, her apron still folded on a workbench, as she talked on the phone, her back to me.

  Spike barked and trotted forward and Robin turned. 'I'll call you when it's done. Bye.'

  She put the phone down. 'You look - like a French cinematographer.'

  'Is that good or bad?'

  'Depends if you like French cinema - it does have a certain... hungry elegance. C'mere.'

  We embraced.

  'What's that cologne?' she said.

  'Andrew's scent. Do you find it alluring?'

  'Oh, yeah. Baguettes and pessimism.' She pulled away, held me at arm's length. 'You're certainly giving them their money's worth. When will you be back?'

  'Depends on how it goes,' I said. 'Probably sometime this afternoon.'

  'Give me a call as soon as you can. I'll get us something for dinner.'

  I held her tighter. Her hand reached up and touched my brisdy head. Paused. Stroked.

  'Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,' I said.

  'If I run out of.000 sandpaper, I'll draft you into service.'

  She pulled away again. Studied me. 'Definitely different.'

  'Overkill,' I said. 'It's a bookstore visit in Hollywood, not sneaking into Iran, but they're the professionals.'

  'Have you seen Hollywood recently?'

  I chuckled. Thought about Nolan's Hollywood.

  She stroked my head some more. 'Three kids, that blind man. Some things grow back.'

  Down in front, parked next to Daniel's Toyota, was the Karmann Ghia from the Genesee garage, cream-colored, not yellow, in the sunlight, with a scarred hood and a dented door.

  He handed me a small color photo.

  Headshot of a young woman with a narrow face, white-blond hair cut almost as short as mine.

  Her features were good but her skin was beyond pale - Kabuki white. Black liner enlarged her blue eyes and emphasized a hypermetabolic glow. Despite that, she looked bored. Resentful. I resisted the urge to interpret; standing in line at the DMV could make anyone feel that way.

  'Driver's license?' I said.

  He nodded, took the picture from me, and put it in his pocket. 'The store is at 2028 Apollo Avenue. Good luck.'

  We shook hands and he drove off.

  The Karmann Ghia's seat was adjusted to my height and the car started up easily. Plenty of power, as Daniel had promised. The interior was trashed - torn upholstery and headliner, crumpled paper cups and fast-food boxes tossed behind the seat.

  The AM-FM radio was old enough to be original. I turned it on. KPFK. The guest was a black 'sociopolitical theoretician and author' who believed Jewish doctors had created AIDS i
n order to kill off inner-city babies. The host let him preach for paragraphs at a time, then threw him grounders that provoked more hatred.

  Daniel was a planner and I wondered if he'd preset the dial.

  Getting me in the mood.

  I switched to jazz and drove.

  Spasm's address put the store just past the border between Hollywood and Silverlake. I passed Sunset's Hospital Row and the Hillhurst intersection, where the boulevard veers southeast toward downtown - today just a smog-shrouded theory. Then a quick left on Fountain, which I followed until it became a side street, yielding to two lanes of dips and curves - Apollo.

  The street was planted with huge, untrimmed trees. Old trees; this was the kind of one-story, mixed-use neighborhood you see only in older parts of L.A.

  Mostly it was auto-body shops and printing plants and used-tire yards, but interspersed among the dreary lots were liquor stores and other small businesses, and small houses - some converted to commercial use, some still sporting gardens and laundry lines, one a Pentecostal church.

  A nail parlor, a tattoo parlor, a botanica advertising crystals and herbs. Unmarked buildings, many with for lease signs. Looking down on all of it were the steep embankments

  of Silverlake, weedy and tree-shrouded where they weren't toasted golden. Dry spots; primed for the arsonist's match.

  The hillside was planted with uneven rows of residences, like shrubs sprouting from a careless garden. Some of the houses flamingoed on stilts, others rested at skeptical angles on tremor-throttled foundations. I saw cracks snaking down stucco, parted seams, roofs missing entire sections of shingle, porch beams bent like reeds. The whole neighborhood looked off-kilter. A mile away, the city was excavating a subway.

  The 2000 block appeared and I spotted Spasm right away.

  The black window was the tipoff. Small black plastic letters were placed near the top of a gray door, illegible from the street.

  Empty curb; no problem parking. As I got out I made out spasm books.

  On both sides of the store were body shops, then an acre of asphalt bearing the badge of an official police tow yard. Across the street was a mom-and-pop taco joint, its doors shut, a closed sign hanging on the knob.

  It was impossible to tell if Spasm was open for business but when I pushed the gray door, it yielded and I stepped into a long, skinny, tunnel-like charcoal-colored room vibrating with loud calypso music. Skimpy lighting was turned even murkier by the tinted lenses of my glasses but I kept them on and tried to affect an air of mild curiosity.

  To the left, a bald, wildly tattooed man sat at a checkout booth and smoked energetically. Leather vest over blue-and-crimson flesh. He was swaying to the music, didn't look up.

  The booth was three panels of plywood pushed up against the wall. On the floor were loose piles of throwaway papers

  - The Reader, The Weekly, The Maoist Exile Wanderer - flyers for Divas in Drag. Where You Can Be What You Want To Be; MaidenHead in Concert; Tertiara Malladonna: A One- Wimin Show About Tampon-Sucking and Rice Confiscation; Uncle Suppurato's Body-Piercing Studio, schedules of night readings in Barnhard Park of poetry concerned with 'quantum physics and gum disease'.

  Leather Vest continued to ignore me as I passed him. Both side walls were lined with slanting shelves of books displayed face-out. Accent lights brightened the covers. Toward the back was a cable-and-plank staircase leading to an upper loft. On the back wall, another gray door.

  Three customers on the ground floor: a wan-looking, clean-cut man in his twenties with bad posture and a fearful frown. He wore a madras button-down shirt, khakis and sneakers, and glanced over his shoulder nervously as I approached. I could imagine him masturbating in his car, dreading discovery, yet hoping for it. The paperback in his hand said Cannibal Killers.

  The other two browsers were a man and woman in their late forties, both with pemmican faces shellacked with a sun-and-boo2e luster. Long hair, missing teeth, lots of beads, a shopping bag full of scraps. Had their tie-dyes and serapes been clean, they could have been traded on Melrose as antiques.

  They were sharing a white-covered paperback and cackling. I heard the woman say, 'Cool', in a grandmother's voice, then the man returned the book to the rack and they left looking jolly.

  HeilRock: Marching Songs of the Waffen SS.

  Peace, love, Woodstock had come to this.

  The man with the cannibal book brought it up to Leather Vest and paid. Now I was the sole patron. The calypso

  soundtrack shifted to Stravinsky. The illustrated clerk lit up another cigarette and began tapping his knee to no discernible rhythm.

  Time to browse.

  Maybe I'd be lucky and find a DVLL reference.

  I decided to start with the second floor, out of view of

  the clerk.

  The staircase took me up to half a loft - just one long wall, with the same face-out display and spotlighting.

  One copy of each book. Nothing labeled by subject matter or author, no alphabetization, though I did find clumps of volumes that seemed related.

  Collections on sado-masochism, lavishly illustrated, some taken to the blood-wound-pus level.

  Prison diaries, crudely printed. A glossy thing called Penitentiary Magazine, with stories on 'Lifer in the Top Bunk: My Favorite Celly', 'Stand Up for Your Rights and Don't Let the System Buttfuck You',' Why Writers Don't Know Shit about Crime', and 'The Best Jack-Off Videos of the Year,'

  Another cluster on human oddities, most written with cold, leering tones. Racist comics.

  Alternative comix that glorified incest. The Turner Diaries and other white-supremacist tomes. Lots of that: The Biological Jew, The Secret History of Zionism; Bloodface; Pickaninny Palace; The Mud People: Why Africa Has

  No Culture.

  The savant on the radio would have liked at least some

  of it.

  No DVLL.

  I came upon a shelf of academic texts, mostly philosophy and history. Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, a Frenchman named Bataille.

  Shelves of practical paranoia: how-to primers on bomb-making, wiretapping, exacting revenge, getting away with slander and libel, dirty tricks.

  Knife Fighters of the Philippines.

  The Bizarre Magazine Compendium.

  Fetishism, bondage, coprophagy. Step-by-step photoessays cobbled from operating-room video: sex-changes, face-peels, brain-tumor removals, liposuction, autopsies.

  The Firearms Bible. The Freemen's Manifesto; The Anarchist's Cookbook; Trotsky's Roach Motel: Exterminating Capitalists.

  A big black-covered thing called The Demon's Workshop, offering exquisitely detailed instructions on building silencers, converting conventional weapons to automatic, imbedding poison in bullets.

  A pictorial history of the Chinese Revolution, devoted to carnage. Its centerfold was a double-width sepia print from the twenties showing a royalist scholar being torn to pieces by a mob, chunks of his flesh gone, ribs and viscera exposed. Fully conscious. Screaming.

  The Pinhead Review, one-hundred pages of empty-faced, clown-suited microcephalies in sideshow booths. Accompanying cartoons and jokes about sex among the retarded.

  Einstein's theories alongside astrology.

  Slavic dictionaries neighboring The Art of Harassment. How to disappear, how to find anyone.

  Computer science. The I ching, hypnosis, Raising Swine for Slaughter.

  The collected works of George Lincoln Rockwell; erotic aromatherapy; A History of Natural Disasters; The Thinking Man's Guide to Idol Worship.

  The organizing criterion seemed to be Stuff Other Stores Won't Carry.

  Nothing on DVLL.

  On the last rack was a collection of solemn-looking hardcovers from a well-respected scientific publishing house: forensic pathology, homicide and rape investigation, gunshot wounds, crime-scene techniques, toxicology.

  Densely worded manuals for police detectives, eighty

  bucks each.

  Had someone considered them primers, as well?

>   I pictured Wilson Tenney or some other cruel loner up here, browsing, maybe even buying.

  I opened the book on homicide procedure.