“Where on the street, Mrs. Santos?”
“Not far from here, like up on Melrose, couple of blocks that way.” Pointing east. “I figured Yuri had gone shopping or something.”
Petra shook her head as she recounted it to Milo and me. She never thought to mention this? “Ma’am, was he carrying a bag that indicated he’d been shopping?”
Santos thought. “It was a while ago- maybe.”
“But you think this was the man he was with?”
“I’m not sure… like I said, it was a long time ago.”
“How long ago?”
“I’d have to say… months. Only reason I noticed was I never saw Yuri with anyone. But it’s not like they were hanging out or anything.”
“What were they doing?”
“Just talking. Like maybe the guy asked Yuri directions or something. Then Yuri walked home alone.”
“The man left on foot?”
“Um, I think so. But there’s no way I could testify or anything. I couldn’t honestly say I remember details, it’s more like maybe. Who is he?”
“Maybe no one. Thank you, ma’am.”
Santos closed her door, looking worried.
Shull lived in a house on Aspen Way, in the Hollywood Hills, and Stahl had been stationed down the block all night, with nothing to report.
“How far is Aspen,” I asked Milo, “from the Hollywood sign?”
“Right down the hill and east. Not far from Kevin, either.” He’d dropped by soon after the meeting, kept busy on the phone, finally sat down at my kitchen table to toss things around.
“Not far from the recording studio where China was recording,” I said. “Or the Snakepit. I’d say Shull likes his Hollywood comfort zone, but we’ve also got three murders on the Westside, not to mention Boston. This guy’s hard to pin down.”
“How do you see the affiliation between Shull and Kevin? Teacher-student thing gone evil?”
“That’s one possibility. I visit Shull, he gets nervous, tells Kevin to make himself scarce. Either or both of them pick up Erna and get rid of her, then Shull drives Kevin to the airport, ditches the car, takes a taxi back.”
“I’ll have my Ds check the cab companies.” He made another call, put in the order. “What’s the other possibility?”
“Terry Drummond’s right and her boy’s innocent.”
“If he is, he’s also probably dead.” He went to the fridge, poured milk, brought it back. “If Kevin did rabbit, I doubt it was to Boston. Shull’d be smart enough not to want Kevin there.”
I knew what he was thinking: How many other cities? How many other bodies?
His beeper went off. The coroner’s office. He called in, and I went to my office and ran A. Gordon Shull through all the general search engines.
A reference to Shull’s personal Web site connected to an inactive notice. Thirty-one additional hits, two-thirds of them duplications. Twelve of the original twenty were citations of Shull’s name in Charter College publications. Presiding over Communications Department symposia, papers he’d delivered.
The Role of the Artist in Contemporary Society
Advocacy Journalism: Acceptable Tool for Change or Subterfuge?
Rock ’n’ Roll Hoochy Coo: Sexuality As a Metaphor in Contemporary Music
Linguistics As Fate: Why Noam Chomsky Might Be God
One title grabbed me by the throat:
A Cold Heart: The Ultimate Fatalism of Artistic Endeavor
No text summary, no reference. Shull had delivered the paper at a coffeehouse in Venice. A late-night party honoring the memory of Ezra Pound.
I checked the venues of his other presentations. All were informal gatherings at cafés and the like. Padding the résumé. Was that why Dr. Martin disapproved of her faculty member? Or perhaps it went beyond that.
I recalled Shull’s easy manner with the coed who’d waited outside his office. Cool prof? Too-friendly slickster? Like politics, academia posed all sorts of possibilities for an amoral guy.
Venice Coffee Shop. What relevance did the concept of comfort zone have in L.A.? Here, if you had a car you mastered your destiny.
Then I thought of something else…
Milo returned. “The wounds on Mehrabian match Baby Boy’s. So do the ligament striations. And guess what: This time our bad boy left physical evidence. Couple of short facial hairs, red-gray. Mehrabian had a beard, too, but it was long and black. The killer got in his face. Literally.”
“Shull sports one of those five-day beards. Ginger-gray.”
“Hey, Sherlock, coroner estimates the hair was five, six days old.”
“So now what?” I said. “You question him and get a warrant to pluck?”
“We’re a ways off from that, yet.”
“Even with the hair?”
“I phoned an ADA. They want more. Significantly more.”
“Shull being a rich kid make a difference?”
He smiled. “ADA would shudder at the thought.”
“This might help.” I pointed to the “Cold Heart” reference on my screen.
He said, “Oh, my.”
“Is Shull warrantable, now?”
“Probably not. Literary pretension doesn’t qualify as probable cause.”
“What about this, then: There were six conventions in Boston the week of Angelique Bernet’s murder. You mentioned one had something to do with the media. That sounds like something Shull might be interested in.”
He whipped out his notepad, flipped pages. “The media and public policy. Harvard.”
“Who ran it?”
“This is all I’ve got,” he said.
“Want me to look into it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Put that Ph.D. to good use. Please.”
He left with a promise to return in an hour. It took nearly that long, but finally I had a copy of the mass-media convention’s attendees in hand.
Confidentiality and all that slowed the process, but one of my grad school classmates taught at Harvard, and I called him, made connections, combined shameless name-dropping with my academic bona fides, and spun a yarn about planning a symposium on the media and violence. Wanting the list so I could “target the right people.”
The final target of that lie was one of the symposium’s cochairs, a fast-talking professor of journalism at the University of Washington named Lionel South.
“That was mine, all right. Harvard let us use the K School- the Kennedy School- so we stuck one of their faculty members’ names on it as a cochair. But Vera Mancuso and I- she’s at Clark- really ran it. You say yours is going to be at the med school? What, a psychiatric slant?”
“Eclectic,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’m running interference between the med school, the psych department, and the law school.” Sometimes falsehood came so easy. In spare moments, I wondered about that.
“Media violence,” said South. “Great funding for that.”
“Not bad,” I said.
“Couple more schoolyard shootings, and you’ll really be set.”
I forced a collegial laugh. “Anyway, about your roster.”
“I’ll e-mail it to you right now. Do me a favor and keep us posted. And if you need a cochair…”
I found it on the third page, halfway down the “S’s”:
Shull, A. Gordon, Prof. Comm., Charter College.
A bit of self-aggrandizement; Shull was a lecturer.
That fit.
Milo came back, and I pointed.
“Oh, yeah! Great work… did Shull deliver a paper?”
“No, he just attended. Or signed up to attend.”
“Playing hooky?”
“It would’ve been easy. Once he registered, no one would’ve checked to see if he actually sat through the meetings. Shull had a free schedule.”
“Plenty of time to take in the ballet.”
“Ballet might very well be his thing,” I said. “Growing up with culture, and all that.”