“Is he gay?”
The eyebrows went up, making wrinkles like tiny rice terraces all the way to the top of his bald head. “He’s not acting out.” He listened to what he’d said and blinked twice. “I mean, murdering people certainly qualifies as acting out, but I’d be surprised if he engaged in physical homosexual acts. My guess is that he leads his victims on, learns as much as he can about them without giving them what they want, what he thinks they want. The murder is the consummation. Of course,” he added apologetically, “this could all be bunk.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“Whenever we hate something deeply,” he said, “it’s almost always something we recognize in ourselves. Remember, when you point at something, only one finger points away. The other three point back at you.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Can I use that?”
He grinned, a flash of cheddar yellow. “It’s not original.”
“What about a cop who beats up on gays?”
“You mean methodically? Singling them out? Without cause?”
“He’s infamous for it.”
“Oh, dear. He needs help. And he’s not likely to look for it.” The corners of his mouth went down, making him look like a man fighting stomach cramps. “LAPD?”
“Sheriff,” I said.
He looked relieved. “Don’t know much about them.” The light flashed again, signaling Miss Trink’s finger, or perhaps her ponytail, on the button. “Damn that woman,” he said.
“The healing attitude.”
“Feh. You’ve got to be tough to heal crazy people. I’ll bet our boy is burning to talk. I’ll bet he’s keeping a diary.”
“You think so?”
“He’s on a crusade,” Schultz said. “He’s cleaning up the world, making it safe for the heterosexual middle class. He sees himself on the side of the angels.”
I got up and walked across the office and removed the baby-poop yarn construction from the wall. “Who on earth does these things?” I asked. “And why?”
His face stiffened. “My wife.”
I hadn’t even known he was married. He had the sloppy fussiness that often descends on single men in middle age. “It’s certainly an unusual medium.”
“She works with children,” he said severely. “Yarn therapy is a good way to get them to externalize. Gradually, she began to do it herself.”
I replaced it on its nail. “It’s very…” I began, and then hit a wall. I had absolutely no idea where to go.
“It’s calming,” he said.
“Does she need a lot of calming?”
“I mean for my patients. It calms my patients. Some of them look at it throughout the entire session.”
“It suggests childhood,” I said to mollify him. “Infancy, in fact.”
“Well,” he said approvingly. “There you are.”
“The two killings in Chicago,” I asked. “Were they consecutive?”
“Could you straighten the assemblage please? Up a bit on the right. I was wondering when you’d ask that. Yes, they were. So were the two in New Orleans. So you see the pattern.”
“He’s going to do it again here.”
“In two to three weeks,” he said. “If the pattern holds.”
“Will it?”
“That’s another reason I wish I were back working with the cops,” Schultz said fretfully. “These patterns always hold.”
12 ~ Robert and Alan
“A serial killer?” Christy Nordine asked. “Max?”
“It changes things,” I said. We were in the living room of a small house just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from Max’s place. Robert and Alan, whose guest Christy was, had met me at the door. Robert, about fifty, had graying hair combed straight back and wore a blue linen leisure suit. A silver fish silhouette, the old Christian symbol, hung from a chain around his neck. Alan, ten or twelve years younger, favored Ivy League, complete to a little buckle at the back of his chinos, a fashion touch I hadn’t seen in decades, and no evident religious affiliation. They’d set out a plate of crudites and an ice bucket full of bottled mineral water and withdrawn to the back of the house, looking domestic and worried.
“What does it change?” Nordine challenged, settling into a wooden captain’s chair.
The captain’s chair was of a piece with its surroundings, which might have been one of my mother’s numerous living rooms. Cherrywood furniture, imitation Early American, gleamed on hooked rugs. Two English Toby mugs, gap-toothed, weather-beaten old sailors with a cheery alcoholic flush on their cheeks, grinned at each other from opposite ends of the wooden mantel. Between them was a small coven of black cats cut from paper, their backs arched in fear or fury, the first Halloween decorations I’d seen. A pinlight picked out what might have been a real Grandma Moses above the mantel, and a grandfather clock ticked slowly next to the front door. The smell of Lemon Pledge everywhere. We could have been in Grand Rapids.
I gave the crudites a fish-eye. I’d come direct from Schultz’s office, and I hadn’t eaten in what seemed like weeks. “It makes it tougher. Before, I was looking for someone who might conceivably have been in Max’s circle of acquaintances for some time, who might have left footprints all over the place. This is someone who floated in from nowhere and doesn’t know anyone, and now he’s going to float out again.”
Nordine’s mouth set into a straight line that put vertical creases in both cheeks. “He still killed Max,” he said. Despite the strain he’d been under, he looked more rested than I’d ever seen him. Alan and Robert were taking good care of him.
I spread my hands. “It’s a different kind of animal.”
“If you’re worried about money-”
“I’m not.”
“-I’ve got a small pile of it.”
“Glad to hear it, but that’s not the point.”
“Well, what is the point?”
“I’m reporting to you,” I said. “That’s part of my job.”
He sat back as far as the chair would allow, and three or four emotions staged an argument over possession of his face. Relief won. “You’re not quitting?”
“I’m telling you that things have changed, that’s all. So far, I’ve checked out the places Max went, talked to the people he knew. All routine. All of it aimed at finding a hypothetical somebody from this community who got next to Max, probably in view of several people, and then killed him. The premise I’ve been operating on, if you can call something this thin a premise, is that the murder was spontaneous. At some point in the relationship or whatever it was, the killer decided that he could get more out of Max dead than alive, and he killed him. Up to that point, he had no reason to be particularly secretive. But this guy-the guy we’re dealing with now-intended to kill Max from the beginning. He didn’t let a lot of people see him. And he’s not going to hang around, going through the motions of a normal life, because he doesn’t have a normal life, at least not in Los Angeles.”
“You said he was going to kill someone else here.”
“I said that he’d followed that pattern in the past.”
“ ‘In a few weeks,’ you said.” Nordine’s stubborn mode was becoming very familiar.
“If the pattern holds.”
“Well, then,” he said, as though everything was settled.
“It may not be in West Hollywood,” I said.
“Of course it’ll be in West Hollywood. Why would he go anywhere else?”
There were a dozen reasons he might go somewhere else, but I didn’t think they’d hold Christy’s attention, and I needed all of it. “I want you to go to the cops,” I said.
That caught him by surprise. He opened his mouth and closed it. Then he swallowed. “You’re joking.”
“Take a lawyer. Take two, if you’ve got a pile of money somewhere. I know a reporter on the L.A. Times you can talk to before you go in. Hell, she’d probably go with you. Even Spurrier isn’t going to pound on you with the media watching.”