Bad Love (23 page)

“Fine. But now we’re back to the same old question: what’s
your
link?”

“Has to be the conference. The killer’s gotten severely paranoid — let his rage get out of control. To him, anyone associated with de Bosch is guilty, and where better to start than a bunch of therapists paying public homage to the old man? Maybe Stoumen’s hit-and-run was no accident.”

“What? Major-league mass murder? The killer’s going after patients
and
therapists?”

“I don’t know — I’m just grasping.”

He heard the frustration in my voice. “It’s okay, keep grasping. Doesn’t cost the taxpayers a dime. For all I know we’re dealing with something so crazy it’ll never make sense.”

We rode for a while. Then he said, “De Bosch’s clinic was private, expensive. How could a janitor like Shipler afford getting treatment there?”

“Sometimes private clinics treat a few hardship cases. Or maybe Shipler had good health insurance through the school system. What about Paprock? Did she have money?”

“Nothing huge, as far as I can tell. Husband worked as a car salesman.”

“Can you get hold of their insurance records?”

“If they had any, and haven’t been destroyed.”

I thought of two motherless grade-school children and said, “How old, exactly, were Paprock’s children at the time of her murder?”

“Don’t remember exactly — little.”

“Who raised them?”

“I assume the husband.”

“Is he still in town?”

“Don’t know that either, yet.”

“If he is, maybe he’ll be willing to talk about her, tell us if she was ever a therapy patient at de Bosch’s clinic.”

He hooked a finger toward the rear seat. “Got the file right there. Check out the address.”

I swung around toward the darkened seat and saw a file box.

“Right on top,” he said. “The brown one.”

Colors were indistinguishable in the darkness, but I reached over, groped around, and came up with a folder. Opening it, I squinted.

“There’s a penlight in the glove compartment.”

I tried to open the compartment, but it was stuck. Milo leaned across and slammed it with his fist. The door dropped open and papers slid to the floor. I stuffed them back in and finally found the light. Its skinny beam fell on a page of crime-scene photos stapled to the right-hand page. Lots of pink and red. Writing on a wall: a closeup of “bad love” in big, red block letters that matched the blood on the floor . . . neat lettering . . . a bloody thing below.

I turned to the facing page. The name of Myra Paprock’s widower was midway through the intake data.

“Ralph Martin Paprock,” I said. “Valley Vista Cadillac. The home address is in North Hollywood.”

“I’ll run it through DMV, see if he’s still around.”

I said, “I need to keep looking for the other conference people to warn them.”

“Sure, but if you can’t tell them who and why, what does that leave? “Dear Sir or Madam, this is to inform you you might be bludgeoned, stabbed, or run over by an unidentified, revenge-crazed psycho?”

“Maybe one of them can tell me the who and why. And I know I’d have liked to have been warned. The problem is finding them. None of them are working or living where they were at the time of the conference. And the woman I thought might be Rosenblatt’s wife hasn’t returned any of my calls.”

Another stretch of silence.

“You’re wondering,” he said, “if they’ve been visited, too.”

“It did cross my mind. Katarina’s not been listed in the APA directory for five years. She could have just stopped paying dues, but it doesn’t seem like her to just drop out of psychology and close up the school. She was ambitious, very much taken with carrying on her father’s work.”

“Well,” he said, “it should be easy enough to check tax rolls and Social Security records on all of them, find out who’s breathing and who ain’t.”

He reached Hilgard and turned left, passing the campus of the university where I’d jumped through academic hoops for so many years.

“So many people gone,” I said. “Now the Wallace girls. It’s as if everyone’s folding up their tents and escaping.”

“Hey,” he said, “maybe they know something we don’t.”

The strip-mall at Olympic and Westwood was dark except for the flagrant white glare from the minimart. The store was quiet, with a turbaned Pakistani drinking Gatorade behind the counter.

We stocked up on overpriced bread, canned soup, lunch meat, cereal, and milk. The Pakistani eyed us unpleasantly as he tallied up the total. He wore a company shirt printed repetitively with the name of the mart’s parent company in lawn green. The nametag pinned to his breast pocket was blank.

Milo reached for his wallet. I got mine out first and handed the clerk cash. He continued to look unhappy.

“Whatsamatter?” said Milo. “Too much cholesterol in our diet?”

The clerk pursed his lips and glanced up at the video camera above the door. The machine’s cyclops eye was sweeping the store slowly. The screen below filled with milky gray images.

We followed his gaze to the dairy case. An unkempt man stood in front of it, not moving, staring at cartons of Half-and-Half. I hadn’t noticed him while shopping and wondered where he’d come from.

Milo eyed him for a long moment, then turned back to the clerk.

“Yeah, police work’s strenuous,” he said in a loud voice. “Got to shovel in those calories in order to catch the bad guys.”

He laughed even louder. It sounded almost mad.

The man at the dairy case twitched and half turned. He glared at us for a second, then returned to studying the cream.

He was gaunt and hairy, wearing a dirt-blackened army jacket, jeans, and beach sandals. His hands shook and one clouded eye had to be blind.

Another member of Dorsey Hewitt’s extended family.

He slapped the back of his neck with one hand, turned again, tried to match Milo’s stare.

Milo gave a salute. “Evening, pal.”

The man didn’t move for a second. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and left the store, sandals slapping the vinyl floor.

The clerk watched him go. The cash register gave a computer burp and expelled a receipt. The clerk tore off the tape and dropped it into one of the half-dozen bags we’d filled.

“Got a box for all this?” said Milo.

“No, sir,” said the clerk.

“What about in back?”

Shrug.

We carried the food out. The gaunt man was at the far end of the lot, kicking asphalt and walking from store to store, staring at black glass.

“Hey,” Milo called out. No response. He repeated it, pulled a cereal variety pack out of one of the bags and waved it over his head.

The man straightened, looked toward us, but didn’t approach. Milo walked ten feet from him and underhanded the cereal.

The man shot his arms out, missed the catch, sank to his knees, and retrieved it. Milo was heading back to the car and didn’t see the look on the man’s face. Confusion, distrust, then a spark of gratitude that fizzled just short of ignition.

The gaunt man hobbled off into the darkness, fingers ripping at the plastic wrapping, sprinkling cereal onto the pavement.

Milo said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” We got into the Fiat and he drove around toward the back of the mall where three dumpsters sat. Several empty cartons were piled up loosely against the bins, most of them torn beyond utility. We finally found a couple that looked and smelled relatively clean, put the bags in them, and stashed the food in back of the car, next to Myra Paprock’s homicide file.

A sliver of moon was barely visible behind a cloud-veil, and the sky looked dirty. The freeway was a stain topped with light and noise. After we rounded Exposition, Little Calcutta continued to elude us — the darkness and the plywood barrier concealed the lot totally. But the place on the sidewalk where I’d talked to Terminator Three was just within the light of an ailing street lamp and I was able to point it out to Milo.

We got out and found gaps in the plywood. Through them, blue tongues quivered — thin, gaseous alcohol flames.

“Sterno,” I said.

Milo said, “Frugal gourmets.”

I took him to the spot along the fence where I’d unhinged the makeshift hatch a few hours before. Extra wires had been added since then, rusty and rough, wound too tightly to unravel by hand.

Milo took a Swiss army knife out of his trouser pocket and flipped out a tiny pliers-like tool. Twisting and snipping, he managed to free the hatch.

We went back to the car, took out the boxes of groceries, and stepped through. Blue lights began extinguishing, as if we’d brought a hard wind.

Milo reached into his trousers again and pulled out the penlight I’d used in the car. I’d replaced it in the glove compartment and hadn’t seen him pocket it.

He removed something from one of the grocery bags and shined the light on it. Plastic-wrapped bologna slices.

He held it up and shouted, “Food!”

Barely audible over the freeway. Fires continued to go out.

Training his beam more directly on the bologna, he waved the meat back and forth. The package and the hand that held it seemed suspended in midair, a special effect.

When nothing happened for several more seconds, he placed the meat on the ground, making sure to keep the penlight trained on it, then removed more groceries from his bag and spread them out on the dirt. Walking backward, toward the hatch, he created a snaky trail of food that led out to the sidewalk.

“Goddamn Hansel and Gretel,” he muttered, then he slipped back out.

I followed him. He was standing against the Fiat, had emptied one bag and crumpled it and was tossing it from hand to hand.

As we stood there and waited, cars rocketed overhead and the concrete hummed. Milo lit up a bad panatela and blew short-lived smoke rings.

A few minutes later, he stubbed out his cigar and jammed it between his fingers. Walking back to the hatch, he stuck his head through, didn’t move for a second, then beckoned me to follow him through.

We stopped just a few feet from the hatch and he aimed the penlight upward, highlighting movement about fifteen feet up.

Frantic, choppy, a scramble of arms.

Squinting, I managed to make out human forms. Down on their knees, scooping and snatching, just as the man at the minimart had done.

Within seconds they were gone and the food had vanished. Milo cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted over the freeway: “Lots more, folks.”

Nothing.

He clicked his light off and we retreated to the other side of the fence again.

It seemed like a game — a futile one. But he looked at ease.

He began emptying another bag, placing food on the streetlit patch of sidewalk, just out of reach of the hatch. Then he returned to the car, sat on the rear deck causing the springs to groan, and relit his cigar.

Luring and trapping
— enjoying
the hunt.

More time passed. Milo’s eyes kept shifting to the fence, then leaving it. His expression didn’t change, the cigar tilted as he bit down on it.

Then he stayed on the fence.

A large, dark hand was reaching out, straining to grab a loaf of white bread.

Milo went over and kicked the package away and the hand drew back.

“Sorry,” said Milo. “No grain without pain.”

He took his badge out and shoved it at the hatch.

“Just talk, that’s it,” he said.

Nothing.

Sighing, he picked up the bread, tossed it through the hatch. Picking up a can of soup, he wiggled it.

“Make it a balanced meal, pal.”

A moment later, a pair of unlaced sneakers appeared in the opening. Above them, the frayed cuffs of greasy-looking plaid pants and the bottom seam of an army blanket.

The head above the cloth remained unseen, shielded by darkness.

Milo held the soup can between thumb and forefinger. New Orleans Gourmet Gumbo.

“Lots more where this came from,” he said. “Just for answering a few questions, no hassles.”

One plaid leg angled forward through the opening. A sneaker hit the pavement, then the other.

A man emerged into the streetlight, wincing.

He had the blanket wrapped around him to the knees, covering his head like a monk’s cowl and shrouding most of his face.

What showed of the skin was black and grainy. The man took an awkward step, as if testing the integrity of the sidewalk, and the blanket dropped a bit. His skull was big and half bald, above a long, bony face that looked caved in. His beard was a kinky gray rash, his skin cracked and caked. Fifty or sixty or seventy. A battered nose so flat it almost merged with his crushed cheeks, spreading like melted tar. His eyes squinted and watered and didn’t stop moving.

He had the white bread in his hand and was looking at the soup.

Milo tried to give it to him.

The man hesitated, working his jaws. His eyes were quieter now.

“Know what a gift horse is?” said Milo.

The man swallowed. Drawing his blanket around himself, he squeezed the bread so hard the loaf turned into a figure eight.

I went over to him and said, “We just want to talk, that’s it.”

He looked into my eyes. His were jaundiced and clogged with blood vessels, but something shone through — maybe intelligence, maybe just suspicion. He smelled of vomit and alcohol belch and breath mints, and his lips were as loose as a mastiff’s. I worked hard at standing my ground.

Milo came up behind me and covered some of the stench with cigar smoke. He put the soup up against the man’s chest. The man looked at it and finally took it, but continued to stare at me.

“You are not police.” His voice was surprisingly clear. “You are definitely not police.”

“True,” I said. “But he is.”

The man glanced at Milo and smiled. Rubbing the part of the blanket that covered his abdomen, he shoved both hands under it, secreting the bread and the soup.

“A few questions, friend,” said Milo. “Simple stuff.”

“Nothing in life is simple,” said the man.

Milo hooked a thumb at the bags on the sidewalk. “A philosopher. There’s enough there to feed you and your friends — have a nice little party.”