Dr. Death (12 page)

He hung up. "Poor baby is getting bored . . . he wanted me to ask you if working with me will turn him psychotic."

"There's always that chance. What made you smile?"

"Your man, Doss, finally called back. Korn and Demetri are gonna talk to him tomorrow."

"Progress," I said.

"Mrs. Doss," he said. "Was she able to move around on her own?"

"As far as I know. She may have driven herself to meet Mate."

"May have?"

"No one knows."

"She just walked out on hubbie?"

I shrugged. But she had. Middle of the night, no note, no warning.

No good-bye.

The deepest wound she'd inflicted on Stacy . . .

"Not very considerate," he said.

"Pain will do that to you."

"Time to call in Dr. Mate . . . Take two aspirins, hook yourself up to the machine and
don't
call me in the morning."

He started up the car, then swiveled toward me again, wedging his bulk against the steering wheel. "Seeing as we'll be face-to-face with Mr. Doss soon, are there any blanks you want to fill in?"

"He didn't like Mate," I said. "Wanted me to tell you."

"Bragging?"

"More like nothing to hide."

"What was his beef with Mate?"

"Don't know."

"Maybe the fact that Mate killed his wife and he never knew it was going to happen?"

"Could be."

He leaned across the seat, moved his big face inches from mine. I smelled aftershave and tobacco. The wheel dug into his sport coat, bunching the tweed around his neck, highlighting love handles. "What's going on here, Alex? The guy said you could talk. Why're you parceling info out to me?"

"I guess I'm still not comfortable talking about patients. Because sometimes patients feel really communicative, then they change their minds. And what's the big deal, Milo? Doss's feelings about Mate aren't relevant. He has an alibi as tight as Zoghbie's. Out of town, just like Zoghbie. The day Mate was killed he was in San Francisco looking at a hotel."

"To buy?"

I nodded. "He was in the company of a group of Japanese businessmen. Has the receipts to prove it."

"He told you all that?"

"Yes."

"Well, ain't that fascinating." He knuckled his right eye with his left hand. "In my experience, it's mostly criminals who come prepared with an alibi."

"He wasn't prepared," I said. "It came up in the course of the conversation."

"What, like 'How's it going, Richard?' 'Peachy, Doc— and by the way I have an alibi'?"

I didn't answer.

He said, "Buying a hotel. Guy like that, rich honcho, gotta be used to delegating. Why would he do his own dirty work? So what the hell's an
alibi
worth?"

"The job done on Mate, all that anger. All that personal viciousness. Did it smell like hired help to you?"

"Depends upon what the help was hired to do. And who got hired." He reached out, placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. I felt like a suspect and I didn't like it. "Do you see Doss as capable of setting it up?"

"I've never seen any signs of that," I said in a tight voice.

He released his hand. "That sounds like a maybe."

"This is exactly why I didn't want to get into it. There's absolutely nothing I know about Richard Doss that tells me he's capable of contracting that level of brutality. Okay?"

"That," he said, "sounds like expert-witness talk."

"Then count yourself lucky. 'Cause when I go to court I get paid well."

We stared at each other. He shifted away, looked past me, up at Zoghbie's house. Two California jays danced among the branches of the sycamore.

"This is something," he said.

"What is?"

"You and me, all the cases we've been through, and now we're having a wee bit of
tension.
"

Veneering the last few words in an Irish brogue. I wanted to laugh, tried to, more to fill time and space than out of any glee. The movement started at my diaphragm but died, a soundless ripple, as my mouth refused to obey.

"Hey," I said, "can this friendship be saved?"

"Okay, then," he said, as if he hadn't heard. "Here's a direct question for you: Is there anything else you know that I should know? About Doss or anything else?"

"Here's a direct answer: no."

"You want to drop the case?"

"Want me to?"

"Not unless you want to."

"I don't want to, but—"

"Why would you want to stay on it?" he said.

"Curious."

"About what?"

"Whodunit, whydunit. And riding around with the po-lice makes me feel oh-so-safe. You want me off, though, just say so."

"Oh Christ," he said. "Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-
nyah
-nyah."

Now we both laughed. He was sweating again and my head hurt.

"So," he said. "Onward? You do your job, I do mine—"

"And I'll get to Scotland afore ye."

"It ain't Scotland I care about," he said. "It's Mulholland Drive— gonna be interesting hearing what Mr. Doss has to say. Maybe I'll interview him myself. When are you seeing the daughter— what's her name?"

"Stacy. Tomorrow."

He wrote it down. "How many other kids in the family?"

"A brother two years older. Eric. He's up at Stanford."

"Tomorrow," he said. "College stuff."

"You got it."

"I may be talking to her, too, Alex."

"She didn't carve up Mate."

"Long as you've got a good rapport with her, why don't you ask her if her daddy had it done."

"Oh sure."

He shifted into drive.

I said, "I wouldn't mind getting a look at Mate's apartment."

"Why?"

"To see how the genius lived. Where is it?"

"Hollywood, where else? Ain't no bidness like
shooow
bidness. C'mon, I'll
shooow
you— fasten your seat belt."

9

MATE'S BUILDING WAS on North Vista, between Sunset and Hollywood, the upper level of a seventy-year-old duplex. The landlady lived below, a tiny ancient named Mrs. Ednalynn Krohnfeld, who walked stiffly and wore twin hearing aids. A sixty-inch Mitsubishi TV ruled her front room, and after she let us in she returned to her chair, folded a crocheted brown throw over her knees and fastened her attention upon a talk show. The skin tones on the screen were off, flesh dyed the carotene orange of a nuclear sunburn. Trash talk show, a pair of poorly kept women cursing at each other, setting off a storm of bleeps. The host, a feloniously coiffed blonde with lizard eyes behind oversize eyeglasses, pretended to represent the voice of reason.

Milo said, "We're here to take another look at Dr. Mate's apartment, Mrs. Krohnfeld."

No answer. The image of a hollow-eyed man flashed in the right-hand corner of the screen. Gap-toothed fellow leering smugly. A written legend said,
Duane. Denesha's husband but Jeanine's lover.

"Mrs. Krohnfeld?"

The old woman quarter-turned but kept watching.

"Have you thought of anything since last week that you want to tell me, Mrs. Krohnfeld?"

The landlady squinted. The room was curtained to gloom and barricaded with old but cheap mahogany pieces.

Milo repeated the question.

"Tell you about what?" she said.

"Anything about Dr. Mate?"

Head shake. "He's dead."

"Has anyone been by recently, Mrs. Krohnfeld?"

"What?"

Another repeat.

"By for what?"

"Asking about Dr. Mate? Snooping around the apartment?"

No reply. She continued to squint. Her hands tightened and gathered the comforter.

Duane swaggering onstage. Taking a seat between the harridans. Giving a so-what shrug and spreading his legs wide, wide, wide.

Mrs. Krohnfeld muttered something.

Milo kneeled down next to her recliner. "What's that, ma'am?"

"Just a bum." Fixed on the screen.

"That guy up there?" said Milo.

"No, no, no. Here. Out there. Climbing up the stairs." She jabbed an impatient finger at the front window, slapped both hands to her cheeks and plucked. "A bum— lotsa hair— dirty, you know, street trash."

"Climbing the stairs to Dr. Mate's apartment? When?"

"No, no— just tried to get up there, I shooed him away." Glued to the orange melodrama.

"When was this?"

"Few days ago— maybe Thursday."

"What did he want?" said Milo.

"How would I know? You think I let him in?" One of the feuding women had jumped to her feet, pointing and cursing at her rival. Duane was positioned between them, relishing every strutting-rooster moment of it.

Bleep bleep bleep.
Mrs. Krohnfeld read lips and her own mouth slackened. "Such talk!"

Milo said, "The bum, what else can you tell me about him?"

No answer. He asked the same question, louder. Mrs. Krohnfeld jerked toward us. "Yeah, a bum. He went . . ." Jabbing over her shoulder. "Tried to go up. I saw him, yelled out the window to get the hell outa there, and he skedaddled."

"On foot?"

Grunt. "That type don't drive no Mercedes. What a louse." This time, directing the epithet at Duane. "Stupid idjits, wasting their time on a louse like
that.
"

"Thursday."

"Yup— or Friday . . . look at that." The women had raced toward each other and collided, alloying into a clawing, hair-pulling cyclone. "Idjits."

Milo sighed and rose. "We're going upstairs now, Mrs. Krohnfeld."

"When can I put the place up for rent?"

"Soon."

"Sooner the better—
idjits.
"

The steps to Mate's unit were on the right side of the duplex, and before I climbed I had a look at the rear yard. Not much more than a strip of concrete, barely space for the double carport. An old Chevy that Milo identified as Mate's was parked next to an even older Chrysler New Yorker. Unused laundry lines sketched crosshatch shadows across the cement. Low block fencing revealed neighbors on all sides, mostly multiple-unit apartment buildings, higher than the duplex. Throw a barbecue down here and lots of people would know the menu.

Mate had chased headlines, desired no privacy in his off-hours.

An exhibitionist, or had Alice Zoghbie been right? Not cued into his surroundings.

Either way, easy victim.

I mentioned that to Milo. He sucked his teeth and took me back to the entrance.

Mate's front door was capped by a small overhang. Ads from fast-food joints littered the floor. Milo picked them up, glanced at a few, dropped them. Yellow tape banded the plain wood door. Milo yanked it loose. One key twist and we were in. A single lock, not a dead bolt. Anyone could've kicked it in.

Mold, must, rot, the nose-tweaking snap of decaying paper. Air so heavy with dust it felt granular.

Milo opened the ancient venetian blinds. Where light penetrated the apartment it highlighted the particulate storms that we set off as we moved through tight, shadowed spaces.

Tight because virtually the entire front of the flat was filled with bookshelves. Plywood cases, separated by narrow aisles. Unfinished wood, warped shelves suffering under the weight of scholarship.

Life of the mind. Eldon Mate had turned his entire domicile into a library.

Even the kitchen counters were piled high with books. Inside the fridge were bottles of water, a moldering slab of hoop cheese, a few softening vegetables.

I walked around reading titles as dust settled on my shoulders. Chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, toxicology. Two entire cases of pathology, forensics, another wall of law— civil liability, jurisprudence, the criminal codes of what appeared to be every state of the union.

Mostly crumbling paperbacks and cold shabby texts with torn spines and flaking pages, the kind of treasures that can be found at any thrift shop.

No fiction.

I moved to the tiny back room where Mate had slept. Ten feet square, low-ceilinged, lit by a bare bulb screwed to a white porcelain ceiling fixture. Bare gray walls jaundiced by western light seeping through parchment- colored window shades. The cheap cot and nightstand took up most of the space, leaving barely enough room for a raw-looking three-drawer pine dresser. Ten-inch Zenith TV atop the dresser— as if Mate had had to make up for Mrs. Krohnfeld's video excess.

A door led to the adjoining bathroom, and I went in there because bathrooms can sometimes tell you more about a person than any other space. This one didn't. Razor, shaving cream, laxatives, antigas tablets, and aspirin in the medicine cabinet. Amber ring around the tub. Bar of green soap bottomed by slime, sitting like a dead frog in a brown plastic dish.