Time Bomb (26 page)

I let that rationalization settle for a while.

His behavior still bothered me. The detachment when he’d talked about her.

An IQ in the Dull Normal range . . .

It was as if her weaknesses, her failure to be
brilliant,
had been a personal insult to him.

I imagined a Burden family crest. Crossed muskets over a field of Straight A’s.

A man used to having his way. She’d upset his sense of organization, had been an affront to his
system
.

Using her to clean house. Prepare
cold
food
.

Some sort of punishment? Or simply an efficient allocation of resources?

Yet at the same time, against all logic, he was proclaiming her innocence.

Contracting me for . . . what? A psychological whitewash?

Something didn’t fit. I sat struggling with it. Finally told myself to stop taking my work home. Once upon a time I’d been good at following that dictum. Once upon a time life had seemed simpler. . . .

Suddenly the music was ear-shattering. I realized I’d blocked it out. Now I could barely stand it and went to switch stations. Just as I touched the dial, the saxophonist quit and some Stanley Jordan guitar wizardry came on. Good omen. Time to push all thoughts of the Burden family from my mind.

But my mind was no different from anyone else’s: It abhorred a vacuum. I needed something to fill the space.

Call Linda. Then I remembered her restlessness. Needing to
breathe
. I’d learned the hard way not to crowd.

I realized I was hungry, went into the kitchen and took out eggs, mushrooms, and an onion. Jordan gave way to Spyro Gyra doing “Shake Her.” I cracked eggs, chopped vegetables in tempo. Paying attention in order to get it just right.

I fried up an omelet, ate, read psych journals, and did paperwork for an hour, then stepped onto the skiing machine and pretended I was crossing some snow-filled meadow in Norway. Midway through the fantasy, Gregory Graff’s bearded visage appeared through the sweat-haze, urging me to work harder. Reciting a list of brand-new products that could maximize my performance. I told him to fuck himself and huffed away.

I got off a half hour later, dripping and ready to sink into a hot bath. The phone rang.

Milo said, “So how’d it go?”

“No big surprises. She was a girl with lots of problems.”

“Homicidal problems?”

“Nothing that overt.” I gave him a brief rundown on what Burden had told me.

He said, “Sounds like she led like a great life.” I thought I detected sympathy in his voice. “That’s all the father knows about Novato?”

“That’s what he says. You learn anything new?”

“Called Maury Smith at Southeast. He remembered the case—said it was still unsolved, one of many. He wasn’t working on it actively because no leads had turned up. There was definitely some of that attitude Dinwiddie had picked up—just another dope burn. He did wake up a bit when I told him it might be related to something on the West Side and he agreed to meet with me tomorrow for lunch and pull the file. I also got the address of the land-lady—Sophie Gruenberg. He remembered
her
pretty vividly. Said she was an old commie, really hostile to the police, kept asking him how he could stand being a black
cossack.
That sounded so inviting I thought I’d drop in on her tomorrow morning.”

“Care for a ride-along?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Do pinkos relate well to shrinks?”

“Hell, yes. Marx and Freud bowled together every Tuesday at Vienna Lanes. Freud got strikes; Marx fomented them.”

He laughed.

“Besides,” I said, “what makes you think she’ll relate to a
white
cossack?”

“Not just any cossack, m’lad. This one’s a member of a
persecuted minority.”

“Planning on wearing your lavender uniform?”

“If you put on your feather boa.”

“I’ll go digging in the attic. What time?”

“How’s about nine.”

“How’s about.”

He came by at eight-forty, driving an unmarked Ford that I’d never seen before. Sophie Gruenberg’s address was on Fourth Avenue, just north of Rose. A short stroll to the beach but this wasn’t Malibu. It was a cold morning, the sun lurking like a mugger behind a grimy bank of undernourished, striated clouds, but zinc-nosed pedestrians were already tramping down Rose, headed for the ocean.

The business mix on Rose proclaimed Changing Neighborhood. In Venice, that meant business as usual; this neighborhood never stopped changing. Designer delis, gelato parlors, and cubbyhole trendtiques shared the sidewalk with laundromats, check-cashing outlets, serious-drinking bars, and crumbling bungalow courts that could be emptied by scrutiny from the Immigration Service. Milo turned right on Fourth and drove for a block.

The house was a one-story side-by-side duplex on a thirty-foot-wide lot. The windows were covered with iron security bars that looked brand-new. The walls were white stucco with red-painted wood trim under a brick-colored composition roof. The front lawn was tiny but green enough to satisfy the Ocean Heights Landscape Committee, and backed by a large germinating yucca plant and a nubby bed of ice plants. Dwarf iceberg roses lined a concrete path that forked to a pair of front stoops. The two doors were also red-painted wood. Brass letters designated them “A” and “B.”

A white ceramic nameplate that said
THE SANDERS
had been nailed just beneath the “A.” Unit B was marked with something else: A white poster taped to the door, bearing the legend
MISSING. REWARD
!!! in bold black letters. Under that a photo-reproduction of an old woman—chipmunk face wizened as walnut meat, surrounded by a frizzy aura of white hair. Serious face, borderline hostile. Large, dark eyes.

Below, a paragraph in typescript:

SOPHIE GRUENBERG, LAST SEEN 9/27/88, 8 P.M., IN THE VICINITY OF THE BETH SHALOM SYNAGOGUE,
402 1
⁄
2 OCEAN FRONT WALK. WEARING A BLUE-AND-PURPLE FLORAL DRESS, BLACK SHOES, CARRYING A LARGE BLUE STRAW HANDBAG.

D.O.B.: 5-13-16

HT: 4'11''

WT: APPROX 94 LB.

MENTAL AND HEALTH STATUS: EXCELLENT

FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED

A
$1000.00
REWARD HAS BEEN OFFERED FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO THE WHEREABOUTS OF MRS. SOPHIE GRUENBERG. ANYONE POSSESSING SUCH INFORMATION SHOULD CONTACT BETH SHALOM SYNAGOGUE.

The address of the synagogue was reiterated at the bottom of the page, along with a phone number with a 398 prefix.

I said, “September twenty-seventh. When was Novato killed?”

“The twenty-fourth.”

“Coincidence?”

Milo frowned and rapped the door to Unit B, hitting it hard enough to make the wood rattle. No answer. He rang the bell. Nothing. We walked over to A and tried there. More silence.

“Let’s try around back,” he said. We peeked into a small yard landscaped with a fig tree and little else. The garage was empty.

Back on the sidewalk, Milo folded his arms across his chest, then smiled at a small Mexican boy across the street who’d come out to stare. The boy scampered away. Milo sighed.

“Sunday,” he said. “Hell of a long time since I’ve spent Sunday in church. Think I can get partial points for synagogue?”

He took Rose to Pacific, headed south for a couple of blocks, and hooked right onto an alley that ran parallel with Paloma. Still no sunshine but the streets and sidewalks were a moving meat market; even the crosswalks were jammed.

The unmarked car inched through the crowd before turning into a pay parking lot on Speedway. The attendant was a Filipino with hair down to his waist, wearing a black tank top over electric-blue bicycle pants and beach sandals. Milo paid him, then showed him a badge and told him to park the Ford where we could get it out fast. The attendant said yessir and bowed and stared at us as we departed, eyes full of curiosity, fear, resentment. Feeling the stare at my back, not liking it, I savored a tiny taste of what it was like to be a cop.

We walked toward Ocean Front Walk, making our way past street peddlers hawking sunglasses and straw hats that might last a weekend, and stands selling ethnic fast food of doubtful origin. The crowd was clearance-sale thick: multigenerational Hispanic tribes, shambling winos who looked as if they’d been hand-dipped in filth, mumbling psychotics and retro-hippies lost in a dope haze, Polo-clad upscalers side by side with rooster-coiffed high-punk roller skaters, assorted body-beautiful types testing the limits of the anti-nudity ordinance, and grinning, gawking tourists from Europe, Asia, and New York, overjoyed at having finally found the real L.A.

A kinetic human sculpture, a quilt patched together with every skin tone from Alpine vanilla to bittersweet fudge. The soundtrack: polyglot rap.

I said, “The Salad Bowl.”

“What?” said Milo, talking loudly to be heard over the din.

“Just muttering.”

“Salad bowl, huh?” He eyed a couple on roller skates. Greased torsos. Zebra-skin loincloth and nothing else on the man, micro-bikini and three nose rings on the woman. “Pass the dressing.”

Splintering park benches along the west side of the promenade were crammed with conclaves of the homeless. Beyond the benches was a strip of lawn planted long ago with palm trees that had grown gigantic. The trunks of the trees had been whitewashed three feet up from ground level to provide protection from animals, four-legged and otherwise, but no one was buying it: The trunks were scarred and maimed and gouged, crisscrossed with graffiti. Past the lawn, the beach. More bodies, glistening, half-naked, sun-drunk. Then a dull-platinum knife blade that had to be the ocean.

Beth Shalom Synagogue was a chunky single story of tan stucco centered by aqua-green double doors recessed under a wooden plaque that bore Hebrew writing. Above the plaque was a glass circle containing a leaded Star of David. Identical stars floated above the arched windows on either side of the doorway. The windows were barred. Flanking the building to the north was a three-story drug rehab center. To the south was a narrow brick apartment building with two shopfronts on the ground floor. One space was empty and accordion-grated. The other was occupied by a souvenir shop entitled
CASH TALKS, THE REST WALKS
.

We walked to the front of the synagogue. Inside the entry alcove, a poster identical to the one we’d just seen on Sophie Gruenberg’s door had been taped to the wall. Below that was a small bulletin board in a glass-fronted case: corrugated black surface with movable white letters, informing the religiously curious of the times for weekday and Sabbath services. The sermon of the week was “When Good Things Happen to Bad People”; the deliverer, Rabbi David Sanders, M.A.

I said, “Sanders. Unit A.”

Milo grunted.

The doors were decorated with a pair of dead-bolt locks and some kind of push-button security affair, but when Milo turned the knob, it yielded.

We entered a small linoleum-floor anteroom filled with mismatched bookcases and a single wooden end table. A paper plate of cookies, cans of soda pop, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky, and a stack of paper cups sat atop the table. A wooden panel door was marked
SANCTUARY
. Next to it, on a metal stand, stood a battered brown leather box filled with black satin skullcaps. Milo took a cap and placed it on his head. I did the same. He pushed open the door.

The sanctuary was the size of a master suite in a Beverly Hills remodel—more of a chapel, really. Light-blue walls hung with oil paintings of biblical scenes, a dozen rows of blond-wood bench pews bordered either side of a central linoleumed aisle layered with a threadbare Persian runner. The aisle culminated at a large podium faced with another six-sided star and topped by a fringed throw of blue velvet. Behind the podium was a pleated velvet curtain sided by two high-backed chairs upholstered in the same blue plush. Dangling over the podium was a cone of red glass, lit. A pair of tall thin windows toward the front of the room allowed in narrow beams of dusty light. The rear was couched in semidarkness. Milo and I stood there, half-hidden by it. The air was warm and fusty, overlaid with kitchen aromas.

A fair-complected bearded man in his late twenties stood behind the podium, a book open before him, addressing a front-row audience of four, all elderly. One man, three women.

“So we see,” he said, leaning on his elbows, “the true wisdom of the Ethics of the Fathers lies in the ability of the
tana’im
—the rabbis of the Talmud—to put our lives in perspective, generation after generation. To teach us what is important and what isn’t. Values. ‘Who is rich?’ the rabbis ask. And they answer: he who is satisfied with his portion. What could be more profound? ‘Without manners, there is no scholarship. Without scholarship, no manners.’ ‘The more meat, the more worms.’” He had a soft, clear voice. Precise enunciation. Some sort of accent—my guess was Australian.

“Worms—oh, boy, is that true,” said the sole male student, using his hands for emphasis. He sat in the midst of the women. All I could see of him was a bald head wisped with white and topped by a yarmulke, just like the one I was wearing, above a short, thick neck. “Worms all the time—all we got now is worms, the way we let society get.”

Mutters of assent from the women.

The bearded man smiled, looked down at his book, wet his thumb with his tongue and turned a page. He was broad-shouldered and had a rosy-cheeked baby face that the dirty-blond beard had failed to season. He had on a short-sleeved blue-and-white plaid shirt and a black velvet skullcap that covered most of his tight blond curls.

“It’s always the same, Rabbi,” said the bald man. “Complication, making things difficult. First you set up a system. To do some good. Till then you’re okay. We should always be looking to do good—otherwise what’s the point, right? What separates us from the animals, right? But then the problem comes when too many people get involved and the system takes over and all of a sudden everyone’s working to do good for the
system
instead of vice-a-versa. Then you got worms. Lots of meat, lots of worms. The more meat, the more worms.”