Victims (8 page)

Covering her mouth with her hands, she wept.

Maybe the closest to mourning Vita Berlin would merit.

Milo fetched her water and when she stopped crying, eased the glass toward her lips while resting a big paw on her forearm.

She drank. Wiped her eyes. “Thank you.”

“Thank you for putting up with us, Samantha. Now please give us the names of the other people Vita claimed had harassed her.”

I expected resistance but Samantha Pelleter’s mouth set crookedly. This smile was hard to characterize.

“You bet,” she said. “I’ll write you out a list. Time to look out for myself, I don’t care about anyone else’s issues.”

From a kitchenette drawer, she retrieved a scrap of paper and a pen. Writing quickly, she presented the list to Milo as if it were a school project.

1. Cleve Dawkins

2. Andrew Montoya

3. Candace Baumgartner

4. Zane Banion

“Appreciate it, Samantha. Are any of these people unusually strong?”

“Sure,” she said. “Zane is big and strong. He’s fat, but he used to play football. And Andrew’s into fitness. He bikes to work, says if people took care of themselves they wouldn’t get sick in the first place.”

“What about Cleve and Candace?”

“They’re regular.”

“They stick to the script.”

“We all do,” she said. “That’s the point.”

Milo drove north on Sepulveda. “Little Miss Sealed Lips, but get her feeling threatened and she rats out her work buddies. Any alarm bells go off?”

“As a psychologist, her fragility bothers me. As your lackey, I don’t see her as a serious suspect.”

“Lackey? And here I was thinking sage or pundit.”

“Well,” I said, “once upon a time there was a particularly obnoxious rooster who wouldn’t stop hassling the hens in the barnyard. Finally, the farmer was forced to take action. He castrated the rooster and turned him into a pundit.”

He laughed. “Sage, then. Unless you’ve got a story about that.”

“Once upon a time, there was an obnoxious rooster …”

“Fine form. Anyway, I agree. If anyone lacks the nerve, the physical ability, and the smarts to do what was done to Vita, it’s ol’ Samantha. But maybe one of the other jokers at Well-Start will turn out to be more interesting.”

He called Moe Reed, passed the four names along, ordered background checks.

Reed said, “Will do. I had no luck with the pizza box so far but Sean’s still out there. You got a call from the coroners, labs are back on Berlin.”

“Too quick for a tox.”

“Guess they prioritized, Loo.”

“I’m talking scientifically, Moses.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” said Reed. “Okay, I’ll run these jokers through, get back to you if I learn anything.”

Clicking off, Milo punched in a preset number.

Dr. Clarice Jernigan said, “Hi, there.”

“Labs are back so soon?”

“Who told you that?”

“That was the message I got.”

“Wonderful,” said Jernigan. “New secretary, she watches too
much TV, likes to throw the jargon around. No, sorry to get your hopes up, Milo. Full labs will take weeks. But I
was
calling about your victim’s blood alcohol and with that, you might not need the tox. She pulled a level of .26, more than thrice the legal limit. Even being the serious alcoholic her liver says she was, she’d have been pretty vulnerable. So there’d be no need to use anything else to subdue her.”

“Drunk,” he said.

“As the perennial black-and-white-striped mammal.”

“Her liver,” he said. “You’ve done the autopsy?”

“Not yet, but I was able to do a visual on a few organs, courtesy of your killer. Once we got rid of all the congealed blood. Which by my estimate was nearly all she started out with. Meaning your offender was meticulous, barely spilled a drop.”

“Someone with medical training?”

“I can’t exclude it but no, you wouldn’t need anything close to that level of skill.”

“What would you need?”

“The strength and confidence to perform two major incisions with a really sharp blade and a strong enough stomach to snip the intestines free. A butcher could do it. A deer hunter could do it. So could anyone with a warped mind and the wrong kind of knowledge. Which you can get off the Internet, if so inclined. In any event, I didn’t need to dissect the liver to know it was seriously cirrhotic. Most of the darn thing was fatty and gray, not a pretty thing to behold. But as I said, even with her being a lush, a .26 could’ve seriously affected her judgment, reaction time, coordination, and strength. A cinch to overpower. Ask Dr. Delaware next time you speak to him. He can probably give you some behavioral parameters.”

I said, “I’m here, Clarice.”

“Oh, hi. You concur?”

“Completely.”

“Great,” she said. “It’s nice when there’s peace in the valley. Milo, I’ll do my best to get the autopsy done by tomorrow. I’ll be traveling
so one of my people will do the actual cutting, but I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“Thanks.”

“That said, don’t be expecting any profound conclusions. She died from a broken neck, was well dead before he cut her up.”

“How long is well dead?”

“Enough time for the blood to settle, which is minutes, not hours. I’m picturing your creep sitting there, waiting, that was a big part of his fun. What do you think, Alex?”

“Makes sense.”

“Oh, if my teenagers could hear this. Mommy’s not always wrong. Bye, guys.”

CHAPTER
10

F
or three days, I heard nothing from Milo. On the fourth morning, he came to the house, vinyl attaché in hand, wearing a black poly suit with lapels from two decades ago and a pumpkinorange tie and muttering, “Yeah, yeah, happy Halloween.” He flicked a pocket flap that buttoned. “Vintage. Live long enough, everything comes back.”

Hard to read his emotions. He cruised past me into the kitchen, did his usual surveillance. Robin and I had been going out to dinner regularly so the fridge was light on leftovers. He made do with beer, bread, mayo, hot sauce, barbecue sauce, steak sauce, mustard, ground horseradish sauce, and three long-forgotten lamb sausages yanked from the back of the freezer that he microwaved into submission.

After several gulps of haphazard sandwich, he took a long swig of Grolsch. “Good morning, boys and girls, can you spell futility?”

Another long swallow of beer. “No one local uses that type of pizza box and all the alleged Well-Start bullies have alibis. None of
them looked good, anyway. The female is pushing sixty, was babysitting her grandkid, the physical fitness guy was on a nighttime mountain bike ride in Griffith Park vouched for by members of his cycling club, the supposedly big strong guy is big but not strong—close to four hundred and uses a cane and an inhaler and the night of the murder he was at his grandmother’s birthday party, verified by the waiter who served his table. The last guy wears Coke-bottle glasses and weighs in at maybe a hundred twenty and he was at the E.R. with one of his kids. Some sort of allergic reaction to shrimp, the nurse and the on-call resident say neither he nor his wife ever left the kid’s side and she was hospitalized overnight.”

He swigged, put the bottle down. “I resisted the temptation to ask if Daddy had pre-screened the kid so she could get treated. They all claimed to be blindsided by the lawsuit, refused to talk about details. I tried to reach someone at Well-Start’s corporate headquarters, big surprise, they stonewalled. I put Sean on it ’cause he’s got a high tolerance for failure and boredom and dealing with robotic turd-brains.”

He constructed another teetering sandwich, polished it off. “Autopsy results came in early this morning. Like Clarice said, no surprises.”

He ripped a slice of bread in half, balled it up, consumed. “Where’s Robin?”

“Working out back.”

“Must be nice to be productive. I located Vita’s sister using phone records. Had to go back nearly a month to find an Illinois number, so we’re not talking regular contact. The sister—Patricia’s her name—lives in Evanston and the call was her phoning Vita on her birthday. Which, she made sure to tell me, Vita would never do for her.”

“Was that after she found out Vita was dead or before?”

“After.”

“Not exactly sentimental,” I said. “How’d she react to the news?”

“She was shocked but it wore off and she got pretty dispassionate.
Analytic, like ‘Hmm, who would do something so terrible?’ And she had a quick answer: ‘If I was a betting woman, I’d say Jay, he despised Vita.’ ”

“The ex-husband?”

“Bingo, that’s why everyone calls you Doctor and bows and scrapes when you enter a room. Jay is one Jackson J. Sloat. He and Vita divorced fifteen years ago but Patricia said the financial battle went on long after. Turns out he’s got a record with some violence in it, lives here in L.A. Los Feliz, which is at most a forty-minute drive to Vita’s place.”

I said, “They hated each other, got divorced, but moved to the same city?”

“Funny about that, huh? So maybe it’s one of those obsessive, love-hate things. A drop-in on ol’ Jay is clearly the next step but if he is our bad guy he could be smart and manipulative and as the ex he could be expecting us. So I figured I’d tap your ample brain for strategy.”

“When were you planning on talking to him?”

“Soon as you finish opining. He works in Brentwood, hopefully he’s there or home.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Salesman at a high-end clothing store.” He retrieved his notepad from the attaché. “Domenico Valli.”

I said, “That’s why you got spiffed up.”

“Just the opposite.” He rubbed a lapel, ended up with brittle threads on his fingertips. “I come in like this, he’ll feel superior, maybe let his guard down.”

I laughed. “What kind of record does Sloat have?”

“Some lightweight vehicular stuff—operating without a license, the requisite DUIs every self-respecting marginal character needs for self-validation. The serious stuff is two ag assaults, one with a crowbar.”

“Who was the victim?”

“Guy at a drinking establishment, he and Sloat had words, Sloat followed him outside. Sloat brained him but also received some fairly serious injuries. That enabled him to claim self-defense and maybe there was something to it because charges were dropped. The other case was similar but it happened inside a bar. That time Sloat used his fists. He got pled down, received ninety days at County, served twenty-six.”

“Enough violence to be worrisome,” I said. “Two incidents in bars could mean he’s got a drinking problem—maybe what he and Vita had in common. More important, he’d be familiar with Vita’s drinking habits, know she was a nighttime boozer, would be vulnerable. And if there was a love-hate relationship, he could’ve wheedled his way into the apartment.”

“Arrives with what looks like a pizza,” he said. “ ‘Hi, honey, I miss you. Remember how we used to share an extra-large pepperoni with sausage?’ ”

He rolled the beer bottle between his hands. “Everything we know about Vita said she was distrustful, maybe borderline-paranoid. You think she’d fall for that?”

“With the help of Jack Daniel’s and old-times’-sake?” I said. “Maybe.”

“Real old times. My phone subpoena covered eighteen months of her records and his number’s not on it.”

“What about a different type of contact?” I said. “Vita used the court system at least once and got rewarded.”

“She’s still dragging him to court? Yeah, that might kick up the anger level.”

He called Deputy D.A. John Nguyen, asked for a quick scan of any legal proceedings between Vita Gertrude Berlin and Jackson Junius Sloat.

Nguyen said, “A quick one I can do for the last five years.”

“That’ll work, John.”

“Hold on … nope, nothing here. Berlin’s your nasty one, right? How’s that going?”

“Nothing profound.”

“There’s been talk in the office, all that weirdness could be the first installment of a whacko serial.”

“Thought you were my friend, John.”

“I’m not wishing it on you, just repeating what I heard. And the leak didn’t start with us. Are there any looser-lipped dudes than cops?”

“Wish I could argue with that,” said Milo. “Anything else I should know about?”

“Some of our guys are hoping it will go serial so they can jockey to take it and career-build.”

“But if you want it, you’ll get it.”

Nguyen laughed. “With Bob Ivey retiring I really am the Senior Junior Dude, meaning even if the boss takes it officially I’m doing the real work. So keep me posted.”

“Long as you pray for me, John. Little offering to Buddha’s fine.”

“I’m an atheist.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get.”

CHAPTER
11

W
hile he ate and washed the dishes, I gave him my best guesses about how to approach Jay Sloat: Keep it non-threatening, preface the news of Vita’s murder by emphasizing that Sloat was not a suspect, just someone Milo was turning to for valuable information.

However Sloat reacted verbally, his body language would be the thing to watch. Criminal psychopaths operate with lower anxiety levels than the rest of us but it’s a myth that they lack emotion. The smartest, coldest antisocials avoid violence completely because violence is a stupid strategy. Look for their smiling faces on election posters. But those a notch lower on the IQ scale often need to prep before indulging their urges with alcohol or dope or by chanting internal rage mantras that provide self-justification.