Survival of the Fittest (8 page)

“That why you asked about bullies in the neighborhood?”

“I asked because at this point I don’t know what else to ask. But yeah, the thought did occur to me that someone could have had it in for her. She was retarded, deaf, Jewish, Israeli. Choose your criterion.”

“Someone had it in for her but took care not to violate the body?”

“He’s twisted. You’re the shrink.” His voice was husky with irritation.

I said, “The M.O. files you gave me didn’t classify by victim characteristic other than age and sex. If you can get hold of the information, I’d look into murders of deaf people. Handicapped people, in general.”

“Handicapped defined how, Alex? Lots of our bad guys and their victims wouldn’t win any IQ contests. Is a dope fiend who OD’s and blasts himself into a coma handicapped?”

“How about deaf, blind, crippled. Documented retardation, if that doesn’t get too unwieldly. Victims under eighteen and strangled.”

He put on speed. “That kind of information is obtainable. Theoretically. Given enough time and shoe leather and cops from other jurisdictions who cooperate and have decent memories and keep decent records.
That’s
for L.A. County. If the killer’s new to the region, did the same thing two thousand miles away, the chances dwindle. And we already know from Gorman’s letter that nothing about the crime tipped off the FBI computers, meaning there’s no VICAP match. Even if we do find another case, it’ll be unsolved. And if the bastard swept up just as thoroughly, we’re not any further along, forensically.”

“Pessimism,” I said, “is not good for the soul.”

“Sold my soul years ago.”

“To whom?”

“The bitch goddess Success. Then she cut town before paying off.” He shook his head and laughed.

“What?”

“Guy gets his statistics straight from the mayor’s office. You see any career boost coming out of this one?”

“Let’s put it this way,” I said. “No.”

He laughed harder.

“Your honesty is laudatory, Doctor.”

At Robertson he stopped at a red light and touched his ear.

“Her own little world,” he said. “Poor kid.”

A few moments later: “Hear no evil.”

That night I didn’t sleep much. Robin heard me tossing and asked what was wrong.

“Too much caffeine.”

Chapter

9

The Observer

The neighborhood was worse than he remembered.

Nice houses on his friend’s street. Big, by his standards, most of them still decently maintained, at least from what he could see in the darkness. But to get there he’d passed through boulevards lined with pawnshops, liquor stores, and bars. Other businesses, to be sure, but at this hour they were all shuttered and the street was given over to girls in minimal clothing and guys drinking out of paper bags.

Night sounds: music, car engines, laughter now and then, rarely happy. People hanging out on corners or half-concealed in the shadows. Dark-skinned people, with nothing to do.

He was glad the Toyota was small and inconspicuous. Even so, occasionally someone stared as he passed.

Watching him, hands in pockets, slouching.

The half-naked girls paraded up and down or just stood at the curb, their pimps out of eyeshot but no doubt waiting.

He knew all about that kind of thing. Knew all the games.

His friend had told him not to be shocked and he’d come equipped, the nine-millimeter out of its box beneath the seat and tucked on the left side of his waistband where he could draw it out quickly with his gun hand.

His gun hand .   .   . nice way to put it.

So here he was, reasonably ready for surprises, but, of course, the key was not to
be
surprised.

Suddenly his thoughts were drowned out by music from a passing car. Big sedan, chassis so low it nearly scraped the asphalt. Kids with shaved heads bobbing up and down. Throbbing bass beat. Not music. Words. Chanting—shouting to electric drums.

Ugly, angry rant that passed for poetry.

Someone shouted and he looked around and checked his rearview mirror.

A siren shrieked in the distance. Got louder.

The ultimate danger.

He pulled to the curb and an ambulance passed and Dopplered to silence.

Silence had been Irit’s world.

Had she been cued into some internal universe, able to feel the vibrations of her own heartbeat?

He’d been thinking about her all day and into the night, imagining and supposing and replaying the scene. But when he began the drive to his friend’s house he forced himself to stop because he needed to concentrate on the present.

Still, so many distractions. This city .   .   . this neighborhood, all the changes.

Don’t be shocked.

He turned off onto a night-black side street, then another, and another, until he found himself in a completely different world: dim, silent, the big houses austere as bureaucrats.

His friend’s house looked the same, except for the
FOR SALE
sign staked in front.

It was good he’d caught him in time.

Surprise!

He pulled into the driveway, behind the dark van.

Touching the gun, he looked around again, got out, alarmed the car, and walked up the flower-lined pathway to the paneled front door.

Ringing the bell, he uttered his name in response to the shouted “Who is it?”

The door opened and he got a face full of smile.

“Hey!”

He stepped in and the two of them embraced briefly. To his friend’s left was an old mahogany mail table against the wall. On it, a large manila envelope.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem. Got time to come in? Coffee?”

“Sure. Thanks for that, too.”

His friend laughed and they went into the kitchen of the big house.

The envelope in his hand, stiff and dry.

The guy had come through. Taking risks.

But when had anything worthwhile ever come easy?

He sat and watched as his friend poured coffee, saying, “Easy drive over?”

“No problem.”

“Good. Told you it got bad.”

“Things change.”

“Yeah, but they rarely improve. So .   .   . you’re back in the game. From the looks of it we’ve got plenty to talk about.”

“That we do.”

The hand stilled. “Black, right?”

“Good memory.”

“Not as good as it used to be.” The hand paused again. “Maybe that’s for the better.”

Chapter

10

“It’s affecting my work,” said Helena. “I see a suicide attempt wheeled into the E.R. and I want to scream,
Idiot!
I watch the surgeons open a gunshot wound and start thinking about Nolan’s autopsy .   .   . he was so healthy.”

“You read the report?”

“I called the coroner until someone spoke to me. I guess I was hoping they’d find something—cancer, some rare disease—anything to justify it. But he was in the pink, Dr. Delaware .   .   . he could have lived a long time.”

She began crying. Pulled a tissue from her purse before I could get to the box. “The damn thing is,” she said, catching her breath, “I’ve thought about him more in the last few weeks than all the years before combined.”

She’d come straight from the hospital, still wearing her uniform, the white dress tailored to her trim frame, her nametag still pinned.

“I feel guilty, dammit. Why should I feel guilty? I never failed him because he never needed me. We didn’t depend on each other. We both knew how to take care of ourselves. Or at least I thought so.”

“Independent.”

“Always. Even when we were little kids we went our separate ways. Different interests. We didn’t fight, we just ignored each other. Is that abnormal?”

I thought of all the genetically linked strangers who’d passed through my office. “Siblings are thrown together by chance. Anything from love to hate can follow.”

“Well, Nolan and I loved each other—at least I know I loved him. But it was more of a—I don’t want to say family obligation. More of a .   .   . general bond. A feeling. And I loved his good qualities.”

She crumpled the tissue. The first thing she’d done upon arriving was hand me insurance forms. Then she’d talked about the coverage, the demands of her job—taking time to get around to Nolan.

“Good qualities,” I said.

“His energy. He had a real—” She laughed. “I was actually going to say “love for life.’ His energy and his intelligence. When he was young—eight or nine—the school tested him because he was goofing off in class. Turned out he was highly gifted—something like the top half-percent and he’d been tuning out because he was bored. I’m not stupid, but I’m not even remotely in that league   .   .   . maybe I’m the lucky one.”

“Being gifted was a burden for him?”

“It’s crossed my mind. Because Nolan didn’t have much patience and I think that had to do with his intelligence.”

“No patience for people?”

“People, things, any process that moved too slowly. Once again, this was back when he was a teenager. He may have mellowed when he was older. I remember him always railing about something. Mom telling him, “Honey, you can’t expect the world to go at your pace,—could that be why he became a cop? To fix things fast?”

“If he did that could have been a problem, Helena. There are very few fast fixes in cop work. Just the opposite: Cops see problems that never get solved. Last time you said something about conservative political views. That could have led him to police work.”

“Maybe. Although, once again, that’s the last phase I knew about. He could have been into something completely different.”

“He changed philosophies often?”

“All the time. There were times he outliberaled Mom and Dad, radical, really. Just about a Communist. Then he swung back the other way.”

“Was all this in high school?”

“I think it was after the satanic phase—probably his senior year. Or maybe his freshman year in college. I remember his reading Mao’s Little Red Book, reciting from it at the table, telling Mom and Dad they thought they were progressive but they were really counterrevolutionary. Then for a while he got into Sartre, Camus, all that existential stuff, the meaninglessness of life. One month he tried to prove it by not bathing or changing his clothes.” She smiled. “That ended when he decided he still liked girls. The next phase was .   .   . I think it was Ayn Rand. He read
Atlas Shrugged
and got totally into individualism. Then anarchy, then libertarianism. Last I heard he’d decided Ronald Reagan was a god, but we hadn’t talked politics for years so I don’t know where he ended up.”

“Sounds like adolescent searching.”

“I guess it was, but I never went through it. Always middle-of-the-road. The boring child.”

“How’d your parents react to Nolan’s changes?”

“They were pretty cool about it. Tolerant. I don’t think they really ever understood Nolan but I never saw them put him down.” She smiled. “Sometimes it was funny—the passion he put into each new phase. But we never made fun.”

She crossed her legs.

“Maybe the reason I never went through any of that was I felt Nolan was so unpredictable that I
owed
it to Mom and Dad to be stable. Sometimes it did seem that the family was divided into two segments: the three of us, and Nolan. I always felt close to my parents.”

She swiped at her eyes with the tissue. “Even when I was in college I’d go places with them, go out to dinner with them. Even after I was married.”

“And Nolan wasn’t part of that?”

“Nolan stopped hanging out with us when he was twelve. He always preferred to be by himself, do his own thing. Now that I think about it, he always kept his life private.”

“Alienated?”

“I guess so. Or maybe he just preferred his own company because he was so smart. Which is another reason becoming a cop seems so strange. Who’s more establishment?”

“Cops can be pretty alienated as a group,” I said. “Living with all that violence, the us-them mentality.”

“Doctors and nurses develop an us-them, too, but I still feel part of society.”

“And you don’t think Nolan did?”

“Who knows what he felt? But life must have been pretty damn bleak for him to do what he did.”

Her voice was tight, dry as kindling.

“How
could
he, Dr. Delaware? How could he get to the point where he didn’t feel tomorrow was worth waiting for?”

I shook my head.

“Dad’s depressions,” she said. “Maybe it’s all genetic. Maybe we’re just prisoners of our biology.”

“Biology is strong but there are always choices.”

“For Nolan to make that choice he must have been profoundly depressed, wouldn’t you say?”

“Men sometimes do it when they’re angry.” Cops sometimes do it when they’re angry.

“Angry about what? Work? I’ve been trying to find out more about his work record, see if he went through any bad work situations. I called the police department to get hold of his file and they referred me to his original training officer, a Sergeant Baker. He’s at Parker Center, now. He was nice enough, said Nolan had been one of his best trainees, there’d been nothing out of the ordinary, he couldn’t understand it either. I also went after Nolan’s medical records, contacted the department insurance office and used some of my nursing skills to pry them loose. Back when I was still hoping for a disease. Nolan hadn’t been treated for any medical conditions but he had seen a psychologist for two months before he died. Up til a week before. So something was wrong. A Dr. Lehmann. Do you know him?”

“First name?”

“Roone Lehmann.”

I shook my head.

“He’s got an office downtown. I left him several messages but he hasn’t called back. Would you have any problem calling him?”

“No, but he may not break confidentiality.”

“Do dead people have confidentiality?”

“It’s an open question but most therapists don’t breach even after death.”

“I guess I knew that. But I also know that doctors talk to doctors. Maybe Lehmann would be willing to tell you something.”