Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 04 - Silent Partner Read online

  I heard myself open up, talk about things I hadn't thought of in years.

  Whatever problems she might have, she'd clean up as a therapist.

  From the beginning I wanted her physically with an intensity that shook me. But something about her—a fragility that I sensed or imagined—held me back.

  For half a dozen dates it remained chaste: hand-holds and goodnight pecks, a noseful of that light, fresh perfume. I'd drive home swollen but oddly content, subsisting on recollections.

  As we headed toward the dorm after our seventh evening together, she said, "Don't drop me off yet, Alex. Drive around the corner."

  She directed me to a dark, shaded side street, adjacent to one of the athletic fields. I parked. She leaned over, turned off the ignition, removed her shoes, and climbed over the seat and into the back of the Rambler.

  "Come," she said.

  I followed her over, glad I'd washed the car. Sat beside her, took her in my arms, kissed her lips, her eyes, the sweet spot under her neck. She shivered, squirmed. I touched her breast. Felt her heart pounding. We kissed some more, deeper, longer. I put my hand on her knee. She shivered, gave me a look that I thought was fear. I lifted my hand. She put it back, between her knees, wedged me in a soft, hot vice. Then she spread her legs. I went exploring, up columns of white marble. She was splayed, had thrown her head back, had her eyes closed,

  was breathing through her mouth. No underwear. I rolled her skirt up, saw a generous delta soft and black as sable fur.

  "Oh, God," I said and started to pleasure her.

  She held me back with one hand, reached for my zipper with the other. In a second I was free, pointing skyward.

  "Come to me," she said.

  I obeyed.

  WITH MlLO out of town, my only other police contact was Delano Hardy, a dapper black detective who sometimes worked as Milo's partner. A few years ago he'd saved my life. I'd bought him a guitar, a classic Fender Stratocaster that Robin had restored. It was clear who owed whom, but I called him anyway.

  The desk man at West L.A. told me Detective Hardy wouldn't be in until the following morning. I debated trying him at home but knew he was a family man, always trying to scrounge more time for his kids, and left a message for him to call me.

  I thought of someone who wouldn't mind being called at home. Ned Biondi was one of those journalists who lived for the story. He'd been a metro writer-reporter when I met him, had since progressed to associate editor but managed to squeeze in a story now and then.

  Ned owed me. I'd helped reverse his daughter's descent to near-death from anorexia. He'd taken a year and a half to pay me, then added to his personal debt by profiting

  from a couple of big stories that I'd steered his way.

  Just after 9:00 P.M. I reached him at his home in Woodland Hills.

  "Doc. I was going to call you."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, just got back from Boston. Anne-Marie sends her love."

  "How's she doing?"

  "Still skinnier than we'd like, but otherwise great. She started social work school this fall, got a part-time job, and found a new boyfriend to replace the bastard who dumped her."

  "Give her my best."

  "Will do. What's up?"

  "I wanted to ask you about a story in today's final. Suicide of a psychologist, page—"

  "Twenty. What about it?"

  "I knew the woman, Ned."

  "Oh, jeez. That's lousy."

  "Is there anything more to it than what you printed?"

  "No reason for there to be. It wasn't exactly a hot scoop. In fact I believe we got it over the phone from police communications—no one actually went out to the scene. Is there anything you know that I should?"

  "Nothing at all. Who's Maura Bannon?"

  "Just a kid—student intern. Friend of Anne-Marie's, in fact. She's doing a semester of work study, little here, little there. She was the one who pushed for the piece—kind of a naive kid, thought the shri... psychologist suicide angle was newsworthy. Those of us familiar with the real world were less impressed, but we let her stick it in the computer just to make her happy. Turns out Section One ends up using it as filler—the kid's thrilled. Want me to have her call you?"

  "If she has anything to tell me."

  "I doubt that she does." Pause. "Doc, the lady in question—did you know her well?"

  My lie was reflexive. "Not really. It just came as a shock, seeing the name of someone I knew."

  "Must have," said Ned, but his tone had turned wary. "You called Sturgis first, I assume."

  "He's out of town."

  "Aha. Listen, Doc, I don't want to be insensitive, but if there's something about the lady that would flesh out the story, I'd be open to hearing about it."

  "There's nothing, Ned."

  "Okay. Sorry for snooping—force of habit."

  "That's all right. Talk to you soon, Ned."

  At eleven-thirty I took a walk in the dark, trudging up the glen toward Mulholland, listening to crickets and night birds. When I got home an hour later, the phone was ringing.

  "Hello."

  "Dr. Delaware, this is Yvette at your service. I'm glad I caught you. A call came in for you twenty minutes ago from your wife up in San Luis Obispo. She left a message, wanted to make sure you got it."

  Your wife. Slap-on-a-sunbum. They'd been making the same mistake for years. Once upon a time it had been amusing.

  "What's the message?"

  "She's on the move, will be hard to reach. She'll get in touch with you when she can."

  "Did she leave a number?"

  "No, she didn't, Dr. Delaware. You sound tired. Been working too hard?"

  "Something like that."

  "Stay well, Dr. Delaware."

  "Same to you."

  On the move. Hard to reach. It should have hurt. But I felt relieved, unburdened.

  Since Saturday I'd barely thought about Robin. Had filled my mind with Sharon.

  I felt like an adulterer, ashamed but thrilled.

  I crawled into bed and hugged myself to sleep. At two forty-five in the morning I woke up, wired and itchy. After throwing on some clothes I staggered down to the carport

  and started up the Seville. I drove south to Sunset, headed east through Beverly Hills and Boystown, toward the western tip of Hollywood and Nichols Canyon.

  At that hour, even the Strip was dead. I kept the windows open, let the sharp chill gnaw at my face. At Fairfax, I turned left, traveled north, and swung onto Hollywood Boulevard.

  Mention the boulevard to most people, and, inevitably, one of two images comes to mind: the good old days of Grauman's Chinese, the Walk of the Stars, black-tie premieres, a neon-flooded night scene. Or the street as it is today—slimy and vicious, promising random violence.

  But west of that scene, just past La Brea, Hollywood Boulevard shows another face: a single mile of tree-lined residential neighborhood—decently maintained apartment buildings, old, stately churches, and only slightly tarnished two-story homes perched atop well-tended sloping lawns. Looking down on this smudge of suburbia is a section of the Santa Monica mountain range that meanders through L.A. like a crooked spine. In this part of Hollywood the mountains seem to surge forward threateningly, pushing against the fragile dermis of civilization.

  Nichols Canyon begins a couple of blocks east of Fairfax, a lane and a half of winding blacktop feeding off the north side of the boulevard and running parallel to a summer-dry wash. Small, rustic houses sit behind the wash, concealed by tangles of brush, accessible only over homemade footbridges. I passed a Department of Water and Power terminal station lit by high arc lamps that gave off a harsh glare. Just beyond the terminal was flood-control district marshland fenced with chain link, then larger houses on flatter ground, sparsely distributed.

  Something wild and swift scurried across the road and dived into the bush. Coyote? In the old days Sharon had talked about seeing them, though I'd never spotted one.

  The old days.
r />   What the hell was I expecting to gain by exhuming them? By driving past her house like some moony teenager hoping to catch a glimpse of his beloved?

  Stupid. Neurotic.

  But I craved something tangible, something to reassure me she'd once been real. That I was real. I drove on.

  Nichols veered to the right. The straightaway turned into Jalmia Drive and compressed to a single lane, darkened even further under a canopy of trees. The road lurched, dipped, finally dead-ended without warning at a bamboo-walled cul-de-sac slotted with several steep driveways. The one I was looking for was marked by a white mailbox on a stake and a white lattice gate that sagged on its posts.

  I pulled to the side, parked, cut the engine, and got out. Cool air. Night sounds. The gate was unlocked and flimsy, no more of a barrier than it had been years ago. Lifting it to avoid scraping the cement, I looked around, saw no one. Swung the gate open and passed through. Closing it behind me, I began climbing.

  On both sides of the driveway were plantings of fan palm, bird of paradise, yucca, and giant banana. Classic fifties California landscaping. Nothing had changed.

  I climbed on, unmolested, surprised at the absence of any kind of police presence. Officially, the L.A.P.D. treated suicides as if they were homicides, and the departmental bureaucracy moved slothfully. This soon after the death, the file would certainly be open, the paperwork barely begun.

  There should have been warning posters, a crime-scene cordon, some kind of marker.

  Nothing.

  Then I heard a burst of ignition and the rumble of a high-performance car engine. Louder. I ducked behind one of the palms and pressed myself into the vegetation.

  A white Porsche Carrera appeared from around the top of the drive and rolled slowly down in low gear with its headlights off. The car passed within inches, and I made out the face of the driver: hatchet-shaped, fortyish, with slit eyes and oddly mottled skin. A wide black mustache spread above thin lips, forming a stark contrast with blow-dried snow-white hair and thick white eyebrows.

  Not a face easily forgotten.

  Cyril Trapp. Captain Cyril Trapp, West L.A. Homicide. Milo's boss, a one-time hard-boozing high-lifer with flexible ethics, now born again into religious sanctimony and gut hatred of anything irregular.

  For the past year Trapp had done his best to wear down Milo—a gay cop was as irregular as they come. Closed-minded but not stupid, he went about his persecution with subtlety, avoiding deliberate gay-bashing. Choosing instead to designate Milo a "sex crimes specialist" and assign him to every homosexual murder that came up in West L.A. Exclusively.

  It isolated my friend, narrowed his life, and plunged him into a roiling bath of blood and gore: boy hookers, destroyed and destroying. Corpses moldering because the morgue drivers didn't show to pick them up, for fear of catching AIDS.

  When Milo complained, Trapp insisted he was simply making use of Milo's specialized knowledge of "the deviant subculture." The second complaint brought him an insubordination report in his file.

  Pushing the issue would have meant going up before hearing boards and hiring a lawyer—the Police Benevolent Association wouldn't go to bat on this one. And unremitting media attention that would turn Milo into The Crusading Gay Cop. That was something he wasn't—probably never would be—ready for. So he pushed his oars through the muck, working compulsively and starting to drink again.

  The Porsche disappeared down the drive but I could still hear its engine pulsate in a chugging idle. Then the creak of the car door opening, padded footsteps, the scrape of the gate. Finally Trapp drove away—so quietly I knew he was coasting.

  I waited a few minutes and stepped out of the foliage, thought about what I'd seen.

  A captain checking out a routine suicide? A West L.A. captain, checking out a Hollywood Division suicide? It made no sense at all.

  Or was the visit something personal? The use of the Porsche instead of an unmarked suggested just that.

  Trapp and Sharon involved? Too grotesque to contemplate.

  Too logical to dismiss.

  I resumed my walk, climbed up to the house, and tried not to think about it.

  Nothing had changed. The same high banks of ivy, so tall they seemed to engulf the structure. The same circular slab of concrete in lieu of a lawn. At the center of the slab, a raised circular bed rimmed with lava rock housed a pair of towering cocoa palms.

  Beyond the palms a low-slung one-story house—gray stucco, the front windowless and flat-faced, shielded by a facade of vertically slatted wood and marked with oversized address numerals. The roof was pitched almost flat and coated with white pebbles. Off to one side was a detached carport. No car, no signs of habitation.

  At first glance, an ugly piece of work. One of those "moderne" structures that spread over postwar L.A., aging poorly. But I knew there was beauty within. A free-form cliff-top pool that wrapped itself around the north side of the house and gave the illusion of bleeding off into space. Walls of glass that afforded a breathtakingly uninterrupted canyon view.

  The house had made a big impression on me, though I didn't realize it until years later, when the time came to buy a home of my own and I found myself gravitating toward a similar ecology: hilltop remoteness, wood and glass, the indoor-outdoor blend and geologic imperman-ence that characterize canyon living in L.A.

  The front door was unobtrusive—just another section of the slatted facade. I tried it. Locked. Looked around some more and noticed something different—a sign attached to the trunk of one of the palms.

  I went over for a closer look and squinted. Just enough starlight to make out the letters:

  FOR SALE.

  A real estate company with an office on North

  Vermont, in the Los Feliz district. Below it another sign, smaller. The name and number of the salesperson. Mickey Mehrabian.

  On the market before the body was cold.

  Routine suicide notwithstanding, it had to be the fastest probate in California history.

  Unless the house hadn't belonged to her. But she'd told me it did.

  She'd told me lots of things.

  I memorized Mickey Mehrabian's number. When I got back to the Seville, I wrote it down.

  THE FOLLOWING morning, I called the real estate office. Mickey Mehrabian was a woman with a Lauren Bacall voice, slightly accented. I made an appointment to see the house at eleven, spent the next hour thinking about the first time I'd seen it.

  Something to show you, Alex.

  Surprise, surprise. She'd been full of them.

  I expected her to be flooded with suitors. But she was always available when I asked her out, even on the shortest notice. And when a patient crisis caused me to break a date, she never complained. Never pushed or pressured me for commitment of any sort—the least demanding human being I'd ever known.

  We made love nearly every time we were together, though we never spent the night together.

  At first she begged off going to my place, wanted to do it in the back seat of the car. After we'd known each other

  for several months she relented, but even when she did share my bed, she treated it as if it were a back seat— never completely disrobing, never falling asleep. After waking up several times from my own postcoital torpor to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, tugging her ear, I asked her what was bothering her.

  "Nothing. I'm just restless—always have been. I have trouble sleeping anywhere but my own bed. Are you angry?"

  "No, of course not. Is there anything I can do?"

  "Take me home. When you're ready."

  I accommodated myself to her needs: rut and run. Some of the edge was taken off my pleasure, but enough remained to keep me coming back for more.

  Her pleasure—the lack of it—preyed on my mind. She went through passionate motions, moving energetically, fueled by an energy that I wasn't sure was erotic, but she never came.

  It wasn't that she was unresponsive—she was easily moistened, always willin
g, seemed to enjoy the act. But climax wasn't part of her agenda. When I was finished, she was, having given something to me, but not her self.

  I knew damn well that it wasn't right, but her sweetness and beauty—the thrill of possessing this creature I was sure everyone wanted—sustained me. An adolescent fantasy, to be sure, but a part of me wasn't that far past adolescence.