Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 25

Two more days passed with no progress. Bad for Milo, a mixed blessing for me because a legal consult came in that could be handled quickly: reviewing the case files of a nine-year-old boy who’d fallen off a defective bicycle, broken several bones, and incurred a closed head injury.

A year later, the child’s tibia, fibula, and femur had mended, as had a hairline fracture of the skull. But psych testing revealed minor learning deficits and my mandate was to judge the quality of that evaluation — first-rate, as it turned out — and to offer an opinion about the durability of the problems.

The honest answer was No Way to Tell.

The judge who’d sent the case said, “You can’t do better?”

“If someone else says they can, they’re lying.”

“Oh, boy. All right, Alex, ambiguity will have to do. But I need someone like you to provide it.”

On the morning of the third day, Milo and I were reviewing Thalia Mars’s far-too-thin murder book, searching for a hidden nugget of data that might energize the investigation.

An hour later: nothing.

Blanche had settled next to Milo, following the gloomy repartee with a suitably grave expression.

“Finding a lead on this is like looking for Bigfoot,” he said. “You know it’s hopeless but you wanna believe.”

My phone rang.

The judge in the bicycle eval, saying he’d gotten my report, didn’t need anything more. For the time being. But he was reserving the right to amend that. If necessary.

Blanche trotted out of the office, into the kitchen, and out to the back door, where she sat, serene and lady-like. I took her to the garden and she favored a particularly hospitable azalea bush with attention.

When we returned, Milo was on his feet. “Just got a text from the pathologist who did Thalia’s autopsy. Something I should see, no details. Haven’t been able to reach her so I’m going over there.”

“After all this time, something on the tox screen?”

“That would be my guess. I need to see for myself.”

“In the mood for company?”

“You or the pooch?” He bent and rubbed Blanche’s head.

“You’ll have to settle for a biped.”

“If she knew how to drive, I wouldn’t. Let’s take the Caddy.”

I brought Blanche out to Robin and we got in the car.

Milo said, “Gotta hand it to you, how long you been driving this antique and the leather still smells great.”

“TLC and fidelity.” I drove south to Sunset as he re-texted the pathologist. By the time I was well into Beverly Hills, there’d still been no reply.

He said, “Maybe there is a big hairy guy roaming around.”

Once the sun rises, there’s no smooth way to make it to East L.A. from Bel Air. The drive to Mission Road took an hour and ten minutes. The pathologist, a new hire named Laura Robaire, wasn’t at the crypt. No one knew when she’d return or what the text had referred to.

We left the building, took a stroll around the parking lot. Milo tried calling and texting back, cursed, smoked a cigar, went over to the Seville and stared blankly through a window.

I walked and stretched. White vans pulled in and out of the loading area. Rapid transit for the dead.

I’d drifted away from him and was avoiding looking at a middle-aged couple trudging toward the north end of the building. The business end of the building; probably picking up a loved one’s effects.

Milo waved. I jogged over.

“The sixth damn time she answered. On her way over. Allegedly.”

Ten minutes later, a racing-green Jaguar S-type zoomed into a reserved slot and a honey-haired woman in her thirties got out. Five-two, maybe a hundred pounds. Lithe walk, too-young-to-be-an-M.D. face.

She flashed a quick smile. “Lieutenant?”

Milo said, “Doctor.”

“Hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“Just got here.”

Laura Robaire wore a knit top the same color as her car, skinny jeans, and bright-green flats. Her eyes were as light as green can be without being gray. Her nail polish was the color of a pine forest at dusk. Some sort of eco-statement? Or she just liked green.

She said, “Had to give a lecture crosstown, left the room and saw all of your texts. Sorry mine was enigmatic but I wanted you to see it for yourself so you could form your own impressions. Because I’m not sure I have anything you can actually use. Still, if it was me, I’d want to be informed.”

We followed her back to the south side of the crypt, took the stairs down, and ended up in the chilly, oversized closet where bodies are wrapped in plastic and stacked on shelves.

The body Robaire wanted was near the top. “I’ll call Marcel, he’s six-four.”

Milo said, “I can handle it.”

“I’m sure you could, Lieutenant, but you’ll still need help placing it on the table, rules are rules and in this case they’re reasonable. You know how it is once they’re taken apart. With snipped tendons and ligaments, there’s less internal structure, we don’t want anything sagging and slipping onto the floor.”

“That would be poor form,” said Milo.

“The poorest.” She removed a beeper from her waistband and pushed a button. “While we wait for Marcel, I’ll fill you in. This one came in early yesterday, not your jurisdiction, not even L.A., Culver City. But the moment I saw it, I knew I had to contact you.”

“Who’s the lead over there?”

“A Detective Gottlieb,” said Robaire. “I’ve never dealt with him before, then again I haven’t dealt with too many people here, just moved from Detroit.”

“The crypt, there?”

“You bet.”

“Busy place.”

“You guys do okay here, but yes, I found myself quite occupied in Detroit. I lived there because my husband had a urology fellowship. Penile repair.”

“Ouch.”

She laughed. “Sorry. But all those gunshot wounds afforded him experience. Anyway, Detective Gottlieb figured his case as a suicide and I could see why. No external wounds, nothing on X-ray, I wasn’t even figuring it for a mandatory autopsy but the age of the decedent made me consider it. Normally, I might’ve just run a tox. I also have an eager-beaver resident shadowing me so I let him cut. Internally, no surprises. But then, when we used the shaver — hi, Marcel.”

A rangy young black man stood in the doorway. “Hey, Doc.”

“I need the benefit of your superior stature.” She pointed. “Lieutenant Sturgis will help you lower it to the gurney that’s right outside.”

“Sure,” said Marcel. “If I need help.”

He didn’t. Once the body was loaded, Milo said, “I’ll drive,” and wheeled the cart to a nearby autopsy room.

The space smelled of chopped liver, copper, spoiled produce, antiseptic. Spotless, but for a red-brown splotch near the sink that made me think of the Aventura’s liverish uniforms.

Everyone gloved up. Milo and Marcel lowered the corpse to a stainless-steel table and began lifting up per Robaire’s instructions as she unraveled the plastic. Heavy-duty sheeting, rolled on in multiple layers that were nearly opaque. Lifeless flesh flashed ivory through the milky sheath.

When the face was revealed, Milo said, “Oh, shit.”

Kurt DeGraw would’ve gazed up at the ceiling if his eyes were open.

Robaire said, “You know him?”

“He managed the hotel where Victim Mars was murdered.”

“Wow. Unbelievable. Thanks, Marcel, you can go now.”

As the attendant left, Milo took out his pad.

Laura Robaire said, “He was found in his apartment yesterday morning by his cleaning woman, lying in bed with a plastic bag over his head. The bag was secured with generic packing string. Time of death estimate is sometime during the night. Lacking any broken skin and with no sign of forced entry, struggle, or ransacking, the EMTs assumed suicide and so did my investigators. The autopsy revealed pulmonary and other organ congestion consistent with asphyxia but told us nothing about manner. I was teaching my resident the importance of being hands-on, not just relying on labs. To illustrate, I palpated, and when I got to under the chin it felt swollen. So we shaved his beard.”

She tilted back DeGraw’s head. “Right here — bruises notably similar to what I found on your Victim Mars. Unlike Mars, there are no broken ribs or ocular bleeding so I still wasn’t considering it dramatic evidence, there are all sorts of ways to get a bruise. But it did make me wonder, so I ran the tox stat and when opiates, alcohol, or any other obvious CNS suppressants came back negative, I realized suicide was a less likely scenario. At that point, I made two calls, to Detective Gottlieb and to you. Even without a link, I thought you two should be talking. I expect you’ll be hearing from him. And now that you’ve established an actual link between the victims, I’m sure he’ll be happy to talk to you.”

I said, “Suicide’s unlikely because people who use bags pre-medicate.”

“I’ve never seen different, Dr. Delaware. Think about what it would entail: You don’t prep with anything to make yourself fade out, just tie a bag over your head and lie there waiting to suffocate? No matter how emotionally depressed someone is, the urge to breathe would kick in. They’d start gasping and even if they tried to fight it, there’s a good chance they’d rip off the bag. Have you observed otherwise?”

I shook my head.

She said, “I just don’t see anyone starving themselves of oxygen for up to fifteen minutes with no sign of any struggle, let alone actually going through with it. Thank God I took the time to shave him. My judgment is he was burked, so manner will definitely be listed as homicide.”

“Burked?” said Milo.

“Same as what was done to your Victim Mars.”

“You didn’t use that term with her.”

“It’s not medical, it’s idiomatic,” said Robaire. “On reports I stick to technical terminology.”

“What is it?”

“A method of murder that originated in Scotland, the 1820s. What one of my professors called the Case of the Two Nasty Billys.”

“A team?”

“A deadly duo, Lieutenant. William Burke and William Hare were a couple of Irishmen who moved to Edinburgh and made a living supplying cadavers to the university med school, during a period where there was an acute shortage of bodies. Other suppliers got naughty but only to the extent of digging up corpses that hadn’t been donated to science — body-snatching. Burke and Hare took it a step further and hastened the process along in living people. They worked as a team, one guy sitting on the victim in order to immobilize, while the other pinched off the nose and held the mouth shut. They chose asphyxia because it created a fresher body that simulated common natural causes of the day — pneumonia, bronchitis, other respiratory ailments.”

Milo said, “Birkenhaar.”

Laura Robaire said, “That’s right.”

“This is something else. Birkenhaar.” He spelled it. “We’ve got suspects who registered at the hotel under that name.”

“Oh, my,” said Laura Robaire. “That is chilling.” Her pretty face knitted in concentration. She smiled. “So I really have come up with something.”

We left the crypt, stunned. Milo was the first to speak.

“Burking. They made a joke of it, the premeditating bastards. What, I’m dealing with students of history?”

I said, “Couple of cellies with lots of spare time? All those books in the prison library.”

“Probably true crime,” he said. “Convicts love that stuff.”

“Thalia didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not a single volume of it in her collection, just fiction.”

“Yeah, well, these guys are into reality. Or Pretty Woman’s the reader and she told them about it.”

“Team effort,” I said. “Killing Thalia was a collaboration from the beginning. They did Burke and Hare one better, made it a three-way. One to immobilize, another to close off her airways, the third to search for treasure. Like Burke and Hare they wanted to make the death appear natural. A victim that old, who’d suspect? Like Burke and Hare, they failed.”

“Four on the team,” he said, “if DeGraw was in on it. Can you see any other reason they’d do him?”

I said, “It explains how they got in. Who better than the manager to provide a master key?”

“Asshole. Never liked him.”

I said, “Be interesting to have a look at his phone records and his computer.”

He phoned Culver City PD and asked for Detective Gottlieb. The receptionist said, “Patricia or Leonard?”

“Leonard.”

Dead air. Then: “He’s out, sir, I’ll give him the message.”

We got back in the car. I said, “The three of them could’ve assumed they’d gotten away with it until you showed up and DeGraw told them. He seemed an excitable type, being drawn into a murder investigation could’ve panicked him. His mistake was showing that to the others. Maybe even pressuring them for his share. So they cut him from the team. Or like we said about Waters, it was a matter of economics and DeGraw was doomed the minute he got involved.”

“Pie divided two ways,” he said. “Or only one if someone else bet wrong.”

I drove out of the lot. He said, “This team concept could get out of hand. What about Ricki S. and her dinner companion?”

“All we know is she had shared a booth with someone.”

“Yeah, but she was way too touchy about Gramps and maybe that was because she was also involved. What we said before. Siphoning dough out of Thalia’s estate and Thalia found out.”

“Thalia wouldn’t have taken action?”

“Maybe she started to, Alex. Step one, she calls you and starts talking about criminal tendencies — Ricki being bent just like Grampa Jack. She didn’t turn Ricki in right away because the two of them went way back, she knew Ricki as a kid. The point of hiring you was to get her own priorities straight. But what if, after your first session, she felt clarified and confronted Ricki?”

“What, then?” I said. “Ricki just happens to know a murderous trio already staying at the hotel?”

“True,” he said. “That doesn’t work.”

“If Ricki was involved, it had to be well before the Birkenhaars checked in. If you can find something linking her to them, you’d be in great shape.”

“Neither of them sounds like the guy in the restaurant.”

“For all we know, that was a blind date.”

“She never had another one.”

“Not at High Steaks.”

“Yeah... I’m not thinking straight... I’ll have Sean or Moe do a loose watch on her for at least a coupla days. An older dude shows up at her doorstep, we can at least find out who he is.”

The return trip was automotive atherosclerosis for ten miles. A hundred minutes later, we were pulling up to my house when Milo’s phone signaled another text. “Hope that’s Gottlieb.”

He read, took a deep breath, loosened his tie, punched a number, and said, “That’s it? You’re sure? Damn. Okay, thanks.”

He hung up. “That was Jake Lev, the archive zombie. Nothing on Leroy Hoke except a folder on the LaPlante heist and it’s thin. He’s making a copy, will fax it over tomorrow.”

He phoned Detective Moses Reed, asked for the tail on Sylvester and gave specifics.

Reed said, “Sure, L.T.”

Click. “Great kid.”

I turned off the engine. He looked at his Timex. “Enough for one day. Let me take you guys out to dinner.”

“Why don’t we have something here?”

“We put in a full day and I’m sure Gorgeous did, too. Name the cuisine — I can even try Rick, see if he’s free.”

“If Robin’s up for it, sure.”

As we climbed the stairs to my front terrace, he phoned Dr. Richard Silverman at the Cedars-Sinai E.R. Head-on auto crash in the Fairfax district, Rick and two other surgeons busy repairing.

Milo said, “No big deal, three of us. The Virtuous Team.”

Robin was in the kitchen reading American Art Review. Blanche snored at her feet.

“Hi, guys. I went to Trader Joe’s and bought three huge steaks ’cause I figured you’d be beat after the drive. Let’s barbecue.”

Blanche opened one eye and purred. Robin smiled. “We just finished a long walk, she’s bushed, but I’m sure she won’t mind a rib to chew on.”

Blanche got to her feet.

Milo said, “She understands Culinary?”

“And a whole lot more. Alex, how about getting the grill going?”

I said, “He offered to take us out.”

Milo said, “A serious offer.”

“That’s sweet of you, Big Guy, but I’ve already begun marinating and what’re we talking about — putting meat on iron?”

“Think about it, kid. How often do I get generous?”

She kissed his cheek. “Like always — okay, you make a salad, Alex tackles the grill, and I’ll sit here and drink a Gimlet with my girlfriend.”

“Tackles? Your grill has an electric starter, it ain’t exactly Boy Scout wisdom.”

“Sometimes it jams,” she said.

I said, “I can always find two sticks or a piece of flint.”

His phone rang. “Sturgis. Oh, hi... yeah it is crazy... yeah... makes sense... when?... sure, thanks, half an hour tops, probably less.”

Click. “Sorry, kids, gotta not eat and run.”

I said, “Gottlieb?”

“None other.”

Robin said, “Who’s Gottlieb?”

“Culver City detective. The manager at Thalia’s hotel got murdered there the same way she did.”

“Someone has a grudge against the hotel?”

“I wish I could tell you — sorry about the barbecue.”

“Let me make you a sandwich.”

He hugged her. “You’re the perfect human being.”

“So Alex claims.” She turned to me. “Here’s where I say you go with him and you pretend to not want to. I’ll make you both sandwiches.”