Survival Of The Fittest

30

That night, at eight, Robin and I were in the bath when the phone rang. She faced me, her hair up, water reaching the bottoms of her breasts.

We played toesies. The damn thing quieted.

Later, drying off, I listened to the taped message.

“It's Milo. Call me on the car phone.”

I did and he said, “Found another DVLL case. Hollywood Division, before Raymond Ortiz. Seventeen months ago.”

“Another poor kid,” I said. “How old-”

“No. Not a kid. And not retarded, either. On the contrary.”

I met him at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Highland north of Melrose named Boatwright's. Rocket-to-the-moon architecture, boomerang-shaped counter, three of the stools occupied by pie-eating newspaper-nosers, the Hollywood Strings on scratchy soundtrack.

He was in his usual cop's back booth, sitting opposite a dark-haired woman. He waved and she turned. She looked around twenty-five. Very thin, pretty in a severe way, she had a pointed chin and ski-slope nose, ivory skin, glossy black wedge-cut hair, glossy brown eyes. Her pantsuit was black. In front of her was a big chocolate malt in a real glass. Milo had a napkin tucked under his chin and was eating fried shrimp and onion rings and drinking iced tea.

The woman kept watching me until I got two feet away. Then she smiled, more the right thing to do than amiability. Scanning me from head to shoe, as if measuring for a suit.

“Alex, this is Detective Petra Connor, Hollywood Homicide. Petra, Dr. Alex Delaware.”

“Good to meet you,” said Connor. A little makeup added depth to eyes that didn't need any more. She had very long, very thin hands with warm, strong fingers that squeezed mine for a second, then flew back to the straw in her malt.

I slid in next to Milo.

“Something to eat?” he said.

“No, I'm fine. What's up?”

“What's up is Detective Connor is an eagle eye.”

“Pure luck,” she said in a soft voice. “Most of the time I never pay attention to memos.”

“Most of the time they're bullshit.”

She smiled and twirled the straw.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I forgot. Working with Bishop you probably never hear sullied speech.”

“I don't, but Bishop does,” said Connor.

“Her partner's a Mormon,” Milo told me. “Very smart, very straight, probably be chief one day. Petra and he picked up the case in question a while back. He's currently off with the wife and million kids in Hawaii so she's riding alone.”

“The whole thing amazes me,” she said. “Being tied into a possible serial. Because ours wasn't even a murder, just an iffy suicide. Not iffy enough to change the coroner's verdict, so we closed it as a suicide. But when I saw your memo…”

Shaking her head, she pushed the malt aside and dabbed at her lips. The lipstick she left on the straw had brown overtones. The black in her hair was real. She was probably closer to thirty than twenty-five, but not a line on her face.

“Who was the victim?” I said.

“A twenty-nine-year-old scientist named Malcolm Ponsico. Cellular physiologist, recent Ph.D. from CalTech, supposed to be some kind of genius. He lived in Pasadena, but was working at a research lab on Sunset near Vermont- Hospital Row- and that's where he did it so it was our case.”

“I used to work at Western Peds,” I said.

“Right there. Two blocks up. Place called PlasmoDerm, they do skin research, developing synthetic grafts for burn victims, that kind of thing. Ponsico's specialty was cell membranes. He killed himself with an injection of potassium chloride- the stuff they use for lethal-injection executions. Did it while working late, the cleaning lady found him at 4:00 A.M., slumped over his lab table. Big laceration right here, where his head hit the edge.”

She traced a line over well-formed black brows.

“He fell on his head when he died?”

“That's how the coroner saw it.”

“Where's the DVLL tie-in?”

“He left it typed on his computer screen. Four letters, right in the middle of the screen. Stu- Detective Bishop- and I figured it for something technical, a formula. But we asked around, just to be careful, in case it was some kind of coded suicide note. No one at PlasmoDerm knew what it meant and it didn't show up in any of Ponsico's computer files- we had one of our data-processing guys check them out. All numbers, formulas. No one seemed surprised by Ponsico writing something only he understood. He was that kind of guy- major brain in a world of his own.”

“Did he leave a message at his home?”

“No. His apartment was in perfect order. Everyone said he was a nice person, quiet, kept to himself, really into his work. No one had noticed him being depressed and his parents in New Jersey said he'd seemed okay when he called them. But parents often say that. People hide things, right?”

“He seemed okay?” I said. “That's not a ringing endorsement of his happiness.”

“His parents said he'd always been a serious boy. Their word- boy. A genius, they'd always let him do his own thing and he'd always produced. Their word, too. They're both professors. I got the feeling it was a high-pressure household. It played out pure suicide. Ponsico's prints were all over the hypodermic and the potassium vial and the coroner said the position we found him in was consistent with self-infliction. Said also it was a fairly quick death- massive heart attack, though Ponsico could have made things easier on himself if he'd taken a tranquilizer like the ones they give Death Row guys. Then again, no one from the ACLU was looking over Ponsico's shoulder.”

“So what was iffy about it?”

“Ponsico's former girlfriend- another scientist at the lab, named Sally Branch- was convinced there was something wrong and kept calling us up, asking us to keep snooping. She said it didn't make sense, Ponsico had no reason to kill himself, she'd have known if there were something wrong.”

“Even though she was a former girlfriend.”

“My thought exactly, Doctor. And she also tried to cast suspicion on Ponsico's new girlfriend, so we figured it was jealousy. Then I met the new girlfriend and wondered.”

She took a sip of water.

“Her name was Zena Lambert and she was weird. She'd worked as a clerk at PlasmoDerm but left a few months before Ponsico's death.”

“Weird, how?” I said.

“Kind of… nerdy- but in a mean way. Snippy. As in, I'm smarter than you so don't waste my time. Even though she claimed to be grieving over Ponsico.”

“An intellectual snob?” I said.

“Exactly. Which was funny because Sally Branch, with her Ph.D., was down-to-earth, and here was this clerk who thought she was the end-all. Still, a bad personality doesn't make someone a suspect and we had absolutely nothing on her.”

“Did Sally Branch give some reason for suspecting Zena?”

“She said Ponsico changed noticeably after he started dating her- even quieter, less social, hostile. All of which seemed logical to me. He'd be less social with Sally because he'd broken up with her.”

“Did she say why he broke up with her?”

“All Zena. To listen to her, Zena swooped down like some harpy and stole him away. She also said Zena had gotten him into some kind of high-IQ club and he'd become obsessed with his intelligence. Big-time arrogant. But that was it, evidence-wise, and she gave me no motive for Zena wanting to hurt him. Eventually, I just stopped taking her calls. Now, Milo's told me about these DVLL murders, someone getting rid of retarded people, maybe a tie-in with genetic cleansing, so I have to wonder about that high-IQ group.”

She shook her head. “Though I still can't see any connection to Ponsico, unless he met your killer at the brainiac club and learned too much for his own good.”

“Did Zena get anothor job after she left PlasmoDerm?” I said.

“Bookstore in Silverlake, it's in the file.”

“Did Sally give you a name for the club?” I said, thinking about Nolan Dahl, another high-IQ suicide.

“Meta,” she said. “You really think there could be a link?”

I told the two of them what I'd learned in the library.

“Survival of the rotten,” she said. “Reminds me of something my father once told me. He was a professor in Arizona, physical anthropologist, did research on wolves, the desert. He said there was a giant study going on- the Human Genome Project- mapping every gene in the human body, trying to figure out which traits are caused by what. The ultimate goal is to collect detailed data on every one of us. My dad said the upside potential for medical research was tremendous but it was also frightening. What if insurance companies got hold of the information and decided to withhold coverage because of some mutation way back in the family tree? Or companies started refusing to hire someone because they were at elevated risk for cancer ten years down the line?”

“Or,” said Milo, “Big Bro identifies the mutations and kills off the carriers… was PlasmoDerm involved in that kind of research?”

“No, just skin grafts, but even if they were, it doesn't explain why Ponsico would kill himself.”

“Maybe he found out he had some incurable disease.”

“Nope, the coroner said he was perfectly healthy.”

Milo pulled out his pad. “Meta. Sounds like Greek.”

“It is,” said Petra. “I went over the file before I came here and looked it up. Means change, transformation. Something that breaks new ground.”

“Brave new goddamn world?” said Milo. “A bunch of arrogant geeks sit around theorizing about improving the species and one of them decides to put it into action?”

Both of them looked at me.

“Sure,” I said. “If you thought you were that superior, you might start figuring the rules didn't apply.”

Out in the parking lot, Connor said, “I spoke to Stu this morning. He won't be back from Maui for another week, says to give you all our data.”

She produced a file from a huge black bag and handed it to Milo.

“Thanks, Petra.”

“No problem.” She flashed an abrupt white smile. “Just promise that if I send around a memo, you'll read it.”

We watched her drive away in an older black Accord.

“Fairly new on the job,” said Milo, “but she'll go far… So I guess the next step is for me to go over this, then give you a look. Then have a talk with Ponsico's two girlfriends.”

“It's the best lead we've gotten, so far,” I said. Saying nothing about Nolan because I was still bound by confidentiality and there was no reason to violate.

We walked to the Seville. “Thanks for the library work, Alex. Have time to go back there and look up this Meta outfit?”

“First thing in the morning. Sharavi's well-equipped in the computer department. Planning to update him?”

“Haven't decided. Because anything I tell him goes straight to Carmeli and how much do I want a grieving high-powered father to know at this point… not that I can put him off too long- hell, if I don't cue him in, he'll probably start bugging the phones again.”

He laughed, cursed. “Distractions… by the way, I think I figured out how Sharavi got Raymond Ortiz's shoes. Same way he got the file- remember how the first time Manny Alvarado looked for it he couldn't find it? Seems a former Newton captain just happened to drop in to visit the station a couple days before. Guy named Eugene Brooker, one of the highest-ranked blacks in the department, they used to think he was on his way to deputy chief. But his wife died last summer and he retired. And guess what- he was a biggie on the same Olympics security Sharavi worked on. So the Israelis are connected to the department, who knows where else. No matter how aboveboard Sharavi acts, I'll always figure he's holding something back. You think his computers can help substantially?”

“I can get academic references from the library, material that's been in the English-language press. But if Meta's an international group, or if it's been implicated in anything criminal overseas, he could be useful.”

He thought about that. “All this assumes Meta's some big deal. For all we know, it's just a group of nerds getting together for chips and dip, patting themselves on the back because God gave them smarts. Even if the killer's one of them, how're we going to pick him out of the group?”

“If there's a membership roster and we get it, we could cross-check with the sex-offender and M.O. files. We can also see if any members present a clear opportunity or motive for the three killings. Like working at the park where Raymond was abducted and/or the conservancy.”

“Park worker with a high IQ?”

“Underachiever,” I said. “That's the way I've seen it all along.”

“Ponsico's second girlfriend- the Lambert woman- sounds like an underachiever, too. Clerking. Not that she's any big suspect, because our boy's definitely male and strong- the way he carried Irit and Raymond, trussed up Latvinia.”

I got in the car. He said, “What do you think of that gene project Connor talked about?”

“Just what we need in the age of kindness, Milo. Some map that determines whose life is worth living.”

“So you're not willing to depend upon the good graces of intellectuals and insurance companies, huh?”

I laughed. “Gang bangers and dope smugglers and back-alley junkie muggers, maybe. But no, not them.”