The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter thirteen

Jacob knew about the Creeper; every L.A. cop did.

Cold for two-plus decades, the case was a favorite of true crime shows for its grisly particulars: nine single women raped, tortured, and slashed.

Every few years, some lazy freelancer dug it up to rehash the lack of progress.

Jacob had been eight or nine at the time of the murders and could remember a paralyzed city. Locks double-checked, no walking to the store, rent-a-cops at drop-off, pickup, recess.

He doubted other kids had noticed.

Exactly the kind of thing he noticed, attuned as he was to an unpredictable world.

Divya Das said, “You look rather more put out than I’d hoped.”

“No,” he said. “No, I–I’m... stunned, I guess.”

“As was I.”

“You’re absolutely sure it’s him?”

“The profile matches every instance where DNA was recovered, seven out of nine. This was offender DNA, mind you, not incidental fluid. Semen from the victims’ vaginas and, at one scene, nonvictim blood, presumably the killer injuring himself in the struggle. It didn’t hit anyone in the system, though, so in a way I suppose this finding raises as many questions as it answers. Nor does it tell us who killed him, or why.”

“That I can answer,” he said. “Justice.”

Divya Das nodded.

He’d been so caught off guard by the news that it only now struck him how swiftly she’d obtained her results. In his experience, the turnaround time on DNA was seldom less than a couple of weeks. He asked her about it and she shrugged. “Friends in high places.”

“Special friends in special places,” he said.

She smiled. “You said you had something to tell me?”

“... yeah.”

He told her about his trip to the house and showed her his photos of the restored countertops. “I was thinking maybe the stuff you used might’ve caused it to fade, or...”

She took the camera, said nothing.

“You swabbed it,” he said.

She nodded.

“And?”

“I examined it for traces of caustic agents. It appears to be an ordinary burn. Anyone could have managed it with a wood-burning pen.”

The same thought he’d had. “Which would leave a mark.”

She pursed her lips at the photo. “Not if it was sanded down.”

“Yeah, but it didn’t look that way to me,” he said. “You can — here.”

He took the camera, scrolled back to a photo taken along the plane of the wood. “If there was a dip in the surface you’d see it. But there isn’t.”

“Perhaps it was sanded down uniformly,” she said.

He hadn’t considered that. There was a reason: it sounded preposterous.

No more so than someone replacing the countertops wholesale, though.

“I guess,” he said. “Any other thoughts?”

A silence.

“None that will help,” she said.

“Maybe I should be looking at contractors,” he said.

She smiled politely.

“One way or the other,” he said, “someone was there. I dusted for prints and didn’t find crap. It’s definitely possible I missed something.”

“I can go back, if you’d like.”

“Would you, please?”

She nodded.

“Thanks,” he said. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

“I can accompany you.”

“That’s not necessary,” she said. The smile had dried up; he sensed his cue to leave. It seemed particularly self-defeating, then, the urge he felt to touch her, to tell her that he wanted to see her more, to learn her, to know the woman in the refrigerator photographs. He slapped himself back into line by thinking of the girl from the bar, the boiling whites of her eyes as she lost consciousness.

He said, “If you think of anything else.”

She nodded again. “I’ll let you know.”

On his way home, he stopped off at Zschyk’s, the kosher bakery. He pulled a ticket from the dispenser and waited among the crowd of housewives and their housekeeper proxies. After his conversation with Divya Das, he regretted having accepted his father’s dinner invitation. A lost evening. He ought to be running down leads.

He supposed he could drop off the challah and cancel. It didn’t seem fair to keep jerking the poor guy around, though.

He could predict his father’s response.

Please. Don’t give it a second thought.

The worst part was knowing that Sam really was hell-bent on not playing the guilt card. Meaning whatever guilt Jacob felt was self-generated. He hadn’t progressed toward adulthood as completely as he liked to think.

The counterwoman called his number, took his order, handed him a warm bag. By the time he arrived back at his apartment, the Honda had filled with a rich, yeasty aroma, and he decided running down leads could wait.

His vic was a very bad guy who’d gotten away with nine murders.

Now he was dead. Justice. No need to hurry unduly.

He tossed the challah down on his desk and sat to think.

He’d pegged Mr. Head as thirty to forty-five. For the guy to have committed the murders in the late eighties, he would have to fall closer to the high end of the estimate. So he’d been off. He was used to that. The land of Tighten and Tuck devalued first impressions; the best way to figure a person’s real age was to look at their hands. Hands didn’t lie.

It would help to have some hands.

It would help to have a body.

Whatever his precise age, Mr. Head had gotten off clean for a long time.

Apparently, not everyone agreed that justice delayed is justice denied.

A person who knew the Creeper’s secret, judged him for it, did not care to wait around for the system to play catch-up.

Tzedek.

Like much of biblical Hebrew, the word had multiple shades of meaning. The same letters formed the root of the word tzedakah, charity.

The mingling of the two concepts struck Jacob as novel, even contradictory. In English, charity and justice stood in opposition. Justice was the letter of the law, the pursuit of absolute truth, the demand for punishment.

Charity mitigated justice, softened it, introduced the variable of mercy.

The murder of a murderer could be considered an act of justice or an act of charity.

Justice for the dead. Justice for their families.

Charity for future victims.

Charity, even, for Mr. Head himself, sparing him from engaging in more evil.

What differentiated between the two Hebrew words was the feminine suffix, the letter heh — itself a symbol for the name of God.

Tzedakah, he supposed, could be considered a womanly form of justice.

That recalled Portia’s courtroom speech from the The Merchant of Venice. A plea for mercy, delivered by a woman, dressed as a man.

The letters of tzedek also gave rise to the word tzaddik: a righteous individual, one who performed good deeds, often in secret, without expectation of recognition or reward.

The doer of justice; the doer of charity.

Did that say something about how Mr. Head’s slayer saw himself?

Herself?

Why not? Hammett said it was a woman who’d called it in.

Jacob checked his e-mail for a response from 911 dispatch, saw a bunch of spam. He started to write to Mallick, telling him what he had, then scrapped the draft. He didn’t really know what he had.

Plugging Night Creeper into the Times archive brought up seven hundred hits. Jacob narrowed his search to those from the appropriate period, curious to see if any of the vics had overtly Jewish surnames.

Helen Girard, 29.

Cathy Wanzer, 36.

Christa Knox, 32.

Every one of them young, well liked, attractive; every one of them the cornerstone of an exponential tower of ruined lives. Wanzer was blond, a massage therapist who worked out of her home. Girard and Knox, both brunettes, left grieving boyfriends, devastated parents.

Patricia Holt, 24.

Laura Lesser, 31.

Janet Stein, 29.

The parade of happy faces was sapping his motivation to solve his crime.

He circled Lesser and Stein.

Inez Delgado, 39.

Katherine Ann Clayton, 32.

Sherri Levesque, 31.

Convenient for a Jewish vic to equal a Jewish avenger. That was wishful thinking, though. And by themselves, names told him very little. There were Jews with non-Jewish names and non-Jews with Jewish names. There were mixed families. There were friends. There were folks who followed a stranger’s case, got interested, and then invested, and then involved far beyond what was reasonable. It happened to cops all the time.

He had to start somewhere, though.

He read about Laura Lesser. A psychiatric nurse. Pretty, like the rest of her unfortunate sorority.

Janet Stein owned a small Westwood bookstore. Memorial held at the funeral chapel of Beth Shalom Cemetery.

Same place his mother was buried.

One definite Jewish victim.

He returned to the archives, found a follow-up article from ’98, ten-year-after piece of rubbernecking. A D named Philip Ludwig had picked up the torch, vowing to revisit every lead, utilize every resource, including the FBI’s newly operational Combined DNA Index System.

In another follow-up, six years later, he sounded less optimistic.

My hope is that whoever committed these crimes is now dead and can’t cause any more tragedy.

The reporter asked if that didn’t deny closure to the victims’ families.

I don’t know what the hell that means.

The article went on to say that Ludwig was headed for retirement at the end of the year. What, the reporter asked, did he intend to do with his free time?

Take up a hobby.

Given the guilt and disappointment seeping through, Jacob was willing to lay even money that, for Ludwig, “hobby” meant sitting around and indicting himself.

Jacob found him living in San Diego — too far to drive and make it back in time for dinner. He called on the sat phone and left a brief message.

He considered starting to track down victims’ families, decided to wait until he heard what Ludwig had to say. That left the day open.