The Murder Book

CHAPTER 38

Bert Harrison placed a hand on the shoulder of the man in the wheelchair. The man rolled his head and hummed. I saw my image doubled in his mirrored lenses. A pair of grim strangers.

I said, "My name's Alex Delaware, Mr. Burns."

Willie Burns smiled and rolled his head again. Orienting to my voice the way a blind man does. The skin between his white beard and the huge lenses was cracked and scored, stretched tight over sharp bones. His hands were long and thin, purplish brown, the knuckles lumped arthritically, the nails long and yellowed and seamed. Across his legs was a soft, white blanket. Not much bulk beneath the fabric.

"Pleased to meet you," he said. To Bert: "Am I, Doc?"

"He won't hurt you, Bill. He will want to know things."

"Things," said Burns. "Once upon a time." He hummed some more. High-pitched voice, off-key but somehow sweet.

I said, "Bert, I'm sorry I had to follow you-"

"As you said, you had to."

"It was-"

"Alex," he said, quieting me with a soft palm against my cheek. "When I found out you were involved, I thought this might happen."

"Found out? You sent me the murder book."

Bert shook his head.

"You didn't?" I said. "Then who?"

"I don't know, son. Pierce sent it to someone but never told me who. He never told me about the book, at all, until the week before he died. Then one day, he brought it to my house and showed it to me. I had no idea he'd gone that far."

"Collecting mementoes."

"Collecting nightmares," said Bert. "As he turned the pages, he cried."

Willie Burns stared sightlessly at the treetops, humming.

"Where'd Schwinn get the photos, Bert?"

"Some were his own cases, others he stole from old police files. He'd been a thief for quite some time. His characterization, not mine. He shoplifted habitually, took jewelry and money and drugs from crime scenes, consorted with criminals and prostitutes."

"He told you all this."

"Over a very long period."

"Confessing," I said.

"I'm no priest, but he wanted salvation."

"Did he get it?"

Bert shrugged. "Last time I checked there were no Hail Marys in the psychiatric repertoire. I did my best." He glanced at Willie Burns. "How are you feeling today, Bill?"

"I'm feeling real good," said Burns. "Considering." He shifted his face to the left. "Nice breeze coming in from the hills, can you hear it? That plunking of the leaves, like a nice little mandolin. Like one of those boats in Venice."

I listened. Saw no movement among the trees, heard nothing.

Bert said, "Yes, it is pretty."

Willie Burns said, "You know, it's getting kinda thirsty out here. Maybe I could have something to drink, please?"

Bert said, "Of course."

I wheeled Burns back into the green board house. The front room was barely furnished- one couch along the window and two bright green folding chairs. Pole lamps guarded two corners. Framed magazine prints- garden scenes painted in Giverny colors- hung askew on plasterboard walls. Between the chairs, a wide pathway had been left for the chair, and the rubber wheels had left gray tracks that led to a door at the rear. No knob, just a kickplate.

Push door. Wheelchair-friendly.

The kitchen was an arbitrary space to the right: pine cabinets, sheet-metal counters, a two-burner stove upon which sat a copper-bottomed pot. Bert took a Diet Lemon Snapple from a bulbous, white refrigerator, wrestled with the lid, finally got it loose, and handed the bottle to Willie Burns. Burns gripped the bottle with both hands and drank down half, Adam's apple rising and falling with each gulp. Then he placed the glass against his face, rolled it back and forth along his skin, and let out a long breath.

"Thanks, Dr. H."

"My pleasure, Bill." Bert looked at me. "You might as well sit."

I took one of the folding chairs. The house smelled of hickory chips and roasted garlic. A string of dried cloves hung above the stove, along with a necklace of dried chilies. I spotted other niceties: jars of dried beans, lentils, pasta. A hand-painted bread box. Gourmet touches in the vest-pocket galley.

I said, "So you have no idea how the murder book got to me?"

Bert shook his head. "I never knew you had anything to do with it until Marge told me you and Milo had been to visit and talked to her about an unsolved murder." He began to lower himself onto the second folding chair, but straightened and stood. "Let's get some air. You'll be okay for a few minutes, Bill?"

Burns said, "More than okay."

"We'll be right outside."

"Enjoy the view."

We walked into the shade of the surrounding trees.

Bert said, "You need to know this: Bill doesn't have much longer. Nerve damage, brittle diabetes, serious circulation problems, hypertension. There's a limit to how much care I can give him, and he won't go to a hospital. The truth is no one can really help him. Too many systems down."

He stopped and smoothed a purple lapel. "He's a very old man at forty-three."

"How long have you been taking care of him?" I said.

"A long time."

"Nearly twenty years, I'd guess."

He didn't answer. We walked some more, in slow, aimless circles. No sound issued from the forest. Not a trace of the music Willie Burns had heard.

"How'd you meet him?" I said.

"At a hospital in Oxnard."

"Same place you met Schwinn."

His eyes widened.

I said, "I was just over at Marge's place."

"Ah." Once a shrink… "Well, that's true," he said. "But Pierce's being there wasn't really a coincidence. He'd been tracking Bill for a while. Not very successfully. And not very consistently, because his amphetamine habit had rendered him pretty much incapacitated. Occasionally, he'd grow lucid, convince himself he was still a detective, make a stab at investigating, then he'd binge and drop out of sight. Somehow, over the years- through his criminal contacts- he managed to figure out that Bill had come up the coast. He knew Bill would need medical care and eventually, he pinpointed the hospital, though not until well after Bill had been discharged. But he began hanging around, checking himself in for spurious reasons. They had him tagged as an addicted hypochondriac."

"He was trying to get access to Burns's records."

Bert nodded. "The hospital staff thought he was just another down-at-the-heels junkie out to steal drugs. As it turns out, he was really ill. An on-call neurologist who didn't know him ordered some testing and found a low-level seizure disorder- petit mal, mostly, some temporal symptoms, all due to drug toxicity. They prescribed anticonvulsants with mixed results, admitted him for short-term care several times, but I was never on duty during those periods. One day, he had a grand mal seizure out in the parking lot and they brought him into the ER and I was on call. One thing led to another."

"Willie Burns needed medical care because he was burned in a house fire."

Bert sighed. "You're as skillful as ever, Alex."

"A house on 156^th Street in Watts. A neighborhood where a black man would be comfortable hiding out. Where a white face would stand out. A white police detective named Lester Poulsenn was assigned to guard Burns and Caroline Cossack and one night he was shot and the house was torched as cover. A high-ranking cop murdered but LAPD kept it quiet. Interesting, don't you think, Bert?"

He remained silent. I went on, "It's a safe bet Poulsenn got ambushed by the people sent to get rid of Caroline and Willie. People who'd pulled off an ambush before and murdered a bail bondsman named Boris Nemerov. Burns's bondsman. Did he tell you about that?"

Nod. "It came out in therapy. Bill felt guilty about causing Nemerov's death. He would have liked to come forward- to come clean about what he saw, but that would have put him in mortal danger."

"What's his version of the ambush?"

"He phoned Nemerov for help because Nemerov had always been kind to him. He and Nemerov arranged a meeting, but Nemerov was followed and murdered and stuffed in the trunk of his car. Bill was hiding nearby, saw it all. Knew Nemerov's death would be blamed on him."

"Why was Burns offered a police guard in the first place?"

"He had contacts in the police department. He'd worked as an informant."

"But after Poulsenn's and Nemerov's murders the department let him dangle."

"Contacts, Alex. Not friends."

"The house was set on fire, but Burns and Caroline got away. How severe were their injuries?"

"She wasn't hurt, his were severe. He neglected the wounds, didn't seek care until months later. His feet had been scorched almost down to the tendons, multiple infections set in, at the time of admission the wounds were suppurating, gangrenous, flesh falling off the bone. Both feet were amputated immediately, but sepsis had spread up into the long bones and additional amputation was necessary. You could actually smell it, Alex. Like barbecue, the marrow had been cooked. We had some marvelous surgeons, and they managed to preserve half of one femur, a third of another, created skin flaps and grafted them. But Bill's lungs had also been burned, as had his trachea and his esophagus. He formed fibroid scars internally and removing the damaged tissue required additional multiple surgeries. We're talking years, Alex. He bore the agony in silence. I used to sit by the whirlpool as the skin sloughed off. Not a whimper. How he tolerated the pain I'll never know."

"Was it the fire that blinded him?"

"No, that was the diabetes. He'd been ill for a while, had never been diagnosed. Made matters worse by indulging an addict's sweet tooth."

"And the nerve damage? Heroin?"

"A bad batch of heroin. He scored it the day of the fire. Slipped away from Poulsenn and walked down the block to meet his supplier. That's how they traced him- something else he feels guilty for."

"How'd he escape on burnt feet?"

"They stole a car. The girl drove. They managed to get out of the city, found themselves on Highway 1, hid out in a remote canyon in the hills above Malibu. At night, she sneaked into residential neighborhoods and scrounged in garbage cans. She tried to take care of him but his feet got worse and the pain caused him to shoot up that last hit of heroin. He lost consciousness, stayed that way for two days. Somehow she cared for him. At the end, she was trying to feed him grass and leaves. Gave him water from a nearby creek that added an intestinal parasite to his miseries. When I saw him in the burn ward, he weighed ninety-eight pounds. All that, and he'd withdrawn cold turkey. His survival's nothing short of a miracle."

"So you became his doctor," I said. "And Schwinn's. And eventually, the two of them connected. Was that by design?"

"I listened to Bill's story, then Pierce's, eventually put it all together. Of course, I never told either of them about the other- Pierce still thought of himself as a detective. Looking for Bill. Eventually- after much work- I got Bill's permission and confronted Pierce. It wasn't easy but… eventually they both came to understand that their lives were interwined."

Matchmaking. Just as he'd done with Schwinn and Marge. The grand physician. Giving.

"You waited until it was clear Burns had nothing to fear from Schwinn," I said. "Meaning you learned the details of Janie Ingalls's murder. But all of you agreed not to pursue it. You became part of the cover-up. That's why you offered me all those apologies."

"Alex," he said. "Some decisions are… these are shattered lives. I couldn't see any other way…"

"Schwinn changed things," I said. "Changed his mind about keeping the secret. Any idea why he grew agitated about the murder during the weeks before his death? Why he sent out the murder book?"

"I've asked myself all that so many times, and the best I can come up with is the poor man felt he was going to die and had an urge to make peace."

"Was he sick?"

"Nothing I could diagnose, but he came to me and complained about feeling weak. Shaky, out of focus. A month before his death, he began experiencing crushing headaches. The obvious possibility was a brain tumor, and I sent him up to the Sansum Clinic for an MRI. Negative, but the consulting neurologist did find some abnormal EEG patterns. But you know EEGs- so crude, hard to interpret. And his bloodwork was normal. I wondered about some late-term amphetamine sequelae. He'd been drug-free for years, but perhaps the self-abuse had taken its toll. Then, a week before the night terrors began, he blacked out."

"Did Marge know about any of this?"

"Pierce insisted on keeping everything from her. Even hid his headache medication in a locked box in his darkroom. I tried to convince him to communicate with her more openly, but he was adamant. Their entire relationship was like that, Alex. Each of them talked to me, and I translated. In that sense, she was the perfect woman for him- stubborn, independent, fiercely private. He could be a profoundly unmovable man. Part of what made him a good detective, I suppose."

"Do you think the night terrors were neurological, or unfinished business come back to haunt him?"

"Maybe both," he said. "Nothing unusual was found at his autopsy, but that means nothing. I've seen postmortem brain tissue that looks like Swiss cheese and turns out the patient was functioning perfectly. Then you come across perfectly healthy cerebral cortexes in people who fall apart neurologically. At the core, we humans defy logic. Isn't that why we both became doctors of the soul?"

"Is that what we are?"

"We are, son- Alex, I am sorry for concealing things from you. At the time I believed it was the right thing to do. But that girl… the killer's still out there." Tears filled his eyes. "One sets out to heal and ends up being complicit."

I placed a hand on his narrow, soft shoulder.

He smiled. "Therapeutic touch?"

"Friendship," I said.

"The purchase of friendship," he said. "Cynics coined the term to demean what we do. Sometimes I wonder about the direction my own life has taken…"

We strolled toward the gravel pathway.

I said, "What kind of relationship did Schwinn and Burns develop?"

"Once I knew Pierce could be trusted, I brought him out here. They began talking. Relating. Pierce ended up helping Bill. He'd come out from time to time, clean the house, wheel Bill around."

"And now Pierce is gone, Burns remains as the last living witness to the Ingalls murder."

Bert stared at the earth and kept walking.

I said, "You call him Bill. What's his new surname?"

"Is that important?"

"It's going to come out, eventually, Bert."

"Is it?" he said, lacing his hands behind his back. He steered me toward the open space at the front of the house. "Yes, I suppose it is. Alex, I know you need to talk to him, but as I told you, he has very little time left, and like most ex-addicts, his self-assessment is brutal."

"I'll be mindful of that."

"I know you will."

"When we spoke earlier," I said, "you made a point of mentioning that heroin addicts were unlikely to be violent. You were trying to steer me away from Burns's trail. Caroline Cossack's, as well, by pointing out to me that females were unlikely to be involved in that kind of sexual homicide. All true, but how'd they end up witnessing the murder?"

"Bill came upon the scene once the poor girl was dead, saw what had been done to her."

"Was Caroline with him?"

He hesitated. "Yes. They were together at the party. She was allowed to be at the party because he was supervising her."

"Supervising?"

"Keeping an eye on her. Her brothers paid him for that."

"Drug pusher baby-sitting the strange little sister?" I said.

Bert nodded.

I said, "So she tagged along with Burns, followed her brothers and their pals to the neighboring estate, came upon the kill spot. The killers saw them, had to be worried they'd unravel. Caroline, because her psychiatric history made her unreliable, Burns because he was a junkie. But instead of eliminating Caroline, they hospitalized her. Probably because even though the Cossacks had participated in murder, they couldn't quite bring themselves to murder their sister. They would've killed Burns, but he disappeared into the ghetto, and being rich white kids, they had no easy way to find him. Burns was scared, tried to make a big score, took too many risks and got arrested, made quick bail thanks to LAPD connections and Boris Nemerov's goodwill, and vanished again. But then, a few months later, he surfaced- got himself a job at Achievement House so he could see Caroline. The boys found out and decided the big step had to be taken. But before they could arrange the hit, Burns was gone again. He and Caroline managed to remain in contact. Eventually, he got her out of Achievement House, and the two of them hid out in Watts. How am I doing so far?"

"A-plus, Alex. As always."

"But something doesn't make sense, Bert. Why would Burns put himself in terrible jeopardy by wangling a job at Achievement House? Why in the world would he risk his life?"

Bert smiled. "Irrational, wasn't it? That's what I mean about human beings being hard to categorize."

"Why'd he do it, Bert?"

"Very simple, Alex. He loved her. Still does."

"Present tense?" I said. "They're still together? Where is she?"

"They're very much together. And you've met her."

He brought me back into the house. The front room was empty and the push door remained shut. Bert held it open, and I stepped into a corn yellow bedroom not much bigger than a closet.

Tiny bathroom off to one side. In the sleeping area were two single beds placed side by side, each made up with thin, white spreads. A stuffed bear sat atop a low dresser painted hospital green. The wheelchair was positioned at the foot of the nearer bed, and the man who called himself Bill remained seated, the nearly empty Snapple bottle in one hand, the other grasped by the pudgy, white fingers of a heavyset woman wearing an oversize, royal blue T-shirt and gray sweatpants.

Her downturned eyes were aimed at the bedspread, and my appearance didn't cause them to shift. She had a pasty, acne-scarred face- raw bread dough, pocked by airholes- and her flat nose nearly touched her upper lip. Faded brown hair striped with silver was tied back in a stub of a ponytail.

Aimee, the cook at the Celestial Café. She'd prepared my crepes, doubled my portion without charging me extra, remained virtually mute.

Just as I'd finished my meal, Bert had come in. Nice coincidence; now I knew it had been anything but.

Marian Purveyance had owned the café until Aimee Baker took over.

He gives people things.

I said, "Didn't know you were a restaurateur, Dr. Harrison."

Bert flushed nearly as purple as his jumpsuit. "I used to fancy myself an investor, bought up a few local properties."

"Including the land this house stands on," I said. "You even transplanted agaves."

He kicked one foot with the other. "That was years ago. You'd be amazed at the appreciation."

"If you ever sold anything."

"Well… the time has to be right."

"Sure," I said, and I found myself throwing my arms around the old man.

Aimee turned, and said, "You're nice."

Bill said, "Which one you talking about, baby?"

"Both," she said. "Everyone's nice. The whole world is nice."