The Wedding Guest

Chapter 33

I forgot to turn the phone back on and when I remembered the following morning at seven thirty, there were five messages from Milo, all variations on the same theme: Dr. Paul Kramer was expecting us at his house at eight a.m.

I took a quick shower, got dressed, tossed down coffee, toasted a jalapeño bagel, and chewed on it as I drove to Beverly Hills.

The two hundred block of South Camden Drive sits prettily between Wilshire and Olympic. Two-story prewar homes nice enough to evade teardown mania are arrayed along a quiet, sycamore-lined street. Beverly Hills began as a meticulously planned city, and this district was created in the twenties for prosperous merchants and professionals. If Paul Kramer, M.D., had bought his cream-colored Spanish in the seventies, he’d paid around a hundred grand for a fifth-acre lot now worth four million.

Milo had just pulled up as I parked. He waited and we approached the house. A white Maserati new enough to sport paper plates rested on a brick driveway bordered by white azaleas. The lawn was impossibly emerald, backed by boxwood hedges, birds of paradise, and some sort of lily blossoming butter yellow.

“Morning.” We approached the house and he stopped at a low iron gate leading to a courtyard. “Didn’t know if you’d make it.”

“Dinner last night with Robin. We went for quiet.”

“The ultimate privilege. You guys score up some good grub?”

“The Bel-Air.”

He let out a low moan. “Too early in the day to weep.”

The gate was unlocked, more design element than security. The courtyard was paved with gray gravel and centered by a burbling blue-tiled Moorish fountain. Loggia to the right, carved oak door dead ahead.

Milo said, “Nice place. Nice guy, too, Dr. Kramer. At least on the phone.”

“How’d he react to talking about his son?”

“Surprisingly calm. Like it was logical.”

We climbed three steps to the door. As he raised a fist to knock, it opened on a white-haired man around eighty.

Small, stooped, smiling but without enthusiasm, he wore a Palm Springs tan, a powder-blue cardigan, a white polo shirt, and navy slacks that matched suede loafers.

“Lieutenant? Paul Kramer.”

“Thanks for meeting us, Doctor.”

“Of course.”

Handshakes all around. I said, “Alex Delaware.”

Dr. Paul Kramer squinted. “Why is that name familiar?”

Milo said, “Dr. Delaware’s our psychological consultant.”

“Is he? Does that have to do with questions about Peter’s mental status?”

“No, sir. It has to do with a complex case.”

“Complex,” said Kramer. “That could mean anything... please.”

We entered a two-story foyer floored in glossy, red Mexican tile.

Kramer said, “This way,” and led us two steps down to a large living room set up with overstuffed couches and weathered Mexican colonial furniture. Grand piano in one corner, hand-plastered walls bare but for two muddy landscapes and two oversized photographs.

One photo featured Paul Kramer twenty years younger with a blond woman his age, both in formal wear. Next to that, three young, dark-haired late adolescents, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, beaming.

“Something to drink?”

“No, thanks, Doctor.”

“Then, please.”

We took the couch he’d indicated and he lowered himself into a red leather chair.

“So,” he said, resting a hand on each knee. “What has changed in regard to Peter’s death?”

Milo said, “Can’t answer that yet, Doctor. We’re making initial inquiries.”

“Hmm. All right, I won’t press. I’m not totally in the dark, Lieutenant. I looked you up. You’re a homicide detective. I’m assuming you suspect something nefarious, rather than the accident the coroner said it was.”

“We’re here to learn more about Peter.”

Paul Kramer tugged at his lower lip. “The accidental thing was...” Head shake. “I’m happy to tell you about Peter. So you’ll know him as more than a victim.”

He pointed to the picture of the three young men. “That was taken the day we took our boat to Catalina. On the left is my oldest son, Barton. He’s a professor of neurobiology at MIT. On the right is my youngest son, Josh. He’s a Harvard MBA who moved to Israel to work in technology. For fun, he joined the Israeli judo team and won a bronze medal at the Olympics.”

Brief intake of breath. Paul Kramer rubbed a knuckle with a thumb. “In the middle is Peter. My wife — she died ten years ago — contended he was the handsomest. As a man, I don’t pick up on that kind of thing so I’ll defer to her judgment.”

I said, “Handsome but not a student?”

Paul Kramer turned to me. “Now I know why your name’s familiar. When I was in full-time practice I sometimes consulted on pediatric cases due to my specialty — the spine. An orthopod at Western Pediatric asked me to look at a case. A boy with osteogenesis imperfecta, the question was, Would surgery help? I read the chart and came across a psychologist’s notes. I was impressed because there was none of the usual jargon and a healthy dose of logical suggestion. You, right?”

I smiled.

Kramer’s nutmeg face creased in confusion then relaxed. “Of course, confidentiality. I’ll take that as a yes. So now you work for the police.”

Milo said, “With the police.”

“Ah,” said Kramer. “Part-time?

I nodded.

“You’re right, Dr. Delaware. Anything academic was painful for Peter. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. His milestones were always considerably slower than his brothers’, he never learned to read with ease, and math baffled him. We received the usual diagnoses. Learning disability, ADHD, some nonsense about optometric asynchrony from a quack the school recommended. We tried medication, tutors, special education, nothing worked. In fact — and this is going to sound cruel — Peter was a sweet boy but there was absolutely nothing he was especially good at. So we probably weren’t the best family for him.”

His eyes moistened as they aimed at the piano. “I once played at concert level, Barton still does. He won a Westinghouse science award as a Harvard-Westlake sophomore. Lenore had a law degree and an MBA, painted wonderfully, produced exquisite bonsai trees, and sewed her own evening wear. Josh taught himself to read at four, was always straight A’s, lettered in three sports at Harvard-Westlake, and wrestled at Harvard College.”

He threw up his hands. “Life’s not fair, right? Not that anyone in the family ever disparaged Peter. He was cherished by all of us. But...”

“It was tough for him,” I said.

“Painful. He was handsome. And charming, girls liked him. But by his junior year at alternative school they were the wrong type of girls. That was his last year of formal education and most of it was spent playing hooky. The school was designed for students with special needs so they would’ve kept him in no matter what he did. But he refused, said he was sick of feeling retarded. Lenore and I went round and round with him on that and finally gave in on condition that he’d home-study and earn a GED. You can guess how that turned out. He did get a job, I’ll grant him that. Construction assistant on a development downtown. One of my friends was the general contractor.”

“How did that go?”

Paul Kramer said, “It didn’t. A few months in, Peter stopped showing up at work and before we knew it, he’d packed a few things and was gone from here. For over two years, he cut us off, we had no idea where he was living, Lenore cried at night. He didn’t come begging for money, I’ll give him that. Then one Mother’s Day, he showed up wearing a full beard and hair to his shoulders and told us he’d been working on a sportfishing boat in Florida. Assisting the captain, which I took to mean some sort of scut work. Meanwhile, Barton’s off researching the brain and Josh is investing and amassing trophies.”

I got up and took a closer look at the shot of the brothers.

Hair tousled and windblown, so close in age they could’ve been triplets. No wattage variation in their perfect smiles.

A knife-blade of gray sea in the background.

Paul Kramer said, “That was a good day. When you’re sailing, you don’t need a Ph.D. Peter did okay when he was able to pay attention.”

I said, “Was the Mother’s Day visit a drop-in or did he stay?”

“He stayed. Lenore was thrilled. Even though Peter stayed up in his room, didn’t clean up after himself, and we rarely saw him. He’d sleep during the day, go out at night, come home at all hours. Sometimes there’d be money missing from Lenore’s purse or my wallet. Friends advised us to use tough love but we didn’t want a confrontation.”

He dabbed at his eyes and cheeks. “I might’ve tried getting tough but Lenore had the softest heart in the Western Hemisphere. Plus when Peter felt social, he’d go shopping with her, they’d lunch, have a grand time. I found the situation distressing so I upped my work hours. It put a strain on my relationship with Lenore but we resolved that.”

Paul Kramer laughed. “By that I mean Peter and Lenore did their thing and I got used to it. Finally, he left, just shy of his twenty-third birthday. By leaving I mean I paid for an apartment in Hollywood and set up a trust fund that gave him enough money to live on for five years with me controlling the payouts. Lenore was dead-set against it. She’d never admit it but I think part of her enjoyed having Peter as a perpetual child. The apartment was my idea. I subverted her and essentially bribed Peter to get the hell out of here. Lenore figured it out. There were some cold nights.”

He shook his head. “She said she forgave me but I’m not sure she ever completely did. I tried to get Peter another construction job but he said he’d do his own thing and ended up working as a busboy in various restaurants. We’d see him spottily, though Lenore and he talked on the phone. Then she developed a brain tumor and our life became a nightmare for the eighteen months she hung on. Bart and Josh flew in as frequently as their situations permitted but Peter was the star. He was at his mother’s side continually, totally devoted. That was when I learned to admire him. I saw the goodness in him that I’d been blinded to because I’m a conventional man.”

I said, “After your wife’s death—”

“I fell apart and paid no attention to any of the boys, least of all Peter. I dated, got married again — we won’t discuss that, it lasted five months. Peter was close to his mother, he had to be devastated. But I wasn’t there for him and when he told me he was moving back to Florida, I wished him luck.”

He leaned forward. “I saw it as one less complication in my life.”

“Before he left, were drugs—”

“A factor in his life? Definitely. The ones I know about are marijuana, Ecstasy, quaaludes, cocaine, and alcohol. I know because Peter was open about his drug use. Basically, he’d brag and dare us to do something about it. He knew his mother was a soft touch so he — but that’s water under the bridge. And despite all that, Dr. Delaware, I never picked up anything to do with heroin. Peter had been terrified of needles since childhood. Even when getting a tattoo became the thing, he said he’d never get one. Not into pain was the phrase he used.”

Milo said, “Nowadays people snort and smoke heroin.”

“So I was told,” said Kramer, “by the coroner who did his autopsy.”

He looked down, hands knitted and twitching. “Second worst day of my life, the first was when Lenore was diagnosed. I suppose I went into denial about the heroin aspect, asked the coroner if he’d found any needle marks. He said he hadn’t but that didn’t prove anything — what you just said, people inhale. I demanded to know if Peter’s autopsy revealed any signs of long-term opiate use. I’d done some research, knew the signs: pulmonary hyperplasia, micro-hemorrhages of the brain, inflammatory heart tissue, liver disease. He admitted Peter’s body showed none of that. But his interpretation was Peter, being a novice, had snorted far too much. Still, accidental never sat right with me. And now you’re here.”

I said, “Peter was thirty-four when he died. What do you know about his life between the time he returned to Florida and then?”

“The second time, he was gone for seven years. I’d get emails two, three times a year, mostly when he needed me to wire cash. Which I did, he didn’t request much. But we were essentially out of touch.”

“Emails from where?”

“Obviously Florida — the Gulf Coast, the fishing thing. Then Texas, he’d gone back to restaurant work in Austin and later the same in San Antonio. Then it was fishing again, back to Florida, he claimed he’d been promoted to first mate or something along those lines. Whatever it was, it didn’t last long. He went down to Mexico — Cabo San Lucas. Then Panama and Costa Rica. He asked for money and informed me he was working at a zip-line outfit in some Costa Rican jungle, had discovered he wasn’t afraid of heights. How do you respond to something like that? Congratulations, you can hang from a wire? I sent him half of what he requested.”

He glanced at the piano, unlaced and fluttered his fingers. “Was I an S.O.B.? Certainly. Widowhood and a disastrous second marriage took it out of me. I wound down my practice, played more golf, tried to get back to music and found I’d lost my flair. I’d visit Barton and his wife in Boston twice a year. Every eighteen months or so I’d endure a sixteen-hour trek and see Josh and his girlfriend in Tel Aviv. I was just back from Israel when Peter showed up here. Unannounced, just like the first time. He was thirty but already had gray hair. He said he needed temporary lodgings so I took him in, we went to dinner, he talked, I listened. Apparently after Costa Rica he’d gone back to Panama City where he’d worked at a hotel. First in the dining room, then the front desk. He said he’d discovered hotel management was his passion and he’d come back to ‘develop himself.’ He also had a girlfriend he’d met there. A dancer at a club, she’d be arriving soon and they’d be living together, could I advance him on the rent? I gave him enough for six months.”

“Generous,” said Milo.

“You think so?” said Kramer. “More like go-away money.” His lips folded inward. “I was an S.O.B. in general and a rotten dad, specifically. And then he died. And now you’re digging it all up.”

I said, “You do know about his last job.”

“Assistant manager at some apartment building. It depressed him, he’d hoped for hotel work but his résumé didn’t cut it. Was his death somehow connected to that?”

Milo said, “We’re curious about the building.”

“In what way?”

“There may be things going on there.”

“It’s a dope den? Westwood Village?” said Kramer. “I guess that’s not so far-fetched. Students, the weirdos who hang around students.”

“Did Peter talk about that?”

“Not to me, Lieutenant, but I used to attend at the health center, I know what I saw.”

I said, “How much contact did you have with Peter when he worked there?”

Kramer ran a hand along the top of neat, white hair. No strands out of place but that didn’t stop him from patting. “I wish I could say we grew closer but we didn’t. I’m assuming Peter didn’t need money because he stopped contacting me. The only reason I found out about his death was he’d listed me in his phone contacts and the coroner’s investigator found me.”

Milo said, “Do you have that phone, Doctor?”

“No. I told them to dispose of all of Peter’s effects. It was hard enough cleaning out Lenore’s closet. I didn’t need to go through that again.”

I said, “Did you ever meet the girlfriend from Panama?”

“Once. I took them to dinner at Spago and she seemed very pleasant. Far better behaved than Peter, who drank too much wine and got loopy and started talking about his mother. I didn’t appreciate hearing Lenore described in a drunk’s slurry voice. The girl could tell, she managed to calm Peter down. Nice young lady. Good looking, too. Peter always had a way with the girls.”

I pulled out the photo of Suzanne DaCosta.

Paul Kramer said, “Yes, that’s her. Are you telling me she was involved in Peter’s death?”

Milo said, “Part of what we’re dealing with is her murder.”

Kramer’s eyes popped. “Murder? She was also a junkie? She’s the one who gave Peter heroin?”

“There’s absolutely no evidence of that, Dr. Kramer. Ms. DaCosta is our primary case and she led us to Peter.”

The fingers of Kramer’s right hand flew to his cheek and drummed the skin lightly. Large fingers for a small man. Expressive, a surgeon’s source of grace and authority. “DaCosta? That’s not the name I was given.”

“Suzanne Kimberlee DaCosta. Sometimes she called herself Kimbee.”

“Not to me, she didn’t,” said Paul Kramer, returning the photo. “I have a good memory for names — most of my age peers don’t — and I remember distinctly that Peter introduced her as Susan Koster. And she said, ‘Call me Susie.’ ”