Time Bomb

25

Outside at the curb, Milo said, “I had nothing to do tonight. Went driving. Saw his car circle the block real slowly, about nine-thirty, slow down further when he reached the school. Third time he came around I decided to put the cherry on my roof and stop him. He had the crowbar right there on the seat. Dumb kid. He nearly browned his pants when he saw me.”

Linda said, “You heard the mother- all those school problems.”

“Just like Holly,” I said.

“But they didn’t know each other,” Milo said. “I worked him over on that with extreme thoroughness. He has no record, no membership in any gangs or groups. So it looks like this is the only mischief he’s been into- or caught at.”

Linda’s back was to him. He raised an eyebrow, wanting to know how much I’d told her.

I gave a tiny shake of my head, said, “Maybe you nipped a criminal career in the bud.”

“His career wouldn’t have lasted long- the dumb ones are the ones we catch. Anyway, time to be shoving off. Sorry for waking you but I thought you’d want to know.”

“I did,” she said. “I’m glad you called. Do you think I did the right thing?”

“Seems as good an option as any. The juvenile system takes over on something like this, we’re talking stern lecture. Maybe. If you got a real kick-ass judge, a week at the honor farm and exposure to some people he doesn’t need to be exposed to. But if he screws up again, let me know. I can always pull a few fast ones, procedurally speaking, and scare the bejesus out of him.”

Linda said, “Okay. And thanks again.”

He said, “Bon soir,” saluted, and walked off.

“Good man,” said Linda.

“No argument there.”

We went back to my place and found we were too wound up to sleep. I located a deck of cards in a kitchen drawer and we bored ourselves with a few hands of poor-attention-span gin, finally turned off the lights and dozed, lying close to each other.

The next morning, I drove her back to her apartment and went up with her. She changed into a lilac-colored suit, picked up her rental car in the subterranean garage, and drove to school. I ran a few errands, then drove there myself. Bits of streamers still clung to the chain link. Otherwise the grounds were quiet- almost ghostly. Morning-after blues.

I waited in Linda’s office while she checked to see if any adjustment problems had cropped up in the aftermath of the concert. A few teachers reported some unruliness, but nothing they couldn’t handle. At noon I stopped in with those teachers and, having convinced myself everything was going smoothly, left.

At 1:00 P.M., Mahlon Burden called. “Any progress, Dr. Delaware?”

“I met with your son last night.”

“Excellent. And?”

“He had nothing new to offer about Holly, but he did say you visited him about a month ago. You were concerned about her.”

Pause. “Yes, that’s true. I knew Howard had been… sneaking her over to his house. He and his wife thought I didn’t know, but of course I did. Since they were spending more time together, I thought he might be able to tell me why she’d been looking sad.”

“Sad?”

“Withdrawn. Uncommunicative. More than usual.”

“When did that start?”

“Let me think back- late September or the beginning of October. I remember because my fall catalogue had just gone out. Excuse me for not mentioning it when you were at the house, but with everything that’s been going on- the memories- it slipped by. I haven’t been functioning at full capacity.”

“Did you suspect her contact with Howard was causing the withdrawal?”

“I didn’t suspect anything, Doctor. I was simply trying to develop hypotheses. Now, of course, you’ve provided me with one. The death of the black boy. That occurred late September. He and Holly may have been closer than I thought. What else do you know about him other than that he was a drug user?”

“Some people who knew him doubt he was a drug user.”

“People?”

“Ted Dinwiddie.”

“Ted Dinwiddie.” Burden gave a small laugh. “Not exactly an Einstein, that one. Howard used to do his homework for him. Where was Novato killed?”

“South L.A.”

“South L.A. Before the riot we used to call it Watts- never could understand that, people burning down their own homes, fouling their own nests. Did your detective friend mention which gang he belonged to?”

“There’s no evidence he belonged to any gang.”

“In this city, drugs means gangs,” he said. “Or at least that’s what they say. What else can you tell me about him?”

“That’s it.”

“All right, then. What’s next on our agenda?”

“Mr. Burden, I haven’t learned anything that would vindicate Holly. And to be honest, I don’t see myself moving in that direction.”

Pause. “That’s very disappointing, Doctor.” But he didn’t sound disappointed. Or surprised. “Have you considered talking to members of Novato’s family- delving into his background?”

“He was from back east, didn’t have family out here. And frankly, Mr. Burden, I don’t see that as being helpful in terms of what you want.”

“Why’s that, Doctor?”

“There just doesn’t seem to be any connection to Holly.”

Silence on the other end.

“I’m sorry,” I said. ‘I don’t see anywhere to take the evaluation that would fulfill your needs.”

He said, “I’m sorry you feel that way. Why don’t you come over again? The two of us can put our heads together, develop some hypotheses.”

“Maybe in a while,” I said. “I’m a little tied up now.”

“I see,” he said. “But you’re not closing the door?”

“No,” I said. “The door’s never closed.”

“Good.” Pause. “Quite a ruckus down by the school yesterday. Papers said Councilman Latch brought in a rock singer to entertain the children. Making political hay?”

“Bales of it.”

“Why not?” he said. “Seize the moment. Next thing you know, they’ll be dancing on my daughter’s grave.”

An hour later Milo called and I told him of my meeting with Howard Burden, described the mental deterioration Howard had seen in his sister after Novato’s death. Her holding the rifle. Wanna see two.

He said, “What’d she wanna see two of?”

“No idea.”

“Hmm,” he said. “How ’bout wanna see two people dead? Massengil and someone else.”

“Latch?”

“Could be,” he said. “Two shitbirds with one stone. Talk about your civic responsibility. Or maybe she was planning to do Massengil at the school, head off somewhere else for victim number two. It’s not unusual for these nutcases to have elaborate plans- delusions. But I don’t have to tell you that, do I? Anyway, all this does is firm up the lone-assassin picture, puts her hands on the weapon a good two weeks before the shooting- shows premeditation. She was mentally shaky to begin with, got stressed out by Novato’s death, became unglued, spent a month and a half building up anger, going to the gun rack, getting the feel of the thing. Then, boom. How’m I doing- psychologically?”

“Good enough.”

“It’s not gonna sound too good to Daddy.”

“I just spoke to him, put him on hold.”

“Till when?”

“Indefinite.”

“Didn’t have the heart to cut him off?”

“I’ve got nothing to offer him,” I said. “But for all I know, his defenses are about to come tumbling down. I wanted to go easy.”

“Thought you didn’t like the guy.”

“I don’t, but that doesn’t alter my responsibility. Besides, the guy’s pathetic- got nothing left in the way of family. His son hates him- it’s obvious he just wanted me to talk to him because there’s no communication between them. So I went easy.”

“Interesting,” said Milo.

“What is?”

“Having a job where you’ve got to be watching yourself all the time, caring about people’s feelings.”

“Part of your job too.”

“Sometimes,” he said. “But mostly the people I care about are dead. Speaking of which, I got in touch with Santa Monica College. Novato did register for summer session, but he dropped out after a week.”

“Long enough to get his name listed at the Employment Center.”

“That’s what I thought too. Probably why he registered in the first place. No ID, no references, would have been hard to find a job.”

“Dinwiddie would have liked the student thing. He yearns for school days.”

“My question,” Milo said, “is why Novato would want a low-paying job if he was selling dope.”

“A cover? Smith said they were getting sophisticated.”

“Maybe. Be that as it may, I don’t know that any of it is worth pursuing. My source at the Holocaust Center flies in from Chicago this afternoon. Got an appointment down there at five- that’s the last thing I’m gonna do on it. Ever been there?”

“No.”

“You should see it. Everyone should.”

“I’m free at five.”

“You drive.”

Scaffolding and an enclosed wooden perimeter marked a construction zone next to a two-story building made of white brick and black marble.

“That’s the museum,” said Milo. “House of Tolerance. They just broke ground last month.”

Traffic was congested for a half-block radius around the site. Motors groaned, clay dust billowed, hammer thuds and saw whines rose above the combustive groan of idling engines. A hard hat in an orange vest stood in the middle of Pico, directing a crane as it backed up onto the boulevard. A female traffic cop whistled and white-gloved a steadily building herd of autos into submission.

Milo leaned toward the center of the Seville and looked in the rearview mirror. A moment later he looked again.

I said, “What is it?”

“Nothing.” His eyes swept back and forth.

“Come on, Milo.”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “A while back I thought someone might be on our tail. It’s probably nothing.”

“Probably?”

“Don’t get in an uproar.” He sat back.

“Where’d you see it?”

“Just before Motor, near Fox Studios. Probably my imagination- there doesn’t seem to be anyone back there now, but it’s too stacked up to be sure.”

“Maybe it wasn’t your imagination. I’ve had the same feeling a couple of times the last week.”

“That so?”

“I also put it down to imagination.”

“Probably was.”

“Probably?”

“Like I said, Alex, don’t get in an uproar. Even if there was someone, most likely it was the Department.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The car. Plymouth sedan. Flat gray, black-wall tires, radio antennae. Except for the narcs and all their confiscated hot rods, the Department hasn’t discovered special effects.”

“Why would the Department be following us?”

“Not us. Me. Maybe I stepped on someone’s toes. Got big feet.” He wiggled his brogans.

I said, “Frisk?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. It’s Kenny’s type of game, but it could be anyone. My persona’s never that grata.”

“But what about the ones who followed me? Guilt by association?”

“Ones? How many were there?”

“Two, both times. First in a brown Toyota, then some kind of sedan. Male and female the second time, I think.”

“Sounds kind of imaginative for the Department. When and where’d it happen?”

“Both times were at night. Coming out of restaurants. The first time I was by myself, in Santa Monica. The second was this past Sunday night, with Linda. Melrose near LaBrea.”

“How long did they stay with you?”

“Not long.” I told him about driving into the gas station to avoid the brown Toyota.

He smiled. “Flashy move, Double-0-Seven. They show any signs of noticing you after you pulled into the station?”

“No. Just drove right by.”

“What about the second time?”

I shook my head. “I pulled off onto a side street and they were gone.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a tail,” he said. “And no similarities to the one I just saw. This was one guy- male Cauc, standard issue. And he didn’t just stay right on our tail. He hung back- the way they teach you in cop school. That’s what caught my eye- the spacing. Professionalism. A civilian would have missed it. I could have easily missed it. Even now, I’m not sure it wasn’t some guy just happening to be driving by. If the Department was bothering to run a two-man tail, chances are the second guy would have been in another car, doing an A-B. Your guys, on the other hand, were obvious as hell- you saw ’em, didn’t you? Which leads me to believe they weren’t tailing yon. So all in all, I’d vote for imagination, Alex.”

“Yours is real, mine’s baloney?”

“Just keeping a sane perspective,” he said. “Mine’s probably baloney too.”

He sat back, made a show of stretching his legs and yawning.

The crane was finally gone and we advanced. As I turned the corner, Milo checked out the cars that sped by.

“Nothing,” he said. “Forget the whole thing.”

We parked in the visitors’ lot in back of the center and walked around to the front entrance. After passing through a metal detector, we signed in with a plainclothes guard in an open booth. He was young, sharp-featured, with cropped black hair, a strong chin, and hard eyes.

Milo showed ID and said, “We’re here to see Judy Baumgartner.”

“Wait, please,” said the guard. Some kind of accent. He stepped back several feet and made a call.

“Israeli,” said Milo. “Since the swastikas, they use ex-secret-service guys as security. Very stubborn. They can be a real pain in the ass to deal with, but they get the job done.”

The guard returned to the counter. “She’ll be a few minutes. You can wait up there.” He pointed to a short, open flight of stairs. Above it was a landing backed with a black-and-white mural of wide-eyed faces. Frightened faces. It reminded me of the TV broadcast the day of the sniping.

Milo said, “How about we look at the exhibit?”

The guard shrugged. “Sure.”

We took the open stairs clown to the basement level. Dark hallway, the sounds of typing and ringing phones. A few people traveled the corridor, purposeful, busy.

To the right of the stairs was a black door marked EXHIBIT in small steel letters.

“Temporary,” he said, “until the museum’s done.”

He opened the door to a room about thirty feet square, paneled gallery-white, gray-carpeted, and very cool. Photo blowups lined the walls.

Milo began walking. I followed.

The first picture: storm troopers kicking and beating elderly Jews on the streets of Munich.

The second, stolid-looking citizens marching with placards:

RAUS MIT

EUCH DRECKIGE

JUDEN!

I stopped, caught my breath, went on.

A jackbooted, peak-capped soldier, not more than nineteen or twenty, using tin snips to cut the beard of a terrified grandfather as other soldiers look on in glee.

The shattered and defaced storefronts of post-Kristallnacht Berlin. Swastikas. Posters in crude gothic lettering.

Gutted buildings. Shattered faces.

A triptych midway down the first wall made me stop even as Milo kept walking. A winter scene. Forest of monumental conifers atop gently rolling snow dunes. In the foreground a row of naked men and women huddled in front of trench graves; some still held shovels. Dozens of emaciated physiques, caved-in chests, shriveled genitals. Victims obscenely bare amid the frosty beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Behind the prisoners, a dozen SS men armed with carbines.

Next photo: the troopers raise weapons to shoulder. An officer holds a baton. Most of the diggers keep their backs turned, but one woman has shifted to face the soldiers, screaming, open-mouthed. A dark-eyed, black-haired woman, her breasts shrunken, her pubic thatch a dark wound in white flesh.

Then: bodies, heaps of them, filling the trenches, merging with the snow. One soldier bayonets a corpse.

I forced myself to move on.

Close-ups of barbed wire- iron fangs. A sign in German. A shred of something clinging to the fangs.

Snarling dogs.

A blowup of a document. Columns of numbers, straight margins, beautifully printed, neat as an accountant’s ledger. Opposite each column, hand-scripted words. Bergen-Belsen. Gotha. Buchenwald. Dachau. Dortmund. Auschwitz. Landsberg. Maidanek. Treblinka. Opposite each name, a number code. Body count. So many digits. A horrific arithmetic…

More snowy-white images: bleached bones. Piles of them. Femurs and tibias and finger bones white as piano keys. Pelvic cradles stripped raw. Yawning rib cages. Scraps and fragments rendered unidentifiable.

A mountain of bones sitting on a base of dust and grit.

An incomprehensible Everest of bones, landscaped with jawless skulls.

My stomach lurched.

Another enlarged document: multisyllabic German words. A translating caption: PROCESSING PROCEDURES. The final solution.

Compulsively detailed lists of those bound for the refuse heap:

Jews. Gypsies. Subversives. Homosexuals.

I looked over at Milo. He was across the room, his back to me. Hands in pockets, hunched and bulky and predatory as a bear out on a night forage.

I kept walking, looking.

A display case of Zyldon B poison-gas canisters. Another containing a shredded striped uniform of coarse cloth.

Little children in cloth caps and braids, herded onto trains. Bewildered, tear-streaked. Tiny hands reaching out for mother love. Faces pressed against a train window.

Another group of children, in spotless school uniforms, marching beneath a swastika banner, giving a straight-armed salute.

Black gallows against a cloudy sky. Bodies dangling from them, their feet barely touching the ground. A caption explaining that the scaffolding had been specially constructed with short drops, so that death, from slow strangulation, was prolonged.

Guard towers.

More barbed wire- spooling miles of it.

Brick ovens.

Pallets of charred, caked matter.

Fat complacent cats licking at a pile of it.

Tiled laboratories that resembled autopsy rooms. Sinks full of glassware. Humanoid things on tables.

A paragraph describing the science of the Third Reich. Ice-water experiments. Eye-color experiments. Artificial-insemination experiments. Cross-species breeding experiments. Benzine injections to harden the arteries. “Surgery” without anesthesia to study the limits of pain tolerance. Twin studies. Dwarf studies. Authoritative-looking men in white coats, bearing scalpels like weapons.

Rows of graves outside a “sanitarium.”

Milo and I had come face to face. When I saw the moisture in his eyes, I realized mine were wet too.

My throat felt as if it had been stuffed with dirt. I wanted to say something but the thought of speaking hurt my chest.

I turned away from him and dried my eyes.

The gallery door opened. A woman came in and said, “Hi, Milo. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

Cheer in her voice. It jolted me like an ice-water bath.

She was in her mid to late forties, tall and slim, with a long neck and a smallish oval face. Her hair was short, gray, and feathered. She had on a silk print dress in mauves and blues, and mauve suede shoes. Her badge said J. BAUMGARTNER, SENIOR RESEARCHER.

Milo shook her hand. “Thanks for seeing me on short notice, Judy.”

“For you, anything, Milo. If I look a wreck, it’s from sitting at O’Hare for four hours waiting to take off. Place is a zoo.”

She looked perfectly put together.

Milo said, “This is Alex Delaware. Alex, Judy Baumgartner.”

She smiled. “Good to meet you, Alex.”

Mile said, “He’s never been here before.”

“Well then, a special welcome. Any impressions?”

“I’m glad I saw it.”

My voice was strained. She nodded.

We left the gallery and followed her down the hall to a small room furnished with four gray metal desks arranged in a square. Three of them were occupied by young people- two females and a male of college age- poring over manuscripts and notating. She greeted them and they said hi and went back to work. The walls were filled with bookcases of the same gray metal. A cardboard box sat atop the unoccupied desk.

Judy Baumgartner said, “There’s a meeting going on in my office, so this will have to do.”

She sat behind the desk with the box. Milo and I pulled up chairs.

She pointed to the box. “Ike’s stuff. I had my secretary go into the library card catalogue and pull everything he’d checked out. This is it.”

“Thanks,” said Milo.

“I’ve got to tell you,” she said, “I’m still pretty shaken. When I got the message in Chicago that you needed to see me, I thought it was going to be something about hate crimes or maybe even some progress on Kaltenblud. Then when I got back and Janie told me what you wanted…”

She shook her head. “He was such a nice kid, Milo. Friendly, dependable-really dependable. That’s why when he stopped showing up for work, I was really surprised. Tried to find the number he’d given me when he applied to volunteer, but it was gone. Must have gotten thrown out. Space is at a premium- stuff gets thrown out all the time. I’m sorry.”

Milo said, “He worked here?”

“Yes. Didn’t Janie tell you?”

“No. All I knew was he’d checked out books, done some research.”

“He did research for me, Milo. For over two months. Never missed a day- he was one of my steadiest ones. Really dedicated. His suddenly dropping out bothered me- it wasn’t like him. I asked the other volunteers if they knew what had happened to him but they didn’t. He hadn’t made friends- kept to himself. I tried to get a number for him but he wasn’t listed. Finally, after a couple of weeks of his not showing up, I put it down to impetuous youth. Figured I’d overrated his maturity. I never expected… never knew. How’d it happen, Milo?”

Milo told her about the shooting, told her it had taken place in a dope alley but left out the toxicology report.

She frowned. “He sure didn’t seem like a druggie to me. If any kid was lucid and straight, it was Ike. Unusually straight- almost too serious for his age. He had a really… crisp mind. Still, people can maintain, can’t they?”

“When did he start volunteering?”

“Late April. Walked in off the street and announced he wanted to help. Good-looking kid, fire in his eyes- passion. He reminded me of the way students used to be during the sixties. Not that I greeted him with open arms. I wanted to make sure he was stable, not just caught up in some impulsive thing. And frankly, I was taken by surprise. We don’t get much interest from non-Jewish kids, and with all the black-Jewish tension lately, the last thing I expected was a black kid wanting to do Holocaust research. But he was really sincere. On top of being smart. A very quick study, and that’s hard to find nowadays. The gifted ones all seem to stay on the career track, get rich quick. The ones like those three”- she pointed to the other desks- “are the exception.”

“Did they know Ike?”

“No. They just started. Fall interns. The summer group consisted of three students from Yeshiva University in New York, one each from Brown and NYU, and Ike. From Santa Monica College. All the others went back for fall semester. Ike didn’t hang out with them. Kind of a loner, really.”

“You said he was friendly.”

“Yes. That’s odd, isn’t it, now that you mention it. He was friendly- smiled a lot, courteous, but he definitely kept to himself. When Janie told me what had happened, I thought back, realized how little he’d told me about himself during the interview: He’d arrived a few months earlier from back east, was working and going to school. He told me he loved history, wanted to be a lawyer or a historian. He kept steering the conversation away from personal things and toward substance-history, politics, man’s inhumanity to man. I was so taken by his enthusiasm that I went along with it, didn’t ask very many personal questions. Do you think he was hiding something?”

“Who knows?” said Milo. “There’s no record at all of his application?”

“No, sorry. We dump tons. Anything to avoid the paper-glut.”

“Wish I had the luxury,” he said. “By now I dream in triplicate.”

She smiled. “Be thankful you don’t deal with the federal government. After years of haggling, the Justice Department’s finally started turning over names of old Nazis who’re still living here. They all lied on their visa applications and we’re processing to beat the band- meeting with federal prosecutors in the various cities, filling out mountains of forms, trying to persuade them to move faster on drawing up deportation papers. That’s what I was doing in Chicago: trying to sock it to a kindly old geezer who runs a bakery on the South Side- best pastry in town, free samples to all the local kiddies. Only problem is, forty-five years ago that geezer was responsible for gassing eighteen hundred kiddies.”

Milo’s face got hard. “Gonna nail him?”

“Gonna try. Actually, this particular case looks good. Of course there’ll be the usual outcry from his family and friends: We’ve got the wrong guy; this one’s a saint, wouldn’t hurt a fly; we’re only persecuting him because of his noble anticommunist background- Moscow’s behind all of it, you see. As if the Russians would give us the time of day. Not to mention a whole bunch of mewling from the nonconfrontational wimps who think human nature’s basically pure and bygones should be bygones. And, of course, straight-out anti-Semitic garbage from the revisionist morons- the it-never-happened-in-the-first-place-but-if-it-did-they-deserved-it crowd. Your basic neo-Bundists.”

“Neo-who?”

“Bundists.” She smiled. “Sorry for being esoteric, I was referring to the German-American Bund. It was a big movement in this country, before World War II. Passed itself off as a German-American pride society, but that was just a cover for American Nazism. Bundists were big in the isolationist movement, agitated against U.S. involvement in the war, used the America First cover to press for mandatory sterilization of all refugees- that kind of thing. But they weren’t just a tiny fringe group. They held rallies at Madison Square Garden for thousands of people, complete with swastika banners, Brown Shirt marches, ‘The Horst Wessel Song.’ Ran paramilitary training camps- two dozen of them, with bunkhouses for ‘storm troopers.’ Their goal was to set up a German-speaking colony- a Sudetenland- in New York State. First step toward an Aryan America. Their leaders were paid agents of the Third Reich. They published newspapers, had a press service, a book publishing company called Flanders Hall. Got support from Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford- the Bundesführer, a man called Fritz Kuhn, was a Ford Motors chemist- and plenty of politicians too. They interfaced with Father Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith, lots of other loonies. But after Pearl Harbor, their leaders were rounded up for espionage and sedition and sent to prison. It put a damper on the movement but didn’t kill it. Extremism’s like that. A recurrent cancer- you need to be always looking out for it, cutting it away. Nowadays it’s skinheads, revisionists… the Holocaust never happened. They thrive on economic hardship- tried to exploit the farmers problems a few years back. The latest thing is Odinism. Some sort of ancient Norse religion. They reject Christianity because it evolved out of Judaism. Then there’s this other group that claims to be the real Hebrews. We Jews are subhuman, the spawn of Eve and the snake. Farrakhan says the same kind of thing- white separatists showed up at one of his rallies and donated money.”

“Nutso,” said Milo.

“But dangerous. We’re working overtime keeping an eye on them all.”

“Was Novato involved in investigating any of them?”

“No. We keep the volunteers away from that kind of thing- too dangerous. I’m up to two death threats a week. He did library work: reshelving, working on the index catalogue. I’d call down with a list of references and ask him to get them for me. Sometimes I’d send him to outside libraries- UCLA or Hebrew Union College. Or over to the Federal Building to pick up some documents. He had a motorcycle, which made him perfect for that. Mostly what he did was read- on his own time. Sat in the library until closing time, then took stuff home with him.”

She looked down at the box. “I glanced through it. Seems to be mostly Holocaust history. The origins and structure of the Nazi party and neo-Nazi groups. At least that’s what he checked out. We’ve got a very comprehensive civil rights collection, and we put together an entire section on black slavery. But he didn’t check out any of that. I was surprised. Which just reminds me how easy it is to stereotype- you’ve got to fight it constantly. Still, it’s the first time I can remember a black kid focusing exclusively on the Holocaust. There was something about him, Milo. A naïveté- an optimistic sincerity- that was really touching. You just knew that in a couple of years he was going to get disillusioned and lose some of that. Maybe even all of it. But in the meantime it was nice to see. Why would anyone want to kill him?” She stopped. “Pretty dumb question coming from me.”

“It’s always a good question,” Milo said. “It’s the answers that stink. Did he ever mention any family or friends?”

“No. The only time he got even remotely personal was toward the end of his… Must have been early September. He came into my office to deliver some books, and after he put them down he kept hanging around. I didn’t even notice at first- I was up to my elbows in something. Finally I realized he was still there and glanced up. He looked nervous. Upset about something. I asked him what was on his mind. He started talking about some pictures he’d come across while cataloguing- dead babies out of the crematoria, Mengele’s experiments. He was really affected. Sometimes it just hits you, out of the clear blue- even after you’ve seen thousands of other pictures, one will set you off. I encouraged him to talk, get it all out. Let him go on about why, if there was a God, He could let those things happen. Why did terrible things happen to good people? Why couldn’t people be kind to one another? Why were people always betraying one another-brutalizing one another?

“When he was through I told him those were questions humanity had been asking itself since the beginning of time. That I had no answers, but the fact that he was asking them showed he was one cut above the crowd- had some depth to him. The wisdom to question. That the key to making the world a better place was to constantly question, never accept the brutality. Then he said something strange. He said Jewish people question all the time. Jewish people are deep. He said it almost with a longing in his voice- a reverence. I said thanks for the compliment, but we Jews don’t have a monopoly on either suffering or insight. That we’d swallowed more than our share of persecution, and that kind of thing did tend to lead to introspection, but that when you got down to it, Jews were like everyone else- good and bad, some deep, some shallow. He listened and got this strange smile on his face, kind of sad, kind of dreamy. As if he were thinking about something else. Then he turned to me and asked me if I’d like him better if he were Jewish.

“That really threw me. I said I liked him just fine the way he was. But he wouldn’t let go of it, wanted to know how I’d feel if he were Jewish. I told him we could always use another bright penny in the tribe- was he thinking of converting? And he just gave me another strange smile and said I should be flexible in my criteria. Then he left. We never talked about it again.”

“What did he mean, ‘criteria’?”

“The only thing I can think of was that he was considering a Reform or Conservative conversion. I’m Orthodox- he knew that- and the Orthodox have more stringent criteria, so maybe he was asking for my approval, asking me to be flexible in my criteria for conversion. It was a strange conversation, Milo. I made a mental note to follow up on it, try to get to know him better. But with the workload it just never happened. Right after that, he stopped showing up. For a while I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing, failed him in some way.”

She stopped, laced her hands. Opened a desk drawer, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and blew out smoke.

“So much for quitting. My first all week. Talking about this isn’t good for my willpower. Since I got your message I’ve been wondering if there was something he was asking from me that I didn’t give. Some way I could have-”

“Come on, Judy,” said Milo. “Dead-end thinking.”

She held the cigarette at arm’s length. “Yes, I know.”

Milo took it and ground it out in an ashtray.

She said, “Been talking to my husband?”

“It’s my job,” he said. “Protect and serve. Got a few more questions for you. Hate groups. Anything new on the local scene?”

“Not particularly, just the usual fringies. Maybe a slight upswing in incidents that seems to be related to the situation in Israel- a lot of the printed material we’ve been seeing lately has been emphasizing anti-Zionist rhetoric: Jews are oppressors. Stand up for Palestinian rights. A new hook for them since the U.N. passed the Zionism-is-racism thing. Basically a way for them to sanitize their message. And some of the funding for the worst anti-Semitic literature is coming from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Syria, so I’m sure that’s got something to do with it.”

“Who’d be breaking into houses and painting anti-Semitic slogans on the walls?”

“That sounds kind of adolescent,” she said. “Why? Are you getting a lot of that? If you are, we should know about it.”

“Just one incident. At the place Ike used to live and the apartment next door. His landlady was Jewish and the next-door neighbor’s a rabbi, so it probably has nothing to do with Ike.”

“Milo,” she said, “you don’t think he was killed because of his work here?”

“Nothing points to that, Judy.”

“But you’re not ruling it out. You’re here because you have at least some suspicion he might have been killed because of his race.”

“No, Judy,” he said, “I’m a long way from that.”

“Kennedy,” I said softly.

It was the first time I’d spoken since we entered the room. Both of them stared at me.

“Yeah,” said Milo. “There is something else. Along with the anti-Semitic stuff, they wrote, Remember John Kennedy! That make any sense to you?”

“Could,” she said, “depending on which John Kennedy you’re talking about.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they scrawled “John F. Kennedy that wouldn’t make much sense. But there was another John Kennedy. Confederate veteran. Lived in Pulaski, Tennessee, and started a social club for other Confederate veterans called the Ku Klux Klan.”

I said, “Punks who know history?”

Milo didn’t say anything.

We left, taking along the carton of books Ike Novato had checked out.

I said, “What do you think?”

Milo said, “Who the hell knows?”

“Seems to me it’s starting to smell more like politics than drugs. Both Novato and Gruenberg have a strong interest in Nazis. Both get killed. Someone breaks into their apartment and paints racist slogans.”

Milo frowned, rubbed his face. Then his beeper went off.

I said, “Want me to find a phone?”

“Nah, I’ll call from your place.”

He did and put down the phone. “Gotta go, fresh d.b. Don’t worry- nothing to do with Nazis. Paraplegic in a rest home on Palm- looks like natural causes.”

“How come the D-Three goes out on something like that?”

“One of the attendants pulled my guy aside and told him the paraplegic had been pretty healthy the day before- and this wasn’t the first funny death they’d had there. Place was full of health code violations, patients getting beaten, sitting in their own shit, not getting their medicine. Owner of the home is politically connected. My guy got nervous. Wanted to know procedure. Procedure is I go out there and play nursemaid.”

He walked to the door. “Got any plans for tonight?”

“Nothing.”

He pointed at the carton of books. “Got time for some reading?”

“Sure.”

“There’s a lot of stuff there. You might wanna check first for notes in margins, underlining, that kind of thing. Barring that, maybe a trend in the kind of books he chose- a subpattern, something more specific than just an interest in Nazis. Depending on how complicated it gets over in Palms, I’ll try to get back tonight, see if you’ve come up with anything.”

“Am I being graded?”

“Nah, it’s pass/fail. Just like real life.”