Twisted

CHAPTER 13

The next day Mac called a noon meeting on the Paradiso shooting. He and Petra and Luc Montoya ate sandwiches in a small conference room and compared notes. Montoya was forty, bald, muscular, with a movie-star face and the longest eyelashes Petra had ever seen on an adult. He wore a cream-colored sports coat, beige linen slacks, white shirt, pale blue tie. Very natty, but his expression was defeated and he didn’t say much.

Mac had on the usual gray sharkskin and unreadable face.

He and Luc had dived into the witness pile, come up empty, and no local gang rumors were flying.

Petra told them about Sandra Leon’s lies.

Luc gnawed his lip. Mac said, “So we have no idea where this kid lives.”

Petra shook her head.

Mac said, “That doctor of hers, think he might know?”

“I’ve got a call in.”

“Maybe you can find him before his vacation’s over. Meanwhile, I’m heading over to Compton. They had a shooting last year, bangers, rap concert, cruise-by in the parking lot. Three down on that one. No solve, but they have ideas and I figured we’d compare notes. Misery and company and all that.”

Petra called Dr. Robert Katzman’s office again, talked to the machine, switched to the Oncology office, and got assertive with a secretary who transferred her to the department administrator, a woman named Kim Pagionides.

“Sandra Leon,” said Pagionides. As if she knew the girl. As if she disapproved of the girl.

Petra said, “You’ve seen her recently?”

“Oh, no.” Small, nervous laugh. “No, I don’t think so. I’ll have Dr. Katzman get in touch when he gets back.”

“I need to speak to him now.”

“I’m sure he’s busy.”

“So am I. Where, exactly, is he?”

“Traveling. To a bunch of cities. He’s delivering papers at four scientific meetings. Important papers. We’re talking about saving lives.”

“And I’m talking about destroyed lives. So maybe the good doctor will be able to relate.”

Silence.

Kim Pagionides said, “Let me check his calendar.”

A few moments later: “He’s in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins. Here’s his cell phone.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Punching the cell number elicited an identical “Dr. Bob” Katzman message, mellow and reassuring. The physicians who’d treated her dad before he died from Alzheimer’s could’ve learned something from Katzman about bedside manner.

Petra tried to keep her own voice serene, but she felt she’d barked at Dr. Bob. So be it.

It was one forty-three P.M. and Isaac hadn’t come in yet and that was just fine with Petra. Less distraction. She called the LAPD pension office and asked for current stats on retired detectives Conrad Ballou and Enrique Martinez.

Martinez was living in Pensacola, Florida, but Ballou was relatively local. Out in Palmdale, a one-hour freeway drive if you danced around the speed limits.

With nothing more to do on the Paradiso case and feeling lonely and itchy, a one-hour drive didn’t sound half-bad.

She decided to take her own car. Wanted to listen to her own music.

As she headed for her Accord, someone called her name. For the merest, foolish moment, she hoped it would be Eric. The last time, they’d met in the lot. In a movie, he’d be back.

She turned, saw Isaac jogging toward her, wearing a white shirt, khakis, and sneakers, briefcase slapping against his thigh.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I got held up at school, hoped I’d get here in time to catch you.”

“Some new bit of data?”

“No, I just thought if it was okay, I could ride with you.”

Petra didn’t answer and Isaac flinched. “That is, if it doesn’t pose a problem- ”

“It’s fine,” she said. “Actually, I’m heading out to talk to someone on one of your June 28 cases.”

His eyes widened. “So you do see the validity of the- ”

“I think you’ve put together something interesting. And seeing as I’ve got nothing else to do, why not check it out?”

Heading toward the 5 on-ramp, she said, “There’s one thing we need to keep clear. This isn’t an official investigation. It’s important to be discreet.”

“About…”

“Talking to anyone else. Period.”

Her voice had stiffened. Isaac shifted his body toward the passenger door. “Sure. Of course.”

“Especially Captain Schoelkopf,” said Petra. “He doesn’t like me, never has. Going off on a tangent when I’ve got a big-time active case could complicate my situation further. Also, it looks as if he had specific feelings about the June murders. In every case, the investigating detective left for one reason or another. Some retired, some moved to other divisions, some died. By itself, that’s not unusual. Since the riots and the Ramparts scandal, there’s been tons of turnover in the department. What is a bit unusual is that none of the files were transferred to new detectives. That’s because Schoelkopf doesn’t like transferring cold cases. So on the infinitesimal chance that we actually learn something about any of these murders, it’s not going to reflect well on him.”

A long silence filled the car before Isaac said, “I’ve complicated things.”

“That’s okay,” said Petra. “Truth is, these victims deserve more than they got.”

A few moments later: “Why doesn’t he like you?”

“Because he’s got poor taste.”

Isaac smiled. “I don’t think he likes me either.”

“How much contact have you had with him?”

“The initial interview and we pass in the hall from time to time. He pretends not to notice me.”

“Don’t take it personally,” said Petra. “He’s a misanthrope. But he does have poor taste.”

“Yes, he does,” said Isaac.

She hooked onto the 210, then shifted to the 114, driving northeast through the beginnings of Antelope Valley. Passing through Burbank and Glendale and Pasadena along the way. The rocky outcroppings and green belt that were Angeles Crest National Forest, the site of Bedros Kashigian’s final moments, and every psychopath’s favorite dump spot.

Pretty, today, under a true-blue sky barely blemished by wispy clouds.

Nice scene to paint. She should get her portable easel out here, find a cozy plein air spot, and go to town.

It had been a long time since she’d painted anything with color.

As the drive stretched on, she told Isaac about being impressed by the wound patterns and everything else she’d learned about the six murders.

He said, “Similar dimensions. That I didn’t notice.”

And none of the detectives had noticed June 28. “You’d have to be looking for it.”

“I’ll be more careful in the future,” said Isaac.

The future?

He said, “That call from the phone booth is interesting. The possibility that it might be someone Mrs. Doebbler knew. What if Mr. Solis knew him as well? Someone familiar to all the victims.”

“I thought of that,” she said. “But it’s a leap.”

“Still, it’s possible.”

“If our killer was acquainted with all six victims, he had a pretty wide social network. We’re talking runaways, male hustlers, executive secretaries, retirees, and that Navy ensign, Hochenbrenner. I haven’t even looked at his file yet.”

Isaac was staring out at the desert. If he’d heard her little speech, it wasn’t apparent. Finally, he said, “Mr. Solis had breakfast food on his plate but the murder occurred around midnight.”

“People eat at odd hours, Isaac.”

“Did Mr. Solis?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “What, you think the bad guy dished up sausage and eggs after bashing in Solis’s head and served it to a corpse?”

Isaac squirmed. She’d grossed him out and it gave her perverse satisfaction.

He said, “I really don’t have much of a database from which to make a judgment- ”

“A culinary killer,” she cut him off. “As if it’s not complicated enough.”

He kept quiet. The car got hot. Ten degrees warmer out here in the desert. A warm June to begin with.

June. Today was the fourth. If there was anything to this craziness, someone else would die in twenty-four days.

She said, “So have you come up with any other notable June 28 occurrences in the historical archives?”

“Nothing profound.” He spoke quietly, kept his eyes aimed at the window. Intimidated?

Bad Petra, mean Petra. He’s just a kid.

“Tell me anything you’ve found,” she said. “It could be important.”

Isaac half turned toward her. “Basically, I’ve been logging into various almanacs, printed some lists. Long lists. But nothing jumps out. Here, I’ll show you what I mean.”

Snapping open his briefcase, he groped around, removed a batch of papers.

“I looked at birthdays and the farthest back I got was June 28, 1367, which is when Sigismund, the emperor of Hungary and Bohemia, was born.”

“Was he a bad guy?”

“Your basic autocratic king.” Isaac’s finger trailed down a long row of small-print items. “Then there’s Pope Paul IV, the artist Peter Paul Rubens, another artist, Jean Jacques Rousseau, a few actors- Mel Brooks, Kathy Bates… like I said, it stretches on. That’s how I came up with John Dillinger.”

“Any bad guys other than Dillinger?”

“Not on the birthday list. When I looked at June 28 as a date of death, I found a few more. But none of them appear connected to this type of thing.”

“This type of thing?” said Petra.

“A serial killer.”

The term set her teeth on edge. Too TV. Too damn hard to solve. She kept her voice light and pleasant. “Which bad guys died that day?”

“Pieter van Dort, a Dutch smuggler. They hanged him on June 28, 1748. Thomas Hickey, a Colonial soldier convicted of treason, was hung in 1776. There’s not much more until 1971, when Joseph Columbo, a New York mafioso, was gunned down. Ten years later, Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, a founder of the Iranian Islamic Party, was killed in a bomb explosion. Though I suppose his being a bad guy would depend upon your political persuasion.”

“Anything of a more wacko criminal nature? A Ted Bundy, a Hillside Strangler?”

“No, nothing like that, sorry,” he said. “In terms of historical events, there’s been plenty of misery on June 28, but no more than any other day. At least I can’t find any statistically significant difference. History’s based on tragedy and upheaval, as well as on the accomplishments of notable people.”

He rolled the papers into a tight tube, drummed his thigh. “I can’t believe I missed similarities in the weapon dimensions.”

“Stop beating yourself up,” said Petra.

She switched on the radio, tuned to a station that played harder rock than she was accustomed to. Filled her head with thunder-drums and guitar feedback and screaming testosterone-laden vocals, until the mountains got higher and static buried the noise.

June 4.

She drove faster.

They were well past Angeles Crest now, zipping past canyon after canyon at eighty-five miles an hour, passing low, gray-brown bowls of high-desert to the east. A small-craft airport hugged the freeway, followed by scatters of white-box storage buildings and factories. Then tracts of red-tile-roofed houses in the distance, laid out neatly in the dirt. Between the structures, Petra spied tiny green lawns, the occasional turquoise pool. Lots of space between developments. Antelope Valley was booming but there was still plenty of room to move.

A sign heralding the approach of Palmdale came into view and Petra pronounced the city’s name.

Isaac said, “It used to be called Palmenthal. Founded by Germans and Swiss. It got anglicized around the turn of the century.”

Petra said, “Really.”

“As if you needed to know that.”

“Hey,” she said. “Education’s good for the soul. Where do you pick up stuff like that?”

“I had an advanced geography placement in high school, mostly independent study. I researched several cities in L.A. County and the surrounding areas. It was a surprise, you’d think everything had Hispanic roots, but many places didn’t. Eagle Rock- that used to be called the Switzerland of the West. Back when the air was good.”

“Ancient history,” said Petra.

He said, “Extraneous information tends to float in my head and sometimes it seeps out through my mouth.”

“And sometimes,” she said, “you come up with interesting stuff.”

She exited at the first Palmdale exit, checked her Thomas Guide, and drove toward the address on Conrad Ballou’s retirement forms, around three miles east.

Knowing about Ballou’s alkie-burnout history, she figured him to be living in a depressing pensioner’s SRO or worse, and the first few neighborhoods she passed were pretty sad. But then the environment took a swing upward- the same kind of tile-roofed tracts she’d spotted from the freeway, some big houses, gated enclaves.

Ballou’s place was a medium-sized Spanish house in a pretty development named Golden Ridge Heights, where the trees- palms and paper-barked things- had grown sizable and some of the lawns sported mature shrubbery. Lots of motor homes and motorcycle trailers, pickups, and SUVs. The streets were wide, clean, and quiet, and the houses had rear yards that looked out to desert panorama. Sharp-edged mountains served as a backdrop. Too quiet for Petra’s taste, but she imagined warm, silent, star-studded nights and thought that might not be too bad.

She pulled to the curb and crows scattered. A ten-year-old Ford half-ton sat in Ballou’s driveway. The neighbors on both sides sported basketball hoops over the garage, yards that were more cement than grass. Ballou’s place was done up beautifully with creeping dwarf junipers, impeccable mounds of mondo grass, lush Sago palms, and little cross-cut tubes of bamboo lining the pebbled walkway. A length of bamboo dipping toward a stone pot served as a fountain and the water trickle was a continuous soprano.

A Japanophile?

It didn’t look like an alkie’s place. Maybe the pension office’s data bank was out of date, as was so much LAPD data. She should’ve phoned first before wasting the time and the gas. Now she’d look like a doofus in front of Mr. Genius.

Japanese letters were etched into the teak panels of the front door, above a weathered brass knocker shaped like a fish. A carp- koi- the type Alex Delaware kept in that cute little pond of his.

Petra used the knocker. The man who opened the door was short, bandy-legged, lean but for a protruding belly that hung over his belt buckle.

Koi belt buckle.

Sixty-five to seventy, with a shaved, sunburnt head and drooping white mustaches. He wore a denim work shirt, jeans, red suspenders, and lace-up boots. A white handkerchief flapped from his rear pocket.

He looked Petra and Isaac over, rubbed his hands together as if he’d just finished washing them.

Clear eyes, pale blue, no booze-blear. Sharp eyes, actually.

He said, “I only sell on the weekend.”

“Detective Ballou?”

The man’s hands stopped moving. Now the eyes were twin specks of granite. “Been a long time since anyone called me that.”

Petra showed him her I.D.

He shook his head. “I’m out of all that. Breed and sell fish and don’t think about the past.” He started to step back into the house.

Petra said, “Marta Doebbler. Ever think about her?”

Conrad Ballou moved his jaw around. “Can’t say that I do. Can’t say that I give a damn about any of that.”

“It hasn’t been that long, sir. Six years. I’m looking into some cold cases, including Doebbler. If I could pick your brain…”

“Nothing to pick,” said Ballou, rubbing his bald head. “According to the shrinks the department sent me to.” He looked ready to spit. “I could’ve saved them the trouble. I wasn’t nuts, I was a drunk. Thank God I didn’t kill anybody.” He shook his head. “They should’ve tossed my can out long before they did. Damn department.”

“So you miss police work,” said Petra.

Ballou glared at her. Smiled. Laughed. “You like fish?”

“To eat?”

“To look at. C’mon in. And bring the intern with you.”

The house was rescued from tract-cliché by a trove of Asian furnishings. Vegetable-dye rugs, rosewood tables, porcelain vases and planters, paper screens on the walls, all portraying brocaded koi.

Way too much stuff for the space and to Petra’s eye, nothing pricey. The kind of gaudy, overlacquered stuff you could pick up in any Chinatown or Little Tokyo tourist trap.

Ballou led them past all that, through rear double doors and out to the backyard. What had been a backyard. Every inch of the quarter-acre space had been converted to fish ponds. Sheets of mesh on stakes roofed the entire area, casting shade, cooling the desert air. Beyond the water was a high bamboo fence and a neighbor’s RV.

Lots of burbling, but the ponds weren’t attractive like Alex’s. These were simply rectangular cement tanks, a dozen of them, arranged in a grid with a walkway between them. Not clear like Alex’s, either. Green water, soupy. The only movement on the surface was created by aeration tubes.

But when Conrad Ballou approached the first pond, the surface broke and scores- no, hundreds- of little golden and pinkish fishy faces popped through, flapping, gulping, gasping.

Ballou pointed to the nearest wall where bright blue plastic bins were piled in a heap next to a mess of nets. Nearby stood a gumball machine. Instead of candy, the glass bell was filled with little rust-colored balls, half the size of a pea.

Ballou motioned them over to the machine. “Toss in a quarter.”

Petra did. He took her hand and cupped it below the spout. Turned the handle and little balls tumbled out and her nose filled with the aroma of ripe seafood.

“Feed ’em,” said Ballou. “It’s fun.”

“Which pond?”

“That one. They’re babies, need the nutrition.” Motioning toward the first pond, where the little fish were still clamoring. Petra walked over and tossed in the pellets and a finned riot ensued.

Isaac was already three ponds ahead. Bending low and examining the fish that had risen to greet him. Larger ones, red and black and gold and blue.

He said, “Mr. Ballou, do you use domestic stock or are these from Niigata?”

Ballou lowered his gaze and stared at the kid. “You know koi.”

“I’ve admired them,” said Isaac. “My mother’s employers have a pond.”

“Admire them, huh?” said Ballou. “Then get into it yourself.”

Isaac laughed.

“Something funny, son?”

“It’s a bit beyond my budget. And space. I live in an apartment.”

“Hmm,” said Ballou, “then get yourself a good job, work your tail off, and buy a house. Pay down the mortgage a bit and reward yourself with a Japanese garden and a pond full of nishikigoi. Nothing like ’em to lower your blood pressure.”

Isaac nodded.

“You do all that, son, come back and buy some fish from me and I’ll give you a free karasu- that’s the black one. Symbol of good luck.”

Petra said, “I could use some luck. On Marta Doebbler.”

Ballou said, “Here we were talking about pleasant things… you drink tea?”

Back in his kitchen, he poured steaming green liquid into three stoneware cups.

“Don’t think I’m some fanatic. Asian culture soothes me. When I got out of rehab a koi dealer, a nice old man in Gardena, hired me to mop up his place. I mopped for two years, kept my mouth shut, started asking questions by the third year, learned a bit. He died and put me in his will. Left me some of his breeding stock. That motivated me to buy this place, set up a little weekend business. It’s real peaceful. I don’t think about my other job with fondness.”

Petra sipped the hot, aromatic tea.

“Marta Doebbler’s a good example,” said Ballou. “Ugly scene. When I think of the things I got used to working Homicide.” He placed a thumb under his suspenders, gazed absently through the window. Then back at Isaac.

“You seem like a nice kid. Why would you wanna do this to yourself?”

Petra said, “Isaac’s going to be a doctor. Meanwhile he’s getting a Ph.D. in biostatistics.”

“Meanwhile?” said Ballou, appraising Isaac all over again. “We’re talking Einstein?”

Isaac muttered, “Hardly.” Flushed clear through his nutmeg complexion. Pink as medium-rare beef.

Petra said, “Can we talk about Doebbler?”