The Golem of Hollywood Page 10

  Now she feels parched. She kicks off the blanket and frigid air hits her skin and freezes the tears in her eyes, and she shivers, groping for the blanket regretfully. She thinks if she cannot find it, she will die. She cannot find it. But a hand touches her shoulder and the blanket draws up to her chin and a voice commands her to sleep. She obeys.

  —

  AWAKENING WITH A CLEARER HEAD, she sees that she is in a cave filled with a pulsing, gelid light. There is no fire. The glow comes from the stones themselves, slick with radiant slime.

  A man stands over her, tall as a tree, gaunt as a reed, wearing luminous white garments.

  He says, “You are hungry,” and hands her a steaming gourd. Asham raises it and touches it to her lips. Expecting heat, she chokes it out: it’s some sort of gruel, water and grain, and it’s cold as white. Once she gets a taste, though, hunger storms forth to claim its due, and she cannot stop herself. She drinks the mixture down without pause. It is salty and thick and nourishing. She hits the bottom of the gourd to get out the last drops, licks the sides clean.

  The man says, “More?”

  She nods, and he pours from a shining vessel. The second bowl she savors. Grateful. And cautious, and confused. She has never seen anyone other than the members of her family. Until this moment, she has been given no indication that anyone else might exist.

  He says, “You were burning with fever when I drew you from the snow.”

  “Snow?”

  The man smiles slightly. “My name is Michael. This is my abode. You may stay here until you’ve recovered your strength, and then I’ll see you down to the valley.”

  She pauses, the gourd halfway to her mouth. “I’m not going to the valley.”

  The fluctuating light plays over Michael’s face, causing his features to shift and fade, so that her eyes cannot catch hold of them. One moment he is young and smooth, the next ancient as stone.

  Asham says, “I’m going over the mountain.”

  “Your brother is far away,” he says. “It would be wiser to go home.”

  “You’ve seen him.”

  Michael nods.

  “Where is he? Was Nava with him?”

  “You can still turn back. You will be given another.”

  “I don’t want another.”

  Michael says, “It is not the will of the Lord.”

  “Maybe not,” she says. “But it’s mine.”

  —

  FOR SEVEN DAYS he tends to her, and on the eighth day he bids her to rise. He provisions her with water, dried fruit, and nuts; he dresses her in clean flaxen garments and gives her a multicolored fur, soft and strong, light and warm. It comes from no animal she has seen, but she is coming to accept the extent of the world beyond her experience. She knows nothing.

  He blesses her in the name of the Lord and says, “Come.”

  The cave is far deeper than she realized. Through tunnels, stepping over frozen pools, the temperature rising. A spot of white appears in the distance and Michael stops and turns to her, his ageless face creased with sorrow. She feels as if she is seeing him for the very first time.

  “Evil crouches by the door,” he says. “It will wait for you all your life, unless you master it.”

  Accustomed to the low light, she emerges blinking into the sun. The air is cool, dry, spicy, rotten. She raises her face gradually, taking in the earth beneath her feet, lightly dusted with snow; the downward slope of the mountain, white giving way to tan, smooth giving way to pebbly; spiky plants rippling with flies; the edge of the sere plain, and then the plain itself, vast, brown, and flat, cracked and smoking beneath a colorless sky, infinite as cruelty itself.

  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.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  First came the hipsters, colonizing Silver Lake and Los Feliz and Echo Park, so that these days you were as likely to see a gourmet taco truck run by mustachioed culinary school grads with earlobes stretched to hula hoops as you were an actual taquería.

  Then real estate developers who’d hit the ocean and run out of raw material sniffed the trend and headed back inland to perform CPR on downtown. They built luxury “green” high-rises with fitness centers and underground parking, and attempted to lure buyers with the promise of a burgeoning nightlife. In Jacob’s view, they were kidding themselves. Real wealth would always flow westward. Lacking a center, Los Angeles would always be seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.

  Even the most ardent downtown boosters steered clear of Boyle Heights. It claimed one of the city’s highest homicide rates; crossing over the trickle of river via the Olympic Boulevard bridge, Jacob saw drugs dealt openly and handguns flashed with a smirk.

  Beth Shalom Memorial Park attested to the neighborhood’s long-fled Jewish community. It was actually three cemeteries—Garden of Peace, Mount Carmel, and House of Israel—wedged between the 710 and the 5. Only the first still accepted new burials; the latter two had been full since the seventies.

  Entering Garden of Peace, he saw EST. 1883 carved into the gatepost and wondered how much room they had left.

  The dead kept on stacking up, relentless as debt.

  The man at the front office had the chatty sheen of the newly hired. He wrote down the plot numbers for
Janet Stein and Bina Lev, marking them roughly on the map. “You know Curly’s here.”

  “Curly.”

  “Like from the Three Stooges?” The guy asterisked a section labeled Joseph’s Garden.

  “Thanks,” Jacob said. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

  The day had turned mushy, and his shirt stuck to his back as he walked the lawns to Janet Stein’s crypt inside the Hall of Memories.

  A stained-glass window cast an array of pinks and purples on the terrazzo. There was no air-conditioning—it wasn’t like the residents needed it—and flowers languished in their holders, layering the floor with more color in the form of shed petals.

  He found her in the middle of the corridor.

  JANET RUTH STEIN

  NOVEMBER 17, 1958–JULY 5, 1988

  BELOVED DAUGHTER & SISTER

  DEATH BE NOT PROUD

  The quote from Donne intrigued him. More typically, you’d expect a passage from the Bible. Jacob supposed it was fitting for a lover of literature, and it gave him another degree of kinship to her. Before coming, he’d looked up Janet Stein’s former bookstore. Like most brick-and-mortar sellers, it was shuttered. He stood in communion, trying to telegraph to her that the man who had cut her down young was gone in a terrible way. It made him feel silly and useless.

  —

  TO BUY HIMSELF SOME TIME, he went to find Curly.

  The headstones of Joseph’s Garden were upright, carved with symbols signifying the deceased’s status in the community, or occupation. A pair of hands, raised in priestly blessing, for a Kohen. For a Levite, a cup pouring water. Lawyers got scales and doctors got caduceus staffs. Movie moguls—there were several—got reel-to-reel cameras. Palm trees swooned in perpetual infatuation. Jacob could tell from the lack of pebbles placed atop the headstones that there had been few recent visitors to these parts.

  Curly had been accorded slightly more attention. Atop the grave, someone had laid out, in pebbles:

  NYUK

  NYUK

  NYUK

  Laughing, Jacob left his own pebble and walked on.

  He wandered around for a while, swirling around the section containing Bina’s plot, like a ship caught in a slow-turning whirlpool. The relative newness of Esther’s Garden was reflected in its more modern headstones, black granite set flush with the grass. From a distance it evoked a tilled field. He found himself stooping to read markers, to place a pebble on those that had been neglected. The sun was ferocious, and he hadn’t brought a hat or water. It was half past two; he could beat traffic back to the Westside, but only if he left right now; he still had to shower and get over to his dad’s. He really should come back later, when he had more time to devote to her.