CHAPTER

28

I reserved a seat on the next flight back to L.A., threw clothes in my bag, and told Milo and Rick’s message machine my arrival time. Checking out of the Middleton, I flagged a taxi to Kennedy.

A fire on Queens Boulevard slowed things down and it took an hour and three quarters to reach the airport. When I got to the check-in counter, I learned my flight had been delayed for thirty-five minutes. Pay TVs were attached to some of the seats, and travelers stared at their screens as if some kind of truth was being broadcast.

I found a terminal lounge that looked half decent and downed a leathery corned beef sandwich and a club soda while eavesdropping on a group of salesmen. Their truths were simple: the economy sucked and women didn’t know what the hell they wanted.

I returned to the departure area, found a free TV, and fed it quarters. A local station was broadcasting the news and that seemed about as good as it was going to get.

Potholes in the Bronx. Condom handouts in the public schools. The mayor fighting with the city council as the city accrued crushing debt. That made me feel right at home.

A few more local stories, and then the anchorwoman said, “Nationally, government statistics show a decline in consumer spending, and a Senate subcommittee is investigating charges of influence peddling by another of the President’s sons. And in California, officials at Folsom Prison report that a lockdown has apparently been successful in averting riots in the wake of what is believed to have been a racially motivated double murder at that maximum-security facility. Early this morning, two inmates, both believed to have been associates of a white supremacist gang, were stabbed to death by unknown inmates suspected of belonging to the Nuestra Raza, a Mexican gang. The dead men, identified as Rennard Russell Haupt and Donald Dell Wallace, were both serving sentences for murder. A prison investigation into the killings continues …”

Nuestra Raza. NR forever. The tattoos on Roddy Rodriguez’s hands.…

I thought of Rodriguez’s masonry yard, shut down, cleaned out, and padlocked. The flight from the house on McVine prepared well in advance.

Evelyn had entertained me in her backyard, as her husband’s homeboys honed their shanks.

Making an appointment for Wednesday, then going into the house with her husband and changing it to Thursday.

Twenty-four more hours for getaway.

Hurley Keffler’s debacle at my house made sense now, as did Sherman Bucklear’s nagging. Prison rumblings had probably told the Iron Priests what was brewing. Locating Rodriguez might have forestalled the hit or, if the deed had already been done, given the Priests instant payback.

Payback.

The same old stupid cycle of violence.

Burglary tools and a quick shove out a eight-story window.

A corpse on a garage floor, a little boy baby never to be.

Two little girls on the run.

Were Chondra and Tiffani in some Mexican border town, being tutored in Fugitive 1A with more care than they’d ever been taught to read or write?

Or maybe Evelyn had taken them somewhere they could blend in. On the surface. But, suckled on violence, they’d always be different. Unable to understand why, years later, they gravitated toward cruel, violent men.

Static dripped out of the speakers—a barely comprehensible voice announcing something about boarding. I got up and took my place in line. Six thousand miles in less than twenty-four hours. My mind and my legs ached. I wondered if Shirley Rosenblatt would ever be able to walk again.

Soon, I’d be three time zones away from her problems and a lot closer to my own.

 

The flight got in just before midnight. The terminal was deserted and Robin was waiting outside the automatic doors.

“You look exhausted,” she said, as we walked to her truck.

“I’ve felt perkier.”

“Well, I’ve got some news that might perk you up. Milo called just before I left to pick you up. Something about the tape. I was just out the door and he was running, too, but he says he learned something important.”

“The sheriff who was working on it must have picked up something. Where’s Milo now?”

“Out on some assignment. He said he’d be home when we got there.”

“Which home?”

The question threw her. “Oh—Milo’s house. He and Rick took really good care of us. And home is where the heart is, right?”

 

I slept in the car. We pulled up at Milo’s house at twelve-forty. He was waiting in the living room, wearing a gray polo shirt and jeans. A cup of coffee was in front of him, next to a portable tape recorder. The dog snored at his feet, but woke up when we came in, gave out a few desultory licks, then collapsed again.

“Welcome home, boys and girls.”

I put my bags down. “Did you hear about Donald Dell?”

Milo nodded.

“What?” said Robin.

I told her.

She said, “Oh …”

Milo said, “Nuestra Raza. Could be the father-in-law.”

“That’s what I figured. It’s probably why Evelyn postponed her appointment with me. Rodriguez told her they had to leave Wednesday. And why Hurley Keffler hassled me—where is he?”

“Still in. I found a few traffic warrants and had one of the jailers lose his paperwork—just another few days, but every little bit helps.”

Robin said, “It never ends.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “There’s no reason for the Priests to bother us.”

“True,” said Milo, too quickly. “They and the Raza boys will be concentrating on each other now. That’s their main game: my turn to die, your turn to die.”

“Lovely,” said Robin.

“I had some Foothill guys drop in on them after Keffler’s bust,” he said, “but I’ll see if I can arrange another visit. Don’t worry about them, Rob. Really. They’re the least of our problems.”

“As opposed to?”

He looked at the tape recorder.

We sat down. He punched a button.

The child’s voice came on.

Bad love bad love.

Don’t give me the bad love.

I looked at him. He held up a finger.

Bad love bad love.

Don’t give me the bad love …

Same flat tones, but this time the voice was that of a man.

Ordinary, middle-pitched, male voice. Nothing remarkable about the accent or the timbre.

The child’s voice transformed—some kind of electronic manipulation?

Something familiar about the voice … but I couldn’t place it.

Someone I’d met a long time ago? In 1979?

The room was silent, except for the dog’s breathing.

Milo turned the recorder off and looked at me. “Ring any bells?”

I said, “There’s something about it, but I don’t know what it is.”

“The kid’s voice was phony. What you just heard might be the real bad guy. No bells, huh?”

“Let me hear it again.”

Rewind. Play.

“Again,” I said.

This time, I listened with my eyes closed, squinting so hard the lids felt welded together.

Listening to someone who hated me.

Nothing registered.

Robin and Milo studied my face as if it were some great wonder. My head hurt badly.

“No,” I said. “I still can’t pinpoint it—I can’t even be sure I’ve actually heard it.”

Robin touched my shoulder. Milo’s face was blank, but his eyes showed disappointment.

I glanced at the recorder and nodded.

He rewound again.

This time the voice seemed even more distant—as if my memory was spiraling away from me. As if I’d missed my chance.

“Goddammit,” I said. The dog’s eyes opened. He trotted over to me and nuzzled my hand. I rubbed his head, looked at Milo. “One more time.”

Robin said, “You’re tired. Why don’t we try again in the morning?”

“Just once more,” I said.

Rewind. Play.

The voice.

Completely foreign now. Mocking me.

I buried my face in my hands. Robin’s hands on my neck were an abstract comfort—I appreciated the sentiment but couldn’t relax.

“What did you mean might be the bad guy?” I asked Milo.

“Sheriff’s scientific guess. He tuned it down from the kid’s voice using a preset frequency.”

“How can he be sure the kid’s voice was altered in the first place?”

“Because his machines told him so. He came across it by accident—working on the screams—which, incidentally, he’s ninety-nine percent positive are Hewitt’s. Then he got to the kid chanting and something bothered him about it—the evenness of the voice.”

“The robot quality,” I said.

“Yeah. But he didn’t assume brainwashing or anything else psychological. He’s a techno-dude, so he analyzed the sound waves and saw something fishy with the cycle-to-cycle amplitude—the changes in pitch within each sound wave. Real human voices shimmer and jitter. This didn’t, so he knew the tape had been messed with electronically, probably using a pitch shifter. It’s a gizmo that samples a sound and changes the frequency. Tune up, you’ve got Alvin and the Chipmunks; tune down, you’re James Earl Jones.”

“Hi-tech bad guy,” I said.

“Not really. The basic machines are pretty cheap. People attach them to phones—women living alone wanting to sound like Joe Testosterone. They’re also used for recording music—creating automatic harmonies. A singer lays down a vocal track, then creates a harmony and overdubs it, instant Everly Brothers.”

“Sure,” said Robin. “Shifters are used all the time. I’ve seen them interfaced with amps so guitarists can do multiple tracks.”

“Lyle Gritz,” I said. “The next Elvis.… How’d the sheriff know which frequency to tune down to?”

“He assumed we were dealing with a male bad guy using a relatively cheap shifter because nowadays the better machines can be programmed to include jitter. The cheap ones usually come with two, maybe three standard settings: tune up to kid, tune down to adult, sometimes there’s an intermediate setting for adult female. By computing the pitch difference, he worked backwards and tuned down. But if our guy’s some sort of acoustics nut with fancy equipment, there may be other things he’s done to alter his voice and what you heard may be nowhere near his real voice.”

“It may not even be his voice that he altered. He could have shifted someone else’s.”

“That, too. But you think you might have heard him before.”

“That was my first impression. But I don’t know. I don’t trust my judgment anymore.”

“Well,” he said, “at least we know there’s no actual kid involved.”

“Thank God for that. Okay, leave the tape with me. I’ll work with it tomorrow, see if anything clicks.”

“The screams being Hewitt, what does ‘ninety-nine percent’ mean?”

“It means the sheriff’ll get up on the stand and testify it’s highly probable to the best of his professional knowledge. Only trouble is, we need to get someone on trial first.”

“So I was right, this isn’t some homeless guy. He’d need a place to keep his equipment.”

He shrugged. “Maybe he’s got a secret den somewhere and that’s where he’s hiding out right now. I had talks about Gritz with detectives at other substations. If the scrote’s still lurking around, we’ll hook him.”

“He is,” I said. “He hasn’t completed his homework.”

I told Milo what I’d learned in New York.

He said, “Pseudo-burglary? Sounds hokey.”

“New York cops didn’t think so. It matched some previous break-ins in the neighborhood: jimmied locks, people on vacation, a glass of soda left on the bedroom nightstand. Soda from the victim’s kitchen. Sound familiar?”

“Were any of the other burglaries in the papers?”

“I don’t know.”

“If they were, all we’ve probably got is a copycat. If they weren’t, maybe our killer has a burglary sideline. Why don’t you get a hold of some four-year-old papers and find out. I’ll phone New York and see if Gritz’s name or Silk-Merino’s shows up on their blotters around the time of Rosenblatt’s fall.”

“He’s been pretty careful about keeping his nose clean so far.”

“It doesn’t have to be a major felony, Alex. Son of Sam got busted on a parking ticket. Lots of cases get solved that way, the stupid stuff.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll hit the library soon as it opens.”

He picked up his cup and drank. “So what’s Rosenblatt’s motive for jumping supposed to have been?”

“Guilt. Coming to grips with his secret criminal identity.”

He scowled. “What, he’s standing there, about to glom jewelry, and he suddenly gets a guilt flash? Sounds like horseshit to me.”

“The family thought so, too, but the New York police seemed convinced. They told the widow if she pressed the issue, everyone’s name would be dragged through the slime. A private investigator she hired told her the same thing, more tactfully.”

I gave him names and he jotted them down.

Looking into his coffee, he said, “You want, there’s still some in the pot.”

“No, thanks.”

Robin said, “Another fall—just like the other two.”

“Delmar Parker’s run off the mountain,” I said. “That has to be the connection. The killer was traumatized in a major way and is trying to get even. We’ve got to find out more about the accident.”

Milo said, “I still haven’t had any luck locating Delmar’s mother. And none of the Santa Barbara papers covered the crash.”

“Out of all those Corrective School alumni,” I said, “someone’s got to know.”

“Still no files, anywhere. Sally and the gang pried up Katarina’s floorboards. And we can’t find any records, yet, of de Bosch applying for government funds.”

Over the rim of his cup, his face was heavy and beat. He ran his hand over it.

“It bothers me,” he said. “Rosenblatt—an experienced psychiatrist—meeting someone in a strange apartment like that.”

“He was experienced, but he had a soft heart. The killer could have lured him there with a cry for help.”

“That’s not exactly standard operating shrink procedure, is it? Was Rosenblatt some kind of avant-garde guy, believed in on-the-scene treatment?”

“His wife said he was an orthodox analyst.”

“Those guys never leave the office, right? Need their couches and their little notebooks.”

“True, but she also said he’d been very upset by something that had happened in a session recently. Disillusioned. It’s a reasonable bet it had something to do with de Bosch. Something that shook him up enough to meet the killer out of the office. He could have believed he was going to the killer’s home—the killer could have given him a good rationale for meeting there. Like a disability that kept him homebound—maybe even bedridden. The window Rosenblatt went out of was in a bedroom.”

“Phony cripple,” he said, nodding. “Then Rosenblatt goes to the window and the bad guy jumps up, shoves him out … very cold. And the wife had no idea what disillusioned him enough to make a house call?”

“She tried to find out. Broke her own rules and listened to his therapy tapes. But there was nothing out of the ordinary in them.”

“This disillusioning thing definitely happened during a session?”

“That’s what he told her.”

“So maybe the session where he died wasn’t the first with the killer. So why wasn’t the first session on tape?”

“Maybe Rosenblatt didn’t take his recorder with him. Or the patient requested no taping. Rosenblatt would have complied. Or maybe the session was recorded and the tape got destroyed.”

“A stranger’s bedroom—that has almost a sexual flavor to it, don’t you think?”

I nodded. “The ritual.”

“Who owned the place?”

“A couple named Rulerad. They said they’d never heard of Harvey Rosenblatt. Shirley said they were pretty hostile to her. Refused access to the private detective and threatened to sue her.”

“Can’t really blame them, can you? Come home and find out someone broke into your place and used it for a swan dive. Was Rosenblatt the type to be a soft touch for a sob story?”

“Definitely. He probably got the same kind of call Bert Harrison did and responded to it. And died because of it.”

Milo said, “So why did the killer keep his appointment with Rosenblatt but not with Harrison? Why, now that I’m thinking about it, was Harrison let off the hook completely? He worked for de Bosch, he spoke at that goddamn conference, too. So how come everyone else in that boat is sunk or sinking and he’s on shore drinking piÑa coladas?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, that’s funny, don’t you think, Alex? That break in the pattern—maybe I should learn a little more about Harrison.”

“Maybe,” I said, feeling sick. “Wouldn’t that be something. There I was, sitting across the table from him—trying to protect him … he treated Mitch Lerner. He knew where Katarina lived … hard to believe. He seemed like such a sweet guy.”

“Any idea where he’s gone?”

I shook my head. “But he’s not exactly unobtrusive with those purple clothes.”

“Purple clothes?” said Robin.

“He says it’s the only color he can see.”

“Another weird one,” said Milo. “What is it about your profession?”

“Ask the killer,” I said. “He’s got strong opinions on the subject.”