16

The day after the Vincent Rossi disaster, Lambkin and Marcia recuperate at home. The next morning they reluctantly return to the office.

“Great police work,” Otis Marlow tells Lambkin. “You cleared another suspect.”

Lambkin laughs. He copes with the disappointment by joking with the other detectives and sardonically recounting the case’s litany of errors, from the lost evidence, to the missing files, to the failure to identify Rossi at the crime scene.

Marcia is too morose to chat. He spends the day staring into a computer screen, studying Goldsmith’s prior arrests, searching for juvenile offenses, scanning the reports for accomplices.

Rick Jackson commiserates with Marcia. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, they’d have identified your suspect,” Jackson says. “You couldn’t have been more thorough. This scenario is so remote.”

Marcia nods in agreement, but without much enthusiasm.

Cheryl Gorman calls the detectives and thanks them for all their hard work. “But I still don’t see,” she says, her voice tinged with frustration, “how they could have failed to identify the guy at the time.”

The detectives have no answer.

In the adjacent squad room, Coulter and Stephens pore over crime reports, autopsy results, and interview statements; they make copies and compile their own murder book. Stephens sits next to Otis Marlow, another veteran, and the two frequently trade barbs. Marlow stands up, peers over Stephens’s shoulder, and says, “You’ve already had that Berman murder for a few days, Roy. Why haven’t you solved it yet?” Marlow, who overheard Stephens discussing the case, offers his assessment: “Durst’s wife’s dead. New York detectives are coming out to talk to Berman about the wife’s murder. Now she turns up dead. I may not be much of a detective, but Durst is the first guy I’d smack in the forehead.”

Stephens explains that Durst is guarded by a phalanx of high-priced New York lawyers who probably will not let him talk. Eventually, he says, they will need to find a way to interview him. “But I’m not so sure he’s our guy. Nobody coming out from New York to kill her would send that letter to the Beverly Hills police. And why would he want her dead? She’d always backed him up.”

Stephens and Coulter have assiduously retraced the investigation of the West Los Angeles detectives. Now they are ready to conduct their own case. They plan to reinterview some of the people who were already questioned and will also attempt to unearth other friends and relatives who have not yet been contacted. When they are familiar with the details of the case and the habits of their eccentric victim, they will then pursue their suspects.

Coulter tells Stephens, who can be charming and is known for his sense of humor, that because he is a “people person,” he should conduct the interviews. Coulter will assume responsibility for the evidence, the murder book, and the daily chronological record of the investigation.

Coulter was a Wilshire Division homicide detective when he first met Stephens. He was not impressed. When Stephens dropped by the division to check on a case, he worked the room like a comedian, joking with everyone, keeping up a steady stream of patter, laughing with the detectives. Coulter considered him a lightweight.

When they were named partners at Homicide Special a few months ago, Coulter was initially dismayed. Now, Coulter respects Stephens and realizes that his exuberant personality is an asset: witnesses, and even suspects, loosen up around him. Stephens may be an acquired taste, but Coulter now enjoys his partner’s sense of humor and light-hearted approach.

Stephens sets up an interview with Berman’s ex-boyfriend’s son. During the early 1990s, he and his father and sister lived with Berman and she considered him the son she never had. Now in his mid-twenties, he works in the music business and has distinctive, waxed, spiky, blond-tipped hair. As the detectives lead him from the squad room to an interview cubicle, one of the older investigators in the unit mutters, “Can’t anyone lend that kid a comb?”

The young man tells Coulter and Stephens that after Berman and his father split up, he continued to visit her at least once a week. She named him the beneficiary of her modest Writer’s Guild insurance policy.

“How often did you talk on the phone?” Stephens asks.

“Constantly. We were very close,” he says as Coulter jots notes on a yellow legal pad.

“Did she generally keep the house locked?”

“Yes. I’d have to knock on the door. She’d check the window. I’d say, ‘It’s me.’ Then she’d let me in.”

“Did she mention having any problems with anyone?”

“The landlady was a point of great contention.”

“What was the problem?”

He explains that the landlady tried to evict Berman on a number of occasions because she had not paid her rent. During several court hearings Berman argued—successfully—that she was withholding the rent until repairs were made to the house.

“The landlady wanted the rent when she wanted it. She told Susan that she owned a gun. She threatened her dogs. Susan always felt threatened. She even said, ‘If I ever turn up dead, it was her.’”

But last year, he tells Stephens, Berman visited the landlady in the hospital after she had had an auto accident. She brought flowers. The detectives also know that Berman sent her a Christmas card and scrawled a friendly message. The two women must have managed to come to a détente. The detectives no longer believe that the landlady, who is in her seventies, is a suspect.

Stephens asks about his father’s relationship with Berman.

“Susan blamed him for losing her money,” he says.

“You ever see him violent?”

“No.”

“Did he have any weapons?”

“No, he’s an ex-hippie.”

“What was her daily schedule?”

“She’d get up and read the paper. The rest of the day was spent writing and in meetings.”

“Did she do much socializing?”

“She invited very few people to come over, because she was embarrassed about her poverty and the condition of her house.”

He and Nyle, her manager, were the only friends she allowed to regularly visit. The detectives are intrigued by Nyle, and Stephens hopes to learn more about him.

“She had a”—he languidly waves a hand—”relationship with him, sort of.…”

But the relationship was never romantic, he says. They went out to movies and dinner, and Nyle often drove Berman to business meetings or doctor’s appointments because she had numerous phobias, including a fear of heights. Berman refused to go higher than the second floor of a building unless Nyle or another friend accompanied her.

After the murder, the young man says, Nyle visited Berman’s house, picked up her mail, and opened her bank statements. Apparently, she owed Nyle money. She told Nyle that Durst had loaned her $15,000. Nyle later heard that the sum was $25,000 and attempted to confirm the amount by taking Berman’s bank statements home with him to examine.

“I went off on him and he returned the bank statement to me.”

“Anyone else she might have had problems with?”

He sighs. “Nobody that she mentioned to me.… Anyone she had problems with she’d clear out of her life.”

Stephens asks him whether he thinks Robert Durst was connected to the murder.

“That’s idiotic. She already proved her loyalty to him eighteen years ago. And if he did do it, he wouldn’t pull the trigger himself. He’d send someone, and Susan never would have let anyone in the house she didn’t know.”

He drops his elbows on the metal table and leans forward. “Bobby Durst called me. He offered his condolences. He offered to pay for a private investigator. He offered to pay for the funeral.”

After the interview, the young man asks Stephens, “How optimistic are you of solving this?”

“We solve most of our cases,” Stephens says matter-of-factly. “Something will turn up.”

A few days later, on a frigid winter morning, the air-conditioning in the squad room continues to blow, despite repeated entreaties to the Parker Center maintenance department. While Coulter and Stephens shiver in the draftiest corner, other detectives loudly complain all morning about their primitive working conditions. They have no voice mail because the department will not buy the equipment. The building is crumbling. They spend many days responding to officer-involved shooting calls, which diverts precious time from their homicide investigations. At the very least, the detectives grumble, they should not be forced to work in a meat locker.

A detective calls out to Stephens, “When you finally going to retire?”

“I’m not leaving,” Stephens says, “until the LAPD can do two things—heat this building and give us voice mail.”

Coulter and Stephens are eager to solve Berman’s murder, which is now almost a month old, and have worked until almost midnight every day during the past week, studying the West L.A. detectives’ paperwork. Stephens believes one element of the case that demands urgent attention is Berman’s three dogs. “We’ve got to check on those dogs,” he tells Coulter. “If nobody picks them up, they’ll kill them.”

One neighbor is caring for Lulu and another has the other two, Romeo and Golda. Stephens wants to be sure that they will adopt the dogs and not dump them off at the pound, where they may be euthanized. Berman was killed in Lulu’s room—the spare bedroom—and the dog is now apparently traumatized because she witnessed the murder, the neighbor told Stephens. She spends all day in the backyard, her nose stuck in the fence, trembling and gazing at Berman’s house.

“Dogs are very sensitive,” Stephens tells Coulter. “My miniature dachshund, Molly, gets real upset if I don’t play with her for fifteen or twenty minutes when I get home from work. She doesn’t like to go outside much because it’s too cold. So I built a little patio in the backyard so she’ll be more comfortable.”

Another detective asks, “What is it with these single women and their dogs? They treat ’em like kids.”

“It’s not just single women,” Stephens says, sounding offended. “A lot of people are very attached to their dogs. They’re very humanlike in their emotions.”

Berman’s will named a friend who works for an animal rescue agency to care for her dogs. The detectives decide to interview the friend next. But first they stop off at a city salvage warehouse. In its dank basement they poke through discarded desks, chairs, file cabinets, and an assortment of defective office supplies, finally unearthing two battered metal space heaters. If the LAPD is unable to heat its building, Coulter and Stephens decide, they will assume responsibility for their chilly corner of the squad room. The detectives then drive to the Criminal Courts Building. They drop off a search warrant for Berman’s phone records at a judge’s chamber.

“This is the so-called mobster’s daughter case,” Coulter says.

“You got anything?” the judge asks.

“Of course not,” Stephens says, laughing. “That’s why they gave it to our unit.”

“Any insurance policy?” the judge asks.

“Yeah, but it’s not much,” Stephens says.

The detectives ride the courthouse elevator up to the district attorney’s office because Stephens has to pick up some files from another murder he recently solved.

“I heard about that New York connection,” says a deputy district attorney who is a friend of Stephens’s. “Sounds like a mob hit.”

“Don’t believe everything you read,” Stephens says.

“One shot?”

“Yeah,” Stephens says reluctantly.

“To the back of the head?”

“Yeah,” Stephens says.

He flashes Stephens a smug look and says, “I told you.” He then asks, “Did he leave any casings?”

“Yes, he did,” Stephens says cheerily. “You know the Mafia uses revolvers. And a hit man never would have left a casing.”

The deputy district attorney looks deflated.

“You have a dog?” Stephens asks him.

“A golden retriever. Why?”

Stephens tells him about Lulu, how she witnessed the murder and now trembles all day. “That’s pretty pathetic, don’t you think?” Stephens says. “You have room to take in another dog?”

“I can’t put my family at risk,” the deputy DA says solemnly, “and hide a witness to a murder at my house.”

Laughing, the detectives set out to interview Berman’s friend who works for the animal rescue agency. She lives high atop a mountain canyon, not far from Berman’s house, in a fashionable neighborhood where homes have sweeping city and valley views. On unusually clear days, residents near the peaks can see the ocean.

Inside the house, the detectives sit on a chintz sofa, flanked by antique lamps, in an elegant living room with gleaming hardwood floors and open-beamed ceilings. As the friend serves them mugs of tea, Stephens pets the woman’s dog and tells her he is remarkably well behaved. “I must be doing something wrong, I can’t train my dog to sit, shake hands, or anything. How’d you do it?”

The woman, who appeared nervous when the detectives knocked at her door, seems more relaxed now that she knows one of them is a dog lover. After she describes a few training techniques, and runs her dog through a series of tricks, Stephens asks her how she met Berman.

“My husband’s a film producer and she pitched a few ideas to him in ’83 or ’84. He thought we’d get along. A few years ago she was flying somewhere, called me, and said, ‘If something happens to me, will you take care of my dogs?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ I’m an artist, but I do a lot of animal rescue work.… I thought Susan’s dogs were very maladjusted, very hard to deal with. But if anything is needed with the dogs, I’ll do it.”

Several years ago, the woman says she lent Berman $1,000. “She told me she had to fly somewhere and needed money for a plane ticket. She said, ‘I thought this deal would go through, but it didn’t.’” The typical Hollywood conversation, the friend says with a sad smile.

“But I haven’t seen her a lot recently,” she adds. “One reason is that she could be very confrontational in public, very difficult to be around. She had a lot of food allergies. One time we were at a restaurant and she said to the waiter, ‘I’m allergic to eggs. There are no eggs in this dish, are there?’ The waiter said no. But she went into the kitchen and confronted the chef. She shouted, ‘I’m wearing a tag and I’ll die if I eat eggs! I’ll die!’ I told my husband I didn’t want to go to a restaurant with her again.”

During the past few years she chatted with Berman only a few times, she tells Stephens. Once Berman said something negative about her landlady, but she cannot recall the details. When the friend says she knows nothing about Berman’s relationship with Durst, Stephens quickly shifts the conversation to Nyle.

“I think she had a crush on him,” the woman says. “That’s one of the only names she ever mentioned. I think she was very lonely. She had a hard life.”

The interview does not advance the investigation, but Stephens is reassured that Berman’s dogs will not be put to death. If the neighbors abandon the dogs, this friend will care for them.

As the detectives prepare to leave, the producer’s wife tries to talk Stephens into adopting a dog she recently rescued. When he tells her that Molly demands all his attention, she asks Coulter whether he has a dog.

“I had one, a border collie named Sarge.” Coulter adds that Sarge recently died of cancer. “I stayed up with him that last night. He was so weak he couldn’t lift his head up. He just whimpered. In the morning, me and my daughter took him to the vet to be put down.” Coulter is flushed and his voice catches. “I was blubbering like a fool.”

As the detectives drive back down the canyon, Coulter continues to talk about Sarge.

“Sounds like you haven’t got over the dog yet,” Stephens says.

“I haven’t.”

“Well, get over it. I’m sick of hearing about him,” Stephens says, suppressing a smile. “Since that lady was a dog trainer, I was embarrassed to tell her that Molly sleeps in bed with me. She keeps crawling into bed and won’t go to sleep unless I let her in.” He shakes his head. “Her dog was so well behaved. I can’t even get Molly to shake hands. She just won’t do it.”

The detectives walk out to their car in the gloaming. On this cold winter evening the crest of the mountains is tinted pink in the waning light and a single star sparkles in the lavender sky. As Coulter heads down the canyon road, he and Stephens attempt to pinpoint when Berman died. Patrol officers found her body at one P.M. on Christmas Eve. The day before, neighbors found her dogs wandering on die street.

“Someone whacked her, left a door open, and the dogs got out,” Coulter says.

“So whoever let the dogs out is our shooter,” Stephens says. He mutters to himself, “Who let the dogs out?” He turns to Coulter, punches him playfully on the shoulder, and sings, parroting the popular song “Who Let the Dogs Out?” He sings again, “Who, who, who, who let the dogs out?” and ends with four loud barks.

Stephens strolls into the office singing the refrain. He explains to the other detectives that when he answers this musical question, he will solve the case. Soon, Stephens, Otis Marlow, and a few other detectives are singing and barking along to the song.

At eight the next morning, Stephens lugs a boom box into the office, slips a CD into the slot, and blares “Who Let the Dogs Out?” as the other detectives sing or bark or boogie to the beat. Every half hour until lunch, Stephens plays the opening to the song as investigators in other units, attracted by the music, scurry down the hall and, looking mystified, peer through the squad room door.