Survival of the Fittest (27 page)

The woman next to him was slim, broad-shouldered, nice-looking, with butter-colored multiflipped hair sporting two curlers on top. An electric blue T-shirt was tucked into black shorts and her nails were long and pearly white.

“Who’s concerned about Helena?” he said.

“Her friends, people she works with at Cedars.”

No answer.

I said, “She quit her job without explaining why. Has she left town?”

He gave a reluctant nod, but didn’t say more. Behind him was a neatly appointed living room, home-shopping show on a big screen hawking a pearl necklace with matching earrings, only 234 left.

“We just wanted to know how she’s doing,” I said. “Do you know about her brother?”

He nodded. “He never came around. At least not since we’ve lived here, which is two years.”

The woman said, “But they both grew up here. It was their parents’ house.” Southern accent. “Helena said he was a police officer. How strange, what he did.”

“Any idea where she is?” I said.

“She said she was going on vacation,” said the man. He took a drink from the can and offered it to his wife but she shook her head.

“Did she mention where?”

“No,” he said.

“When did she leave?”

“What’d you say your name was?”

I repeated it and held out my business card and my police-consultant badge.

“You’re police, too?”

“I work with them sometimes but that has nothing to do with Officer Dahl.”

His posture loosened. “My work’s kind of related to police work. I teach traffic school, just opened my own business—you’re sure this doesn’t have anything to do with him—investigating his death, for insurance or something like that?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m just concerned about Helena.”

“Well, she just went away to get some rest. At least that’s what she said, and can you blame her?”

I shook my head.

“Poor thing,” said the woman.

Her husband stuck out his hand. “Greg Miller, this is Kathy.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“She left yesterday,” he said. “Pardon the suspicion, but you can’t be too careful, all the stuff that goes on, nowadays. We’re trying to get a block association together, in order to look out for each other. Helena asked us to watch her house while she was gone.”

“Crime problems in the neighborhood?” I said.

“It’s not Watts but it’s worse than you’d think—mostly stupid kid stuff, now they’ve got the white kids thinking they’re gang bangers, too. There was a party last week, over in Granada Hills. Gang bangers showed up and when they didn’t let ’em in, they did a drive-by. Sometimes I work nights so I taught Kathy how to shoot and she’s good. Probably gonna get an attack dog, too.”

“Sounds like serious problems.”

“Serious enough for me,” he said. “I believe in prevention. All we had til recently was kids driving by booming their stereos late at night, speeding, screaming, throwing out bottles. But the last few months there’ve been burglaries, even during the day, while people are at work.”

Another glance between them. She nodded and he said, “Last burglary was Helena, as a matter of fact. Just two days ago. With her brother
and
that, you can’t really blame her for wanting to take off, right?”

“Two days ago?”

“At night, hers was a nighttime thing. She went out to do some grocery shopping, came back, found the back door jimmied. Kathy and I were out, thankfully they didn’t hit us. They took her TV and the stereo and some jewelry, she said. Next day she was packed up and asking us to look after the house. Said she’d had enough of L.A.”

“Did she call the police?”

“No, she said she’d had enough of the police, too. I figured she meant her brother, didn’t want to push it. Even though I thought we definitely
should
call it in. For block security. But she was so stressed out.”

“Of all the people for it to happen to,” said Kathy. “She was so down to begin with. And she’s such a nice person. Mostly she kept to herself, but she was always real nice.”

“Any idea where she went?” I said.

“Nope,” said Kathy. “She just said she needed a rest and we didn’t want to be nosy. She had a couple suitcases in the back of the car but I don’t even know if it was a driving trip or she was heading for the airport. I asked her how long she’d be away but she said she wasn’t sure, she’d call to let us know if it was going to be long. If she does call, would you like me to tell her you were by?”

“Please,” I said. “And good luck with your block association.”

“Luck’s what you make it,” said Greg. “God helps those who help themselves.”

Heavy traffic and bad tempers on the freeway ride back to the city. As I sat in a jam just north of the Sunset exit, I thought of the luck of the Dahl family.

Both Nolan’s and Helena’s homes defiled.

L.A.’s burglary rate had skyrocketed, but I’d never worshiped at the altar of coincidence and it made me edgy.

Someone out to get them?

Someone looking for something? Information about Nolan’s death?

Data Helena had?

The family photo albums were all she’d taken the day I’d gone with her to Nolan’s place, but maybe she’d returned, picked through the mess, discovered something that had upset her enough to cancel her therapy, quit her job, and leave town?

Or maybe it
was
just the final straw.

Traffic started again, then stopped.

Honks, lifted middle fingers, shouted expletives.

Civilization.

Chapter

30

That night, at eight, Robin and I were in the bath when the phone rang. She faced me, her hair up, water reaching the bottoms of her breasts.

We played toesies. The damn thing quieted.

Later, drying off, I listened to the taped message.

“It’s Milo. Call me on the car phone.”

I did and he said, “Found another DVLL case. Hollywood Division, before Raymond Ortiz. Seventeen months ago.”

“Another poor kid,” I said. “How old—”

“No. Not a kid. And not retarded, either. On the contrary.”

I met him at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Highland north of Melrose named Boatwright’s. Rocket-to-the-moon architecture, boomerang-shaped counter, three of the stools occupied by pie-eating newspaper-nosers, the Hollywood Strings on scratchy soundtrack.

He was in his usual cop’s back booth, sitting opposite a dark-haired woman. He waved and she turned. She looked around twenty-five. Very thin, pretty in a severe way, she had a pointed chin and ski-slope nose, ivory skin, glossy black wedge-cut hair, glossy brown eyes. Her pantsuit was black. In front of her was a big chocolate malt in a real glass. Milo had a napkin tucked under his chin and was eating fried shrimp and onion rings and drinking iced tea.

The woman kept watching me until I got two feet away. Then she smiled, more the right thing to do than amiability. Scanning me from head to shoe, as if measuring for a suit.

“Alex, this is Detective Petra Connor, Hollywood Homicide. Petra, Dr. Alex Delaware.”

“Good to meet you,” said Connor. A little makeup added depth to eyes that didn’t need any more. She had very long, very thin hands with warm, strong fingers that squeezed mine for a second, then flew back to the straw in her malt.

I slid in next to Milo.

“Something to eat?” he said.

“No, I’m fine. What’s up?”

“What’s up is Detective Connor is an eagle eye.”

“Pure luck,” she said in a soft voice. “Most of the time I never pay attention to memos.”

“Most of the time they’re bullshit.”

She smiled and twirled the straw.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I forgot. Working with Bishop you probably never hear sullied speech.”

“I don’t, but Bishop does,” said Connor.

“Her partner’s a Mormon,” Milo told me. “Very smart, very straight, probably be chief one day. Petra and he picked up the case in question a while back. He’s currently off with the wife and million kids in Hawaii so she’s riding alone.”

“The whole thing amazes me,” she said. “Being tied into a possible serial. Because ours wasn’t even a murder, just an iffy suicide. Not iffy enough to change the coroner’s verdict, so we closed it as a suicide. But when I saw your memo   .   .   .”

Shaking her head, she pushed the malt aside and dabbed at her lips. The lipstick she left on the straw had brown overtones. The black in her hair was real. She was probably closer to thirty than twenty-five, but not a line on her face.

“Who was the victim?” I said.

“A twenty-nine-year-old scientist named Malcolm Ponsico. Cellular physiologist, recent Ph.D. from CalTech, supposed to be some kind of genius. He lived in Pasadena, but was working at a research lab on Sunset near Vermont—Hospital Row—and that’s where he did it so it was our case.”

“I used to work at Western Peds,” I said.

“Right there. Two blocks up. Place called PlasmoDerm, they do skin research, developing synthetic grafts for burn victims, that kind of thing. Ponsico’s specialty was cell membranes. He killed himself with an injection of potassium chloride—the stuff they use for lethal-injection executions. Did it while working late, the cleaning lady found him at 4:00
A.M.,
slumped over his lab table. Big laceration right here, where his head hit the edge.”

She traced a line over well-formed black brows.

“He fell on his head when he died?”

“That’s how the coroner saw it.”

“Where’s the DVLL tie-in?”

“He left it typed on his computer screen. Four letters, right in the middle of the screen. Stu—Detective Bishop—and I figured it for something technical, a formula. But we asked around, just to be careful, in case it was some kind of coded suicide note. No one at PlasmoDerm knew what it meant and it didn’t show up in any of Ponsico’s computer files—we had one of our data-processing guys check them out. All numbers, formulas. No one seemed surprised by Ponsico writing something only he understood. He was that kind of guy—major brain in a world of his own.”

“Did he leave a message at his home?”

“No. His apartment was in perfect order. Everyone said he was a nice person, quiet, kept to himself, really into his work. No one had noticed him being depressed and his parents in New Jersey said he’d seemed okay when he called them. But parents often say that. People hide things, right?”

“He
seemed
okay?” I said. “That’s not a ringing endorsement of his happiness.”

“His parents said he’d always been a serious boy. Their word
—boy.
A genius, they’d always let him do his own thing and he’d always produced. Their word, too. They’re both professors. I got the feeling it was a high-pressure household. It played out pure suicide. Ponsico’s prints were all over the hypodermic and the potassium vial and the coroner said the position we found him in was consistent with self-infliction. Said also it was a fairly quick death—massive heart attack, though Ponsico could have made things easier on himself if he’d taken a tranquilizer like the ones they give Death Row guys. Then again, no one from the ACLU was looking over Ponsico’s shoulder.”

“So what was iffy about it?”

“Ponsico’s former girlfriend—another scientist at the lab, named Sally Branch—was convinced there was something wrong and kept calling us up, asking us to keep snooping. She said it didn’t make sense, Ponsico had no reason to kill himself, she’d have known if there were something wrong.”

“Even though she was a
former
girlfriend.”

“My thought exactly, Doctor. And she also tried to cast suspicion on Ponsico’s new girlfriend, so we figured it was jealousy. Then I met the new girlfriend and wondered.”

She took a sip of water.

“Her name was Zena Lambert and she was weird. She’d worked as a clerk at PlasmoDerm but left a few months before Ponsico’s death.”

“Weird, how?” I said.

“Kind of   .   .   . nerdy—but in a mean way. Snippy. As in, I’m smarter than you so don’t waste my time. Even though she claimed to be grieving over Ponsico.”

“An intellectual snob?” I said.

“Exactly. Which was funny because Sally Branch, with her Ph.D., was down-to-earth, and here was this clerk who thought she was the end-all. Still, a bad personality doesn’t make someone a suspect and we had absolutely nothing on her.”

“Did Sally Branch give some reason for suspecting Zena?”

“She said Ponsico changed noticeably after he started dating her—even quieter, less social, hostile. All of which seemed logical to me. He’d be less social with Sally because he’d broken up with her.”

“Did she say why he broke up with her?”

“All Zena. To listen to her, Zena swooped down like some harpy and stole him away. She also said Zena had gotten him into some kind of high-IQ club and he’d become obsessed with his intelligence. Big-time arrogant. But that was it, evidence-wise, and she gave me no motive for Zena wanting to hurt him. Eventually, I just stopped taking her calls. Now, Milo’s told me about these DVLL murders, someone getting rid of retarded people, maybe a tie-in with genetic cleansing, so I have to wonder about that high-IQ group.”

She shook her head. “Though I still can’t see any connection to Ponsico, unless he met your killer at the brainiac club and learned too much for his own good.”

“Did Zena get anothor job after she left PlasmoDerm?” I said.

“Bookstore in Silverlake, it’s in the file.”

“Did Sally give you a name for the club?” I said, thinking about Nolan Dahl, another high-IQ suicide.

“Meta,” she said. “You really think there could be a link?”

I told the two of them what I’d learned in the library.

“Survival of the rotten,” she said. “Reminds me of something my father once told me. He was a professor in Arizona, physical anthropologist, did research on wolves, the desert. He said there was a giant study going on—the Human Genome Project—mapping every gene in the human body, trying to figure out which traits are caused by what. The ultimate goal is to collect detailed data on every one of us. My dad said the upside potential for medical research was tremendous but it was also frightening. What if insurance companies got hold of the information and decided to withhold coverage because of some mutation way back in the family tree? Or companies started refusing to hire someone because they were at elevated risk for cancer ten years down the line?”