Survival of the Fittest (43 page)

The black crocodile valise said a very well-employed working woman. She strode confidently to the front desk. The lobby was crowded—lots of check-ins, mostly Japanese tourists. Several harried-looking clerks, male and female pretty-faces, were on duty, typing, dispensing keys. Petra waited in one of the lines, allowed an old Japanese man to go past her, so she could get a male clerk.

Nice-looking guy, blond, struggling actor, yawn, yawn. The poor dear was clicking away, miserable through his smile.

She looked at her watch. “I’m from DeYoung and Rubin with the delivery for Mr. Galton. Has he checked in yet?”

Blondie gave her a half-second lookover, then a real smile, as he tapped computer keys.

“Frank Galton,” she added, a little more impatient. “He phoned from the plane, said he’d be in by now.”

“Yes, he is—just arrived. Shall I call him for you?”

Chest tightening, Petra checked her watch again. “No need, he’s expecting this, said to have you bring it right up.”

Blondie looked past her at the undiminished line.

Petra tapped her nails on the granite counter. “Okay, I’ll do it—what room?”

“Three fourteen,” said the clerk, refusing eye contact. “Thanks.”

Daniel lit up the off-duty sign and moved his taxi to Hartford Way on the west side of the hotel, where he exchanged it for the gray Toyota and changed into an olive-green uniform with the name Ahmed embroidered over the pocket.

Petra had a Coke in the hotel bar, avoiding the stares of men, making several trips to the third floor.

The third time, Daniel was up there, too, holding a broom, and she returned to the lobby and read a newspaper, looking all-business.

At 9:00
P.M.,
Daniel saw a room-service waiter bring Farley Sanger a club sandwich, a Heineken, and coffee.

No food at the party? Going late to the party?

He phoned Petra and told her he was returning to the Toyota, to let him know if Sanger came downstairs.

Circling the hotel property, slowly.

At 10:00, just as he pulled up to the mouth of the drive for the fifth time, Petra called. “Still no sign of him. Maybe he’s not going to the party, after all.”

Maybe, indeed, thought Daniel. Was this whole evening, like so much police work, a wrong guess based on fine logic?

By 10:15, Daniel was ready to believe the lawyer had turned in—for Sanger, still on East Coast time, it was 1:00 in the morning.

Give it another hour to be safe.

Five minutes later, Petra said, “Here we go. He’s wearing a light gray sportcoat, black shirt, black slacks.”

Daniel thanked her and started his taxi, told her to have a nice night.

“Sure you don’t need me?” she said.

“I’m fine. Thanks. Stay on call.”

She didn’t argue, understood that one strange car near the house on Rondo Vista was enough.

At 10:20, the lawyer pulled out onto Sunset, going east, and Daniel was ready for him.

Sanger stayed on the boulevard, leaving Beverly Hills, and cruising the Strip, the Sunset Plaza boutique district, continuing into Hollywood, where marble and granite and sultans’ fortunes were the last things on anyone’s mind.

Daniel could see him well enough to know the lawyer was smoking steadily, progressing from one cigarette to another, flicking still-lit butts out the window, where they sparked on the asphalt.

The scenery was ancillary film businesses—photo-processing places, color labs, sound studios—plus convenience and liquor stores, cheap motels with the requisite prostitutes out front.

Cruising for something the wife back in Manhattan would never know about? A little fun
before
the party?

Wouldn’t that be interesting?

But, no. Sanger kept looking but never stopped.

Smoking his third cigarette since leaving the hotel.

And that briefcase said business   .   .   .

They stopped at a red light at the Fountain intersection and Daniel prepared himself for a right turn toward Apollo, but when the light changed, Sanger stayed on
Sunset.

Speeding up.

Continuing east, toward a sparkle of lights in the distance.

Downtown.

Daniel stayed with him under the Pasadena Freeway overpass to Figueroa. Figueroa south to Seventh Street, Seventh to the corner of Flower, where Sanger parked in a pay-lot, got out, looked around for several seconds, and began walking down the street.

Financial buildings, now dark and deserted.

Sanger looked a bit nervous, checking over his shoulder, glancing from side to side.

Holding the green briefcase close to his body.

That much cash in a tough neighborhood?

Daniel parked across the street, in another lot, watched Sanger stop at a six-story limestone building. The lobby was lit, faintly, but enough for Daniel to see charcoal granite with discreet gold trim.

The shock of recognition.

This time, a uniformed security guard sat behind the small desk.

Sanger stood at the locked double doors, tapped a foot, until the security guard saw him, opened the doors, and escorted him in.

Surprise, surprise.

Daniel sat in his car, trying to make sense of it.

Chapter

50

Friday night. Party time.

I left the house at seven, spending some time at the Genesee apartment, wanting to get used to the place in case Zena had the impulse to come here. To
Semite-town.

Robin had asked me what Zena was like and I’d said only, “Weird, just what you’d expect.”

Robin and I had made love at six. Because she wanted to and I wanted to. And I had another reason: Anything that weakened the reflexive response to Zena was welcome.

It made me feel dishonest.

Four murders—maybe five—helped me live with it.

I sat on Andrew’s dusty couch, listening to Andrew’s music, thumbing through Andrew’s books. Then
Twisted Science,
the first few pages of the late Professor Eustace’s essay on the Loomis Foundation.

Eustace’s tone went well beyond academic criticism, as he accused the group of racist underpinnings, exploiting slave labor in Asia. Funding diploma mills in order to churn out “eugenic foot soldiers.” Apex University, Keystone Graduate Center, New Dominion University—I’d set my watch for 9:30
P.M.
and it chimed. Placing the book under the mattress, I went out to the garage and pulled out the Karmann Ghia. Children’s voices filled the block and the smells of supper drifted from nearby buildings. Edging into the alley, I drove up Fairfax to Sunset and traveled east, very slowly. Twenty-five minutes later I was at Apollo and Lyric.

Well past the cocktail hour. Late enough, I hoped, for me to be lost in the activity and able to observe.

Enough activity to occupy the hostess.

The souped-up Karmann Ghia chewed its way up the nearly black road. Treacherous if someone came barreling down from the summit. The parked cars began well before the corner of Rondo Vista and I had to pull over and continue on foot.

I tried on the tinted glasses. The night rendered them hazardous and I returned them to my pocket and continued on, inspecting the cars. Average cars. No vans. A few lights shone from neighbors’ windows but most were dark. Night wind had blown away some of the smog, and blades of view between the properties sparkled. As I got closer to Zena’s house, I heard music.

Calypso, just like in the bookstore.

Bongos and happy vocals. Just another hillside party.

Who were these people? How many of them, if any, were killers?

Murdering out of some warped notion of genetic cleansing? Or just for
fun
?

Or both.

There was precedent for that kind of thing. Seventy years ago, two young men with stratospheric IQ scores had stabbed to death an innocent fourteen-year-old boy in Chicago. Motivated, they claimed, by the challenge of pulling off the perfect “motiveless” crime.

Leopold and Loeb had been sexually twisted psychopaths and I was willing to bet the DVLL crimes had roots in something beyond intellectual exercise.

I’d reached the white-and-blue house. Lights poked through drawn drapes, but barely. Turning, I sighted down the road, at the line of parked cars.

Had Milo already arrived? Copied down license numbers, sent them along to Daniel for a quick screen?

Calypso shifted to Stravinsky.

The exact same tape from the bookstore.

Frugal? Probably cheap booze, too.

No matter; I wouldn’t be drinking.

The door was locked and I had to ring several times before it opened. The man in the doorway was in his middle thirties with a bushy, wheat-colored beard and a crew cut. He wore a gray sweatshirt and brown pants, was holding a glass of something yellow and filmy.

Small, alert eyes. Small, unsmiling mouth.

He held the door open just wide enough to accommodate his wiry frame. Rough hands, dirty nails. Behind him, the room was dotted with a few colored lights but otherwise dark. I caught a glimpse of faces, moving mouths, but the music pounded, blotting out conversation.

“Yes?” I saw the word, couldn’t hear it.

“Andrew Desmond. Zena invited me.”

He held up a finger and closed the door. I stood there for several minutes before Zena came out. She wore a full-length dress, royal blue silk crepe, printed with tangerine-colored orchids. Long-sleeved, low neckline, no waistline, generously cut. I supposed it was a muumuu, probably vintage. On a large woman it might have looked tentlike. But the filmy fabric flowed over her tiny body, heightening a sharp pelvis and somehow lengthening her, making her appear taller.

Loose and flowing   .   .   . easier access to the precious parts?

“I was starting to wonder about you,” she said. “Fashionably late?”

I shrugged, looked down at her feet, again in high-heeled sandals. Pink toenails. Three-inch heels. She was able to kiss me without straining.

Just a peck. Her lips were supple. Then she took my chin as she had in the restaurant and her tongue impelled itself between my lips. I offered some tooth resistance, then let her in. Her hand dropped, cupped my butt and squeezed. She moved back, taking my hand, twisting the doorknob. “All those who enter, abandon all hope.”

“Of what?”

“Boredom.”

She took my hand. The house was packed, the music well past loud and into painful. As she led me through the crowd, I tried to look the place over without being obvious. Just past the entry were two doors—a bathroom designated
LE PISSOIR
by a computer-printed sign, and an unmarked one that was probably a closet. An unrailed staircase led downstairs. Like many hillside homes, bedrooms on the lower floor.

A gray-haired woman in a black dress with a white Peter Pan collar waited edgily near the lav, not looking up as we passed. The jam of bodies was bathed in Stravinsky and barely illuminated. Some people danced, others stood and talked, managing to communicate despite the din. The colored lights were Christmas bulbs strung from the low-beamed ceiling and they did little but blink in opposition to
The Rite of Spring.
I saw shadows rather than people.

No other signs or banners, nothing identifying it as a Meta bash. What did I expect?

Zena dragged me forward. The other partygoers moved aside with varying degrees of cooperation but no one seemed to notice us. The house was smaller than I would have guessed, the entire second floor just one main room, a waist-high counter sectioning off a two-step kitchen to the right. Every inch of counter was filled with plastic soda bottles, bags of ice, beer cans, packages of paper plates, plastic utensils.

What I could see of the walls was hung with prints in metal frames. Florals, nothing telling. It didn’t seem like Zena’s style, but who knew how often she reinvented herself?

One thing was certain, she wasn’t into decorating. The few pieces of furniture I saw weren’t much better than Andrew’s, and the books that filled two walls sat in flimsy-looking shelves nearly identical to his.

Spooky prescience on Daniel’s part. If he ever tired of police work, a career as a matchmaker awaited.

Zena’s hand burned my fingers as she continued to guide me past a long folding table covered with white paper. Behind it were yet more people, eating and drinking.

Then, the only feature elevating the house above low-rent crackerbox: glass doors onto a balcony, beyond them a symphony of stars.

Man-made constellations twinkling from houses half a mile across a darkened ravine and the real stuff set into a melanin sky.

Drop-dead view,
a real-estate agent would claim, working mightily to show the place at night.

As we neared the food, I played passive and managed a rough body count. Sixty, seventy people, enough to congest the modest room.

I looked for Farley Sanger. Even if he’d been there, I’d have been unlikely to spot him in the darkened crush.

Sixty, seventy strangers, as average-looking as their cars.

Men seemed to outnumber women. The age range, thirty to mid-fifties.

No one particularly ugly, no raving beauties.

It might have been a casting call for Nondescript.

But an
active
bunch. Fast-moving mouths, a mass lip-synch. Lots of gesturing, posturing, shrugs, grins, and grimaces, finger-stabs of emphasis.

I spotted the thickly bearded man who’d answered the door off in a corner by himself, sitting on a folding chair, holding a can of Pepsi and a paperback book, worrying a fold of his sweatshirt.

He looked up, saw me, stared, returned to reading with the intensity of a finals-crammer. Nearby, two other men, one in a baggy tan suit and plaid tie, the other wearing an untucked white shirt and khakis, sat at a tiny table playing silent chess and smoking.

As my eyes accommodated, I noticed other games going, on the edges of the room. Another chess match—a woman and a man—moving pieces quickly and fiercely, a minute-glass filled with rapidly sifting white sand next to the woman’s left hand. A few feet away, yet more table warfare. Scrabble. Cards. Backgammon. Go. Something that resembled chess but was played on a cubelike plastic frame by two bespectacled, mustached men wearing black who could have been twins—three-dimensional chess. On the near side of the kitchen partition, two other men did something intense with polished stones and dice and a mahogany chute. How did anyone concentrate with the noise?