Time Bomb (39 page)

“That’s it.”

“All right, then. What’s next on our agenda?”

“Mr. Burden, I haven’t learned anything that would vindicate Holly. And to be honest, I don’t see myself moving in that direction.”

Pause. “That’s very disappointing, Doctor.” But he didn’t sound disappointed. Or surprised. “Have you considered talking to members of Novato’s family—delving into his background?”

“He was from back east, didn’t have family out here. And frankly, Mr. Burden, I don’t see that as being helpful in terms of what you want.”

“Why’s that, Doctor?”

“There just doesn’t seem to be any connection to Holly.”

Silence on the other end.

“I’m sorry,” I said. ‘I don’t see anywhere to take the evaluation that would fulfill your needs.”

He said, “I’m sorry you feel that way. Why don’t you come over again? The two of us can put our heads together, develop some hypotheses.”

“Maybe in a while,” I said. “I’m a little tied up now.”

“I see,” he said. “But you’re not closing the door?”

“No,” I said. “The door’s never closed.”

“Good.” Pause. “Quite a ruckus down by the school yesterday. Papers said Councilman Latch brought in a rock singer to entertain the children. Making political hay?”

“Bales of it.”

“Why not?” he said. “Seize the moment. Next thing you know, they’ll be dancing on my daughter’s grave.”

An hour later Milo called and I told him of my meeting with Howard Burden, described the mental deterioration Howard had seen in his sister after Novato’s death. Her holding the rifle.
Wanna see two.

He said, “What’d she wanna see two of?”

“No idea.”

“Hmm,” he said. “How ’bout wanna see two people dead? Massengil and someone else.”

“Latch?”

“Could be,” he said. “Two shitbirds with one stone. Talk about your civic responsibility. Or maybe she was planning to do Massengil at the school, head off somewhere else for victim number two. It’s not unusual for these nutcases to have elaborate plans—delusions. But I don’t have to tell
you
that, do I? Anyway, all this does is firm up the lone-assassin picture, puts her hands on the weapon a good two weeks before the shooting—shows premeditation. She was mentally shaky to begin with, got stressed out by Novato’s death, became unglued, spent a month and a half building up anger, going to the gun rack, getting the feel of the thing. Then, boom. How’m I doing—psychologically?”

“Good enough.”

“It’s not gonna sound too good to Daddy.”

“I just spoke to him, put him on hold.”

“Till when?”

“Indefinite.”

“Didn’t have the heart to cut him off?”

“I’ve got nothing to offer him,” I said. “But for all I know, his defenses are about to come tumbling down. I wanted to go easy.”

“Thought you didn’t like the guy.”

“I don’t, but that doesn’t alter my responsibility. Besides, the guy’s pathetic—got nothing left in the way of family. His son hates him—it’s obvious he just wanted me to talk to him because there’s no communication between them. So I went easy.”

“Interesting,” said Milo.

“What is?”

“Having a job where you’ve got to be watching yourself all the time, caring about people’s feelings.”

“Part of your job too.”

“Sometimes,” he said. “But mostly the people I care about are dead. Speaking of which, I got in touch with Santa Monica College. Novato did register for summer session, but he dropped out after a week.”

“Long enough to get his name listed at the Employment Center.”

“That’s what I thought too. Probably why he registered in the first place. No ID, no references, would have been hard to find a job.”

“Dinwiddie would have liked the student thing. He yearns for school days.”

“My question,” Milo said, “is why Novato would want a low-paying job if he was selling dope.”

“A cover? Smith said they were getting sophisticated.”

“Maybe. Be that as it may, I don’t know that any of it is worth pursuing. My source at the Holocaust Center flies in from Chicago this afternoon. Got an appointment down there at five—that’s the last thing I’m gonna do on it. Ever been there?”

“No.”

“You should see it. Everyone should.”

“I’m free at five.”

“You drive.”

Scaffolding and an enclosed wooden perimeter marked a construction zone next to a two-story building made of white brick and black marble.

“That’s the museum,” said Milo. “House of Tolerance. They just broke ground last month.”

Traffic was congested for a half-block radius around the site. Motors groaned, clay dust billowed, hammer thuds and saw whines rose above the combustive groan of idling engines. A hard hat in an orange vest stood in the middle of Pico, directing a crane as it backed up onto the boulevard. A female traffic cop whistled and white-gloved a steadily building herd of autos into submission.

Milo leaned toward the center of the Seville and looked in the rearview mirror. A moment later he looked again.

I said, “What is it?”

“Nothing.” His eyes swept back and forth.

“Come on, Milo.”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “A while back I thought someone might be on our tail. It’s probably nothing.”

“Probably?”

“Don’t get in an uproar.” He sat back.

“Where’d you see it?”

“Just before Motor, near Fox Studios. Probably my imagination—there doesn’t seem to be anyone back there now, but it’s too stacked up to be sure.”

“Maybe it wasn’t your imagination. I’ve had the same feeling a couple of times the last week.”

“That so?”

“I also put it down to imagination.”

“Probably was.”

“Probably?”

“Like I said, Alex, don’t get in an uproar. Even if there was someone, most likely it was the Department.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The car. Plymouth sedan. Flat gray, black-wall tires, radio antennae. Except for the narcs and all their confiscated hot rods, the Department hasn’t discovered special effects.”

“Why would the Department be following us?”

“Not us.
Me.
Maybe I stepped on someone’s toes. Got big feet.” He wiggled his brogans.

I said, “Frisk?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. It’s Kenny’s type of game, but it could be anyone. My persona’s never that grata.”

“But what about the ones who followed me? Guilt by association?”

“Ones? How many were there?”

“Two, both times. First in a brown Toyota, then some kind of sedan. Male and female the second time, I think.”

“Sounds kind of imaginative for the Department. When and where’d it happen?”

“Both times were at night. Coming out of restaurants. The first time I was by myself, in Santa Monica. The second was this past Sunday night, with Linda. Melrose near LaBrea.”

“How long did they stay with you?”

“Not long.” I told him about driving into the gas station to avoid the brown Toyota.

He smiled. “Flashy move, Double-0-Seven. They show any signs of noticing you after you pulled into the station?”

“No. Just drove right by.”

“What about the second time?”

I shook my head. “I pulled off onto a side street and they were gone.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a tail,” he said. “And no similarities to the one I just saw. This was one guy—male Cauc, standard issue. And he didn’t just stay right on our tail. He hung back—the way they teach you in cop school. That’s what caught my eye—the spacing. Professionalism. A civilian would have missed it.
I
could have easily missed it. Even now, I’m not sure it wasn’t some guy just happening to be driving by. If the Department was bothering to run a two-man tail, chances are the second guy would have been in another car, doing an A-B. Your guys, on the other hand, were obvious as hell—you saw ’em, didn’t you? Which leads me to believe they weren’t tailing yon. So all in all, I’d vote for imagination, Alex.”

“Yours is real, mine’s baloney?”

“Just keeping a sane perspective,” he said. “Mine’s probably baloney too.”

He sat back, made a show of stretching his legs and yawning.

The crane was finally gone and we advanced. As I turned the corner, Milo checked out the cars that sped by.

“Nothing,” he said. “Forget the whole thing.”

We parked in the visitors’ lot in back of the center and walked around to the front entrance. After passing through a metal detector, we signed in with a plainclothes guard in an open booth. He was young, sharp-featured, with cropped black hair, a strong chin, and hard eyes.

Milo showed ID and said, “We’re here to see Judy Baumgartner.”

“Wait, please,” said the guard. Some kind of accent. He stepped back several feet and made a call.

“Israeli,” said Milo. “Since the swastikas, they use ex-secret-service guys as security. Very stubborn. They can be a real pain in the ass to deal with, but they get the job done.”

The guard returned to the counter. “She’ll be a few minutes. You can wait up there.” He pointed to a short, open flight of stairs. Above it was a landing backed with a black-and-white mural of wide-eyed faces. Frightened faces. It reminded me of the TV broadcast the day of the sniping.

Milo said, “How about we look at the exhibit?”

The guard shrugged. “Sure.”

We took the open stairs clown to the basement level. Dark hallway, the sounds of typing and ringing phones. A few people traveled the corridor, purposeful, busy.

To the right of the stairs was a black door marked
EXHIBIT
in small steel letters.

“Temporary,” he said, “until the museum’s done.”

He opened the door to a room about thirty feet square, paneled gallery-white, gray-carpeted, and very cool. Photo blowups lined the walls.

Milo began walking. I followed.

The first picture: storm troopers kicking and beating elderly Jews on the streets of Munich.

The second, stolid-looking citizens marching with placards:

RAUS MIT
EUCH DRECKIGE
JUDEN!

I stopped, caught my breath, went on.

A jackbooted, peak-capped soldier, not more than nineteen or twenty, using tin snips to cut the beard of a terrified grandfather as other soldiers look on in glee.

The shattered and defaced storefronts of post-Kristallnacht Berlin. Swastikas. Posters in crude gothic lettering.

Gutted buildings. Shattered faces.

A triptych midway down the first wall made me stop even as Milo kept walking. A winter scene. Forest of monumental conifers atop gently rolling snow dunes. In the foreground a row of naked men and women huddled in front of trench graves; some still held shovels. Dozens of emaciated physiques, caved-in chests, shriveled genitals. Victims obscenely bare amid the frosty beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Behind the prisoners, a dozen SS men armed with carbines.

Next photo: the troopers raise weapons to shoulder. An officer holds a baton. Most of the diggers keep their backs turned, but one woman has shifted to face the soldiers, screaming, open-mouthed. A dark-eyed, black-haired woman, her breasts shrunken, her pubic thatch a dark wound in white flesh.

Then: bodies, heaps of them, filling the trenches, merging with the snow. One soldier bayonets a corpse.

I forced myself to move on.

Close-ups of barbed wire—iron fangs. A sign in German. A shred of something clinging to the fangs.

Snarling dogs.

A blowup of a document. Columns of numbers, straight margins, beautifully printed, neat as an accountant’s ledger. Opposite each column, hand-scripted words.
Bergen-Belsen. Gotha. Buchenwald. Dachau. Dortmund. Auschwitz. Landsberg. Maidanek. Treblinka.
Opposite each name, a number code. Body count. So many digits. A horrific arithmetic . . .

More snowy-white images: bleached bones. Piles of them. Femurs and tibias and finger bones white as piano keys. Pelvic cradles stripped raw. Yawning rib cages. Scraps and fragments rendered unidentifiable.

A mountain of bones sitting on a base of dust and grit.

An incomprehensible Everest of bones, landscaped with jawless skulls.

My stomach lurched.

Another enlarged document: multisyllabic German words. A translating caption:
PROCESSING PROCEDURES
. The final solution.

Compulsively detailed lists of those bound for the refuse heap:

Jews. Gypsies. Subversives. Homosexuals.

I looked over at Milo. He was across the room, his back to me. Hands in pockets, hunched and bulky and preda-tory as a bear out on a night forage.

I kept walking, looking.

A display case of Zyldon B poison-gas canisters. An-other containing a shredded striped uniform of coarse cloth.

Little children in cloth caps and braids, herded onto trains. Bewildered, tear-streaked. Tiny hands reaching out for mother love. Faces pressed against a train window.

Another group of children, in spotless school uniforms, marching beneath a swastika banner, giving a straight-armed salute.

Black gallows against a cloudy sky. Bodies dangling from them, their feet barely touching the ground. A caption explaining that the scaffolding had been specially constructed with short drops, so that death, from slow strangulation, was prolonged.

Guard towers.

More barbed wire—spooling miles of it.

Brick ovens.

Pallets of charred, caked matter.

Fat complacent cats licking at a pile of it.

Tiled laboratories that resembled autopsy rooms. Sinks full of glassware. Humanoid things on tables.

A paragraph describing the science of the Third Reich. Ice-water experiments. Eye-color experiments. Artificial-insemination experiments. Cross-species breeding experiments. Benzine injections to harden the arteries. “Surgery” without anesthesia to study the limits of pain tolerance. Twin studies. Dwarf studies. Authoritative-looking men in white coats, bearing scalpels like weapons.

Rows of graves outside a “sanitarium.”

Milo and I had come face to face. When I saw the moisture in his eyes, I realized mine were wet too.

My throat felt as if it had been stuffed with dirt. I wanted to say something but the thought of speaking hurt my chest.