The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter four

Mike Mallick said, “Lev, would you say times are good or bad?”

“I’d say that depends, sir.”

“On what?”

“Individual experience.”

“Come on, now. You know better than that. For us, the creatures that we are, times are always bad.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’s life in Valley Traffic?”

“Can’t complain.”

“Sure you can. Basic human right.”

The room was, or had once been, a storage garage. Concrete walls breathed acrid, nose-pinching mold. It was icy, cavelike, windowless save the glass door, free of furniture but for a crooked halogen lamp turned a quarter of the way up, its cord snaking off unseen.

“What’re you working on?” Mallick asked.

“Fifty-year citywide data analysis,” Jacob said. “Car versus pedestrian accidents.”

“Sounds stimulating.”

“Without a doubt, sir. It’s a regular diamond mine.”

“My understanding is you needed a break from Homicide.”

This again? “As I told Captain Mendoza, I was speaking out of frustration. Sir.”

“What’s his beef with you? You steal his lunch or something?”

“I like to think of Captain Mendoza’s style as a form of tough love, sir.”

Mallick smiled. “Spoken like a true diplomat. Anyhow, you don’t have to justify yourself to me. I get it. It’s natural.”

Jacob wondered if he’d been picked for some sort of experimental psychobabbly program; a puppet to trot out for the press, help dispel LAPD’s well-earned reputation as an orgy of paramilitary machismo. And we gave him a bag of kittens, too! “Yes, sir.”

“I hope you don’t plan on making a career of it,” Mallick said. “Traffic.”

“Could do worse,” Jacob said.

“Actually, you couldn’t. Let’s not kid ourselves, okay? I talked to your superiors. I know who you are.”

“Who am I, sir?”

Mallick sighed. “Turn it off, would you? I’m here to do you a favor. You’ve been temporarily reassigned.”

“Where?”

“Wrong question. Not where, who. You’ll report directly to me.”

“I’m flattered, sir.”

“Don’t be. It’s got nothing to do with your skills. It’s your background I’m interested in.”

“Which part of it, sir? I’m a pretty complex guy.”

“Think tribal.”

Jacob said, “I’m assigned because I’m Jewish.”

“Not officially. Officially, the Los Angeles Police Department actively and enthusiastically promotes diversity. In matters of case assignment, we maintain a strict policy of race blindness, gender blindness, ethnicity blindness, religion blindness.”

“Reality blindness,” Jacob said.

Mallick smiled and offered a scrap of paper.

Jacob read an address with a Hollywood zip code. “What am I going to find there?”

“Homicide. As I said, you’ll report to me. This is a sensitive matter.”

“The Jewish angle,” Jacob said.

“Call it that.”

“The vic?”

“I’ll let you form your own impressions.”

“Can I ask what’s so special about Special Projects?”

“Everybody’s special,” Mallick said. “Or hadn’t you heard.”

“I have,” Jacob said. “I haven’t heard of you.”

“As a unit, we don’t feel it’s appropriate for us to get overly involved in the day-to-day,” Mallick said. “It enables us to move faster when we’re really needed.”

“What do I tell Traffic?”

“Let me handle them.” Mallick walked to the glass door, held it open. The sun turned his white shirt to a mirror. “Enjoy the view.”

Jacob’s GPS put 446 Castle Court at the northernmost reaches of Hollywood Division — north of the reservoir, west of the Sign — and estimated a travel time of fifteen minutes.

It had lied. Half an hour in, he was still climbing, the temperature gauge on the Honda spasming as he pushed past mid-century boxes, some remodeled, others flaking. Cross streets appeared in thematic spurts, Astra and Andromeda and Ion, followed by Eagle’s Point and Falconrock, then Cloudtop and Skylook and Heavencrest. Evidence of multiple real estate developers, or a single one with ADD.

The road writhed and forked, civilization thinning along with the oxygen, until the asphalt petered out and the GPS announced that he’d arrived.

Another lie. No crime scene in sight. Nothing but a continuing ribbon of rocky soil.

He drove on.

“Recalculating,” the GPS said.

“Shut up.”

Pebbles spat against the undercarriage, and the Honda rattled over buckling earth on rotten shocks. It felt like he was being punched in the kidney by an angry, relentless toddler. He had to take it down to five miles an hour to avoid a blowout. The surrounding land was weedy, desolate, cratered, scrubby; devoid of human structure because there was no place level enough to accommodate any; devoid of life, seemingly, until he spotted a pair of horny squirrels flaunting their sexuality beneath a spiky thicket.

He wasn’t the only one to notice: in an instant, a bird was circling overhead. Large one, probably a raptor. Ready to turn the amorous couple into brunch.

The eagle of Eagle’s Point? The falcon come down from its Rock?

The bird began to bank, and Jacob craned to watch the drama unfolding, his attention drifting. Then a crest raised him up and slammed him down and he beheld a shallow mountaintop depression, a couple of wind-whipped acres of dirt and stone, bounded to the south and east by a steep, curving canyon.

A stark gray cube cantilevered out over the city like a faceless gargoyle.

He’d arrived.

Total travel time: fifty-one minutes.

“Recalculating,” the GPS said.

“Eat me,” Jacob said, and turned it off.

There was none of the postmortem party that took place when agencies converged. No black-and-whites or unmarkeds, no Coroner’s van, no tech crew. Just a necktie of yellow tape fluttering from the doorknob, and a silver Toyota askew on a concrete parking pad. Crypt card on the dash. Woman perched lightly on the hood.

Mid- to late thirties, she was slim, graceful, nice-looking despite — or perhaps because of — a toucan-beak nose. Wide charcoal eyes shone; long, lush hair the same color; skin like freshly ground nutmeg. She wore jeans and sneakers, a white coat over a flame-orange sweater.

She stood up when he got out of the car, spoke his name when he was three feet away.

“In the flesh,” he said.

Her hand was warm and dry.

The badge clipped to her breast pocket said DIVYA V. DAS, M.D., PH.D.

He said it was nice to meet her. She yawed her head skeptically.

“You might want to reserve judgment,” she said.

Indian English in her voice: musical, coy.

“Nasty?” he asked.

“When aren’t they?” She paused. “You’ve never seen anything like this, though.”

Like the garage on Odyssey Avenue, the house showed signs of long abandonment: water stains, rodent droppings, close air saturated with filth.

The light was nice, at least. He could appreciate that. The architect had exploited it to its utmost with sweeping glass panels, at present crying out for a washing, yet clean enough to offer a 270-degree panorama of hills and sky.

Beneath a veil of smog, the city winked and snickered.

Jacob had long believed that every last square inch of Los Angeles had been fought for and claimed. Not here.

Perfect place to kill someone.

Perfect place to leave a body.

Or, in this case, a head.

It was in the living room, lying on its side, centered precisely on a faded oak floor.

Exactly two feet away — a measuring tape had been left in place — was a greenish-beige mound of what looked like a jumbo portion of spoiled oatmeal.

He looked at Divya Das. She nodded permission, and he came forward slowly, his own head filling with white noise. Some guys could stand around in the aftermath of a massacre, cracking jokes and popping Cheetos. Jacob had seen plenty of bodies, plenty of body parts, and still, the first sight always knocked him sideways. His underarms felt clammy, and his breathing had grown shallow, and he suppressed his rising gorge. Suppressed the thought that a nice Jewish boy with an Ivy League education (or part of one, anyway) lacked the stomach to work homicide. He reduced the scene to shapes, colors, impressions, questions.

Male, anywhere from thirty to forty-five, ethnicity unclear; dark-haired, beetle-browed, snub-nosed; an inch-long nub of scar tissue on his chin.

Decapitation had taken place where the throat would have met the shoulders. Aside from the vomit, the floorboards were spotless. No blood, no leaking brain matter; no dangling blood vessels, tendons, or muscle meat. As Jacob made a circuit on his haunches, he saw why: the bottom of the neck had been sealed. Rather than ending in a ragged tube, it pinched together, as though pulled tight with a drawstring. The surrounding tissue was smooth and plasticky, bulging with the pressure of fluid and death-bloat, the domain of higher thought turned to a gore-bag.

The rats had left it alone.

He dragged his attention from the head to examine the fetid heap twenty-four inches to the left. It glistened surreally, like a gag item fished from the ninety-nine-cent bin at a novelty shop.

“The green means bile, indicative of rather severe emesis, explosive. I took samples for analysis and I’ll scoop up all of it when you’re through. But I wanted you to see it as it appeared.”

He said, “Explosive vomit in one neat pile.”

She nodded. “You’d expect spatter, speckling, clumps.”

Jacob stood up and backed away, pulling in air. He looked out the window again.

Sky and hills, for miles.

“Where’s the rest of him?”

“Excellent question.”

“This is it?”

“Show a little gratitude,” she said. “It could be a foot.”

“How’d he vomit without a stomach?”

“Another excellent question. Given the lack of spatter, I assume that the actual vomiting took place elsewhere, and that it was brought here, along with the head.”

“For decoration,” Jacob said.

“Personally, I prefer carpet,” she said. “But that’s me.”

“How’d they close the neck up?”

“Three for three, Detective Lev.”

“So I didn’t miss any tiny stitches.”

“Not that I can see. I’ll want a better look at it, of course.”

“Blood?”

“Only what you see.”

“I don’t see any,” he said.

She shook her head.

“No drips leading from the door.”

“No.”

“Nothing outside.”

She shook her head again.

“It happened somewhere else,” he said.

“I would call that a reasonable conclusion.”

He nodded. Looked again at the head. He wished it would shut its eyes and close its mouth. “How long’s he been here?”

“Hours, not days. I arrived at one-fifty a.m. A uniform handed it off to me and was quick to excuse himself.”

“Did you get his name?”

“Chris. Something with an H. Hammett.”

“Did he say who called it in?”

She shook her head. “They don’t tell me that.”

“And who else has been by since?”

“Just me.”

Jacob wasn’t a stickler for procedure, but this was rapidly going from weird to troubling.

He checked his watch: it was close to ten. Divya Das looked trim and bright-eyed. She certainly didn’t look like a woman who’d been toiling solo over a crime scene for eight hours.

He noticed that she was on the tall side, as well.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You’re Special Projects.”

“I’m whatever the Commander needs me to be,” she said.

“That’s nice of you,” he said.

“I try,” she said.

“They really want to keep this quiet, don’t they?” he said.

“Yes, Jacob. They really do.”

“Mallick said I’m here because of my background,” he said. “What’s Jewish about this?”

She said, “In here.”

The kitchen dated from the fifties. Functionless, no appliances, cheap frames for the cabinets, counters cut from the same budget wood, warped and splintering at the edges. The suggestion of water damage, but no smell of mold. To the contrary: the room felt bone-dry.

In the center of the longest counter was a burn mark.

Black shapes, etched in charcoal.

Divya Das said, “This means something to you.”

A statement, not a question.

He said, “Tzedek.”

“Meaning.”

“Meaning,” he said, “‘justice.’”