The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter forty-one

“I suppose you’ll be wanting money for the funeral.”

In the minutes it had taken Heap to stow his rifle and confiscate the remaining toffee, he had recovered his cool, along with his contempt.

“You won’t be having it from me, I can assure you of that.”

A burled walnut gun cabinet dominated the ground floor library. Discolored patches of flooring and wallpaper spoke of rolled-up rugs, bygone art. There was an aluminum frame cot, surplus woolen blanket, and tousled linens. Cans of baked beans and tinned asparagus were stacked, incongruously, atop a baroque demilune table. Between its carved feet sat an electric hot plate and a crusty frying pan.

Heap dropped the string of hares, their dead bodies reviving a giddy crop of dust bunnies.

He headed for the stairs. “Don’t gawk.”

Jacob had been wrong about the upper-story windows. They hadn’t been left open. They’d been shot out, as had portions of the banister. The whole house, in fact, had been given over to target practice. Bullet holes pockmarked the walls and ceiling, ranging in size from small-caliber puncture wounds to catastrophic shotgun blasts that laid bare the plumbing. While the damage didn’t follow a consistent pattern — some rooms were untouched, others hardly existed at all — the effort behind it spoke to a certain perverse dedication.

In a strange way, the place reminded him of Fred Pernath’s house in Hancock Park. Both suggested the same hermetic impulse, the masculine will to power gone haywire, reveling in its inhospitality.

A house was a body; to kill it, pick your method. Fred Pernath had chosen strangulation, clogging out light and life, like a heart bursting with fat. Edwyn Heap, the inverse, a gradual erosion of the boundary between inside and out.

There was also the shared lack of family photos, although Jacob supposed that, in Heap’s case, that could be construed as a kindness. Anything hung on the wall was subject to be being blown to smithereens.

“Did Reggie come home often?” he asked.

“Helen would let him stay when he was hard up,” Heap said. He was wheezing as they climbed. “Once she died, I put my foot down.”

“When was that?”

“Four years, September. The woman had a spine of gravy.”

“Has he been back since?”

“Not long after the funeral he turned up looking for something to pinch and sell. I chased him off and that’s the last time I laid eyes on him.”

On the second floor, they came to a door so long shut that the paint around the frame had adhered to itself. Heap shouldered it open and it swung wide, wobbling on its hinges.

“The chamber of the little prince.”

The little prince, who would’ve been in his mid-forties had he not died, had once been a boy, and Jacob felt a chill as he regarded an otherwise ordinary boy’s room. Tight duvet, race-car pattern, as though the occupant had not progressed beyond age nine. Textbooks, gooseneck desk lamp, CD player — tape deck combo.

No DIY taxidermy.

No knife collection.

That there was nothing sinister about it made it somehow more sinister.

What had gone wrong?

When had it happened? How?

A handful of items hinted at maturity. A reclining female nude — poster for an Egon Schiele retrospective at the Tate — affixed to the walls with yellowing tape. A framed certificate from the Oxford Undergraduate Art Society, acknowledging Heap’s first prize for his drawing titled To Be Brasher.

Edwyn Heap plucked a school photo off the desk.

“And the prince himself.”

Aswim in a sea of starchy white and somber black, the young Reggie Heap had a hunted look, sweat flashing on his forehead, his eyes seeking an escape route.

“It was a mistake to send him up,” Edwyn Heap said. “He didn’t stand a chance.” He tossed the photo on the desk. “Well. What do you intend to do about it?”

Jacob used his camera to take a picture of the picture. It came out blurry; he tried again. Better. “I was hoping you could give me a starting point. A last address, maybe.”

“He didn’t have one.”

“He must’ve lived somewhere.”

“Not to my knowledge. He went here, he went there.”

“Was he employed?”

“Not respectably. Most often he went hand-to-mouth. My hand, his mouth. I believe he played office boy whenever the direness of his circumstances grew particularly pronounced. It’s turned out just as I warned. He went up to read law. Not halfway through Hilary, he rang to announce his intention to change to fine art. It goes without saying that I forbade this caprice. ‘We’ll be underwriting him for the rest of our lives,’ I told Helen, and so it has been. Ah, but you should have seen how she defended him. It was a splendid performance, tugging all the right strings. ‘Teddy, he’s lost.’ ‘Then let him get a bloody map,’ I said. He rang again a week later, saying he had reconsidered; it was history of art he wanted to do — and Helen said, ‘What a smashing idea, he can be a professor, it’s very prestigious.’ You see how they tricked me. I was made to consider it a compromise.”

Heap shook his head. “I suppose they had plotted together all along. Bloody history of bloody art... Nor could he see that through to the end. Off it was, soon enough, to broaden his horizons. Exorbitant course fees, supplies. Six months in Spain, six in Rome. ‘To what end?’ ‘He’s in search of inspiration.’ A hopeless Neanderthal, I was to them. But a bowl of fruit is a bowl of fruit whether in Paris or Berlin or New York.”

“He was in New York?”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t bloody know. Timbuktu. I don’t know.”

“He did travel in the United States, though.”

“I’m sure he did. If it cost money, he wanted to do it.”

“He didn’t tell you where he was going?”

“I long ago ceased to ask. Hearing about it gave me indigestion.”

“When I mentioned that I was from Los Angeles, you said, ‘What’s he done there?’”

“Yes, all right.”

“That’s an interesting choice of words.”

Instantly, Heap’s guard was up. “Why.”

“Has he been in trouble before? Run-ins with the law?”

“I can’t say I know anything about that.”

“The girl in Prague said he tried to rape her.”

“Naturally she’d claim that, now that he’s not around to prove otherwise.”

Jacob said, “There was another girl, Peg. She worked for you.”

“I’ve had too many employees to remember them by name.”

“Some folks around here seem to think that Reggie was involved in her death.”

“Only a fool believes everything he’s told.”

“That’s a no, then.”

“I don’t reckon I like the way you’re talking to me,” Heap said. “You inform me my son has been murdered, and in the next breath you’re regurgitating slander for which not a single shred of evidence has ever been produced.”

Now he wanted to claim him as his son? “I apologize. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You upset me insofar as your willingness to accept the conjectures of imbeciles as fact demonstrates you to be easily misled. You said he was found in Prague. Why are you here? Why am I talking to an American? Was there nobody else available? Has it truly come to this?”

“Help set me straight,” Jacob said.

“Pearls before swine,” Heap said.

“You don’t know where he was traveling.”

“I told you, no.”

“But he was traveling a lot.”

“I suppose,” Heap said.

“With what money?”

“Helen laid aside a sum for him to collect on the first of every month. Mind you, that didn’t stop him from ringing me up on the fifteenth, groveling for more.”

“Did the money go into his bank account?”

“I suppose.”

“Which bank?”

“Barclay’s. What business is it of yours?”

“I could contact them and find out where the withdrawals were made.”

“Why are you so concerned with where he’s been? You know where he was murdered. Go there.”

“You mentioned a job—”

“I don’t believe I did. As a matter of fact, I was quite clear that there was none.”

“You said he played office boy.”

“I refuse to dignify that as more than it was: a cheap stalling tactic.”

“Be that as it may, I’d like to know who he worked for, and where.”

“An architect,” Heap said. “A former tutor of his at school.”

“Name?”

“James, George, something royal. The selfsame worthless poofter who had years earlier convinced him to lay aside his studies and take up doodling.”

“It was my impression that Reggie had some talent as an artist.”

A glimmer of pride; it rapidly curdled. “So said my wife.”

Jacob indicated the framed certificate. “At least a couple others must’ve agreed.”

“Ah yes, achievement of a lifetime, as he’d have you believe. And never let her forget it, whenever he ran short of dosh.”

“Do you have any of his work?”

“Connoisseur of the finer things, are we?”

“Humor me.”

“That’s all I’ve bloody done for the last half hour,” Heap said. He nosed at the bed. “Under there.”

Jacob knelt and drew out a pair of portfolio boxes, along with a bag of stubby charcoals, some fine-tipped artist’s pens, a sketch pad.

He opened the first box on the bed.

Heavy, creamy paper carried ink beautifully, maintaining the surgical crispness of Reggie Heap’s vision.

He could draw. No doubt about that. There were the aforementioned bowls of fruit; stark countryside landscapes. They had a mechanical quality, like photographic tracings.

“Hung them all over the house, she did,” Heap said. “I took them down, I couldn’t stand to look at them.”

Most of the drawings were signed and dated; they had been thrown together without regard for chronology. Jacob saw work as recent as 2006 and as old as 1983.

“You kept them,” he said.

“To get rid of them would have required effort.”

“More effort than taking them down and putting them in boxes?”

“What’s your damned point.”

That you were prouder of him than you want to admit. Which is both endearing and disturbing. “Which one did he win the prize for?”

“None of these. The bloody Art Society kept it. Helen offered them a thousand pounds but they said it was the terms of the competition.”

The art got more interesting with the second box, which contained nude studies and facial portraits. The women were arrestingly frenzied, Reggie’s id outstripping his hand. Jacob could virtually hear the panting that had accompanied their creation.

By contrast, the men were controlled, heroic, formidable.

“Recognize any of these people?” Jacob said. “Anyone I could talk to?”

“I presume they were his friends.”

“From?”

“I don’t bloody know. Doodlers. Reprobates.”

“Did he mention anyone by name?”

“If he had, I would have labored to forget them.”

“Girlfriends?”

Heap snorted.

“I ask because I’m trying to find out what kind of people he was associating with.”

“Not the kind who’d kill him,” Heap said.

You’d be surprised.

Two-thirds of the way through, Jacob stopped and flipped back several pages.

He’d nearly missed it.

He wasn’t paying attention. He was thinking about the nudes and what they said about Reggie’s relationship to women.

He was thinking about his own father’s visage in clay, his mother’s hands working.

The intervening years had also done their part: the drawing was dated December 1986.

He was trying to avoid concocting imaginary connections. Above all, he was trying to stay clearheaded and do his job.

Yes. The job.

And here was the payoff.

Jacob flipped slowly to the next page. There it was again. And again. What he had mistaken for a careless mark repeated itself on five consecutive pages — a scar on the chin.

Five angles.

The same man.

Mr. Head.

Through static, he heard Heap say, “That’s one of them.”

“Who.”

“The doodlers. He came to stay a Christmas. Helen’s idea.”

“Who is he?”

“A school friend. Buggered if I can remember his name.”

Jacob said, “Can I borrow these?”

Heap stared at him. “He’s the one that you’re after.”

“I don’t know,” Jacob said. “But it’d be helpful if I could find out.”

Heap snatched up a few of the drawings, flung them at Jacob. “The rest of them you can put back where you found.” He turned to go. “Ten minutes. Then off with you, or I’ll summon the police and have you arrested for trespassing.”

Jacob carefully rolled up the drawings of Mr. Head, securing them with a rubber band he found in the desk. He cleared the rest of the mess off the bed, then poked his head into the hallway.

Hearing movement from a lower floor, he hurried to search the bureau, looking for old socks or underwear, anything that might cough up a piece of DNA.

Zip.

Downstairs, a gigantic boom, followed by crumbling plaster.

Exit music.