The Golem of Paris

Chapter eight

Rosario heard Jacob running toward the lobby and smiled without looking up.

“No more cookies.”

“Something’s wrong with my mother,” he said.

Out on the patio, Bina was as Jacob had left her, fetal, sheened, the vein bisecting her forehead hideously engorged, neck a tendon cage, fluid hands shrunk to clubs. The remains of her dinner had been swept to the concrete, the tray pinwheeling, mashed potato skid marks.

Rosario took her blood pressure and pulse. She had a temporal lobe artery thermometer, which was a good thing, because Bina wouldn’t open her mouth.

“Come on, honey. I need to look in your eyes.”

Slowly, Bina’s eyelids parted, allowing Rosario to check her pupillary response.

Like the rest of her vitals, it was normal.

While Rosario went off to page the on-call MD, Jacob paced, trying to talk his own heart down. The silence felt much heavier than usual, thrown into hard relief by his mother’s burst of life.

For a brief moment, he’d seen her.

Now she was gone again.

“He’ll be here as soon as he can,” Rosario said, returning. She glanced at Bina, whose body had begun to lose its tautness, causing her to slide down, her head wilting over her chest. “She seems like she’s okay now.”

Jacob said, “You didn’t see what I saw.”

“What did you see?”

He didn’t know how to answer that.

The doctor arrived inside the hour, by which point Bina had gone completely limp.

“We’ve got it from here,” Rosario said. “Promise.”

Jacob hesitated. “If you need to admit her, call me. Not my father. Okay?”

Rosario nodded, both of them knowing full well it was Sam’s name on the proxy.

She touched his arm. “There’s really nothing more for you to do.”

He could take a hint. He’d done enough already.

The first and only time his father had accompanied him to the care facility, he’d led Jacob along a circuitous route — east through Boyle Heights, south through Downey. It was absurd, really, taking driving directions from a blind man, and Jacob had laughed, asking if they were being followed.

There was nothing joking in Sam’s response.

You tell me.

The precautions went further than that: he’d registered Bina under a false name, going so far as to sign himself in as Saul Abelson.

Jacob still didn’t understand exactly what, or whom, his father was afraid of. They’d never gotten a chance to discuss it. But Sam’s sins didn’t change the fact that he was a thoughtful man. If he deemed precautions necessary, Jacob would take precautions.

Tonight he performed his usual pre-drive check, feeling in the wheel wells and peering at the car’s underbody for tracking devices. He made a few wrong turns, pulling over to flush out tails. Once on the freeway, he pushed the needle to eighty-five, his salivary glands pinching in anticipation as he neared the exit for his former favorite bar.

He wondered if they missed him. He hadn’t been by in months. He wasn’t looking for women, and he could drink alone, just as effectively and at half the price.

He imagined his face plastered to bourbon bottles across the state.

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

Impulsively, he veered toward the off ramp — veering back as a horn blared.

One lane over, a middle finger waved.

“Yeah, okay, sorry.”

But the guy wouldn’t be placated, continuing to lean on the horn.

Jacob glanced over. Standard-issue asshole.

Thankfully, that was all.

There had been a period, the first four or five months after the madness in the garden, when he felt like an emotional antenna. He looked at people and saw — there was no other word for it — auras. Purple or blue or gray, gradated and shifting with every change of heart. He could walk into a room and know at a glance who’d fought with his wife the night before; who’d gotten laid; who could not let go, who could not hold on.

An exquisite, excruciating sympathy that would’ve made him a great therapist, but that turned freeway-driving into a terrifying ordeal. Every car became a plasma jar, lit up with the concerns of its occupants.

He couldn’t tell anyone. They’d think he was losing it.

He thought he was losing it.

At the time, he’d been sneaking four or five Vicodin a day, nursing a cache accumulated during his hospital stay. He cut back. When that didn’t help, he flushed the remaining pills down the toilet. The hallucinations persisted.

His GP gave him a mini-mental and sent him home with a psych referral. Jacob went so far as to make an appointment, canceling the morning of. He decided to tough it out, congratulating himself on his foresight and fortitude when, with time, the symptoms faded. Now he looked back and chalked them up to stress and detox.

Some days he even believed that.

One lane over, the guy was lobbing F-bombs.

Jacob fished out his badge and pressed it to the glass. The guy recoiled, yanking his steering wheel and nearly hitting another car himself.

It took several hours to undo the havoc Bina had wreaked on the Marquessa Duvall file. Even after Jacob had gotten it in order, it remained incomplete: pages missing, pages waterlogged, pages nibbled by mice, pages from other cases mixed in.

Bottle of Beam in hand, he sat on his couch to read.

Early on the morning of December 20, 2004, a jogger completing his daily circuit noticed a human shape slumped in an alley south of Santa Monica Boulevard, between El Centro and Gower. That area, like most of Hollywood, had a large homeless population, and as the jogger explained, it was not unusual to come across people passed out, especially on a Monday, following a weekend of partying.

What was unusual was the person’s size.

Mr. Sproul advised that he stopped to take a closer look. When I asked why, he stated that he was concerned it was a child. Mr. Sproul called out several times but received no response. He then proceeded to approach the person. He confirmed that the person appeared to be a black male between the ages of four and seven years old. The victim was propped in a semi-upright position against the wall on the north side of the alley. The victim did not appear to be breathing. Mr. Sproul stated that although he is trained in CPR, he did not attempt to touch the victim’s body or to perform resuscitation. He advised that he could observe severe injuries to the victim inconsistent with survival. He stated, “I know a dead kid when I see one.”

Mr. Sproul advised that he turned away from the body and took out his mobile phone to dial 911. In doing so, he discovered a second body, positioned opposite the child’s body and facing it. The second body appeared to belong to a black female in her mid- to late twenties. She showed similar injuries and did not appear to be breathing.

Mr. Sproul advised that he did not notice the presence of the second body prior to then because it was blocked by a large trash container.

Mr. Sproul left the immediate vicinity to dial 911.

Marquessa Duvall, twenty-three years old.

Her five-year-old son, Thomas White Jr.

Jacob flipped through photos, advancing down the alley in shutter clicks.

The area was familiar to him from his days riding patrol in Hollywood Division: a trash-strewn corridor hemmed in on one side by commercial property, on the other by chain-link and pickets, cracked yards and lopsided parking pads. Yellow evidence markers flourished like an invasive species.

He kept going until he found what he’d dreaded and craved: a close-up of the boy.

A neat hole drilled in the center of the forehead. Crimson ribbons unfurled over his eye sockets, along the bridge of his nose, over his cheeks and his baby-fat double chin, throat shortened by the skeptical bend of his head, tugged down by gravity. His T-shirt collar, dyed red. He was dressed for activity, jeans and shoes with Velcro straps. His hands were folded in his lap.

I know a dead kid when I see one.

His eyes were wide open, making him appear polite and weirdly attentive. Jacob shuddered and shuffled rapidly to the next victim.

The fifty-gallon can used to prop Marquessa Duvall’s body had been dragged there for that purpose; a group of identical cans lived down at the other end of the alley, behind a bakery. He pictured the killer struggling to keep her dead weight from toppling over, growing more and more irritated. The boy had been simpler; once wedged, his tiny frame stayed put. His mother had a large bust and a slim waist. She flopped around. Even in death, she wouldn’t cooperate.

Like her son, she had a single gunshot wound to the forehead. It was easier for Jacob to estimate its size relative to an adult face. Small-caliber, probably.22 or nine-mil.

Her eyes were also open, and a medium-angle shot showed what he’d already inferred. Mother and child had been positioned as though staring at each other from across the alley, engrossed in a conversation never to take place.

It was this photo that Bina had gotten her hands on.

Of course it upset her. It was an atrocity.

Had context heightened the effect? She was sitting with her own son.

Wouldn’t that be nice to think.

Someone was home, after all.

Sick, but nice.

He cycled through the stack twice more, searching for a trigger that might’ve led to the mashed potato sculpture. Dead bird, bird necklace, bird earrings, bird graffiti.

Nothing.

He checked the evidence log.

Candy wrappers.

Malt liquor bottles.

Cigarette butts by the score.

No shell casings.

No birds.

He was overanalyzing. The picture had freaked her out, and she’d resorted to the only form of self-soothing she knew: making something with her hands. As to her inspiration, who could say? Maybe a bird lived in the fig tree. Maybe she wanted chicken instead of meatloaf. You couldn’t question an artist, certainly not a catatonic one.

He decided to wipe his mind of preconceptions, approach the case like any other.

Approach? Like it belonged to him?

Mallick’s pronouncement rang loud in his head.

You’re not going to solve them. They’re hopeless.

Aren’t we all.

Jacob went back to the beginning.

The first D assigned was a guy named Dan Ballard. His signature appeared on the reports until mid-2007, when a woman named Theresa Krikorian took over. For three years, she worked Ballard’s leads and developed a couple of her own.

Then the paper trail dried up.

From what Jacob could piece together, there’d been no traction since. He did register the likelihood of stray documentation floating around in the system, lost on a hard drive or a shelf or a desk drawer.

He looked up Ballard, got an obituary.

He looked up Theresa Krikorian. Got another.

He could understand why cops would shy away from the case: it had already claimed two of them.

Dan Ballard had suffered a golf course heart attack.

Theresa Krikorian’s family had established a fund in her memory, cancer research.

Killed in the line of duty could mean a lot of things.

Too many desk lunches. Too much nicotine.

Jacob drank to their memories, plunged back into the short lives of Marquessa Duvall and Thomas White Jr.

Single working mother, her Culver City address a good nine miles from the dump site. Based on the absence of spatter or pooling, it appeared that the murders had gone down elsewhere, the bodies transferred to the alley.

On the questions of where elsewhere and why transferred, the file was mute.

Ballard described Marquessa’s job as “hostess.” Attach the right modifier and you came up with any number of activities ranging from banal to seedy.

Restaurant hostess? Hospitality hostess? Game show hostess?

I’ll take Double Homicides for eight, Alex.

Maybe hostess meant hooker — a bit of respectful whitewashing on the D’s part. Jacob hoped not. Euphemisms did no favors to anyone, least of all the victim. Anyway, Ballard’s writing showed the hallmarks of a linear thinker.

Jacob returned to the close-up of Marquessa’s face. Death didn’t improve one’s appearance, and it was hard to look good with an extra hole in your face. But he could tell how beautiful she’d been. Lips, a coy invitation; waved hair, lush and streaked like macassar ebony.

He found himself searching for his reflection in her eyes. They were that big and dark and naïve.

And wrong. He couldn’t pinpoint it.

He compared close-ups of both victims. Wide, wide open. Like there were invisible toothpicks stuck between the lids.

He dug out the autopsy report, which put Marquessa Duvall’s time of death between ten p.m. and two a.m. — at least three hours prior to discovery.

Cause of death: gunshot wound to the head.

Lacerations to the right forearm and bruising of the right thigh.

No indication of sexual assault.

On a separate pathology page, he saw an enlarged facial diagram, arrows pointing to the eyes. A text box explained.

Victim’s upper and lower eyelids

Jacob took a strong pull of bourbon before forcing himself to continue.

Victim’s upper and lower eyelids were removed bilaterally with a sharp instrument. The precision of the cut and lack of cutaneous bleeding suggests mutilation took place postmortem. Search of the crime scene failed to recover the excised tissue.

The boy had been identically savaged.

Jacob went to the kitchen and stuck his head inside the fridge, lungs prickling. He had seen and could not unsee; and he felt sick all over again, imagining the trauma he’d unleashed on Bina, the horrors caroming around her hobbled brain.

The phone rang. The caller ID announced, “Lev, Samuel.”

Jacob glanced at the microwave. Five-thirty a.m. For his father to call on a Saturday meant it was bad. Not many things overrode the Sabbath. Human life was one of them.

“Lev, Samuel.”

If there was a true emergency, Rosario would have let him know.

The machine answered on the fourth ring. His father’s voice came on.

“Jacob.” He sounded calm. “Son. Please pick up.”

Jacob wanted to. He missed his father, missed his complex, sometimes tortured logic. Sam was a Talmudist to the core, able to mine value from any idea, regardless of how bizarre it seemed on the surface. Jacob admired him for that.

He hated him for it.

“I don’t want you to worry,” Sam said, “but I got a call from the facility—”

Jacob disconnected the line.

He texted Rosario.

ok?

Her response came quickly. doc says shes fine

So why had Sam called?

As if she sensed the question, Rosario added two more lines.

i spoke to ur dad

he wants to talk to u

Good for him.

thanks he typed. keep me updated

of course

Sleep was now out of the question. Jacob took a quick shower, drank a cup of coffee, and officially kicked off his weekend.