Jonathan Kellerman - The Murderer's Daughter

Fresh-baked croissant, the aroma was wonderful. Set neatly on waxed paper in a small cardboard box. A bakery called Chez something.

She said, “Thanks but I’m really not hungry.”

“Tsk,” said One-Eye. “Save it for later.”

“It’s okay, enjoy.” She began to rise.

The bent old man said, “Why are you studying that hellhole?”

“What hellhole?”

He pointed to the condemned building. “The boondoggle, the scama-rama, the suck-on-the-public-teat extravaganza. You’ve been watching it since you got here. Or am I mistaken?”

“It’s a con, huh?”

“May I?” He pointed to the bench.

Grace shrugged.

“Not much of a welcome,” said the little man, “but beggars-choosers-and-such.” He plopped down as far from her as possible, got to work on the croissant, nibbling daintily and constantly brushing away crumbs.

A fastidious bum. His shoes were battered wingtips, resoled countless times.

When he finished eating, he said, “What was your major? You did go to college?”

“I did.”

“Here?”

“No.”

“What did you study?”

Why bother lying? “Psychology.”

“Then you know about the Hebbian synapse, Friedrich August von Hayek.”

Grace shook her head.

“Kids today.” One-Eye laughed. “If I told you I studied economics with Hayek, you wouldn’t believe me so I won’t waste my breath.”

“Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

“Well, I did, daughter,” he said, grinning. Intent on a monologue. “Had no problem with the man’s accent — Friedrich the Great. Though others did. Try to disprove that fact of nature, daughter, and you’ll come out on the losing end, I’m telling you nothing but truth. You may be cagey about your alleged education but I have nothing to hide. I took courses in a swirl of eclecticism down in La La Land, the sixties, before Leary and Laing made madness socially acceptable.”

He tapped his own head. “Born too early, by then they were talking to me in here, forcing me to ignore them. I eschewed food and water for stretches, I went without female companionship for a century, I traversed campus wearing paper bags on my feet and avoiding the I Ching. Despite a closet full of haberdashery and an Anglican mother. Nevertheless, I learned my social science.”

He waited. Grace said nothing. “Oh, bosh,” he finally said. “ Ook- la. Palm trees and pedagogy?”

Grace stared.

One-Eye exhaled in frustration. “Ookla? Numero Two campus? Predicated on this place being Uno.”

It took a moment for Grace to decode that. “UCLA.”

“Finally! Sí, sí, the wilds of Westwood, back before the hippies and the libertines took over. Before everyone talked about social justice but no one did anything about it. More like so -called justice. Or should I say So Cal justice and we all know about the morality of manipulative movie moguls.”

A withered hand gestured toward the construction site. “Case in point. Green. Ha. So is snot.”

“You don’t approve.”

“It’s not up to me to approve, daughter, the die is cast.”

“For the project.”

He shifted closer to her, brushed away nonexistent crumbs. “It’s perfidy grounded in hypocrisy, mendacity, and two-facedness. The prior owner of that rather homely pile of mud was a villain who had the good graces to die but also the poor judgment to sire a second-generation villain who trumpets social justice and greases the palms of forward- leaning politicians. Same old story, no? Caligula, Putin, Aaron Burr, name any petty alderman of Chicago at random.”

“Politics corrupts—”

“Think about it, daughter: You inherit a decrepit pile of bricks, what should you do with it... hmm, shall I ponder — I know, let’s sell it to the city at an inflated price then propose a snot-green project to build cubicles for yet more bureaucrats and manage to insinuate ourself as the builder.”

Now Grace was on full alert. “One-stop shopping, huh? Doesn’t look as if much has been done.”

He frowned. “Was a time a man could find refuge in there.”

“In the building?”

Three hard nods. “Was a time.”

So the place had served as a squat. Grace said, “When did that stop?”

“When the family tradition recommenced.”

“What tradition?”

“Have you not been paying attention?”

Grace shot him a helpless look.

He said, “All right, I’ll slow down and enunciate — where did you say you went to college?”

Grace said, “Boston U.”

“Not Harvard-grade, eh? All right, you’re too young to remember this but once upon a time an unpleasant shifting of tectonic plates wrought devastation upon the land upon which we now sit. Bridges crumbled, a baseball game was interrupted, and if that’s not spitting in the eyes of all that is patriotic and sacred, I don’t know what is—”

“The Loma Prieta quake.”

The old man’s single functional eye widened. “A student of history. At BU, no less.”

Grace said, “It’s not exactly ancient history.”

“Daughter, nowadays anything prior to five minutes ago is ancient. Including the messages transferred into here by the powers that be.” Tapping his forehead again.

He stood, smoothed his trousers, sat back down. “So... the plates shifted and the dishes shattered. Heh heh! Then the second disaster ensued, villains profiteering as they always do when collectivism and the collective unconscious collude to triumph over the will of man and by man I mean both sexes so please no whinnying about sexism, daughter.”

Grace looked at the construction site. “The people involved with that profiteered from the quake?”

“Insurance,” he said. “Essentially, a game of chance with infrequent payoffs. But even in Vegas machines pay off occasionally.”

“They didn’t.”

He crooked a thumb in the direction of the high school. “The young are essentially unsocialized savages, correct? Lords, flies, et cetera, if anyone should qualify for capital punishment it’s fourteen-year-olds. But one villain easily sniffs out another and those Fly Lords were entrusted with the task of pressuring the common folk not to pursue recompense.”

“The guy in charge of that project hired students to intimidate—”

“They might as well have worn suicide vests. These were terrorists, nothing more, nothing less, and they enabled the villain to buy up distressed properties for an off-key song and sell them back to the you-know-who.”

“The government,” said Grace.

“Agency A, Agency B, Agency Zeta — that one implanted an iridium electrode right here and attempted to convert me to Islam.” He tapped his right temple. “Fortunately, I caught on and managed to deactivate it.”

He yawned, dropped his head, began snoring.

Grace said, “Nice talking to you.”

She was a few yards away when he said, “Anytime.”

Okay, so now she had a confirming source.

Psychotic to be sure, but with enough occasional lucidity — and premorbid intelligence — to take seriously.

She found a moderately busy Internet café farther up on Center Street, brought a latte and a bagel she had no intention of eating to a corner booth. One sip later, sitting among students and those pretending to be students, she’d logged onto the wide wide world of random knowledge.

Municipal green workspace pulled up a dozen hits, mostly government documents composed in agency doublespeak. After wading through a few choice sections, Grace got the gist: The construction project had moved quickly through numerous city and state committees and subcommittees, received approval a little over a year ago, with the contract awarded on the basis of “specialized bidding contingency” to DRL-Earthmove, Inc., of Berkeley, California.