Jonathan Kellerman - Survival Of The Fittest

“Nothing in Irit's evidence bag?”

“No personal effects in Irit's evidence bag. Everything was returned to the parents and the evidence-room log lists no pocket contents of any kind.”

“Is returning clothes on an unsolved standard procedure?”

“No, but with no semen or body fluids or any other evidence, and Carmeli being a big shot, I can understand why it happened.” Pause. “Yeah, it's a screwup. But at this point I'd settle for a bad guy's lawyer jumping up and down on it.”

“Going to ask the Carmelis to look at the clothes?”

“Think it's worth it?”

“Probably not, but why risk another omission?”

“Yeah. I'll bring it up when I speak to the mother. Left a message with Carmeli respectfully requesting blah blah blah, but haven't heard back. For all I know the clothes have already been buried. Do Jews bury the clothing?”

“Don't know.”

“Whatever. Okay, I'll call you if anything interesting comes up. Thanks for listening, send me a bill.”

I set out for downtown, avoiding the freeway and taking Sunset. Wanting to feel the city from Bel Air to Skid Row. Entering Hospital Row made me think of my days at Western Pediatrics Hospital, my induction into a world of suffering and occasional redemption. Heroics, too. I thought of Guillermo Montez, saving all those lives in Asia, winning all those medals, now a janitor working a second job.

At Echo Park, L.A. became Latin America. Then the downtown skyline came into view behind a cloverleaf of highway, blue steel and white cement and the pure gold of reflective glass towers incising a curdled-milk sky.

Lehmann's Seventh Street office was in a lovely six-story limestone building, one of the older ones, in a circumscribed part of the district where pinstripe and Filofax predominated and the homeless and diseased were invisible.

I parked at a nearby pay-lot and walked over. The entire ground floor of the building was taken up by an insurance company with its own entrance. To the right was a separate foyer for the rest of the structure, generous and chilly, charcoal granite with gold deco trim, two gold-cage elevators, a tobacco-and-aftershave smell, a carved walnut reception desk with no one behind it.

The directory said floors 2 and 3 were occupied by a private bank called American Trust and the fourth by something called the City Club, accessed by private elevator key only. The rest of the tenants were investment firms, lawyers, accountants, and, on the top story, Roone Lehmann, Ph.D., listed as a “consultant.”

Unusual setting for therapy and Lehmann wasn't advertising that he was a psychologist.

For the sake of treatment-shy police officers and other reluctant patients?

One of the cages arrived and I rode up six flights. The corridor ceilings were high, white, ringed with garland molding; the hallways, oak-paneled and carpeted in maroon wool printed with tiny white stars. The office doors were oak, too, and identified by small silver plaques that had been buffed recently. Soft, characterless music flowed from invisible speakers. Hunting prints hung on the walls and fresh flowers in glass vases sat on oiled Pembroke tables every twenty feet. Far cry from the plain-wrap ambience of the Israeli consulate.

Lehmann's office was in a corner, neighbored by multiple-partner law firms. His name and degree on silver, again no occupation.

I tried the door. Locked. An illuminated button off to the right glowed ember-orange against the wood.

I pressed it and was buzzed immediately into a very small brown-walled anteroom furnished with two blue wingback chairs and a stiffly upholstered deep green Queen Anne sofa. A glass-topped chinoiserie coffee table bore The Wall Street Journal, the Times, and USA Today. Artless walls. Reluctant light from two overhead recessed spots. Another button on the inner door over a PLEASE RING IN sign.

Before I reached it, the door opened.

“Dr. Delaware? Dr. Lehmann.” The dry-mellow voice, more muted than it had been over the phone, almost sad.

I shook a soft hand and we studied each other. He was in his fifties, tall and round-shouldered and soft-looking, with shaggy white hair and thick, flattened features. Bushy eyebrows bore down on fatigued lids. Brown eyes worked their way through a squint.

He wore a double-breasted navy blazer with gold buttons, gray flannel slacks, white shirt, loosely knotted pink tie, white pocket square carelessly stuffed, black wing tips.

Rumpled-looking, though the clothes were perfectly pressed. And expensive. Cashmere blazer. Working buttonholes on the cuffs said hand-tailored. Single-needle stitching on the shirt collar. The tie was silk mesh.

He motioned me in. The rest of the suite consisted of a small walnut-paneled bathroom and a huge butter-yellow office with a high, molded ceiling and distressed herringbone oak flooring that had lifted in places. A frayed blue Persian rug that looked very old spread diagonally over the wood. Two more blue wingbacks and a filigreed silver table formed a conversational area at the rear of the room. Between them and the desk was an empty expanse of rug, then a pair of black tweed armchairs closer to a massive cherrywood desk.

Two Victorian mahogany bookshelves were crowded with volumes but the glass doors to the cases spat back glare from a pair of windows, obscuring the titles. The windows were narrow and high, cut at the outer corners by ruby velvet pull-back drapes, offering rectangles of city view.

Great view. A newer building would have offered a full wall of transparency. When this one was built, the vista had probably been smokestacks and beanfields.

The yellow walls were silk. No credentials, no diplomas. Nothing that identified the purpose of the office.

Lehmann motioned me to take one of the black armchairs and sank behind the cherry desk. The top was green leather with gold-tooled edges and on it were a brown calfskin folding blotter, silver inkwell, letter knife, and pen cup, and a curious-looking silver contraption with a flamboyantly engraved crenellated top. Envelopes extended from compartments. Probably some kind of message rack.

Lehmann ran his finger along the edge.

“Interesting piece,” I said.

“Document holder,” he said. “Georgian. It sat in British Parliament two hundred years ago. Repository for history. There's a hole at the bottom where it was screwed into the clark's desk so no one could make off with it.”

He used both hands to lift it and show me.

I said, “Found its way across the ocean, anyway.”

“Family piece,” he said, as if that explained it. Spreading his hands flat on the blotter, he looked at a thin gold watch. “Officer Dahl. It would help me to understand what you already know about him.”

“I've been told he was bright and mercurial,” I said. “Not your typical cop.”

“Cops can't be bright?”

“They can be and are. Helena- his sister- described him as someone who'd read Sartre and Camus. I may be stereotyping but that isn't what you generally think of as typical LAPD material. Though if you work extensively with the police, you'd know better.”

His hands flew upward and the palms drifted toward each other and touched silently.

“Each year, my practice brings fewer surprises, Dr. Delaware. Don't you find it harder to resist seeing patterns?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Did the department refer Nolan to you?”

Another pause. Nod.

“May I ask why?”

“The usual,” he said. “Adjustment problems. The work is extremely stressful.”

“What kinds of work problems was Nolan having?”

He licked his lips and white hair tumbled across his forehead. Pushing it away, he began playing with his pink tie, flicking the tip with a thumbnail, over and over.