Jonathan Kellerman - A Cold Heart

Visitor parking was easy and free. I picked up a campus map from a Take-One stand and made my way to the Anna Loring Slater Library. A good number of the handsome kids I passed were smiling. As if life tasted delicious, and they were ready for the next course.

The library was a two-story, twenties masterpiece with a mediocre, four-story, eighties addition tacked to its south wing. The ground floor was all hush and computer-click, a hundred or so students glued to their screens. I asked a librarian the name of the school paper and where I’d find back copies.

“The Daily Bobcat ,” he said. “Everything’s on-line.”

I found a computer station and logged on. The Bobcat file contained sixty-two years of back issues. For the first forty, the paper had been published as a weekly.

Kevin Drummond was twenty-four, meaning he’d probably enrolled six years ago. I backed up a year to be careful and set about scrolling thousands of pages and scanning bylines. Nothing with Drummond’s name on it showed up for the first three years. No pieces by Faithful Scrivener or E. Murphy, either. Then, in the March of what turned out to be Drummond’s junior spring semester, I got my first hit.

Kevin Drummond, Communications, had penned a review of a showcase at the Roxy on Sunset. Seven new bands doing their thing in hopes of a breakthrough. Thumbnail reviews of every act; Kevin Drummond had liked three, hated four. His prose was straightforward, uninspired, with none of the puffery or the sexual imagery of the SeldomScene pieces.

I found eleven more articles, spread out over a year and half, ten write-ups of rock acts, similarly bland.

The exception was interesting.

May of Drummond’s senior year. Faithful Scrivener byline. A retrospective look at the career of Baby Boy Lee.

This one, longer, gushing, termed Baby Boy, “a manifest icon, whose elephantoid shoulders may sag Atlassly under the ponderous mantle of Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jackson, the entire pantheon of Delta-Chicago-craw-aching royalty but whose soul is whole and will never be sold. Baby Boy deserves the weight and the pain of genius’s crushing burden. He is an artist with too much emotional integrity and psychopathology to ever achieve long-lasting popular acclaim.”

The essay ended by quoting lyrics from “the totemic, aorta-straining lament ‘A Cold Heart,’ “ and concluded that, “to a bluesman, the world will always be a coldhearted, unwelcoming, treacherous place. Nowhere does the adage ‘no gain without pain,’ apply more than in the noir universe of smoky bars, loose women, and sad endings that has fed the genius of every scurvied picker and addicted string-bender from time immemorial. Baby Boy Lee may never be a happy man, but his music, raw and vital and resolutely uncommercial, will continue to warm the hearts of many.’ “

A year later, Lee had put the lie to that thesis by sitting in on the sessions that produced Tic 439’s monster pop hit.

Cognitive dissonance, but on the face, not much of a motive for murder.

I needed to know more about Kevin Drummond.

Charter College’s Communications Department was housed in Frampton Hall, a majestic, Doric-columned affair, separated from the library by a five-minute stroll. Inside were worn mahogany walls, a domed ceiling, and cork floors that muted footsteps. The building also hosted the departments of English, History, Humanities, Women’s Studies, and Romance Languages. Communications shared the third floor with the latter two.

Three faculty members were listed on the directory: Professor E. G. Martin, Chair; Professor S. Santorini; Professor A. Gordon Shull.

Start at the top.

Chairperson Martin’s corner suite was fronted by an empty reception area. The door leading to an inner office was six inches ajar and a keyboard click-clack solo in the same key as the library sound track leaked into the anteroom. Sepia photos of Charter College in its infancy decorated the walls. Big, clean buildings dominating twiggy saplings; grim, celluloid-collared men and high-buttoned women with the resolute look of the heaven-sent. A sign above the nearest file spelled out the chair’s full name. ELIZABETH GALA MARTIN, PH.D.

I approached the inner office. “Professor Martin?”

A sentence worth of key-presses, then silence. “Yes?”

I stated my name and appended my academic appointment at the med school downtown and cracked the door another couple of inches.

Professorial.

A very dark black woman in a calf-length, topaz silk dress and matching pumps came around from her desk. She had cold-waved, hennaed hair, wore a string of pearls and matching earrings. Forty or so, plump, pretty, puzzled. Sharp licorice eyes above gold, half-moon glasses looked me over.

“Professor of pediatrics?” An alto that might have been mellow under other circumstances, sectioned each word into precise syllables. “I don’t recall any appointment.”

“I don’t have one,” I said, showing her my LAPD consultant ID. She came closer, read the small print, frowned.

“Police? What’s this all about?”

“Nothing alarming, but if you’d be kind enough to spare me a moment?”

She stepped back and appraised me again. “This is irregular, to say the least.”

“I apologize. I was doing research in your library, and your name came up. If you’d rather set up an appointment-”

“My name came up how?”

“As chair of Communications. I’m looking into one of your alumni. A man named Kevin Drummond.”

“You’re looking into him,” she said. “Meaning the police are.”

“Yes.”

“What, exactly, is Mr. Drummond suspected of?”

“Do you know him?”

“I know the name. We’re a small department. What has Mr. Drummond done?”

“Maybe nothing,” I said. “Maybe murder.”

Elizabeth G. Martin removed her glasses. Dull thumps sounded from the corridor. Shoes on cork. Youthful chatter crescendoed and diminished.

She said, “Let’s not stand out here.”

Her office was Persian-carpeted, book-lined, compulsively neat, with two walls of windows that looked out to luxuriant lawns. California impressionist landscapes, probably valuable, probably college-owned, hung wherever the bookshelves left off. Elizabeth Martin’s Berkeley Ph.D. and ten years of ensuing academic honors were heralded on the wall behind her carved, gilded-age, partner’s desk. On the desk were a smoke gray laptop and an assortment of crystal office niceties. A green marble fireplace hosted a rack of cold, scorched logs.

She sat down and motioned me to do the same. “What exactly is going on?”

I tried to be forthcoming with as few details as possible.

“Well, all that’s dandy, Professor Delaware, but there are First Amendment issues here, not to mention academic freedom and common courtesy. You don’t really expect to waltz in here and have us throw open our files simply because that would abet your investigation. Whatever it’s alleged to be.”

“I’m not interested in confidential information about Kevin Drummond. Just anything that might be relevant to a criminal investigation, such as disciplinary problems.”

Elizabeth Martin remained impassive.

I said, “We’re talking multiple murders. If Drummond turns out to be involved in criminal activities, that will become public. If he posed problems here, and Charter hushed it up, the college will be drawn in.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No,” I said. “Just a statement of how these things play themselves out.”

“Police consultant… your academic department’s comfortable with your activities? Do you keep them fully apprised?”

I smiled. “Is that a threat?”