Jonathan Kellerman - A Cold Heart

“So now we’ve got a diagnosis,” he said. “But no patient.”

“Tentative diagnosis. The advisor also said Kevin felt strongly that commercial success and quality were incompatible. By itself that means little- he termed it dorm-room doctrine, and he’s right. But most college students move past dorm life and develop autonomy. Kevin doesn’t seem to have made big strides in that direction.”

“Arrested development… success is corrupt, so nip it in the bud. Meanwhile, no sign of him, and it’s looking more and more as if he’s rabbited. Petra says Stahl’s been on the apartment like a rash, hasn’t caught a glimpse of the guy. I’m putting a BOLO on Drummond’s Honda but without declaring him an official suspect, it’ll be prioritized at the bottom of the basket.”

“Despite the missing car, it’s possible Drummond’s holed up in his apartment,” I said. “A loner like that, some canned soup and a laser printer could sustain him for a while. Has Stahl checked?”

“He had the landlady knock. No answer, no sounds of movement on the other side of the door. Stahl thought of having her use her master key- go in on pretense of a gas leak, whatever. But he thought better of it, called Petra, she called me, and we all decided to wait. Just in case a search does pull up something serious. Kevin’s daddy is a lawyer. We ever bust the kid, he’s gonna be represented by a shark, no sense jumping the gun and risking an evidentiary mess. Just to make sure, I had a chat with an assistant D.A. who leans toward permissive about grounds for warrants. She listened to what I had, asked me if I was taking my routine to open-mike night at the Comedy Store.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Stahl keeps watching, and Petra continues checking out Hollywood spots, clubs, alternative bookstores, to see if anyone knows Kevin. I’m going over the file on Julie Kipper to see if there’s anything I missed. I also called Fiorelle in Cambridge and suggested he scour hotel registers for Drummond. He said he’d try, but that was a lot to ask for.”

“One more thing,” I said. “I spoke to Christian Bangsley, China Maranga’s other living band mate. He says China was certain someone was stalking her.” I recounted the incident near the Hollywood sign. “It made her angry, not frightened. The night she disappeared, she was enraged at the band. Throw in drugs and her aggressive personality, and it could add up to a volatile situation.”

“With a guy like Kevin.”

“With any wrong guy. China being buried near the sign is consistent with a stalker. She had a thing for the sign, went up there regularly. Someone watched her, learned her patterns. Maybe she wasn’t picked up walking the streets. Maybe she chose that night to hike, was followed and ambushed. Bangsley said when she screamed, no one heard. Up there in the hills, the sound of a struggle would be muted.”

“What kind of thing did she have for the sign?”

“The story of that starlet flinging herself to her death appealed to her.”

“Unfulfilled dreams,” he said. “Sounds like she and Drummond would’ve had some common ground.”

“Sure,” I said. “Until they didn’t.”

After a futile double shift combing Hollywood for someone who recognized Kevin Drummond, Petra went to bed at 3 A.M., got up at nine, and did phone work from her apartment, lying in bed, hair pinned, still in her T-shirt and panties.

Milo had filled her in on Alex’s visit to Drummond’s college. Drummond’s professor’s description, firming up the profile.

Your basic loner; big shock.

One heck of a loner- not a single club owner or bouncer or patron or bookstore employee remembered his face.

The only people she found who responded to Drummond’s DMV photo at all, were the owner of a Laundromat within two blocks of Drummond’s apartment and the clerk at a nearby 7-Eleven who thought, yeah, maybe the guy came in there and bought stuff from time to time.

“What kind of stuff?”

“Maybe Slim Jims?” The clerk was a skinhead with a vulnerable face who reacted with the edgy eagerness of a game show contestant.

“Maybe?” said Petra.

“Maybe pork rinds?”

The Laundromat owner was a Chinese man who barely spoke English and smiled a lot. All Petra could get from him was “Yeah, mebbe wash.” She resisted the impulse to ask if Drummond had rinse-cycled a load of bloody duds, trudged back to her car, and returned to the station, where she decided to work Drummond’s pen names.

No chance Faithful Scriveners would be in the system, but she found plenty of felonious E. Murphys. Too late to deal with it at this hour, so she put it off for tomorrow.

Now, here she was all comfy and beddy-bye, working the phones.

Two hours later: none of the E. Murphys looked promising.

She located Henry Gilwhite, the transsexual-murdering husband of obnoxious Olive, the POB lady, and by 12:35 P.M. she knew that Gilwhite had begun his sentence at the state penitentiary at San Quentin only to be transferred to Chino within a year. A three-minute conversation with an assistant warden told her why.

She thanked the A. W., brewed coffee, ate a hollowed-out bagel, showered, dressed, drove to Hollywood.

She found a parking space in the strip-mall lot that afforded a clean view of the mail drop. A few scuzzy types entered and exited, then nothing for ten minutes. Petra made a smiling entrance and earned a brown-lidded glare from Olive.

“Hi, there, Mrs. Gilwhite. Heard from Henry, recently?”

Olive went scarlet, the splotches on her face knitting into a rosaceous mask. “You.”

Never had a pronoun sounded more hostile.

“Have you?” said Petra.

Olive mumbled something foul under her breath.

Petra put her hands in her pockets and stepped closer to the counter. Rolls of stamps sat at Olive’s dimpled elbow. She snatched them up and turned her back on Petra.

“Nice for you that Henry got transferred, Olive. Chino’s a lot closer than San Quentin, easier to visit. And you do get there regularly. Every two weeks, like clockwork. So how’s he doing? The old blood pressure under control?”

Olive half turned, revealing a flabby profile. Her lips bunched, as if gathering spit. “What’s it to you?”

“Chino’s a lot safer, too,” said Petra. “What with Armando Guzman, a cousin of Henry’s victim incarcerated at Quentin and being a big deal in the Vatos Locos gang. Turns out, there’s a large contingent of V.L.s in Quentin, but only a few at Chino, so it’s easier to segregate someone like Henry. What they tell me, though, is that Chino’s getting overcrowded. Situation like that, you can never tell when things are going to change.”

Olive wheeled around. Pale. “You can’t .” Hostility had been sucked from her voice, replaced by a nerve-scratching whine.

Petra smiled.

Olive Gilwhite’s cheeks fluttered. The peroxide thatch above her drinker’s face thrummed. Living with this harridan must’ve been fun for Henry. Then again, there were always trannies available for back-alley trysts.

Olive Gilwhite said, “You can’t.”

“The thing is,” said Petra, “Henry being a convicted murderer, even at his age, even with the hypertension, he’s not going to garner much sympathy from the prison administration. The fact that he’s refused any psychological counseling isn’t helping him in the brownie-points department, either. Stubborn fellow, your Henry.”

Olive picked at the platinum bird’s nest. “What do you want ?”

“Box 248. What do you remember?”

“A loser,” said Olive. “Okay? Like all of them. What the hell kinda clientele you think I deal with? Movie stars?”