Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Hollywood

Each sip blunted his headache fractionally, and he began to think of Mai.

It was raining weirdos.

He killed the drink and killed its twin and had a seat at his new desk.

Opening up the browser, he plugged in a query. The computer was indeed responsive.

Commander Michael Mallick had a handsome wife and two handsome daughters.

He was an alumnus of Pepperdine University, class of ’72.

The final standings of several amateur golf tournaments suggested that he ought to consider taking up tennis.

File photos had him talking to reporters, announcing the arrest of a local terrorist cell plotting to bomb the office of a state congressman.

So maybe Jacob was after a Jewish terrorist, after all.

The idea embarrassed him. His people. Collective responsibility.

How long did you have to be on your own before they ceased to be your people?

Anyhow, how would Mallick know who the bad guy was?

And if he did know, why hadn’t he told Jacob?

Questions are good.

But for a cop, answers were better, and Jacob had the unsettling thought that Mallick preferred to have him spinning his wheels.

A sensitive matter.

Protecting someone?

Maybe the whole thing really was revenge from Mendoza. Make Jacob look dumb, lower his clearance rate, keep him subservient.

He shook his head. He was getting paranoid.

He looked up Officer Chris Hammett in the PD directory. He dialed him on his personal cell. It wouldn’t go through. His home phone worked fine, though, and he used it to leave the officer a message — a small act of defiance, little better than a tantrum. They hadn’t explicitly forbade him from making calls on the landline, and moreover he assumed that they were listening in, as well.

He searched for Dr. Divya V. Das .

A native of Mumbai, a graduate of Madras Medical College. Her Facebook page was set to private. She’d done her doctorate at Columbia University.

The V stood for Vanhishikha .

He could squander the rest of the day on the Internet, reading about other people, and get no closer to closing his case. Murders weren’t solved by technology. They were solved by people, and persistence, and enough caffeine to disable a yeti.

The sat phone’s directory listed Michael Mallick, Divya Das, Subach, and Schott.

All the numbers you’ll need are preprogrammed.

In other words, no consults allowed. Jacob felt his headache returning.

As far as he could tell, the camera was a normal camera.

He opened the pleather binder.

Blank pages, his job to fill them.

But not empty, not completely. A tooth of paper peeked up from the rear slit pocket.

A check made out to him, written on departmental Special Account, signed by M. Mallick.

Ninety-seven thousand ninety-two dollars.

One year’s salary, before taxes.

Badly needing air, he stuffed the Discover card and the sat phone in his pockets and walked the four blocks to the 7-Eleven on Robertson and Airdrome.

Except for a year in Israel, another in Cambridge, and a brief, unsuccessful bid by Stacy to graft him to West Hollywood, Jacob had always lived within the same one-mile radius. Pico-Robertson was the hub of west L.A.’s Orthodox Jewish community. His current home was on the second floor of a dingbat, three blocks from the dingbat he’d lived in after college.

He sometimes felt like a dog tugging on its chain. He never did tug that hard, though; breaking free required energy he didn’t have.

In a sense, he was ripe for hush-hush undercover work. He lived an undercover life, walking familiar streets wearing a stranger’s face. Sometimes a childhood acquaintance would buttonhole him, wanting to catch up. He’d smile and oblige and move on, knowing what they’d be saying about him at lunch on Saturday.

You’ll never guess who I ran into.

He’s a what?

He married who?

Divorced?

Twice?

Oh.

We should have him over.

We should fix him up.

Steadily his childhood friends had filled their expected positions of prominence. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, people engaged in ambiguous “finance” activities. They married each other. They took out mortgages. They had robust, adorable children.

For this reason, it didn’t bother him that he’d devolved into a cliché: the hard-drinking loner cop. It didn’t bother him, because it wasn’t his cliché.

And even if he avoided the community, he felt comforted that it thrived.

Someone had faith, relieving him of the burden.

More important, he had his father to think of. Sam Lev would never leave, and by extension, neither would Jacob.

A reason for staying, and an excuse.

Their corner of the neighborhood had always been low-rent despite proximity to South Beverly Hills and Beverlywood, with their tony mini-mansions. His grade-school classmates engaged in an arms race over the latest Jordans or Reebok Pumps. Jacob got off-brand back-to-school Velcro specials, once a year, Memorial Day weekend. The Levs didn’t own a television until the Gulf War, when Sam bought a crappy black-and-white so they could keep count of the Scud missiles pelting Israel. As soon as the hostilities ended, the set went out on the lawn, for sale. Nobody wanted it. Jacob hauled it out with the trash.

The mere fact that he was an only child made him an outlier. Free-spirited, deeply pious, his parents had met and married relatively late in life, raising Jacob in a kind of intellectual and social bubble, without the large extended family that swaddled his peers. The grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins who made sure you were never, ever alone.

Jacob was often alone.

Now, pushing through the doors at 7-Eleven, he thought about his TV, disconnected and slumped on the sofa. His father would be thrilled.

The clerk greeted him by name. He did most of his shopping there.

Bachelor’s diet.

Bachelor cop’s diet. He needed to start living better.

He bought two hot dogs and four bottles of Jim Beam.

The clerk, whose name was Henry, shook his head as he scanned the liquor. “I say this as your friend. Go to Costco.”

“Duly noted,” Jacob said. He dug out his wallet, started to give Henry a twenty — then reconsidered and handed him the Discover card.

While he waited for it to ring up, he glanced at the ATM. He had the check in his wallet, too — he hadn’t wanted to leave it at home — and he smiled to himself, imagining the machine belching smoke and exploding as he tried to deposit a hundred grand at once.

“It’s not going through,” Henry said.

No limit, my ass. Jacob couldn’t pretend to be surprised. It was LAPD. Of course they’d use some company like Discover. He paid in cash, took his dinner, and left.

He made this trip five or more times a week, and his pace was carefully calibrated so that he’d finish the hot dogs right as he reached his building. Two blocks shy, his pocket began to buzz. He crammed the remaining fourth of the second dog in his mouth and fished the sat phone out, hoping for Officer Chris Hammett.

His father.

Jacob tried to quickly chew a too-big bite, coughing as he answered. “Hello?”

“Jacob? Are you all right?”

He swallowed, painfully. “Fine.”

“Is this a bad time?”

Jacob pounded his chest. “... no.”

“I can call back.”

“It’s fine, Abba. What’s up?”

“I wanted to invite you for Shabbos dinner.”

“This week?”

“Can you come?”

“Dunno. I might be busy.”

“Work?”

Jacob assumed that his lack of observance was a disappointment to his father, for whom working on the Sabbath was inconceivable. It was to Sam Lev’s credit that he’d never showed outward disapproval. On the contrary, he expressed a shy but morbid fascination with the terrible things Jacob related.