“The two killings in Chicago,” I asked. “Were they consecutive?”
“Could you straighten the assemblage please? Up a bit on the right. I was wondering when you’d ask that. Yes, they were. So were the two in New Orleans. So you see the pattern.”
“He’s going to do it again here.”
“In two to three weeks,” he said. “If the pattern holds.”
“Will it?”
“That’s another reason I wish I were back working with the cops,” Schultz said fretfully. “These patterns always hold.”
12 ~ Robert and Alan
“A serial killer?” Christy Nordine asked. “Max?”
“It changes things,” I said. We were in the living room of a small house just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, not far from Max’s place. Robert and Alan, whose guest Christy was, had met me at the door. Robert, about fifty, had graying hair combed straight back and wore a blue linen leisure suit. A silver fish silhouette, the old Christian symbol, hung from a chain around his neck. Alan, ten or twelve years younger, favored Ivy League, complete to a little buckle at the back of his chinos, a fashion touch I hadn’t seen in decades, and no evident religious affiliation. They’d set out a plate of crudites and an ice bucket full of bottled mineral water and withdrawn to the back of the house, looking domestic and worried.
“What does it change?” Nordine challenged, settling into a wooden captain’s chair.
The captain’s chair was of a piece with its surroundings, which might have been one of my mother’s numerous living rooms. Cherrywood furniture, imitation Early American, gleamed on hooked rugs. Two English Toby mugs, gap-toothed, weather-beaten old sailors with a cheery alcoholic flush on their cheeks, grinned at each other from opposite ends of the wooden mantel. Between them was a small coven of black cats cut from paper, their backs arched in fear or fury, the first Halloween decorations I’d seen. A pinlight picked out what might have been a real Grandma Moses above the mantel, and a grandfather clock ticked slowly next to the front door. The smell of Lemon Pledge everywhere. We could have been in Grand Rapids.
I gave the crudites a fish-eye. I’d come direct from Schultz’s office, and I hadn’t eaten in what seemed like weeks. “It makes it tougher. Before, I was looking for someone who might conceivably have been in Max’s circle of acquaintances for some time, who might have left footprints all over the place. This is someone who floated in from nowhere and doesn’t know anyone, and now he’s going to float out again.”
Nordine’s mouth set into a straight line that put vertical creases in both cheeks. “He still killed Max,” he said. Despite the strain he’d been under, he looked more rested than I’d ever seen him. Alan and Robert were taking good care of him.
I spread my hands. “It’s a different kind of animal.”
“If you’re worried about money-”
“I’m not.”
“-I’ve got a small pile of it.”
“Glad to hear it, but that’s not the point.”
“Well, what is the point?”
“I’m reporting to you,” I said. “That’s part of my job.”
He sat back as far as the chair would allow, and three or four emotions staged an argument over possession of his face. Relief won. “You’re not quitting?”
“I’m telling you that things have changed, that’s all. So far, I’ve checked out the places Max went, talked to the people he knew. All routine. All of it aimed at finding a hypothetical somebody from this community who got next to Max, probably in view of several people, and then killed him. The premise I’ve been operating on, if you can call something this thin a premise, is that the murder was spontaneous. At some point in the relationship or whatever it was, the killer decided that he could get more out of Max dead than alive, and he killed him. Up to that point, he had no reason to be particularly secretive. But this guy-the guy we’re dealing with now-intended to kill Max from the beginning. He didn’t let a lot of people see him. And he’s not going to hang around, going through the motions of a normal life, because he doesn’t have a normal life, at least not in Los Angeles.”
“You said he was going to kill someone else here.”
“I said that he’d followed that pattern in the past.”
“ ‘In a few weeks,’ you said.” Nordine’s stubborn mode was becoming very familiar.
“If the pattern holds.”
“Well, then,” he said, as though everything was settled.
“It may not be in West Hollywood,” I said.
“Of course it’ll be in West Hollywood. Why would he go anywhere else?”
There were a dozen reasons he might go somewhere else, but I didn’t think they’d hold Christy’s attention, and I needed all of it. “I want you to go to the cops,” I said.
That caught him by surprise. He opened his mouth and closed it. Then he swallowed. “You’re joking.”
“Take a lawyer. Take two, if you’ve got a pile of money somewhere. I know a reporter on the L.A. Times you can talk to before you go in. Hell, she’d probably go with you. Even Spurrier isn’t going to pound on you with the media watching.”
He considered it and changed the subject slightly. “They’re already watching.”
“Come again?”
“I told you they would be. Haven’t you seen the paper?”
“I don’t get one.”
“Hold on.” He got up and went into the back of the house, and I heard Alan’s inquiring voice before Christy reappeared with a folded copy of the Times in his hand.
MURDERED MAN WAS TV STAR read the headline. Bottom right corner of page one. Not bad for a gay murder; the Times is so conservative on some issues as to be fundamentalist.
A West Hollywood man who was murdered on Tuesday was a popular television star in the 1950s, the story began. Max Grover, 77, who was brutally beaten to death in his home by an unknown assailant, starred in a top- rated series, Tarnished Star, under the name Rick Hawke.
“They finally woke up,” I said. Nothing about the mutilation, nothing yet about the serial angle.
“Well,” Christy said, the soul of reason, “Max kept it pretty quiet.”
“All the more cause for you to talk to a reporter before you go in.”
Reason went out the window and truculence came in. “I’m not going in.”
“Shush,” I said. I’d seen a name toward the bottom of the story.
Grover’s longtime agent, Ferris Hanks, told the Times that Grover had lived quietly since abandoning his career toward the end of the fifties. “Max could have been a major star,” Hanks said. “He was a great talent. When he quit, he could have had his pick of the networks.”
“Ferris Hanks,” I said.
“Oh, how Max loathed that man,” Christy said. “Said he was inverse proof that the good die young. Eighty- two-he says — and still doing mischief.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“ Meet him? We wouldn’t go near him.”
“Before Max, I mean.”
“Of course not. Hardly my circle.”
“But Max talked about him.”
“Like you’d talk about an operation you once had. And he called a couple of times.”
“What about?”
