But Lisa changes her mind, resists, shuts him down.
Ramsey seethes, feels like slugging her. But remembering the way she went public, he keeps his rage to himself.
Stays cool, drives her home.
Malibu to Doheny Drive Hills would mean Pacific Coast Highway to Sunset or the freeway through the Valley, then down one of the canyons. But instead of hooking south, he continues east, maybe Laurel Canyon down Hollywood Boulevard, up Western to Los Feliz, then over to Griffith Park.
That hour, not much traffic. He drives to the parking lot. Lisa knows something’s wrong, tries to escape.
He holds out for one last embrace.
Then a steel kiss.
No sexual assault, because he’d had a blood orgasm.
It felt right to Petra.
It also depended on Gregory Balch lying straight-facedly about Ramsey’s alibi.
She’d have to learn more about Balch, too. Eventually.
Along with Ilse Eggermann and Karlheinz Lauch. A similar-unbelievable. She imagined Schoelkopf’s grin, the disgusted look on Stu’s face. When she’d left, he hadn’t looked up, just muttered a halfhearted good-bye.
The library-book thing, so out of the blue. Stu was compulsive, mega-organized. Maybe it wasn’t his marriage; maybe it was career anxiety-the chance to apply for lieutenant suddenly coming up and he found himself stuck with a big-time loser whodunit? For Petra, just another case. For him, do or die?
Would he bail on her? Sacrifice her if he needed to?
For eight months, they’d ridden together, eaten together, worked side by side, Stu spending as much time with her as he did with Kathy, sometimes more, and he’d never laid a hand on her, never made a suggestive comment, not even the slightest hint of double entendre.
She’d thought she knew him, but eight months wasn’t very long, was it?
She and Nick had been together over two years. About the same as Lisa and Ramsey.
Men and women…
Once, when she was fifteen, home for summer vacation, she’d woken up at 1 A.M. on a long night in Arizona, hearing imaginary things, finally realizing it was the hot desert wind scraping the side of the house. Itchy, jumpy, she’d walked out to the hallway, spied the familiar splinter of light under the door of her father’s office, knocked, entered the tiny, dim, detritus-clogged room.
Dad was sitting low in his oak chair facing his Royal manual, blank sheet in the roller. He saw her, gave a slack smile, and when she came closer, she smelled the Scotch on his breath, saw the dullness in his eyes, and took advantage of it as only a teenager can. Getting him to talk about what he hated talking about-the woman who’d died birthing her.
Aware that it would cause him pain, but damnit, she had a right to know!
And talk he did, in a low, slurred voice.
Anecdotes, remembrances, how gawky Kenneth Connor and gorgeous Maureen McIlwaine had met on the Long Island Ferry and found true love. The same old stories, but she thirsted for them, could never get enough.
That night she sat at his feet on the warped hardwood floor, motionless, silent, afraid any distraction would cause him to stop.
Finally, he did grow quiet, staring down at her, then slapping his hands over his face and holding them there.
“Daddy-”
The hands dropped into his lap. He looked so sad. “That’s all I remember, sweetheart. Mother was a wonderful woman, but…”
Then he began crying, and had to hide from her again.
Men hid when they cried.
Petra came over and hugged his broad, bony shoulders. “Oh, Daddy, I’m so-”
“She was wonderful, baby. One in a million, but it wasn’t perfect, Pet. It was no storybook situation.”
He opened a desk drawer and peered down at what had to be the bottle.
When he turned back to Petra, his eyes were dry and he was smiling, but it wasn’t any of the smiles Petra knew-not the warm, protective one or the wry, sarcastic one or even the soft-around-the-edges drunk one that used to bother her but no longer did.
This was different-flat, hollow, frozen as statuary. In her tenth grade English class they had learned about tragedy, and she was sure this was it.
Defeated, that smile. As terrifying as a glimpse of eternity.
“Daddy…”
He scratched his scalp, shook his head, hiked a droopy sock up a pale ankle. “The thing is, Pet, no matter what… I guess what I’m saying, sweetheart, is men and women are really two separate species. Maybe that’s the anthropology talking, but it’s no less true. One little scrap of DNA separates us-here’s something funny: The X chromosome’s really the one that counts, Petra. The Y doesn’t seem to do much but cause problems-aggression- understand what I’m getting at, sweetheart? We men aren’t really worth that much.”
“Oh, Daddy-”
“Mom and I had our problems. Most were my fault. You need to know that so you don’t romanticize things, expect too much out of… demand too much from yourself. Understand, baby? Am I making sense here?”
Taking hold of her shoulders, the light in his eyes almost maniacal.
“You are, Daddy. Yes.”
He let go. Now the smile was okay. Human.
“The point is, Petra, there are big questions out there, cosmic questions that have nothing to do with stars and galaxies.”
Waited for her response. She didn’t know what to say and he went on:
“Questions like, can men and women ever really know each other or is it always going to be one stupid, clumsy dance around the interpersonal ballroom?”
He flinched, suppressed a belch, sprang up, went into his bedroom, and closed the door, and she could hear the latch turn and knew he’d locked himself in.
The next morning her brother Glenn, the only one still living at home, got to the breakfast table first and said, “What’s with Dad?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s gone, went out on a field trip, must have been before sunrise. Left me this.” Waving a piece of notebook paper that said, Out to the desert, kids.
“Just one of his bone hunts,” said Petra.
Glenn said, “Well, he took his camping stuff-that means a long one. Did he mention anything to you? ’Cause yesterday we were talking about going over to the Big Five and getting some hockey stuff.”
“Actually, he did,” she lied.
“Great,” said Glenn. “That’s just great. He tells you but never mentions it to me.”
“I’m sure he meant to, Glenn.”
“Yeah, right, great-fuck, I really need a new stick. Do you have any money I can borrow?”
She phoned seven more detectives, endured seven more you’ve-got-to-be-kiddings, no more similars.
From the far end of the room, the fax machine started humming and she jumped up and was there in a second, snatching papers out of the bin. Moving so quickly, a couple of the other D’s looked up. But not for long; they were busy, too. This room, this city-the blood never stopped.
Karlheinz Lauch was big-six-foot-four-and ugly. Small, dark, squinty eyes popped like raisins in a pasty, misshapen crepe of a face. The merest comma of a lopsided mouth, a mustache that looked like a grease squirt. Straight, fair hair-the stats called it brown, so probably dishwater-styled in that modified shag some Europeans still wore.
To Petra, he appeared a grubby loser.
The photo was from a four-year-old Vienna mug shot, lots of fifty-letter German words and umlauts. Sorensen’s typed note said Lauch had been busted for assault in Austria the year before Ilse Eggermann’s murder-
