The Golem of Hollywood (7 page)

U
p early, wired, Jacob hacked away at the keyboard, nursing a cup of spiked coffee and neglecting an Eggo waffle.

The murder house belonged to a trust, which belonged to another trust, which belonged to a holding company in the Cayman Islands, which belonged to a shell corporation in Dubai, which belonged to another holding company in Singapore, for which he found a number.

He calculated the time difference, debated whether there was any point calling in the middle of the night, decided it was worth a try to see if the number even worked.

A woman answered in accented English, and a tortuous series of questions revealed that he was speaking not to the holding company but to an answering service whose sole reason for being was to divert nosy callers from obtaining information about the holding company. He was in the midst of conjuring his most persuasive self when the sat phone jumped: Officer Chris Hammett.

Jacob hung up on Singapore without saying good-bye.

Hammett sounded young and bewildered. “Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, Detective. I was kind of—I got held up.”

“Not a problem. How're you doing?”

“Honestly?” Hammett exhaled. “Still kind of freaked out.”

“I don't blame you. I saw it.”

“I mean, seriously. That is some fucked-up shit.”

“No kidding. You mind telling me how it went down?”

“All right, well, I got up there about midnight—”

“Before that,” Jacob said. “Where were you when the call came in?”

“Down Cahuenga, near Franklin. Dispatch said they got a woman calling in to report something suspicious.”

“A woman?”

“That's what they told me.”

“What did they say?”

“Just that there was something needed attention at that address.”

“Name?”

“Nope. Said get someone to get on up there and check it out. I was closest.” Hammett paused. “I'll be straight with you, sir: it took me a while. The signs're for shit and I almost ran off the road. I didn't get there till maybe an hour later.”

Jacob's annoyance was tempered by sympathy as he imagined himself trying to find the house for the first time at night. “And when you did?”

“I didn't hear nothing or see anything out of the ordinary. The door was open a couple inches. I poked my head in and shined my light down the hall, and there it was.”

“The head.”

“Yes, sir.” Hammett described his search of the house and his discovery of the letters in the kitchen counter. “I called in and my captain had me send over a picture. I guess he must've kicked it up the chain, cause pretty soon after that, the crypt doctor showed up. She said she'd take it from there.”

“Anything else you think might be relevant?”

“No, sir. But—question for you?”

“Go ahead.”

“Is this, like, something I need to be concerned about?”

“How do you mean?”

“Yesterday when I came in the station there was some guys waiting to talk to me from some department I never heard of.”

“Special Projects,” Jacob said.

“That's the one.”

“Big guys.”

“Like, circus big.”

“Mel Subach. Or Paul Schott.”

“Actually, it was both of them. Schott did the talking, though. He took me aside and implied that it was in my interests to keep what I'd seen on the DL. That's why it took me a while to get back to you, sir. I didn't want to overreach. I called him up and asked about you and he said go ahead, just after that, pretend it never happened. Don't get me wrong, I can sit on it.”

“Thanks,” Jacob said. “You've been very helpful.”

“Anytime. I hope you get him.”

“Your mouth to God's ears,” said Jacob.

“Pardon me?”

“Have a nice day, Officer.”

—

J
ACOB
E
-
MAILED
M
ALLICK
to update him, adding that he was having trouble with the credit card he had been issued. He e-mailed 911 dispatch to request a copy of the call, got dressed, and headed down to his car. While backing out, he noticed that the window treatment van hadn't moved since yesterday evening.

—

B
Y
NINE
A
.
M
. he was back at the scene, walking the grounds with a topo map printed off Google. He'd brought his new camera. It had a nice hefty zoom lens, as close as he was going to get to the bottom of the canyon without a pickaxe and crampons and a whole lot of rope and determination.

He went inside the house to rephotograph it, starting with the letters burnt into the kitchen counter.

They were gone.

For a moment, he did not move. Then he turned around, thinking he'd misremembered their location.

The rest of the countertops were clean.

The original photos were on his personal cell—the useless one, back in his apartment. He estimated where the mark had been, bent close to inspect the spot, taking care not to touch it. He couldn't see evidence of sanding or scraping or erasing, not there or anywhere else.

Maybe Divya Das's swab had caused the mark to degrade. But that was only possible if it was superficial, and what he remembered seeing was incised into the surface of the wood. Restoring a perfectly even surface would require replacing the entire countertop.

Message delivered, they'd come back to remove the evidence?

He straightened up, acutely aware of the stillness.

He shut the camera off and put it in his pocket, drew the Glock, crept through the living room, the master, the studio.

Deserted.

Outside to recheck the perimeter.

He was alone.

He fetched his fingerprint kit out of the trunk of the Honda and went back to the kitchen. He snapped a host of photos of the now-pristine countertops, then dusted, coming up blank.

The good news was that if someone had been here doing renovations while he slept, Claire Mason's security system would have caught them. He left the house and drove back down the hill.

“You're back,” she squawked through her intercom.

“Couldn't stay away.”

The gate motor growled to life.

In daylight he could appreciate the scope of the property. It was an ode to human ingenuity, an oasis of modernity in that barren, prehistoric setting: three-car garage, electric blue pool, desert landscaping, weathered brick paths branching through terrain artificially gentled and
tufted. Stark steel I-beam sculpture, patinated to match the front gate. The peaked glass brow of a greenhouse poked up from behind a neat grove of fruit trees. He wondered what she wanted with so much homegrown produce. Given what he knew of her, he could easily figure her for an end-of-the-worlder, preparing for the worst, erecting walls to keep out the ravenous hordes that would inevitably turn up in times of shortage, licking their lips, ready to feast upon the rich.

She met him wearing the same flannel bathrobe, and he suffered through another giganto helping of tea.

“Twice in twelve hours,” she said. “How can you tell me I shouldn't be concerned?”

“Due diligence,” he said. He gestured to the view. “Lovely place you have here.”

“It's a rental,” she said.

In the security room she played back the previous night's footage—static, except for the arrival and departure of Jacob's car.

“Is there another way up? Fire road, or something that's not showing up on my map?”

“The area to the north is public land. You get oddballs coming through. Hikers. That's why I have the cameras.”

“Right,” he said.
That, and cause you're bonkers.

Having her on duty was like running a twenty-four-hour stakeout: he left his card with her, asking that she contact him if she saw anyone go up the hill.

For the next two hours, he tooled around Griffith Park, failing to find any way to access the canyon. A brief consult with a park ranger confirmed as much. Unless Jacob could convince Special Projects to call in a rappel team, a body down there was staying put for the foreseeable future.

—

A
LL
THOSE
TRUSTS
and blinds and holding companies stank of money. Keywording the Castle Court address pulled up nothing, not
even the expected Zillow or other real estate sites. An afternoon at the desk brought Jacob to the home page of a USC professor interested in the social history of the Southern California upper class. The prof had undertaken to scan in decades of Blue Books, getting as far back as 1926 and as far forward as 1973. OCR made the directory searchable.

Jacob found what he needed in the 1941 edition.

The house belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. Herman Pernath. Mister was a principal architect at a firm that bore his name. The couple had two children, Edith, sixteen, and Frederick, fourteen.

The
L.A. Times
archive yielded obituaries for Herman in 1972, his wife two years before that. Daughter Edith Merriman, née Pernath, had died in 2004.

A search for Fred Pernath brought up an Internet Movie Database entry with scores of special effects credits, the sort of Z-grade gorefests Jacob figured didn't get made anymore. But there were titles as recent as three years ago, indicating that Pernath was alive and well, and another search yielded a phone number and an address in Hancock Park.

Jacob called him on the sat phone, explained who he was, and asked if he could find out more about the house on Castle Court.

“What's there to find out?”

“Have you been there recently?”

Pernath's laugh was wooden. “Not since it became mine.”

“When was that?”

“What's this regarding, Detective?”

“It's an ongoing investigation,” Jacob said. “Who else has access to the house?”

“How was it you found me?”

Jacob didn't like people who answered questions with questions. They reminded him of his grade-school rabbis. “Look, Mr. Pernath—”

“You want to talk to me, you can come here.”

“A phone conversation would be fine,” Jacob said.

“Not to me,” Pernath said, and he hung up.

F
red Pernath lived on June Street, north of Beverly Boulevard, in a stately Georgian at odds with the Neutra-like stylings of Castle Court. Jacob did detect a certain similarity in the lack of upkeep. Every other home on the block had been landscaped, repainted, reroofed. Pernath's gutters sagged; brown smeared the front lawn.

One look at the man himself went a long way toward ruling him out as a suspect. He was pigeon-chested and emaciated, leaning on a cane whose tip squeaked against the hardwood as he beckoned Jacob in and hobbled off into the gloom.

Like its exterior, the house's overflowing interior stood in contrast to the emptiness of Castle Court. Jacob didn't see any severed heads, but he might well have missed them, lost among the quivering electric sconces, the still lifes in carved gilt frames, the Chinese vases sprouting dusty silk flowers. Ornate, polished furniture impeded easy passage—reverse feng shui—every space remotely horizontal clustered with gewgaws.

Amid the dizzying visual thicket, no family photos.

They went to Pernath's study, wallpapered with ghoulish posters and production stills. Jacob sank into a depleted loveseat, declining with considerable reluctance Pernath's offer of whiskey. He watched enviously as Pernath poured from a crystal decanter and crossed the room to open a built-in cabinet containing cut-glass bowls of nuts and a severed head.

Bloody and ragged and gazing out eyelessly.

Jacob leapt up.

Pernath glanced at him incuriously. He plucked the head by its hair and hurled it at Jacob, who caught it.

Rubber.

“For a cop, you seem a tad high-strung,” Pernath said.

He took out two bowls of cashews, setting one in front of Jacob.

“Apologies if they're not at the peak of freshness,” Pernath said, folding himself behind a formidable oak desk.

From up close, the head was obviously fake, the paint job meticulously crafted to look correct at a distance of about fifteen feet—Monet meets Grand Guignol.

His heart still tripping, Jacob said, “You do that for all your guests?”

“You're not a guest.” Pernath popped a cashew in his mouth. “You might want to get on with it,” he said. “I am eighty-four.”

Jacob sat down in the loveseat. “Tell me about the house.”

Pernath shrugged. “It was my father's. He came from money, owned property all over the city. Houses, factories, raw land. It was a great deal of real estate, and when he died, that made for a great big fight.” He sipped whiskey. “The truth is I didn't need the money. But my sister decided she had to have it, so naturally I decided I wouldn't let her.”

“She's deceased, your sister.”

Pernath cackled. “That's how I won. I had a fifth column: Virginia Slims.” He sat back in his chair, which was large and creaky and studded with brass nailheads. In its grip he resembled a dried leaf. “
Technically
, I won. Lawyers gobbled up two-thirds of the pie. I kept the properties that brought in income and sold the rest. Made out like a bandit. The house was part of a larger plot that my father subdivided. He built it. His design.”

“He was an architect.”

“He was a pig,” Pernath said. “But, yes, he did draw. Personally, I've never cared for his work. Bit antiseptic for my liking.”

Jacob glanced at a stuffed monkey suspended from the ceiling. “So I gathered.”

Pernath chuckled and got up to pour himself another whiskey.

“That house,” Jacob said. “It brings in income?”

“Not a cent.”

“Then why not sell? Seems to me it's wasting away.”

“That's exactly the point. Let it rot. Every time I think about it falling apart, I get a nice fuzzy feeling inside.” Pernath stoppered the decanter and hobbled back to his chair, making a detour to reclaim the rubber head, which he cradled in his lap like a shih tzu. “It was supposed to be a haven for him, someplace he could go to dip into the well of creativity. I don't think he so much as lifted a pencil there. He was
creative
, after a fashion, and no doubt he did a lot of
dipping
. Every secretary or office girl he ever hired saw the inside of that place—or the ceiling, anyway, while he bounced on top of them. It's amazing he didn't crush anyone to death. He was a pig, in every sense of the word. He destroyed my mother.”

“Why not tear it down, then?”

“Oh, well, I would
never
. It's architecturally
significant . . .
” Pernath finished his second drink in one swallow. “Call it a monument. To adultery.”

“You haven't been by since you inherited it.”

“Why would I?”

“Who else has access?”

“Everyone. I leave it unlocked. Anyone who wants to come in, that's their problem. The more curses heaped upon that place, the better.”

Jacob frowned. That wasn't what he'd wanted to hear.

“What kind of crime are you investigating, Detective? Something ugly, I hope.”

“A homicide.”

Pernath's throat clicked. “Ugly as it comes. Shame. Whodunnit?”

“If I knew, I wouldn't be talking to you.”

“Who died?”

“I don't know that, either.”

“What do you know, Detective?”

“Not much.”

“That's the spirit,” Pernath said. He tilted his glass. “Embrace ignorance.”

Jacob, thinking of the missing photos, said, “You have other family in town?”

“My ex-wife's remarried, although I hesitate to call her family. She lives in Laguna. My son's in Santa Monica. My daughter's in Paris.”

“Do you see them often?”

“Not if I can help it,” Pernath said.

“So it's just you,” Jacob said.

“Me,” Pernath said, stroking the fake head, “and Herman.”

—

P
ERNATH
'
S
CHILDREN
HAD
INHERITED
their grandfather's preference for clean lines. Greta ran a gallery in the Marais that sold stripped-down works rendered edgy through the use of materials like chewed gum and donkey urine. Richard was an architect whose work consisted of steel-and-glass skeletons. Jacob clicked through his portfolio, reflecting on the generational pendulum, everyone rising up to slaughter their fathers' tastes.

In any event, both seemed successful in their own right, busy people with busy lives.

Dead end.

A database search for similar crimes generated a short list of beheadings but nothing that matched his: no sealed neck, no burn marks (disappearing or otherwise), no Hebrew. Usually the bad guy was mentally ill and had been caught quickly. One offender had staked the head of his
elderly aunt in the backyard and danced around it, singing “We Are the Champions.”

The most rational beheader—so to speak—was a Pakistani in Queens who had strangled and decapitated his teenage daughter for texting racy photos to a classmate.

Religious fervor brought out the best in people.

Justice.

Jacob perused the files on Jewish terror groups in the United States.

Broadened his parameters to include any example of Hebrew at the scene of a homicide.

Broadened them to include any burns.

Broadened them to include the word
justice
.

Nada.

He sat back, stomach growling. It was nine forty-five p.m. His untouched breakfast waffle sat on a cold plate beside the computer, its surface glazed with syrup and caulked with congealed butter. He scraped it into the kitchen can. He knew the fridge was bare, but he checked it for form's sake before walking down to 7-Eleven to buy a couple of hot dogs.

—

J
ACOB
DOUBTED
HIS
PERP
would risk a second revisit of the scene, especially now that the message had been erased. But he had no fancy evening plans, and it seemed worth a few hours of his time. He drove up to the hills and eased the Honda onto the shoulder fifty yards past Claire Mason's driveway. He uncapped a beer, racked the seat back, and waited for good luck to strike.

Shortly before three, he started awake, whanging his elbow against the steering wheel. His back was stiff, his mouth dry. He had a full bladder and a raging erection.

Crickets tittered at him as he got out to take a piss at the side of the road. He'd been dreaming of Mai, naked in the garden, closer to her yet
still unable to touch her. While he waited for his penis to relinquish her image, and soften up, he considered the meaning of the distance between them. His missed opportunity, perhaps. But that very incompleteness, the tension it created, had a pleasurable aspect to it. He thought of her playful ease with her own body, the way she hid nothing from him, making the erotic innocent.

He could use some of that in his life. His work over the past seven years had forged a link in his mind between sex and violence. He didn't like it, but there it was. If a woman like Mai wanted to come along and redeem him, he had no objections.

At the same time, he knew exactly the kind of chick who hung out at 187.

You're a nice-looking man, Jacob Lev.

He wondered if she'd ever go back there.

One way to find out.