The Murder Book (30 page)

“If she allows herself to focus on it, my guess is she feels a good deal worse about it than you do.”

He’d met Robin twice, and yet I didn’t feel him presumptuous. A few months after our house had burned down, we’d driven up to Santa Barbara for a change of scenery and had run into Bert at an antiquarian bookstore on State Street. He’d been browsing through eighteenth-century scientific treatises. In Latin. (’My current hobby, kids.’) Dust had speckled the front of his jumpsuit.

“She loves you deeply,” he said. “At least she did when I saw her, and I have my doubts about that depth of feeling just vanishing.” He ate more pastry, picked almond slivers from his plate, and slipped them between his lips. “The body language — the mind language, was all there. I remember thinking, ‘This is the girl for Alex.’ ”

“I used to think so.”

“Cherish what you’ve got. My second wife was like that, accepted me with all my irregularities.”

“You think Robin accepts me, no matter what.”

“If she didn’t, she’d have left long ago.”

“But putting her through more of my risk-taking would be cruel.”

He squeezed my hand. “Life is like a bus stop, Alex. We map out our route but linger briefly between adventures. Only you can chart your itinerary — and hope God agrees with it. So what brings you to Ojai?”

“Enjoying the scenery.”

“Then come up to my house, let me show you my acquisitions.”

We finished our food and he insisted on paying. The old station wagon was parked out front, and I followed him into town and onto Signal Street, where we climbed past a drainage ditch paved with fieldstones and spanned by footbridges, up to the top of the road.

The front door to the purple house was open and shielded by a well-oxidized screen. Bert climbed the steps with agility and ushered me into the living room. The space was exactly as I remembered: small, dark, plank-floored, crammed with old furniture, shawls, throw pillows, an upright piano, the bay window lined with dusty bottles. But now there was no room to sit: A gigantic, hammered-bronze gong nudged the piano. Every couch and chair bore drums and bells and lyres and zithers and Pan pipes and harps and objects I couldn’t identify. The floor space behind the piano bench was taken up by a six-foot dragon-shaped contraption topped with corrugated wood. Harrison ran a stick along the ridges and set off a percussive but melodic scale.

“Bali,” he said. “I’ve learned ‘Old MacDonald’ on it.” Sigh. “One day, Mozart.”

He cleared instruments from a sagging sofa, and said, “Be comfortable.”

As I sat, something metallic behind the couch caught my eye. A folded-up wheelchair.

Bert said, “I’m storing it for a friend,” and settled his small frame on a hard-backed chair. The fingers of his right hand brushed against a pedal harp, but not hard enough to make a sound. “Despite your stress you look well.”

“As do you.”

“Knock wood.” He rapped the rim of the harp, and this time a note rang out. “G sharp… so you’re just passing through? Next time, call and we can have lunch. Unless, of course, you need solitude.”

“No, I’d love to get together.”

“Of course, we all need solitude,” he said. “The key is finding the right balance.”

“You live alone, Bert.”

“I have friends.”

“So do I.”

“Milo.”

“Milo and others.”

“Well, that’s good — Alex, is there anything I can do for you?”

“No,” I said. “Like what?”

“Anything, Alex.”

“If you could solve cold cases, that would be helpful.”

“Cold cases,” he said. “A murder.”

I nodded.

“The body may be cold,” he said, “but I wonder if the memory ever really cools. Care to tell me about it?”

I didn’t. Yes, I did.

I
described the Ingalls murder without mentioning names or places or the murder book. But there was no sense withholding Milo’s name. Bert Harrison had met Milo, had given a statement to Milo on the Bad Love case.

As I talked, he rarely allowed his gaze to wander from my face.

When I finished, he said, “This girl — the one who poisoned the dog — sounds monstrous.”

“At the very least, severely disturbed.”

“First a dog, then a person… that’s the typical pattern… though you have only the neighbor’s accusation to go on.”

“The behavioral warning in the girl’s chart is consistent with the neighbor’s report. She didn’t belong in that school, Bert. String-pulling by her family probably got her in — safe hiding during the investigation of the murder.”

He folded his hands in his lap. “And no word on the other possible victim… I assume Milo’s been looking for her.”

“No sign of her, yet,” I said. “Most likely she’s dead. The disturbed girl seems to have vanished, completely. No paper trail at all. That reeks of more string-pulling.”

“A supportive family,” he said.

“In terms of aiding and abetting.”

“Hmm… Alex, if the case was taken out of Milo’s hands twenty years ago, how did he manage to be reassigned?”

“He was unofficially reassigned,” I said. “By someone who knew we worked together and was sure I’d give him the message.”

“What message, Alex?”

I thought about how much to say. Told him about the murder book and its probable link to Pierce Schwinn.

“Pierce?” he said. “So that’s why you’re here.”

“You knew him?”

“I did. I know his wife, Marge, as well. Sweet woman.”

“Milo and I were up at her ranch a few days ago,” I said. “It’s a good bet Schwinn assembled that book, but the only photos of his she claims to know about are nature shots.”

“Claims?” said Harrison. “You doubt her?”

“She seemed truthful.”

“I’d believe her, Alex.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because she’s an honest woman.”

“And Schwinn?”

“I have nothing bad to say about him either.”

“How well did you know him, Bert?”

“We ran into each other from time to time. In town — shopping, at the Little Theater.”

“Are you aware of any confidante he might’ve had other than Marge? Someone he’d have trusted to send the book? Because it was mailed to me seven months after he died.”

“You’re certain it emanated from Pierce?”

“The photos are LAPD crime-scene shots, probably purloined from old files. Schwinn was a shutterbug, used to bring his own camera to crime scenes in order to snap his own pictures. On top of that, Marge Schwinn said she purchased three identical blue leather albums for Pierce, over at O’Neill & Chapin. She showed us two but the third was missing and she had no idea where it was. That’s what drew me back here. I wanted to speak to the shop’s owners to see if they’d sold any others.”

“The owner,” he said, “is a lovely woman named Roberta Bernstein, and she’s in Europe. O’Neill & Chapin are her pet terriers.” He pressed a blunt little index finger to his lips. “Sounds like the totality of evidence does point to Pierce…”

“But?”

“No buts, Alex. You’ve put together a solid argument.”

“Any idea who he might’ve passed it to?”

He crossed his legs, hooked a finger under the hem of a purple trouser leg. “The only person I ever saw Pierce with was Marge. And as I said, I doubt she’s involved.”

“Because she’s honest.”

“And because Pierce was protective of her, Alex. I can’t see him exposing her to something like that.”

“Sounds like you knew them both pretty well,” I said.

He smiled. “I’m a psychiatrist. I’m allowed to theorize. No, we never really socialized, but this is a small town. You meet the same people over and over. I suppose I’m drawing upon Pierce’s body language when they were together.”

“Protective.”

“Very much so. Marge seemed to take well to that. I found that interesting. She’d never lived with anyone before. Her family goes way back in this region, and she’s taken care of that ranch nearly single-handedly for years. People of a certain age can get set in their ways, not take well to the demands of a relationship. But Marge seemed quite content with domestic life. They both did.”

“Did you know Pierce had been a detective?”

“Marge told me,” he said. “Soon after Pierce moved in. I believe it was at the theater, as a matter of fact. Out in the lobby, during intermission. She introduced me, and we began chatting about a crime story in the newspaper — something down your way, bank robbers, a shoot-out, the criminals had escaped. Marge said something along the lines of ‘If Pierce were still on the force, he’d solve it.’ ”

“How’d Pierce react to that?”

“If I recall correctly,
un
reactive. Didn’t say much of anything. That’s the way he usually was. Reserved.”

Milo had described Schwinn as verbally aggressive, prone to sermonizing. Lots had changed over twenty years.

I said, “Marge told us Pierce had grown serene.”

“She’d know best… so Pierce was Milo’s partner. How interesting. The world grows smaller yet.”

“The way he died,” I said. “Falling off that horse. Any thoughts about that?”

He uncrossed his leg, tapped a rosy cheek, and allowed his hand to brush against an ornate concertina. “You suspect something other than an accident? Why, Alex?”

“Because that’s the way my mind works.”

“Ah,” he said.

I could hear Milo laughing.

“Small world,” he repeated. “That’s about all I can tell you… can I fix you some tea, Alex? Wait — you’re a guitarist, aren’t you? I’ve got something in back that might interest you. A turn-of-the-century Knutsen Hawaiian harp-guitar. Perhaps you can tell me how to tune the drone strings.”

His spare bedroom was filled with instruments and antique music stands, and I hung around for a while watching him fiddle and tinker, listened to him expound on music and rhythm and culture. He began to reminisce about his time in Chile. Ethnographic research in Indonesia, a summer of musicology in Salzburg, ministering to Israeli kibbutz children who’d been traumatized by terrorism.

No mention of his Santa Barbara days — the years he’d spent at a school for troubled kids, just a few miles away. The kind of place someone like Caroline Cossack might easily have ended up. That high-priced travesty had caused more problems than it had solved.

Bert had a selective memory for the positive. Perhaps that’s why he’d seemed reluctant to imagine a young girl evincing brutality.

He stopped narrating and threw up his hands. “I’m such a bore — you’ve probably begun wondering if I’m going senile.”

“I haven’t at all, Bert.” Though I had thought:
He seems distracted
.

“The truth is, I have lost some short-term memory. But nothing beyond my age norms.”

“Your memory seems fine to me,” I said.

“That’s kind of you to say…” He gestured around the room. “All this — all these toys, Alex, they’re a wonderful distraction. A boy needs a hobby.” Pudgy fingers took hold of my forearm. His grip was forceful. “We both know that, don’t we?”

I stuck around for tea, finally told him I needed to get back to L.A.

As he walked me to my car, he said, “That girl. So monstrous, if it’s true.”

“You seem skeptical.”

He nodded. “I do find it hard to believe that a young female would be capable of such savagery.”

“I’m not saying she acted alone, Bert, or even initiated the murder. But she could’ve lured the victims, and either receded into the background or participated.”

“Any theories about the main perpetrator?”

“The girl had a boyfriend, six years older, with a criminal history, including murder.”

“Sexual murder?”

“No, an ambush killing.”

“I see,” he said. “Any particular reason you didn’t mention him, initially?”

“The cover-up’s more likely related to the girl.”

“This fellow wasn’t wealthy.”

“Young black street pusher.”

“I see — and what became of this murderous young felon?”

“He vanished, too.”

“A girl and a young man,” he said. “That would change things. Psychosocially.”

“A killing team,” I said. “One scenario is the two of them picked up the victims at the party and took them somewhere to be raped and murdered.”

“A Svengali-Trilby situation,” he said. “Dominant male, submissive female… because that’s what it usually takes to get an impressionable young female involved in extremely violent behavior. Nearly all sexual violence seems to emanate from the Y chromosome, doesn’t it? What else do you know about this boyfriend?”

“Apart from being a junkie and a pusher, he was manipulative enough to get a street-smart bail bondsman to forgo a bond. And calculated enough to ambush the bondsman — that’s the homicide he’s wanted for. Still wanted. Another of Milo’s open cases.”

“Sad convergence for Milo,” he said. “A junkie in the strict sense — heroin?”

“Heroin was his first choice, but he was eclectic.”

“Hmm… then I suppose that would explain it.”

“Explain what?” I said.

“With sexual sadists, one usually thinks of alcohol or marijuana as the drugs of choice, correct? Something mild enough to take the edge off inhibition, but not sufficiently incapacitating to blunt the libido. Other drugs — amphetamines, cocaine — can foster violence, but that’s usually more of a paranoid reaction. But heroin?” He shook his head. “Opiates as the great pacifiers. Take away the necessity to steal in order to obtain heroin and no place would be safer than a city full of addicts. I’ve certainly never heard of a junkie acting out in such a sexually violent manner.”

“Not while high,” I said. “But a heroin addict in need of a fix wouldn’t be good company.”

“I suppose.” He scratched an ear. “Even then, Alex, wouldn’t the violence be impulsive — born of frustration? An addict would be interested in the needle, not luring and raping and cutting up young girls. Just garnering the concentration would be difficult, wouldn’t you say? At least that’s the way it was years ago when I worked with addicts.”

“When was that?”

“During my internship, I rotated through the Federal hospital in Lexington.”

“Where haven’t you been, Bert?”

“Oh, lots of places… do forgive my rambling, Alex. What do I know about crime? You’re the expert.”