“Late afternoon would work best.”
“Let’s see how it shakes out.” He sat back, stretched his long legs, closed his eyes.
I said, “If COD on Cassy Booker’s suicide turns out to be heroin and fentanyl, it might bear a closer look.”
“You called Lopatinski. Any reason for me to take over?”
“Only if you have a problem with me following up.”
“None whatsoever, amigo.” His eyes shut again. “While you’re talking chemistry, ask her about Lotz’s—anything on the bloods, has she been able to change their mind about the autopsy.”
“Will do. I’d also like to look into Pena’s assistant, Pete Kramer. He handled the situation with Booker before he was made redundant.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“I think former employees can be helpful same as exes.”
“Ah, the fine art of cultivating hostility. Sure, delve.”
Then he slept.
* * *
—
I dropped him at the station, took Pico to Westwood Boulevard, where I sat in burgeoning traffic that lasted well into the Village. Students jaywalking obliviously didn’t help. Neither did random road work. Trailing the lower rim of the U.’s city-sized campus, I continued the northward trek onto Hilgard and hooked east on Sunset. Every turn slowed the mph, as if some sadistic traffic Satan were churning chrome butter, and by the time I entered the Glen, the trip was long stretches of inertia peppered by momentary spurts of forward movement.
Faster to walk the three miles to my house, but I was stuck with a combustion engine. I never use the phone while driving but this was driving like prison’s a hotel. I began the search for Peter Kramer.
Common name spanning multiple continents. I added property manager and got hits in Brooklyn, Fort Lauderdale, and Silver Spring, Maryland. Images accompanied the last two: a thirtysomething condo superintendent in Florida, a seventysomething, yarmulke-wearing nonspecified in Maryland.
The car in front of me moved a few inches. Before I did the same, the driver behind me leaned on the horn. I checked the rearview. Young woman, maybe a student, in a VW Bug. Bouncing in her seat and waving a phone and flipping me off.
Another half-foot roll, then a total stop. The ranting behind me persisted.
The car stuck in the southbound lane opposite me was a Tesla driven by a black-T-shirted, white-haired man with flabby, crepe-laced arms unimproved by a barbed-wire biceps tattoo. He looked at me and shook his head.
Appreciating the empathy, I shrugged.
His face darkened. “You don’t fucking get it. If you didn’t use your fucking phone, we could all fucking go home.”
A woman in an open-air Fiat behind him raised her eyebrows and did a he’s-nuts corkscrew motion with her index finger.
Hoping she meant him, not me, I smiled at her, rolled up my window, turned on the radio. Given the miasma of the moment, the blues seemed about right. Anything but the news.
CHAPTER
27
I got home nearly forty minutes later. Robin had left me a note in her fine calligraphic hand. Left a message with Sharon I., went to Trader Joe’s, Blanche snoozing.
Dogs’ natural routine is to sleep most of the day but they wake easily. Maybe it’s a self-protective throwback to their wolf origins a zillion years ago. Maybe they’re just curious about the baffling world people have created.
In the service porch behind the kitchen, my dog lay curled in her crate, soft brown eyes wide open.
We use the crate because denning’s another natural dog thing. Some pooches don’t like it but Blanche does, savoring her space the way a kid enjoys a tree house. But we don’t lock it and when I said, “Hey, gorgeous,” she yawned and smiled, nudged the grate open with her nose, and padded out. Rubbing her knobby head against my leg, she told me about her day, an oration of grunts, beeps, and snuffles.
When she finished, I said, “Sounds like you had more fun than I did,” refilled her water bowl, gave her a liver snap that she mouthed daintily, and brewed a half pot of coffee. My cup filled, we headed for my office.
She lay at my feet as I called Younger Peter Kramer in Florida. Disconnected number. Older, skullcapped Peter in Maryland answered in a hoarse, husky voice. “Kray-mer.”
Fudging my qualifications, I asked if he’d ever worked in L.A.
“Why do you want to know?”
“It’s related to a case, here. A property manager with your name worked in Westwood—”
“I don’t know any Westwood,” he said. “Police? I take care of buildings in Baltimore, near the race course.”
“Pimlico.”
“You been there.”
I lied, “Long time ago.”
“It’s the same dump, things happen, try to get cops to show up. California? Haven’t been out there in twenty years. Good luck.”
I ran another Peter Kramer search using real estate management, building supervisor, dormitory, dorm, and private dorm.
Nothing.
Back to the name by itself, unlimited. Two and a half million hits.
Logging off, I tried Basia Lopatinski’s number at the crypt and lucked out.
She said, “Alex. Something new?”
“We got an I.D. on the wedding victim.”
“Good! Who is she?”
I gave her the basics.
“Studio City,” she said. “I will put this in the file. Thanks for letting me know.”
“Anything on Michael Lotz’s tox screen and autopsy?”
“The bloods aren’t back, yet, but he shows all the external signs of an opioid O.D. His body’s a pincushion and he’s got all sorts of Nazi-type tattoos. No decision on an autopsy, they’re having a scheduling meeting tomorrow. I’m hoping they’ll take my recommendation to cut him open. Why didn’t Milo call himself?”
“He’s swamped so I volunteered.”
“Nice of you,” she said. “It’s an interesting thing the two of you have. I’ve heard some other detectives are jealous.”
“And others have nothing good to say about it.”
She laughed. “So you know. Okay, check back with me by the end of tomorrow on the autopsy. Maybe the tox will also be back.”
“One more thing. I was wondering if you could look up an old case. Suicide a couple of years ago in Westwood. A student at the U. named Cassandra Booker.”
A pen scratched. “What would you like to know about her?”
“Cause of death.”
“This has something to do with Ms. DaCosta?”
“Same address as the building where Lotz worked.”
“Hold on.” A series of keyboard clicks. “Heroin and fentanyl, but a lot more fentanyl than DaCosta. Without an immediate shpritz of naloxone, this would’ve been rapidly fatal. It’s listed as undetermined not suicide. We do that for the family’s sake when an accidental O.D. is a reasonable possibility.”
Maxine Driver had heard differently. School gossip?
I said, “Any psychiatric data in the file?”
“Let me see…no, sorry.”
“Any way to ask the pathologist?”
“That was Doctor…Fawzi. He’s not with us anymore, somewhere in the Mideast, no idea where, and there’s no guarantee he’d remember.”
“Where did she die?”
“Says…in her room on her bed,” said Lopatinski. “Not the bathroom like DaCosta if that’s what you’re getting at. That, the dosage, no garrote, I have to say I’m seeing more discrepancies than similarities, Alex. To either Ms. DaCosta or Mr. Lotz—no needle marks on Ms. Booker, new or old.”
“She snorted.”
“A lot of kids do it that way. They don’t like pain but aren’t afraid of long-term consequences. That’s the definition of youth, right, Alex?”
* * *
—
I returned to the Peter Kramer search, using Los Angeles as a limiter. Still well over a hundred possibilities. Of those, only a handful of commercial sites included phone numbers, a good portion of which were inoperative or linked to clickbait or other nonsense. That’s the internet: an ocean of quantity, droplets of quality.
The Kramers I was able to reach were baffled by my questions; a few grew irritated.