The Golem of Hollywood (32 page)

T
he decrepit fence surrounding the Heap estate told the story: land-rich, cash-poor. Jacob squeezed through a gap in the chain-link, carrying a package of Tesco brand toffee.

In the hour since the rain had let up, the pools in the pitted asphalt had been colonized by insects. If he hadn't known any better, he might've looked at the teeming life and thought it the product of spontaneous generation. He couldn't blame the ancients for making that assumption.

No beetles.

Still, he hurried up the driveway.

The door knocker came off in his hand. Jacob reinserted it on loose screws and circled around the house. Someone had carelessly left several upper-story windows open. Wet, ragged curtains ballooned and snapped in the wind.

Out back, he mounted a buckling terrace, surveying a wide, unkempt lawn, bounded by treeline.

He cupped his mouth and bellowed
hello.

Silence.

He called again, received no answer, turned to knock on the French doors.

A clap and a whine and the concrete planter fifteen feet to his left cleaved in two.

The second shot removed the stump. Jacob had by then dropped
behind the balustrade, balled up, his head between his knees, his arms around his shins.

A third shot shattered the planter to his right.

The gunfire was coming from the trees. Run and he'd be open season for the minute it would take to cover the lawn.

Option two was scrambling for the French doors. Kick in a panel, dive for safety. He'd cut himself. He'd probably still get shot. Obvious break and enter, no charges filed.

Frantically he keyed his phone. It loaded one agonizing byte at a time.

The fourth shot went wide, chunking the house's brick exterior.

The number for emergency services in the United Kingdom was 999. You could also use 112 or, charmingly, 911.

He dialed.

The voice that answered was American.

Two more shots; two more exploding bricks.

He tried the other emergency numbers, without success; either his phone beeped at him or he ended up speaking to someone in West Virginia. He added a 1, then a 1-1, a 0-1-1. Futile; he returned to Google.

He was going to die while incurring massive data roaming charges.

The shots stopped, replaced by the sound of boots on grass.

“You're trespassing.”

Without moving, Jacob called, “I knocked.”

“And therefore?”

Jacob dared to poke the box of candy over the balustrade. When his hand wasn't blown off at the wrist, he rose, showing his badge. “I'm sorry. Really.”

The human bulldozer before him wore baggy flannel trousers. Seventyish, with snow-white streamers whipping from a sun-splotched scalp, he carried a string of hares slung over one shoulder, a hunting rifle propped on the other.

“Those were warning shots. Fifty yards. From this distance, I reckon I could shave you blindfolded.”

“I'm sure you could, sir.”

“So. Move along.”

Feeling like the butler, Jacob opened the box and held it out.

“What is that? Is that toffee?” The man clomped up the steps and selected a piece, pink cheeks reddening as he chewed. He grunted and grimaced, as if he were having his teeth torn out and enjoying every moment of it.

He swallowed. “This is revolting,” he said, reaching for another piece.

“Edwyn Heap?”

“Mm.”

“Jacob Lev. I'm a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.”

“How marvelous for you.”

“I'm here about your son, Reggie.”

“A term best used loosely.”

“Pardon?”

“I told Helen from the outset: I don't fancy squandering my life and treasure on a stranger's mistakes.”

Jacob said, “He was adopted.”

“Of course he bloody was. No natural son of mine would've turned out that way. What's he done in Los Angeles?”

Jacob noted the syntax: not
what's he doing
but
what's he done
. “I'm not sure.”

“Rather a long way to come in a state of doubt.”

“Was he in Prague last April?”

“Prague?”

“In the Czech Republic.”

“I know where Prague is, you prat.”

Heap swallowed wetly and plucked another piece of toffee, leaving seventeen in the box.

“Absolutely, perfectly revolting,” he muttered.

Jacob had an idea that the conversation would last as long as the candy. “Do you know if he's been there?”

“I do not, nor do I care. He's a grown man, or so says the law. He may go where he pleases. Nor can I see what an American police officer's got to do with any of it.”

Jacob glanced at the gun. Close enough that he could get to it if necessary, wrest it away. “I'm afraid I have some bad news. Prague police found a body that appears to be his.”

Heap stopped chewing.

“I'm sorry,” Jacob said.

Heap leaned against the balustrade, his eyes bulging as he gulped the half-chewed toffee.

The rifle clunked down, and he clutched his chest. Jacob reached for him, but Heap swatted his hand away, breathing savagely. “What happened.”

“Are you okay, sir?”

“What happened.”

Jacob said, “It's not entirely clear. It appears that he was murdered—”

“‘Appears'? What the bloody hell's the matter with you? Murdered by whom?”

“We're still working on that—”

“Well
work on it
, you idiot. Don't stand there asking
me
questions.”

“I'm so sorry to have to tell you this.”

“I don't give a toss how sorry you are. I want to know what happened.”

“It appears—”

Heap snatched up the gun and leveled it at Jacob's midsection. “You dare tell me one more time what it
appears
to be and I'll paint my house with your guts.”

A beat.

Jacob said, “He tried to rape a woman.”

Heap said nothing; nor did he react.

“She fought him off and fled the scene,” Jacob said. “When the police returned to look for him, they found him dead. Murdered.”

“How.”

“. . . how?”

“How was he murdered?”

“He was . . .” Jacob cleared his throat. “He was decapitated.”

The rifle wavered in Heap's hands.

Jacob said, “I know it's hard.”

Heap smiled sourly. “Do you have a son?”

“No, sir, I don't.”

“Then you don't know what it's like to find out he's been murdered, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“And, consequently, you don't have the faintest notion of how hard it is.”

Jacob said, “None.”

A silence.

“If you could show me a photo,” Jacob said. “I need to confirm that it was him.”

The gun swung loosely at Heap's side. He went in through the French doors. Jacob followed.

I
suppose you'll be wanting money for the funeral.”

In the minutes it had taken Heap to stow his rifle and confiscate the remaining toffee, he had recovered his cool, along with his contempt.

“You won't be having it from me, I can assure you of that.”

A burled walnut gun cabinet dominated the ground floor library. Discolored patches of flooring and wallpaper spoke of rolled-up rugs, bygone art. There was an aluminum frame cot, surplus woolen blanket, and tousled linens. Cans of baked beans and tinned asparagus were stacked, incongruously, atop a baroque demilune table. Between its carved feet sat an electric hot plate and a crusty frying pan.

Heap dropped the string of hares, their dead bodies reviving a giddy crop of dust bunnies.

He headed for the stairs. “Don't gawk.”

Jacob had been wrong about the upper-story windows. They hadn't been left open. They'd been shot out, as had portions of the banister. The whole house, in fact, had been given over to target practice. Bullet holes pockmarked the walls and ceiling, ranging in size from small-caliber puncture wounds to catastrophic shotgun blasts that laid bare the plumbing. While the damage didn't follow a consistent pattern—some rooms were untouched, others hardly existed at all—the effort behind it spoke to a certain perverse dedication.

In a strange way, the place reminded him of Fred Pernath's house in Hancock Park. Both suggested the same hermetic impulse, the masculine will to power gone haywire, reveling in its inhospitality.

A house was a body; to kill it, pick your method. Fred Pernath had chosen strangulation, clogging out light and life, like a heart bursting with fat. Edwyn Heap, the inverse, a gradual erosion of the boundary between inside and out.

There was also the shared lack of family photos, although Jacob supposed that, in Heap's case, that could be construed as a kindness. Anything hung on the wall was subject to be being blown to smithereens.

“Did Reggie come home often?” he asked.

“Helen would let him stay when he was hard up,” Heap said. He was wheezing as they climbed. “Once she died, I put my foot down.”

“When was that?”

“Four years, September. The woman had a spine of gravy.”

“Has he been back since?”

“Not long after the funeral he turned up looking for something to pinch and sell. I chased him off and that's the last time I laid eyes on him.”

On the second floor, they came to a door so long shut that the paint around the frame had adhered to itself. Heap shouldered it open and it swung wide, wobbling on its hinges.

“The chamber of the little prince.”

The little prince
, who would've been in his mid-forties had he not died, had once been a boy, and Jacob felt a chill as he regarded an otherwise ordinary boy's room. Tight duvet, race-car pattern, as though the occupant had not progressed beyond age nine. Textbooks, gooseneck desk lamp, CD player–tape deck combo.

No DIY taxidermy.

No knife collection.

That there was nothing sinister about it made it somehow more sinister.

What had gone wrong?

When had it happened? How?

A handful of items hinted at maturity. A reclining female nude—poster for an Egon Schiele retrospective at the Tate—affixed to the walls with yellowing tape. A framed certificate from the Oxford Undergraduate Art Society, acknowledging Heap's first prize for his drawing titled
To Be Brasher
.

Edwyn Heap plucked a school photo off the desk.

“And the prince himself.”

Aswim in a sea of starchy white and somber black, the young Reggie Heap had a hunted look, sweat flashing on his forehead, his eyes seeking an escape route.

“It was a mistake to send him up,” Edwyn Heap said. “He didn't stand a chance.” He tossed the photo on the desk. “Well. What do you intend to do about it?”

Jacob used his camera to take a picture of the picture. It came out blurry; he tried again. Better. “I was hoping you could give me a starting point. A last address, maybe.”

“He didn't have one.”

“He must've lived somewhere.”

“Not to my knowledge. He went here, he went there.”

“Was he employed?”

“Not respectably. Most often he went hand-to-mouth. My hand, his mouth. I believe he played office boy whenever the direness of his circumstances grew particularly pronounced. It's turned out just as I warned. He went up to read law. Not halfway through Hilary, he rang to announce his intention to change to fine art. It goes without saying that I forbade this caprice. ‘We'll be underwriting him for the rest of our lives,' I told Helen, and so it has been. Ah, but you should have seen how she defended him. It was a splendid performance, tugging all the right strings. ‘Teddy, he's lost.' ‘Then let him get a bloody map,' I said. He rang again a week later, saying he had reconsidered; it was
history
of art he wanted to do—and Helen said, ‘What a smashing idea, he can be a
professor, it's very prestigious.' You see how they tricked me. I was made to consider it a compromise.”

Heap shook his head. “I suppose they had plotted together all along. Bloody history of bloody art . . . Nor could he see that through to the end. Off it was, soon enough, to broaden his horizons. Exorbitant course fees, supplies. Six months in Spain, six in Rome. ‘To what end?' ‘He's in search of inspiration.' A hopeless Neanderthal, I was to them. But a bowl of fruit is a bowl of fruit whether in Paris or Berlin or New York.”

“He was in New York?”

“Don't ask me. I don't bloody know. Timbuktu. I don't know.”

“He did travel in the United States, though.”

“I'm sure he did. If it cost money, he wanted to do it.”

“He didn't tell you where he was going?”

“I long ago ceased to ask. Hearing about it gave me indigestion.”

“When I mentioned that I was from Los Angeles, you said, ‘What's he done there?'”

“Yes, all right.”

“That's an interesting choice of words.”

Instantly, Heap's guard was up. “Why.”

“Has he been in trouble before? Run-ins with the law?”

“I can't say I know anything about that.”

“The girl in Prague said he tried to rape her.”

“Naturally she'd claim that, now that he's not around to prove otherwise.”

Jacob said, “There was another girl, Peg. She worked for you.”

“I've had too many employees to remember them by name.”

“Some folks around here seem to think that Reggie was involved in her death.”

“Only a fool believes everything he's told.”

“That's a no, then.”

“I don't reckon I like the way you're talking to me,” Heap said. “You inform me my son has been murdered, and in the next breath you're
regurgitating slander for which not a single shred of evidence has ever been produced.”

Now he wanted to claim him as his son? “I apologize. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“You upset me insofar as your willingness to accept the conjectures of imbeciles as fact demonstrates you to be easily misled. You said he was found in Prague. Why are you here? Why am I talking to an American? Was there nobody else available? Has it truly come to this?”

“Help set me straight,” Jacob said.

“Pearls before swine,” Heap said.

“You don't know where he was traveling.”

“I told you, no.”

“But he was traveling a lot.”

“I suppose,” Heap said.

“With what money?”

“Helen laid aside a sum for him to collect on the first of every month. Mind you, that didn't stop him from ringing me up on the fifteenth, groveling for more.”

“Did the money go into his bank account?”

“I suppose.”

“Which bank?”

“Barclay's. What business is it of yours?”

“I could contact them and find out where the withdrawals were made.”

“Why are you so concerned with where he's been? You know where he was murdered. Go there.”

“You mentioned a job—”

“I don't believe I did. As a matter of fact, I was quite clear that there was none.”

“You said he played office boy.”

“I refuse to dignify that as more than it was: a cheap stalling tactic.”

“Be that as it may, I'd like to know who he worked for, and where.”

“An architect,” Heap said. “A former tutor of his at school.”

“Name?”

“James, George, something royal. The selfsame worthless poofter who had years earlier convinced him to lay aside his studies and take up doodling.”

“It was my impression that Reggie had some talent as an artist.”

A glimmer of pride; it rapidly curdled. “So said my wife.”

Jacob indicated the framed certificate. “At least a couple others must've agreed.”

“Ah yes, achievement of a lifetime, as he'd have you believe. And never let her forget it, whenever he ran short of dosh.”

“Do you have any of his work?”

“Connoisseur of the finer things, are we?”

“Humor me.”

“That's all I've bloody done for the last half hour,” Heap said. He nosed at the bed. “Under there.”

Jacob knelt and drew out a pair of portfolio boxes, along with a bag of stubby charcoals, some fine-tipped artist's pens, a sketch pad.

He opened the first box on the bed.

Heavy, creamy paper carried ink beautifully, maintaining the surgical crispness of Reggie Heap's vision.

He could draw. No doubt about that. There were the aforementioned bowls of fruit; stark countryside landscapes. They had a mechanical quality, like photographic tracings.

“Hung them all over the house, she did,” Heap said. “I took them down, I couldn't stand to look at them.”

Most of the drawings were signed and dated; they had been thrown together without regard for chronology. Jacob saw work as recent as 2006 and as old as 1983.

“You kept them,” he said.

“To get rid of them would have required effort.”

“More effort than taking them down and putting them in boxes?”

“What's your damned point.”

That you were prouder of him than you want to admit. Which is both endearing and disturbing.
“Which one did he win the prize for?”

“None of these. The bloody Art Society kept it. Helen offered them a thousand pounds but they said it was the terms of the competition.”

The art got more interesting with the second box, which contained nude studies and facial portraits. The women were arrestingly frenzied, Reggie's id outstripping his hand. Jacob could virtually hear the panting that had accompanied their creation.

By contrast, the men were controlled, heroic, formidable.

“Recognize any of these people?” Jacob said. “Anyone I could talk to?”

“I presume they were his friends.”

“From?”

“I don't bloody know. Doodlers. Reprobates.”

“Did he mention anyone by name?”

“If he had, I would have labored to forget them.”

“Girlfriends?”

Heap snorted.

“I ask because I'm trying to find out what kind of people he was associating with.”

“Not the kind who'd kill him,” Heap said.

You'd be surprised.

Two-thirds of the way through, Jacob stopped and flipped back several pages.

He'd nearly missed it.

He wasn't paying attention. He was thinking about the nudes and what they said about Reggie's relationship to women.

He was thinking about his own father's visage in clay, his mother's hands working.

The intervening years had also done their part: the drawing was dated December 1986.

He was trying to avoid concocting imaginary connections. Above all, he was trying to stay clearheaded and do his job.

Yes. The job.

And here was the payoff.

Jacob flipped slowly to the next page. There it was again. And again. What he had mistaken for a careless mark repeated itself on five consecutive pages—a scar on the chin.

Five angles.

The same man.

Mr. Head.

Through static, he heard Heap say, “That's one of them.”

“Who.”

“The doodlers. He came to stay a Christmas. Helen's idea.”

“Who is he?”

“A school friend. Buggered if I can remember his name.”

Jacob said, “Can I borrow these?”

Heap stared at him. “He's the one that you're after.”

“I don't know,” Jacob said. “But it'd be helpful if I could find out.”

Heap snatched up a few of the drawings, flung them at Jacob. “The rest of them you can put back where you found.” He turned to go. “Ten minutes. Then off with you, or I'll summon the police and have you arrested for trespassing.”

Jacob carefully rolled up the drawings of Mr. Head, securing them with a rubber band he found in the desk. He cleared the rest of the mess off the bed, then poked his head into the hallway.

Hearing movement from a lower floor, he hurried to search the bureau, looking for old socks or underwear, anything that might cough up a piece of DNA.

Zip.

Downstairs, a gigantic boom, followed by crumbling plaster.

Exit music.