The murder of a murderer could be considered an act of justice or an act of charity.
Justice for the dead. Justice for their families.
Charity for future victims.
Charity, even, for Mr. Head himself, sparing him from engaging in more evil.
What differentiated between the two Hebrew words was the feminine suffix, the letter heh — itself a symbol for the name of God.
Tzedakah, he supposed, could be considered a womanly form of justice.
That recalled Portia’s courtroom speech from the The Merchant of Venice. A plea for mercy, delivered by a woman, dressed as a man.
The letters of tzedek also gave rise to the word tzaddik: a righteous individual, one who performed good deeds, often in secret, without expectation of recognition or reward.
The doer of justice; the doer of charity.
Did that say something about how Mr. Head’s slayer saw himself?
Herself?
Why not? Hammett said it was a woman who’d called it in.
Jacob checked his e-mail for a response from 911 dispatch, saw a bunch of spam. He started to write to Mallick, telling him what he had, then scrapped the draft. He didn’t really know what he had.
Plugging Night Creeper into the Times archive brought up seven hundred hits. Jacob narrowed his search to those from the appropriate period, curious to see if any of the vics had overtly Jewish surnames.
Helen Girard, 29.
Cathy Wanzer, 36.
Christa Knox, 32.
Every one of them young, well liked, attractive; every one of them the cornerstone of an exponential tower of ruined lives. Wanzer was blond, a massage therapist who worked out of her home. Girard and Knox, both brunettes, left grieving boyfriends, devastated parents.
Patricia Holt, 24.
Laura Lesser, 31.
Janet Stein, 29.
The parade of happy faces was sapping his motivation to solve his crime.
He circled Lesser and Stein.
Inez Delgado, 39.
Katherine Ann Clayton, 32.
Sherri Levesque, 31.
Convenient for a Jewish vic to equal a Jewish avenger. That was wishful thinking, though. And by themselves, names told him very little. There were Jews with non-Jewish names and non-Jews with Jewish names. There were mixed families. There were friends. There were folks who followed a stranger’s case, got interested, and then invested, and then involved far beyond what was reasonable. It happened to cops all the time.
He had to start somewhere, though.
He read about Laura Lesser. A psychiatric nurse. Pretty, like the rest of her unfortunate sorority.
Janet Stein owned a small Westwood bookstore. Memorial held at the funeral chapel of Beth Shalom Cemetery.
Same place his mother was buried.
One definite Jewish victim.
He returned to the archives, found a follow-up article from ’98, ten-year-after piece of rubbernecking. A D named Philip Ludwig had picked up the torch, vowing to revisit every lead, utilize every resource, including the FBI’s newly operational Combined DNA Index System.
In another follow-up, six years later, he sounded less optimistic.
My hope is that whoever committed these crimes is now dead and can’t cause any more tragedy.
The reporter asked if that didn’t deny closure to the victims’ families.
I don’t know what the hell that means.
The article went on to say that Ludwig was headed for retirement at the end of the year. What, the reporter asked, did he intend to do with his free time?
Take up a hobby.
Given the guilt and disappointment seeping through, Jacob was willing to lay even money that, for Ludwig, “hobby” meant sitting around and indicting himself.
Jacob found him living in San Diego — too far to drive and make it back in time for dinner. He called on the sat phone and left a brief message.
He considered starting to track down victims’ families, decided to wait until he heard what Ludwig had to say. That left the day open.
Chapter fourteen
First came the hipsters, colonizing Silver Lake and Los Feliz and Echo Park, so that these days you were as likely to see a gourmet taco truck run by mustachioed culinary school grads with earlobes stretched to hula hoops as you were an actual taquería.
Then real estate developers who’d hit the ocean and run out of raw material sniffed the trend and headed back inland to perform CPR on downtown. They built luxury “green” high-rises with fitness centers and underground parking, and attempted to lure buyers with the promise of a burgeoning nightlife. In Jacob’s view, they were kidding themselves. Real wealth would always flow westward. Lacking a center, Los Angeles would always be seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.
Even the most ardent downtown boosters steered clear of Boyle Heights. It claimed one of the city’s highest homicide rates; crossing over the trickle of river via the Olympic Boulevard bridge, Jacob saw drugs dealt openly and handguns flashed with a smirk.
Beth Shalom Memorial Park attested to the neighborhood’s long-fled Jewish community. It was actually three cemeteries — Garden of Peace, Mount Carmel, and House of Israel — wedged between the 710 and the 5. Only the first still accepted new burials; the latter two had been full since the seventies.
Entering Garden of Peace, he saw EST. 1883 carved into the gatepost and wondered how much room they had left.
The dead kept on stacking up, relentless as debt.
The man at the front office had the chatty sheen of the newly hired. He wrote down the plot numbers for Janet Stein and Bina Lev, marking them roughly on the map. “You know Curly’s here.”
“Curly.”
“Like from the Three Stooges?” The guy asterisked a section labeled Joseph’s Garden.
“Thanks,” Jacob said. “I’ll bear it in mind.”
The day had turned mushy, and his shirt stuck to his back as he walked the lawns to Janet Stein’s crypt inside the Hall of Memories.
A stained-glass window cast an array of pinks and purples on the terrazzo. There was no air-conditioning — it wasn’t like the residents needed it — and flowers languished in their holders, layering the floor with more color in the form of shed petals.
He found her in the middle of the corridor.
The quote from Donne intrigued him. More typically, you’d expect a passage from the Bible. Jacob supposed it was fitting for a lover of literature, and it gave him another degree of kinship to her. Before coming, he’d looked up Janet Stein’s former bookstore. Like most brick-and-mortar sellers, it was shuttered. He stood in communion, trying to telegraph to her that the man who had cut her down young was gone in a terrible way. It made him feel silly and useless.
—
To buy himself some time, he went to find Curly.
The headstones of Joseph’s Garden were upright, carved with symbols signifying the deceased’s status in the community, or occupation. A pair of hands, raised in priestly blessing, for a Kohen. For a Levite, a cup pouring water. Lawyers got scales and doctors got caduceus staffs. Movie moguls — there were several — got reel-to-reel cameras. Palm trees swooned in perpetual infatuation. Jacob could tell from the lack of pebbles placed atop the headstones that there had been few recent visitors to these parts.
Curly had been accorded slightly more attention. Atop the grave, someone had laid out, in pebbles: