Milo had just pulled up as I parked. He waited and we approached the house. A white Maserati new enough to sport paper plates rested on a brick driveway bordered by white azaleas. The lawn was impossibly emerald, backed by boxwood hedges, birds of paradise, and some sort of lily blossoming butter yellow.
“Morning.” We approached the house and he stopped at a low iron gate leading to a courtyard. “Didn’t know if you’d make it.”
“Dinner last night with Robin. We went for quiet.”
“The ultimate privilege. You guys score up some good grub?”
“The Bel-Air.”
He let out a low moan. “Too early in the day to weep.”
The gate was unlocked, more design element than security. The courtyard was paved with gray gravel and centered by a burbling blue-tiled Moorish fountain. Loggia to the right, carved oak door dead ahead.
Milo said, “Nice place. Nice guy, too, Dr. Kramer. At least on the phone.”
“How’d he react to talking about his son?”
“Surprisingly calm. Like it was logical.”
We climbed three steps to the door. As he raised a fist to knock, it opened on a white-haired man around eighty.
Small, stooped, smiling but without enthusiasm, he wore a Palm Springs tan, a powder-blue cardigan, a white polo shirt, and navy slacks that matched suede loafers.
“Lieutenant? Paul Kramer.”
“Thanks for meeting us, Doctor.”
“Of course.”
Handshakes all around. I said, “Alex Delaware.”
Dr. Paul Kramer squinted. “Why is that name familiar?”
Milo said, “Dr. Delaware’s our psychological consultant.”
“Is he? Does that have to do with questions about Peter’s mental status?”
“No, sir. It has to do with a complex case.”
“Complex,” said Kramer. “That could mean anything... please.”
We entered a two-story foyer floored in glossy, red Mexican tile.
Kramer said, “This way,” and led us two steps down to a large living room set up with overstuffed couches and weathered Mexican colonial furniture. Grand piano in one corner, hand-plastered walls bare but for two muddy landscapes and two oversized photographs.
One photo featured Paul Kramer twenty years younger with a blond woman his age, both in formal wear. Next to that, three young, dark-haired late adolescents, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, beaming.
“Something to drink?”
“No, thanks, Doctor.”
“Then, please.”
We took the couch he’d indicated and he lowered himself into a red leather chair.
“So,” he said, resting a hand on each knee. “What has changed in regard to Peter’s death?”
Milo said, “Can’t answer that yet, Doctor. We’re making initial inquiries.”
“Hmm. All right, I won’t press. I’m not totally in the dark, Lieutenant. I looked you up. You’re a homicide detective. I’m assuming you suspect something nefarious, rather than the accident the coroner said it was.”
“We’re here to learn more about Peter.”
Paul Kramer tugged at his lower lip. “The accidental thing was...” Head shake. “I’m happy to tell you about Peter. So you’ll know him as more than a victim.”
He pointed to the picture of the three young men. “That was taken the day we took our boat to Catalina. On the left is my oldest son, Barton. He’s a professor of neurobiology at MIT. On the right is my youngest son, Josh. He’s a Harvard MBA who moved to Israel to work in technology. For fun, he joined the Israeli judo team and won a bronze medal at the Olympics.”
Brief intake of breath. Paul Kramer rubbed a knuckle with a thumb. “In the middle is Peter. My wife — she died ten years ago — contended he was the handsomest. As a man, I don’t pick up on that kind of thing so I’ll defer to her judgment.”
I said, “Handsome but not a student?”
Paul Kramer turned to me. “Now I know why your name’s familiar. When I was in full-time practice I sometimes consulted on pediatric cases due to my specialty — the spine. An orthopod at Western Pediatric asked me to look at a case. A boy with osteogenesis imperfecta, the question was, Would surgery help? I read the chart and came across a psychologist’s notes. I was impressed because there was none of the usual jargon and a healthy dose of logical suggestion. You, right?”
I smiled.
Kramer’s nutmeg face creased in confusion then relaxed. “Of course, confidentiality. I’ll take that as a yes. So now you work for the police.”
Milo said, “With the police.”
“Ah,” said Kramer. “Part-time?
I nodded.
“You’re right, Dr. Delaware. Anything academic was painful for Peter. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. His milestones were always considerably slower than his brothers’, he never learned to read with ease, and math baffled him. We received the usual diagnoses. Learning disability, ADHD, some nonsense about optometric asynchrony from a quack the school recommended. We tried medication, tutors, special education, nothing worked. In fact — and this is going to sound cruel — Peter was a sweet boy but there was absolutely nothing he was especially good at. So we probably weren’t the best family for him.”
His eyes moistened as they aimed at the piano. “I once played at concert level, Barton still does. He won a Westinghouse science award as a Harvard-Westlake sophomore. Lenore had a law degree and an MBA, painted wonderfully, produced exquisite bonsai trees, and sewed her own evening wear. Josh taught himself to read at four, was always straight A’s, lettered in three sports at Harvard-Westlake, and wrestled at Harvard College.”
He threw up his hands. “Life’s not fair, right? Not that anyone in the family ever disparaged Peter. He was cherished by all of us. But...”
“It was tough for him,” I said.
“Painful. He was handsome. And charming, girls liked him. But by his junior year at alternative school they were the wrong type of girls. That was his last year of formal education and most of it was spent playing hooky. The school was designed for students with special needs so they would’ve kept him in no matter what he did. But he refused, said he was sick of feeling retarded. Lenore and I went round and round with him on that and finally gave in on condition that he’d home-study and earn a GED. You can guess how that turned out. He did get a job, I’ll grant him that. Construction assistant on a development downtown. One of my friends was the general contractor.”
“How did that go?”
Paul Kramer said, “It didn’t. A few months in, Peter stopped showing up at work and before we knew it, he’d packed a few things and was gone from here. For over two years, he cut us off, we had no idea where he was living, Lenore cried at night. He didn’t come begging for money, I’ll give him that. Then one Mother’s Day, he showed up wearing a full beard and hair to his shoulders and told us he’d been working on a sportfishing boat in Florida. Assisting the captain, which I took to mean some sort of scut work. Meanwhile, Barton’s off researching the brain and Josh is investing and amassing trophies.”
I got up and took a closer look at the shot of the brothers.
Hair tousled and windblown, so close in age they could’ve been triplets. No wattage variation in their perfect smiles.
A knife-blade of gray sea in the background.
Paul Kramer said, “That was a good day. When you’re sailing, you don’t need a Ph.D. Peter did okay when he was able to pay attention.”