“You all right?”
“Taking some downtime. How about you?”
“I’m off to play putt-putt golf with my grandson. Don’t let them grind you down, kid. You’re a solid girl.”
Shrinks kept forty-five-minute hours, so at four forty-five Petra tried the clinic where Dr. Sarah Casagrande worked, was transferred to voice mail, left a forceful message. No return. She repeated the process at five forty-five and this time a woman’s voice broke in.
“This is Sarah.” Soft, breathy, hesitant. “I was just about to call you.”
“Thanks,” said Petra. “As I said in my message, Doctor, this is about Marta Doebbler.”
“All these years,” said Casagrande. “Has something changed?”
“In terms of…”
“The detective I spoke to led me to believe the case was unlikely to be solved.”
“Did he?”
“Oh, yes,” said Casagrande. “I suppose he was being honest, but at the time it was hard to hear.”
“Do you remember what reason he gave?”
“He said there was no evidence. He had suspicions, but nothing more.”
“Suspicions of who?”
“Kurt. I felt the same way. All three of us did.”
“You told him that?”
“Of course.”
Something Ballou had neglected to tell her. Or write down.
“Why did you suspect Kurt?”
“He made me uneasy. Sometimes he made me feel uncomfortable.”
“Lecherous?” said Petra.
“No, I couldn’t say that. Couldn’t say he was actually projecting any interest in me. It was just the opposite, a lack of emotion. I’d see him looking at me, during a barbecue or some other social thing, and then I’d realize he wasn’t, he was looking through me. I told my husband and he said he’d noticed that, too, all the guys thought Kurt was strange, no one invited him to play poker.”
“You’re a psychologist. Care to diagnose?”
“I’m a psychological assistant,” said Casagrande. “A year away from taking the licensing exam.”
“Still,” said Petra. “You know more than the average person. How would you classify Kurt Doebbler?”
“I hate to do that. Long-distance analysis isn’t worth much.”
“Off the record, Doctor.”
“Off the record, if I had to bet, I’d say Kurt displays schizoid tendencies. That doesn’t mean he’s crazy. It refers to an asocial personality. Flat emotion, a lack of connection to other people.”
“Can that lead to murder?”
“Now,” said Casagrande, “you’re really asking me to step outside the bounds of my- ”
“Off the record, Doctor.”
“Most asocial types aren’t violent, but when they do act out- when schizoid tendencies are combined with aggressive impulses- it can be pretty horrendous.”
Meticulous planning followed by stunning violence…
“The Unabomber comes to mind,” said Sarah Casagrande. “A lifelong loner who hated people. He constructed an ecological excuse for murder, but all he wanted to do was destroy.”
The bomber had been a tech type, too. Math Ph.D., meticulous, scheming. And how many years had it taken to bring him down…
“I’m not saying Kurt’s like the Unabomber,” said Casagrande. “That was serial murder. We’re talking about someone killing his wife.”
If you only knew. “If Kurt did murder Marta, what do you think his motive was?”
Casagrande laughed nervously. “All this speculation.”
“Detective Ballou thought the case was hopeless and maybe he was right, Doctor. But I’m trying to prove otherwise and I need all the help I can get.”
“I hear what you’re saying… a motive. I’d have to say jealousy.”
“Of who?”
“It’s possible- and this is real speculation- that Marta was seeing someone.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“You have?”
“By Emily Pastern.”
“Emily,” said Casagrande. “Yes, it was Emily who raised the possibility in the first place, but I’d been thinking the same thing. We all had, because of changes in Marta’s behavior. She seemed happier. There was more… physicality to her. The way she carried herself, the way she dressed.”
“Sexier wardrobe?” said Petra.
“No, Marta was a very restrained person, even after the changes she was a long way from sexy. But she did start wearing more feminine clothing- dresses, stockings, perfume. She had a lovely figure but always used to cover it up under baggy sweats. She had great bone structure. Fixed up, with just the smallest touches, she was a very attractive woman.”
“How long before she was murdered did she start to change?”
“I’d say… months. Four, five months. I suppose there could’ve been other reasons for it.”
“Such as?”
“Trying to breathe new passion into her marriage. But I never saw any change in the way Marta and Kurt related.”
“Which was?”
“Platonic.”
The exact same word Emily Pastern had used. Which could be nothing more than consensus born of girl-chat. On the other hand, these were smart, perceptive women who’d known Marta Doebbler a lot better than Petra could ever hope to.
She pressed Casagrande more on the affair, got nothing but a polite denial of details. Running Casagrande through the events at the theater produced an account consistent with Pastern’s.
“Thanks, Doctor.”
“I hope you succeed in getting him,” said Casagrande. “If it is him… have you considered his job, what he does for a living?”
“Missile designer,” said Petra. “Guidance systems.”
“Think about that,” said Casagrande. “He figures out ways to destroy things.”
CHAPTER 42
TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 3:47 P.M., L.A. PUBLIC LIBRARY, CENTRAL BRANCH, 630 W. FIFTH STREET, HISTORY AND GENEOLOGY DEPARTMENT, LOWER LEVEL 4, TOM BRADLEY WING
Isaac’s eyes had blurred twenty minutes ago, but he waited to take a break until he’d finished the Herald Examiner files.
His self-assigned task of today: going back to the birth of as many L.A. newspapers as he could find and reading every June 28 issue. In the case of the Herald, cross-referencing to the photomorgue when something interesting came up.
Lots of duplication among the papers, but all that history added up to hundreds of felonies, mostly robberies, thefts, burglaries, assaults, and, as the automobile took control of the city, drunk-driving arrests.
He whittled down the homicides to those that weren’t bar killings or family disputes or related to robberies. Some of what remained was distinctively psychopathic: a series of Chinatown prostitutes slashed at the turn of the century, unsolved drownings and shootings, even some bludgeonings. But nothing matched the modus or the flavor of the six cases.
No huge surprise; when he’d first come across the pattern- before he’d gone to Petra, before running his statistical tests of significance- he’d covered some of the same ground in the L.A. Times files. Still, it paid to be careful, maybe he’d missed something.
Three days to go until June 28, and after nearly seven hours of tedious, back-cramping, eyestraining work, he’d come up with nothing. Yesterday had been just as futile, spent on the third floor of the Goodhue Building, in the Rare Books Department, where he’d showed up full of purpose only to be informed that he needed an appointment. Which was logical, these were collector’s items, what had he been thinking?
He’d flashed his grad student I.D., made up some story about thinking the BioStat Department had already made an appointment, and the librarian, a thin older man with a bristly white mustache, had taken pity.
“What is it you’re looking for?”
When Isaac explained- keeping it ambiguous but you couldn’t get away from the word murder- the librarian looked at him differently. But he’d been helpful, anyway, handing Isaac a written application form, then guiding him through the holdings.