3rd Degree

A deep, sickening silence fell over the table. The waitress came. We ordered numbly. When the waitress left, I met their eyes.

“That son of a bitch.” Cindy shook her head. “I’d like to cut off his balls.”

“Join the club,” I shot back, “that’s all I thought about last night.”

“How long?” asked Claire. “How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t really know. She keeps saying it was the baby. When she lost it, Mr. Sensitivity there laid the blame on her. ‘You couldn’t do it, could you? The big hotshot. You couldn’t even do what every other woman can. Have a child.’ ”

“We have to help her,” Cindy said.

I sighed. “Any ideas how?”

“Get her the hell out,” Claire said. “She can stay with one of us. Does she want out?”

I didn’t know. “I’m not sure she’s gotten there yet. I think what she’s dealing with now is just shame. Like she’s letting people down. Us. Maybe him. Strange as it sounds, I think there’s a side of her that wants to prove she can be the wife, and mother, he wants her to be.”

Claire nodded. “So we talk to her, right? When?”

“Tonight,” I answered.

I looked at Claire. “Tonight,” she agreed.

Our food came and we picked at it without much appetite. No one had even asked about the case. Suddenly Claire shook her head. “Like you didn’t have enough going on.”

“Speaking of which”—Cindy pulled up her bag—“I have something for you.” She brought out a spiral notebook and ripped off a page.

Roger Lemouz. Dwinelle Hall. 555-0124.

“This guy’s at Berkeley. In the Linguistics Department. Globalization expert. Be prepared: his view of life, let’s just say, may not exactly coincide with yours.”

“Thanks. Where’d you get this?” I folded the paper in my purse.

“I told you,” Cindy said, “a million miles away.”

Chapter 33

I pushed the situation with Jill to the back of my mind as best I could; I phoned and managed to catch Roger Lemouz in his office. We spoke briefly and he agreed to see me.

Just getting out of the Hall was a breath of fresh air. These days, I rarely went over to this part of the bay. I parked my Explorer near the stadium off of Telegraph Avenue and headed past the street rats hawking pot and bumper stickers. The sun was beating onto Sproul Plaza, students in backpacks and sandals sitting around, reading on the steps.

Lemouz’s office was in Dwinelle Hall, an official-looking concrete structure just off the main quad. “Please, it’s open,” a strong, Mediterranean accent answered my knock. A hint of something more formal, educated. British?

Professor Lemouz leaned back behind a chaotic desk in the small office cluttered with books and papers. He was large-shouldered and swarthy, with curly black hair falling over his forehead, a shadowy growth on his face.

“Ah, Police Inspector Boxer,” he said. “Please sit, be my guest. Sorry the surroundings are not so plush.” The room was musty and smelled of books and smoke. An ashtray and a pack of unfiltered Rothmans were on the desk.

I lowered myself into a seat across from him and pulled out my pad. I handed him a card.

“Homicide,” Lemouz read, bunching his lips, seemingly impressed. “So I suspect it’s not some rogue etymological nuance that brings you here?”

“Perhaps another interest of yours,” I said. “You’re aware, of course, of the events going on across the bay?”

He sighed. “Yes. Even a man with his nose in his books most of the time brings it out now and then. Tragic. Totally counterproductive. Fanon said, ‘Violence is its own judge and jury.’ Yet, one ca

Lemouz’s phony sympathy appealed to me about as much as a dentist’s drill. “You mind telling me just what you mean by that, Mr. Lemouz?”

“Of course, Madam Inspector, if you would be so kind as to tell me just why you are here.”

“It’s Lieutenant,” I corrected him. “I head up the Homicide detail. And I was given your name as someone who might have some firsthand knowledge of what’s going on here. The ideological scene. People who might find blowing up three sleeping people and almost killing two i

“By ‘over here,’ I assume you mean the peaceful, academic groves of Berkeley,” Lemouz said.

“By ‘over here,’ I mean wherever someone would want to do these awful things, Mr. Lemouz.”

“Professor,” he replied. “The Lance Hart Professor of Romance Languages”—I saw the glimmer of a smile—“as long as we’re spouting credentials.”

“You said you didn’t find these murders surprising.”

“Why should they be?” Lemouz shrugged. “Should the patient be surprised he is ill when his body is covered in lesions? Our society is infected, Lieutenant, and the very people who transmit the disease look around and go, ‘Who, me?’

“Do you know,” he said, raising his eyes, “that the powerful multinational corporations now have an output larger than the GNP of ninety percent of the countries around the globe? They have supplanted governments as the system of social responsibility in our world.

“Why is it,” he laughed cynically, “we are so quick to rail against the moral outrage of apartheid when it threatens our racial sensibilities, but are so asleep to recognize it when it is economic. It is because we do not see it through the eyes of the subjugated. We see it through the culture of the powerful. The corporation. On TV.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but I’m here about four gruesome murders. People are dying.”

“Yes they are, Lieutenant. That’s exactly my point.”

There was a part of me that would like to have grabbed Lemouz by the lapels and shaken him. Instead, I pulled out the photo of the au pair on Wendy Raymore’s ID and a police artist’s sketch of the woman videotaped walking into the Clift Hotel with George Bengosian. “Do you know either of these women, Professor?”

Lemouz almost started to laugh. “Why would I want to help you? It’s the state who is the architect of this injustice, not these two women. Please tell me, who has committed the larger injustice? The two women suspects”—he threw the front page of the Chronicle across the desk at me—“or these sparkling examples of our system?”

I was staring at photos of Lightower and Bengosian.

“If these people are signaling the start of a war,” Lemouz laughed, “I say, let it unfold. What is the new phrase, Lieutenant?” He smiled. “The one Americans have embraced with all their moral imperative? Let’s roll.”

I picked up the pictures, closed my pad, and placed it back in my bag. I stood up, feeling tired and soiled. I walked out on the Lance Hart Professor of Romance Languages before I blew him up.

Chapter 34

I was steaming all the way back to the Hall thanks to Lemouz’s sanctimonious rantings, plus my frustration that we weren’t getting anywhere on these murders. I was still hot when I got to the office after six. I called Cindy and made a date to meet at Susie’s. Maybe we could get something accomplished over lobster quesadillas. I needed the girls on this.

As I hung up with Cindy, Warren Jacobi stepped into my office. “Yank Sing,” he said.

“Yank Sing?”

“It’s a better bet than quesadillas. Dim sum. Women always open up with Chinese. You should know that, LT. While you’re there, they say the chicken in salt and ginger caused the downfall of the Qin dynasty.

“Where you been?” He sat down. He had something for me. I knew that sly grin of his.

“Out wasting my time, in the People’s Republic. You got something, other than the restaurant review?”

“We got a hit on the Wendy Raymore APB,” he said, gri

That got my juices flowing.

“A Safeway across the bay called in. Night clerk thought he recognized the face. There’s a video on the way. He said she has red hair now and was wearing sunglasses. But she took them off for a second to count the cash, and he swears it’s her.”