JONATHAN KELLERMAN. THERAPY

Bumaya frowned.

Milo said, “Want another drink? It’s on me.”

“No,” said Bumaya. “No, thank you.” The snapshot of the murdered boys remained on the table. He picked it up, placed it back in his snakeskin billfold.

“You pretty good with firearms, Mr. Bumaya? Being a former cop and all that.”

“I know how to shoot. However, I am not traveling armed.”

“So if I look around your friends’ apartment, no guns are going to show up?”

“Not one,” said Bumaya. His mouth moved around, covering a swath of emotional territory, until it finally settled on a small, flat smile. “Perhaps I have not made myself clear, Detective Sturgis. My sole purpose is to gather facts and to report back to my superiors.”

“All this trouble for Albin Larsen.”

“He and others.”

“Others here in L.A.?”

“Here, other cities. Other countries.” Bumaya’s eyes shut and fluttered open. His irises, once clear and inquisitive, had clouded. “I will be doing this for a very long time.”

*

We watched him leave the bar.

Milo said, “Think I was rough on him?”

“A bit.”

“I sympathize with the cause, but he’s all about his own goals, and I don’t need complications. If I can get Larsen off the street, I’ll be doing Bumaya and his superiors the biggest favor of all.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Does it?” He frowned. “Those two boys.” He looked away, summoned Green Shirt for a third shot.

Green Shirt looked down at me. “You, too?”

I placed my hand atop my glass and shook my head. When Milo’s refill arrived, I said, “Bumaya has his own agenda, but what he said firms things up for us. Larsen’s got a history of exactly the kind of scam we theorized about. And he uses violence when it suits him.”

“The quiet ones,” Milo muttered.

“Tonight, when he introduced Issa Qumdis, he had plenty of fire.”

“Ideology and profit,” he said.

“Misery pimp. I like that.”

He drank.

I said, “Just out of curiosity, how do you know so much about Issa Qumdis?”

“What, cops don’t read?”

“Never knew you to be political.”

He shrugged. “Rick leaves books and magazines around. I pick ’em up. One of them happened to be The Jewish Beacon, with the article that claimed Issa Qumdis invented himself.”

“Never knew Rick to be political, either.”

“He never was. Even gay issues didn’t mobilize him.” He stretched his neck and winced. “His parents are Holocaust survivors.”

After all these years I knew little about Rick. About Milo’s life when he closed the door of his little house in West Hollywood.

He said, “They were always getting after him about it.”

“The Holocaust?”

He nodded. “They wanted him to be more aware of being Jewish. There was always baggage, the gay thing complicated it. When his folks found out, they freaked out, the Holocaust got all mixed up in it. His mother crying like someone had died. His father yelling at him and telling him he was stupid because now the Nazis would have two reasons to gas him.”

He drank more Scotch, swirled it around like mouthwash. “He’s an only child, it hasn’t been easy. What made it better was the passage of time and his parents getting older. Eventually, he and his old man could talk about it.”

Something Milo had never experienced before his own father died.

“Then came September 11, and Rick changed,” he said. “He took it personally. The fact that Arabs were behind it, the revisionist theories blaming the Jews. All the anti-Semitic swill coming out of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. All of a sudden, Rick got more interested in being Jewish, started reading up on Jewish history, Israel. Started giving money to Zionist causes, subscribing to magazines.”

“That you happened to pick up.”

“The Issa Qumdis thing caught my eye because the basic point was that the guy was a scamster but that it hadn’t impeded his academic career. That always fascinates me. How little reality has to do with the way life plays out—he was something, wasn’t he? Tenure Personified, that cultured stance, then coming out and saying people should be killed. Pretty damn hateful for a college professor.”

“Lots of hatred in academia,” I said.

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