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“You recognized Cordi that way.”
“I had prior dealings with her.”
He waved that away. “You notice things other people don’t, fine. I’m used to it. Though sometimes I wish I could wear your eyes. Go on.”
I said, “The time Toni—the wife—complained about was when Deeb had already moved out. He came by to pick up his daughter but instead detoured to Cordi’s house. When Toni confronted him about it, he admitted being inside for an ‘academic discussion.’ ”
“You show me your doctorate, I show you mine,” he said. “So he’d know the layout.”
“And if there’d been a prolonged affair, he might have a key. Or lifted one.”
He thought about that. Nodded. “But not sure how that leads to evil.”
“I’m not, either, but the physical resemblance between Cordi and Toni isn’t casual. It’s striking. And that got me thinking about Deeb’s academic work—signs, symbols, analogies, metaphors. Displacements of reality. I still figured I was being over-imaginative but kept digging and came up with the Boston stabbing, then this.”
Page number two nearly lifted him off the couch.
“Bloomington…who’s Randi Walenska?”
“Someone who looked an awful like this woman.” I handed over an image I’d found.
He said, “Judith Deeb, registered dietitian in Indianapolis…the first wife?”
“Second. This is his third divorce, each marriage lasted around three years. He and Toni had an affair while he was married to Judith and Toni got pregnant.”
His eyes moved back and forth between the headshots. “Judy Deeb, Randi Walenska…shit, they could be sisters. Do you have a shot of Toni?”
“No.”
He fooled with his phone, retrieved a DMV photo. Sat back and said, “She and Cordi are more like twins—oh, man, you’ve just taken me to crazy-town.”
I said, “There’s more. Just before you got here, I found the date of the second divorce. Randi Walenska was stabbed to death in her apartment six weeks before Deeb and Judith finalized their divorce.”
I pointed to my screen. He came over and had a look. Pushed the print button, collected the paper, and sat back down. Sweat beads had collected at his hairline. He wiped them with a handkerchief. Flexed his jaws and his nostrils. Looked at me.
“So what’re we saying? Guy’s marriages fall apart and he takes out his rage on surrogates? Why not the women who actually piss him off?”
I said, “Don’t know for sure but my best guess is displacement.Projecting anger and other emotions onto substitute targets. It’s the basis of racism and it’s also common in borderline personality. So are inappropriate anger and a distorted self-image. Grandiosity, seeing yourself as above the rules, which is how Toni describes Deeb’s approach to his superiors. His career’s been based on the study of symbols and that could be rooted in more than scholarly interest.”
“No such thing as accidents, huh?”
“Oh, there are,” I said. “But rarely when it comes to murder.”
“What about the first wife? She healthy?”
“All I’ve got is a first name, Adele, was about to trace her when you got here. I figured I’d start with the University of Rochester because that’s where Deeb taught before he moved to Bloomington.”
He got up again and pointed to my monitor. “May I?”
—
Milo’s LAPD password gives him access to the usual databases and several beyond civilian reach.
It didn’t take him long to find an eight-year-old address for Adele and Conrad Deeb on Raleigh Street, in Rochester, New York. Nor to learn that Adele’s Social Security number now traced to Adele Banerjee, Ph.D., associate professor of classics and women’s studies at Barnard College in Manhattan.
Banerjee’s faculty headshot showed a pretty, bespectacled redhead in her forties with an open smile. Primary interest: re-contextualizing the writings of Edith Wharton to make them compatible with post-feminist perspectives. She’d been at Barnard for eight years, had earned tenure after four.
I said, “She did a lot better than Deeb.”
