Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery Read online

  There was no surefire way to predict that someone would in fact become violent, but the fact that such a strong potential for violence existed in Avram Cohen’s handwriting was crucial information for Grusha to have.

  Again Claudia asked herself—was this one of the mistakes Andy had made, that she had been brought in to find? She thought of how suave and smooth Avram had been that afternoon. Could she be wrong in her evaluation? She was certain that she was not. Her final assessment was that, thanks to the important information Andy Nicholson had left out of his report, Avram had probably acted badly with a match Grusha made for him and it was now coming back to bite her.

  The two of them had appeared quite chummy in her office, but it was possible that the hundred thousand dollars the Israeli client had paid for Grusha’s services might have had something to do with that.

  She scribbled some notes and stuck them in Avram’s file. When they met the next afternoon, she would have some pointed questions to ask the baroness. Claudia had not yet seen the matchmaker’s handwriting, which was a foolish omission on her part. If there hadn’t been such a rush to bring her to the East Coast, she would have insisted on first seeing a sample.

  Deciding that she had earned a break, Claudia left the files on the bed and went to check her e-mail on the laptop. She found one from Peggy Yum, the producer. It looked like Yum had been serious about wanting to have her appear again on Hard Evidence.

  Grusha Olinetsky’s people called me for your number. Is she using you on her show? We’re planning a segment on “dating services—are they safe?” Call me as soon as you get this. It’s a winner!

  Claudia looked over at the clock. Eight fifteen. Three hours earlier in L.A. Yum might still be in her office.

  “Hard Evidence,” Yum’s voice chirped on the other end of the phone. “Peggy Yum, segment producer, speaking. How may I help you?”

  “Peggy, hi. It’s Claudia Rose. I just got your e-mail.”

  “Claudia! Fantastic; we were just talking about you at the production meeting. We want to schedule this segment ASAP. Can you be here Thursday morning? We’ll talk about—”

  “Wait, Peggy, I can’t. I’m in New York for a few days, so this week is out. And listen, it’s a problem for me to talk about dating services right now.”

  “So, Olinetsky is using you? That’s way cool! It’d be perfect, like, you’d be undercover. You can give us the scoop on what goes on behind the scenes.”

  “I didn’t say she was using me, but if she were, don’t you think it would be a little unethical for me to accept this kind of assignment?” Claudia’s reflection in the mirror behind the desk mouthed back at her, Can you spell conflict of interest? “You’re probably looking for dirt on her, right? I’m not interested in being part of an exposé.”

  “It doesn’t have to just be dirt.” Yum’s self-righteous indignation made it sound as if she were pouting. “I guess we could use some success stories, too. Look, Claudia, I really want to do this segment, and you’d be perfect for it. You’re so great on camera. You have bunches of credibility. This could be a really awesome segment.”

  “Thanks for the compliment, Peggy. I appreciate it; really, I do. If it were any other time, I’d jump on it, but for now, I think you need to find another story if you want me to be involved. How about one on handwriting analysis for employers? That’s mostly what people use graphology for.”

  “That’s not sexy.” Yum was now into full sulk. “Just forget it. Talk later.”

  Claudia was left listening to dead air, debating whether she wanted to work with the young producer at all. Their conversation had left her feeling old and cranky, but as long as Grusha was her client, she didn’t see how she could accept an assignment such as the one Peggy Yum was proposing. She would think about it, see if she could find some sort of compromise, but she refused to bend her principles.

  A few stretches of stiff muscles to help refocus her attention; then she settled back on the bed with the next client folder and a couple of cold French fries.

  The glam shot in the next folder in the stack showed a sloe-eyed gamine beauty with black hair cut short and punked into spikes. Heavy black eyeliner and purple shadow made pale cheeks paler. Heather Lloyd, a fashion model. Twenty-five, five-nine. With those looks, Claudia guessed, probably successful in her field.

  A selection of snaps that were supposed to be informal had obviously been posed for maximum effect. One scene had been shot on Ellis Island with a backdrop of Lady Liberty, Heather’s skirt billowing in the breeze, à la Marilyn Monroe. In another she was dressed in cutoffs and a halter top, sitting on the steps of a brownstone, blowing an exaggeratedly puckered kiss at the camera. A third showed her on a fashion show catwalk in filmy lingerie, revealing legs that were close to being anorexic thin.

  Before she turned to the handwriting, Claudia tried to imagine what it might look like. From Heather ’s modeling photos, it was clear that she spent a lot of effort creating her appearance. Chances were the same was true of her handwriting.

  When she came to the sample page, the stylized script told Claudia that her educated guess had been right, and the content agreed.

  I want a certain kind of lifestyle, so I am seeking a very successful gentleman who is financially secure. I want a man who is kind and lovable who will take care of me. He wants a woman to love and worship, always and forever. He wants me to be that woman.

  The text described what Heather wanted, but she had written nothing about what she might have to offer a mate. Even without the narcissistic sentiments she had expressed, her painstakingly constructed handwriting with its many arcaded forms revealed a woman who would make security and financial reward the highest priority in her life. It was all about image and how she projected it. The way others perceived her was of paramount importance, so she would take pains to hide anything about herself she believed flawed. For anyone to see her as less than perfect would give her a sense of shame.

  The handwriting had one uncommon characteristic: Several of the lower loops were twisted into something resembling a bow. In handwriting, lower loops were connected to, among other things, biological urges.

  In virtually all cases Claudia had examined, the particular form Heather had adopted was made by victims of sexual assault. The convoluted path that Heather’s loops followed was a strong indicator that, like Avram, she had sexual issues. The question was, would that affect her ability to form a healthy intimate relationship? In Claudia’s opinion, it would.

  Had Andy Nicholson explained all this to Grusha?

  She read his report, which said little of substance: “She is a cumulative thinker who builds one idea upon another. She has the trait of yieldingness, but there is some resentment.”

  He’d written about her gregarious personality and generosity. What Andy’s report failed to state was that the handwriting painted a portrait of a sweet-natured but naive girl who acted younger than her years, whose self-image was tied in with her beauty. That would all make sense if she had been the object of unresolved sexual abuse.

  Cumulative thinking, gregarious, yieldingness, resentment —a superficial laundry list of traits that meant little in the big picture of Heather Lloyd’s egocentric self-absorption or the sexual implications of those lower zone bows.

  Claudia glanced over at the clock and saw that the hour was getting late. Time always seemed to surge forward when she was immersed in handwriting samples. What felt like ten minutes was in reality an hour.

  She knew she should get some rest so she would be ready for her meeting with Grusha tomorrow, but her body was telling her it was three hours earlier than the nightstand clock claimed it was. If she went to bed now, she would be awake by three a.m.

  Her eyes went to her cell phone on the nightstand. She wondered how Jovanic and Alex were doing on their stakeout. Would he call? He usually did when there was little action. She gave a small sigh and reached for the next folder.

  Over the next half hour Claudia reviewed
three files where the clients’ handwriting was not particularly noteworthy or remarkable. She made a few notes, but the samples looked normal and emotionally healthy enough that she didn’t bother to read Andy Nicholson’s reports. She knew instinctively that these were not problem clients.

  Another short break. She took a small bottle of white wine from the minibar and poured it into a water glass from the bathroom. It wasn’t up to the standard of Grusha’s Cabernet, but it was drinkable.

  The next client was a man named Marcus Bernard. Thirty-six, he’d listed his vitals as six two, two-ten, but Claudia was sure he must have fudged his weight by about ten pounds. In his head shot he wore a red baseball cap. His smile, hidden behind a full, graying beard, seemed open and affable. Something about him reminded her of the actor Sean Connery at a younger age, though Marcus Bernard’s lips tended more to thinness.

  In his biographical notes under Occupation, he’d entered “real estate developer, hotels.” Several snapshots showed him outdoors in natural settings—hiking with a tall walking stick; standing in front of an open pit at a groundbreaking. In one he wore a tuxedo, a silk scarf draped with studied carelessness around his neck.

  Claudia turned to his handwriting sample in the back of the folder. He had scrawled only a couple of lines that said he was looking for a woman who was sexy in the boardroom or the bedroom. How original.

  “Someone who is fun to be with,” he had penned. “Loyal, passionate, adventurous, and flexible.”

  The word flexible was underlined several times. That kind of heavy underlining often meant that the writer was dogmatic and tended to pontificate. What kind of flexibility did he expect to find? In the context of this handwriting sample, she thought it might be referring to a partner who would be tolerant of indiscretions. Or maybe his desire was for a woman who would participate in exotic activities, such as group sex. That was something his handwriting couldn’t tell her.

  The sample displayed many of the hallmarks of a smooth talker: slack rhythm; thready, indefinite letter forms. Some words were illegible. Bernard had left little space between words and lines. The upper loops were too tall, the long lower loops too long and pulling to the left.

  In some ways, the handwriting reminded Claudia of another writer—Lyle Menendez, who had been convicted of helping his younger brother murder their wealthy parents back in the mid-1990s.

  The capitals in Bernard’s signature were large and tall, which indicated that he thought very well of himself—maybe too well. The final stroke on the capital M in Marcus plunged below the baseline and curved under the a, which was the next letter to the right. A long beginning stroke on the a crossed the downstroke, creating a form that resembled the letter X.

  Claudia had researched this “X formation,” and had discovered that in most cases, those who made it had a fatalistic attitude or had been close to death in some way. She wondered whether Bernard had lost someone close to him.

  What she saw in the handwriting suggested that he was something of an action junkie who threw his energy around, sticking his fingers into a dozen pies. He needed excitement and stimulation, but small details were unimportant to him. He would need a strong support staff to follow behind and pick up the pieces. Experience told Claudia that he would use diffuse activity to help him avoid dealing with things he would rather not face.

  By this time, she figured she knew what she would find in Andy’s report: sex, sex, and more sex. This was one case where she couldn’t disagree with him. With the disproportionately long lower loops as part of the whole picture, Marcus Bernard would constantly be seeking new experiences and possibly new partners, but emotional satisfaction would elude him. The question was, knowing that, would Grusha have taken him on as a client?

  The wine and the fatigue from the long day were kicking in. Claudia yawned as she scribbled more notes, then moved on to folders number seven and eight. Seven was a rather boring sample; nothing stood out. Ron Gibson, twenty-nine, an advertising executive. The writing meandered along without a lot of energy. Claudia thought he was a little depressed, but he would be okay once Grusha hooked him up with the woman of his dreams.

  Number eight was an elfin woman with massively large, artistic handwriting. Her bio notes described her as Penelope Mendes, a twenty-seven-year-old writer from L.A. The handwriting was block printed but the letters touched, which suggested that while she wanted to be independent, Penelope really needed closeness.

  The last folder in the pile belonged to John Shaw, award-winning professional photographer and world traveler. At thirty-nine, he was a little older than the other clients she had viewed. He had a clean-cut, wholesome look, with springy ginger hair and blue eyes—unusual for a redhead, she thought. When she came to his handwriting sample, the news was not so good.

  The writing style was a conventional school type, except for a serious problem with the upper loops. Some of the l’s were twisted, while others were shaped like a candle flame with bulging sides and soft angles at the apex.

  While twisted lower loops like the ones in Heather Lloyd’s handwriting pointed to sexual issues, in the upper loops the twists could indicate serious medical or psychological problems. Claudia couldn’t diagnose a specific illness without a medical license, but she knew that physiological problems could sometimes be seen in handwriting.

  If a physical illness was not the source of the flame-shaped loops, then John Shaw had an idiosyncratic view of life; he was not on the same wavelength as the rest of the world. The baselines also pointed down, a sign of depression, illness, or fatigue.

  Claudia stacked the folders on the desk and went into the bathroom. She began her evening rituals to prepare for bed, thinking about what she had learned. So far, several of the male population of Grusha’s matchmaking club had monumentally failed to impress her. She had observed enough red flags in the handwritings of three of the male clients to believe that any of them could have engaged in behavior that might come back to haunt the matchmaker. And Heather Lloyd was a self-involved egotist, so she could be a problem, too. She guessed that the other clients had been thrown in as ringers, to test her.

  She got into bed and was switching off the light when her cell phone rang.

  Chapter 5

  “Claudia? Hey, how ya doing? It’s Susan Rowan—sorry to call so late, but I figured you’d be up. I know you—you’re always working.”

  The Long Island accent on the other end of the line was one that was hard to mistake. Susan Rowan was a colleague who lived in Manhattan. Claudia didn’t know Susan well enough to view her as a close friend, but they had crossed paths several times over the years and shared meals at a couple of handwriting analysis conventions.

  “Susan. Good to hear from you.”

  “I just heard you were in the city, so I was hoping we could get together while you’re here.”

  “Where in the world did you hear that?”

  “Oh, you know. A little bird told me.”

  “What little bird might that be?”

  “I’ll tell you about that later. How long are you gonna be here? Do you have time to meet?”

  “Of course, Suze, I’d love to see you. What’s your schedule like?”

  “How about breakfast tomorrow? There’s a good bagel shop up a block from your hotel. Go out the front door, turn left and start walking. You can’t miss it.”

  Claudia pressed the end button and crawled back under the covers, wondering where Susan had obtained the information on her whereabouts. Besides Jovanic, she hadn’t told anyone except her close friend, Kelly Brennan, that she was going to be away.

  Susan Rowan had commandeered a table in a secluded spot at the back of the noisy café. A stylish redhead, she wore a tweed jacket over a turtleneck sweater that attempted to cover loose folds of skin on her neck. Her Levi’s bagged a little at the seat on a body that was all angles and planes.

  She smiled with genuine warmth and brushed Claudia’s cheek with her own. “They’ll kill you as soon as look
at you to get a table,” she said, slipping out of her jacket and draping it over the back of the chair. “I’ll order for us if you’ll stand guard.”

  Noticing her sallow complexion, Claudia remembered hearing that Susan had been receiving cancer treatment. She could see that her friend had lost considerable weight since their last encounter at a seminar a couple of years earlier.

  Claudia watched Susan elbow her way to the counter, ignoring the grumbles of other customers. The humidity from the bagel kettle, the warmth of the oven, the steam from pots of fresh coffee had all conspired to fog up the windows, creating a sense of cozy seclusion that was more imagined than real. Savory aromas perfumed the air, making her stomach gurgle. It all felt very New Yawk.

  Susan reappeared five minutes later, bearing a tray laden with bagels in a plastic basket. Claudia reached for a cinnamon raisin and a single container of cream cheese. “These smell wonderful. I’m glad you phoned me. And not just because of the bagels.”

  Susan cracked a smile as she began layering lox and cream cheese on a water bagel. “Oh, sure, I know where I stand.”

  “I heard you’d been ill. I hope that’s all behind you now.”

  “It’s been a long haul,” Susan said, grimacing. “But I’m great now, really great. I’m done with chemo, got my hair back, and the docs have given me a clean bill of health. I’ve been planning what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

  “And have you got it all figured out?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have. I finally got divorced—it’s the damn marriage that made me sick. Never marry a doctor, Claudia, I’m telling you, they’re only good for the alimony.”