I flashed my ID while I asked, “Who are you?”
“Joan Hagler. Lisa’s manager.” Joan handed my ID back. “Come in.” She led me inside.
Over the travertine tiles, down a lithograph-lined hallway to Lisa’s living room. The room was all white. Walls, couch, chairs. Even the piano was white. The room had high ceilings and a massive white marble fireplace.
Sliding glass doors looked out on the backyard. Someone was swimming laps in the black bottom pool. I could only see the top of a blond head and graceful arms cutting through the water, but I knew it was Lisa.
“Lisa will join us in a minute,” Joan said. “In the meantime, I’d like to ask a few questions.”
“There is only so much I can reveal about the case,” I said. “I’m afraid details about ongoing investigations are kept confidential.”
“I wasn’t talking about the Gravesnatcher. I was talking about you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Why is Lisa so afraid of you?”
Oh, that ...
Let’s flash back five years. I was sitting at my desk, nursing a hangover, when I heard a frightened voice with just a trace of a southern accent: “Will you be my hero?”
I looked up and was impaled by a pair of green eyes. Lisa’s blond hair was shorter then, styled a little like the early Beatles, and she wore a pink sundress tight enough to make me think that was all she was wearing. She looked young—twenty-two or twenty-three at the most.
I wondered for an instant if she was some sort of gin-induced hallucination. Surely she couldn’t be real. I mean, scenes like this only happened in bad noir films.
“Lieutenant Rocket said you might be able to help me,” she said urgently. “Please, I’m desperate.”
Now, I probably would’ve still helped her if she’d been fat and seventy-five, but the prospect of rescuing this damsel in distress was irresistible. “You have a name?”
“Lisa. Lisa Ann Montgomery. My agent wants me to drop the Ann. ‘Too southern,’ he says. So you can just call me Lisa.”
“And I’m Gideon. Your knight in shining armor.”
She thought she was being stalked. She’d never exactly seen a stalker. But she felt him. When she was driving. Shopping. Even at home. And things were missing from her house. A bracelet, hairbrush, a pair of pink panties. Since no threats had been made and Lisa had no suspects, there was nothing the police could do. So Mary Rocket told her she needed a private investigator and recommended me.
I followed Lisa to her rented Laurel Canyon bungalow. Simple but homey, it was filled with thrift shop furniture, fake Tiffany lamps, needlepoint pillows, and framed photos of her on stage in various college productions.
She’d told me she was an actress and had just been in her first movie, a romantic comedy called Moonbeams and Magic. It was a huge hit, and the green-eyed actress with the short blond hair was getting all the attention. But there was a price to her newfound fame. The stalking started two days after the picture opened.
Lisa wanted to know how the stalker was getting in. I checked the doors and windows, which she claimed were always locked, and found the problem. The lock on the sliding glass living room door was loose. A couple of tugs and it slid right open.
Leaving Lisa in the house, I searched outside for signs of a stalker. The centerpiece of the backyard was a hot tub. I think everyone in Laurel Canyon got one during the fad-crazed ’80s. There was a tiny patch of grass, a couple of scraggily fruit trees, and a small brick wall where the yard met the hillside. No clues here. The front yard yielded just as little.
Then I noticed an abandoned house across the street. No doubt a victim of the housing market collapse, the house had a ‘For Sale’ sign stuck in its overgrown lawn and a hastily erected cyclone fence surrounding the property.
While examining the perimeter of the fence, I found a section that had been cut and peeled away then reattached with garbage ties, creating a temporary gate. I slipped inside the fence, reached through a broken window and opened the back door.
I did a quick search of the house and struck gold in the master bedroom. A sagging, drained waterbed dominated the room, no doubt a leftover from the ’70s—just as fad-crazed as the ’80s.
In front of a corner window, directly across from Lisa’s bedroom window, I found the detritus of a stalker; overflowing ashtray, empty beer cans, crumpled fast food wrappers. I also found something else. The bottom of the window facing Lisa’s bedroom was stained with a crusty, milky film—dried semen.
I told Lisa what I’d found, not bothering to mention the fact that her stalker would stand in front of the window, watching her walk around her bedroom, and masturbate.
I told her to stay put tonight. I was going to stake out the house across the street and wait for her stalker to arrive.
I made myself a nest across the hall from the master bedroom in what—judging from the Barbie doll wallpaper, pink carpet and drapes—must have been a little girl’s room decorated amidst the fad-crazed ’60s.
There was no way of knowing if the stalker showed up every night, at what time, or how long he stayed. So I checked my watch—8:17—and settled in for a long wait.
As I sat there, I realized I was living a cliché, a PI with a beautiful woman as a client. I couldn’t help but wonder if this case would follow the rules of pulp fiction, which would require me to end up in bed with her.
Not an entirely unpleasant thought, I had to admit, especially at this point in my life. My marriage to Stacy was falling apart. She was ready to leave me.
Incredibly ambitious, Stacy was desperate to outdo her old man, a thirty-seven-year veteran of the LAPD who’d died at his desk, a Captain. Now that I’d been forced off the force, Stacy was worried her career would be damaged, a guilt by association thing. This possibility made her even more critical, impatient, demanding, sarcastic, and bitchy than usual.
It didn’t help that my self-esteem was at an all time low. At the risk of sounding too much like a Jonathan Kellerman psycho thriller, my ego had been betrayed by my superego, so my id was paying the price. I’d lost the only thing I’d ever really wanted—to be a cop—and I had no one but myself to blame.
Having a beautiful young starlet confuse gratitude with desire and show her thanks by ripping my clothes off might provide a little compensation.
My reveries were interrupted by the squeak of a floorboard, the crinkling of paper and the familiar smell of McDonald’s French fries. A glance at my watch told me it was 9:02.
I slipped out my gun as I heard the intruder climb the stairs. A man crossed the hall and entered the bedroom, a McDonald’s bag in one hand, a bottle of wine in the other. He had his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face, only his long, dishwater-blond hair tied in a ponytail. He was about five eight or nine and wore a black leather jacket, jeans, and work boots.
I crept to the bedroom doorway. His back was still to me as he stared out the window. He took a swig from the bottle then muttered to himself, “Come on, baby, daddy’s here.”
“So am I, asshole,” I said in my best hard-ass cop voice. “Freeze.”
He didn’t. He spun instead, hurling the bottle of wine at my head. I ducked, but his throw was low, and I ending up ducking right into the goddamn thing. I dropped to my knees, dazed.
He charged right past me, plunged down the stairs and out the front door. I would have chased after him, but that’s when I blacked out.
“Gideon?”
I opened my eyes to find two beautiful emeralds staring at me. A fogbank encircled my brain. Such beautiful eyes, I thought. Then my nose twitched as I smelled wine and my skin crawled. I realized I was soaking wet.
The eyes settled into a face—Lisa’s face—and she looked worried. “Gideon, are you all right?”
I struggled to my knees as an excruciating headache finally burned through the fog. I patted the side of my skull and felt a lump the size of an egg. Grade A jumbo. The big ones. The really big ones.
I looked
down. I’d been lying next to my gun in a puddle of wine. I picked up the Glock and, embarrassed, stuck it back in my holster.
“When you didn’t come back I got worried. Thought something dreadful might’ve happened.”
“What time is it?”
“Just after midnight.”
Christ, I’d been out for three hours. “Something did happen. Your stalker is real.”
“I knew it!” she said, relieved she wasn’t crazy and fearful of what that entailed. Then my present circumstances hit home.
“Where is he? What happened?”
You hired a pathetic loser, I thought. “Let’s just say, he got away,” I said. “I do have a general description of him, so don’t worry; next time he shows up, I’ll catch him.” I didn’t have the guts to tell her he’d have to back into the room wearing the same jacket, jeans and work boots for me to identify him, since I was too busy staring at the incoming bottle to look at his face.
“Just to be safe, I don’t think you should stay here tonight. My wife and I have an extra bedroom. You can bunk with us.”
“So how long were you a cop?”
“Thirteen years.”
“Wow, I didn’t know you could retire after only thirteen years.”
“You can’t. I quit.”
“Oh. Why?”
We were driving from Laurel Canyon toward Stacy’s and my three-bedroom house in Van Nuys. I had one hand on the wheel while the other held an ice pack to my throbbing head.
Lisa had just asked the million-dollar question: why had I quit the force? What the hell should I tell her? The standard, I got sick of all the bullshit, or the truth? I’d never told anyone the whole truth, but something about the trusting way Lisa looked at me made me want her to know what had really happened.
“You have to put up with a lot of bullshit being a cop. The courts make it almost impossible to arrest anyone, then the D.A.’s won’t prosecute unless it’s an ironclad case. Even if you get to court, L.A. juries let everybody off anyway.”
“O.J. and all that.”
“Yeah. But once in a while, when the evidence is just so, a jury has to come back with a guilty verdict. However, you need incontrovertible evidence.”
“Fibers, DNA, stuff like that?”
“No. Fibers and DNA can be argued. The science can be questioned, the chain of evidence. Incontrovertible evidence means things like fingerprints, security camera tape, unimpeachable eyewitnesses, confessions. Nothing circumstantial. Nothing debatable. Nothing a weak-kneed judge or half-brained jurist could throw out. That’s the only way you can get justice in this crazy town. So that’s what I arranged for Ernie Wagner.”
“Who?”
“Ernie Wagner, a subhuman cretin who beat and raped old women. He’d hang around the Fairfax district, pick out a victim shopping alone and follow her home. He must have been locked in some weird Oedipal fantasy, because they all looked alike—in their mid-to-late seventies, always short, usually under five feet, with their hair dyed red.”
“He actually raped old women?”
“Seven we knew about. He’d knock on the door, identify himself as a cop, flash a store-bought badge, and talk his way in. He’d beat them, often breaking the jaw and nose, then tie their hands and feet and gag them with duct tape. He’d light a cigarette and touch the burning embers to the left breast, again and again—twenty-three times, always twenty-three times, forming the shape of a heart. Finally he’d sodomize them.”
“My God—”
“We caught him with a decoy. One of our dispatchers matched the body type and a Hollywood make-up man turned a thirty-four-year-old Valley girl named Crystal into a redhaired septuagenarian. We trolled for three days before he took the bait, followed her to our rented apartment and talked his way in with the tin badge. After he threw his first punch we came out of the bedroom and took the freak down.
“That’s when the headshrinkers moved in. Told the court that he’d been abused by his mother, convinced the jury that society had failed poor Ernie. He was sentenced to ten years in the Camarillo State Psychiatric Hospital. After only three years Ernie convinced his keepers that they were geniuses and had cured him. Congratulating themselves, they returned Ernie Wagner to society.”
“No!”
“Oh, yeah. I only found out about it because some irate reporter for the L.A. Times picked up on Ernie’s release and wrote a scathing article. Two days later my partner and I were called to a Fairfax apartment, where a seventy-six-year-old woman named Ida Glass lay, bound head and foot, mouth duck taped shut, a heart burned into her left breast.”
“Ernie—”
“No question. Only this time he’d made a mistake. Her neck was broken; she was dead. Looking down at that poor, pitiful woman, I realized that no matter how hard I worked to avenge the dead, between the prosecutors, judges, juries and shrinks, scumbags like
Ernie would always get away. Not this time, I promised myself. No matter what, Ernie was going down.
“But Ernie was smart. In the seven earlier rapes he’d worn a condom. He never left any sperm, no pubic hair, no fingerprints, no trace evidence whatsoever, so tying him to this murder wasn’t going to be easy. I decided to increase the odds. But my new partner, Victor Chu, was a real straight arrow, so I’d have to go rogue. Since Victor hadn’t worked the earlier rapes, he hadn’t made the connection to Ernie, and I didn’t say anything. While he searched the living room, I drifted into the kitchen. On the counter I found a matched set of knives sticking out of a wooden block. Five knives, each knife in its custom-sized slot. I slipped one of the knives out of the block and into my pocket.
“Later, after my partner and I’d left the crime scene and split up for the night, I made a call to the Camarillo facility, got an address on Ernie, and made a quick stop at a 7-Eleven to buy some duct tape.”
“Duct tape?”
“I was going to plant the knife in Ernie’s apartment to tie him to the murder, and since I knew the brand of duct tape Ernie used from our earlier lab analysis, I wanted to leave traces of the adhesive on the knife.”
“Icing on the cake sort of thing?”
“Exactly. So I cut a piece of duct tape with the knife, then threw away the tape, wiped my fingerprints off the knife and dropped it back in my pocket. Next I called my partner Victor, said I’d made the connection to Ernie and told him to meet me outside Ernie’s apartment in Silverlake. It was three a.m. by the time we banged on Ernie’s door. While Victor questioned him I searched his apartment. Ernie denied everything, but of course had no alibi. Said he’d been home alone watching TV all night. Then I ‘found’ the knife on the floor of his closet and we busted him.”
“So you had your incontrovertible evidence.”
“We never needed it. Three days later Ernie’s throat was slashed in a jailhouse brawl over cigarettes, and he bled to death on the floor of the rec room.”
Lisa digested this as we crested Mulholland and began our descent down Coldwater Canyon into the Valley. “Wait,” she said, confused. “I don’t get it. If Ernie was killed anyway, and you never used the fake evidence to convict him, why’d you have to leave the police department?”
“Ernie was innocent.”
“What?!”
“Four days later Mort Stein, the guilt-ridden son of our seventy-six-year-old victim, confessed to killing his mother.”
“But the duct tape, the burned heart ...?”
“They were printed in that L.A. Times article. Mort pulled a copycat number and would’ve gotten away with a perfect crime if he’d been able to handle the guilt.”
“And if Mort had killed his mother, the cops wanted to know how Ida’s knife got into Ernie Wagner’s closet.”
“Yep. I played dumb and never confessed, but everybody knew. A few anal types in the D.A.’s office wanted to press charges, but the Chief was afraid of what would happen if the press found out the city’s finest were framing suspects. He let me resign.”
What I didn’
t tell her was the thing that had hurt me most. I expected the wrath I got from the brass and the D.A. What I didn’t expect was the cold shoulder I got from all my friends on the force. I was suddenly a pariah. Nobody wanted to be seen with me. Nobody wanted to talk to me. I was not only cut out of the force, I was cut out of their lives.
Lisa studied me in silence as I turned into my driveway. She must’ve felt my vibe, because she asked, “You lost a lot more than your job, didn’t you?”
“You smell like shit.”
“Actually, it’s Robert Mondavi Reserve Chardonnay, and it goes for almost twenty bucks a bottle.”
“But I think Mr. Mondavi manufactures it for people to drink, not bathe in.”
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Stacy and I were standing in our bedroom; a suitcase was open on the bed, filled with Stacy’s clothes. She’d been packing when I got home and had barely looked up when I’d walked in. I’d told Lisa to wait in the living room while I explained to Stacy why she was here—something I hadn’t had a chance to do yet.
The repartee that Stacy and I exchanged was actually our sorry excuse for not talking about what was really bothering us. We could dodge the issues by dueling pithy one-liners. The sniping provided emotional armor, protecting us from talking about the day-to-day un-pleasantries. The horror of work, our front row seats to humanity’s underbelly, and our deteriorating marriage. A marriage that had been great for a while—all hand-holding, long, hot unmotivated kisses, sex three or four times a week. A marriage that had been stressed by work and then ruptured by my evidence planting. Divorce seemed inevitable, but neither one of us was willing to mention the D word. Funny thing was, I still loved Stacy. In my suddenly topsy-turvy life, she was the only remaining constant. Problem was, she thought of me as a pariah, an embarrassment to the police department, and a detriment to her career.
I’d fucked everything up.
Stacy pointed at the lump on my head. “Is that a softball growing out of your brain or are you just glad to see me?”
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