Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack

by Jack Bunker

  “A hell of a lot of good it did her.”

  I think back on that moment when my hand brushed Ginger’s leg, and she closed up like a clam. I feel strangely exonerated.

  Gloria takes the opportunity to remind the combatants of our presence. “She was pretty provocative for a woman who didn’t like men.”

  “I didn’t say she didn’t like ’em,” says Billy. “I said she didn’t like ’em to touch her. Only the Lord Almighty hisself knows what the hell was bouncin’ ’round in her brainbox. She was ’bout as stable as a two-legged stool.”

  EIGHTEEN

  I sit in my fake Eames, trying to concentrate on a handwritten transcript of Lana’s answering machine messages, daydreaming about taking a nap.

  Melody leans back from the computer.

  “Boom-Boom Laphroig’s high school buddy accepted my friend request. I suggested she friend you, too,” she says.

  I acknowledge this with a nod and glance out the window. The smog sits like a brown blanket over the Valley, so thick you can’t even see the Van Nuys Civic Center three miles away.

  The phone rings. Melody punches the speakerphone button. “Nob Brown’s office.”

  “Is he there?” It’s Holly. I start waving my arms like a flagman trying to prevent a collision. Melody refuses to lie for me, so I step into the hallway.

  “Sorry,” she says. “He stepped out.”

  “Tell him to pick up the phone, Melody.”

  Melody shoots me a look, but I shake my head.

  “I’ll tell him you called, Holly.”

  “I don’t deserve this, Nob.” The line goes dead.

  Melody punches off the speakerphone. “You don’t pay me enough for this shit.”

  I walk back into the room. “Once Jerry’s on the case, I’ll have to cut your pay anyway.”

  “I only wish there was something to cut.”

  We both watch a KNBC chopper buzz down the 101 to check traffic. Mel’s neck is backlit by the window, a gooseneck that makes her look fragile, vulnerable. But within the frail package lies a tough broad, a Chihuahua who goes after Rottweilers. What Melody lacks in heft, she makes up in chutzpah.

  She stands up and drops into her signature splits. “Lana led such a public life. How come no one ever figured out who the Asshole was?”

  “The cops certainly tried. But it was a chaotic investigation. Most of the people they interviewed were so drugged out they wouldn’t have known a fact if it sprang from their morning latte. And the press was all over it like the OJ trial. Everyone was jockeying for airtime. The cops logged seventy-eight confessions—seventy-eight assholes aspiring to be the Asshole. My personal favorite was the Baptist preacher who said the painting made him do it because ‘Pop art is the devil’s bullhorn.’”

  She pulls an old Time magazine from the file. The Lichtenstein is on the cover. “That the Dotted Babe?”

  “Yeah.” Sans blood, sans corpse. “It made the covers of Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and TV Guide all within two weeks of the murder, and three months later it made Art Forum.”

  “Lichtenstein never had it so good.”

  I pass her the answering machine transcript. “Put that back in the file, will you?”

  “Anything interesting on the tape?” She finally moves to her work area to access the accordion file we’re using to organize Lana’s stuff.

  “A couple folks left their first names and no call-back numbers. Maybe you can try to figure out who they are from Lana’s phone bills. They’re in the file.”

  “I guess I could do that,” she says.

  “The last call was from her father,” I add. “He told her he was sorry he didn’t beat the shit out of her the night before and, among other anatomical impossibilities, he said she could go fuck herself.”

  NINETEEN

  I could have gone online to search the LA Times archives, but when you go back as far as the eighties, you have to pay for each hit, and I can’t afford to buy everything that’s ever been written about Lana Strain just to find the few facts I don’t already know from her case file and the Web, so I’m going low tech. I’m threading 35 mm film onto the sprockets of a microfilm reader that sounds like it hasn’t been oiled in about two millennia. I feel like I should be wearing white cotton gloves, as if I’m handling an ancient Macedonian burial urn.

  I’m four floors underground in the Central Library on Fifth Street, but the History and Genealogy Department is flooded with natural morning light from the cavernous Bradley wing atrium. I’m scanning thousands of microfilmed newspaper pages, just as they originally appeared in the Times of yesteryear. I’m flooded with images from my childhood as I scroll past ads for stores and products that haven’t existed in decades. The process is tedious, and six hours later I’ve found only three items of interest.

  The first, from a long-gone gossip columnist named Liz Smith, alleged that Billy Kidd had moved back into Lana’s house less than an hour after the police released the crime scene. According to Liz, Lana’s father, Nathaniel Strain, had not been pleased.

  The second, from an anonymous source, claimed that Billy had sent both of his teenage daughters to a shrink recommended by actress Courteney Cox, whom Billy had met while shooting a fifteen-second cameo on Friends.

  And the third, which Billy himself told to Barbara Walters, denied the Courteney Cox rumor, claiming to have found the shrink through Lana’s seamstress and best friend, Claudine Hugo.

  I wouldn’t describe any of these items as burning clues, and my back feels like I’ve been jammed inside a suitcase all day. But it had to be done.

  As I head into the parking garage, I realize that my dople was the closest thing to a meal I’ve had since yesterday, so I crawl the Hollywood Freeway to Carnicería Argentina on Victory for an empanada fix.

  Hanibal is behind the enormous meat counter braiding intestines into chinchulines when I walk in. “Hey, Brownie, how you doin’?”

  “Que tal, Hanibal.” I can fake Spanish when I have to.

  He raves about a new Cabernet from Mendoza as he packs a dozen of his homemade beef turnovers for my freezer and heats two more for me to eat in the car.

  I drive home savoring the flavor of the Pampas, feeding my soul as well as my stomach, and thinking about Lana’s will. I finish the second empanada as I pull up to my house.

  Melody’s car is nowhere to be seen. I assume she’s off either taking or teaching dance or Pilates or yoga or “movement,” whatever that means. I check the mailbox, hoping for Lana’s probate papers from the county, but there’s nothing but catalogues, bills, and a postcard from a real estate agent I don’t know letting me in on exciting news about a house sale I don’t care about. Still no replies to any of the six story queries I sent out three weeks ago. I make a mental note to place some follow-up calls this afternoon.

  My house is on a downslope, so I descend from the street to get to the front door. There are only eight steps but I still take them two at a time. Got to sneak in whatever exercise I can get. I’ve always had a naturally lean build, but lately I’ve been noticing some incremental waistline creep. Not enough to show, but enough to tighten my pants. As I absently palpate my key ring for my house key, I consider the possibility of squeezing in an extra swim workout tonight at Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Park.

  I open the front door and walk into an unexpected whiff of whiskey. My antennae spring up. Red alert.

  I sneak toward my office, and the floor crunches underfoot. Broken glass. I freeze, an insect hitting a windshield of fear. I hold my breath and listen for someone else’s, but all I hear is the ceaseless white noise of the Valley. After a long pause, I back up, trying to be silent, but with the glass on the floor, I sound like a horse chewing Corn Nuts. I’ve clearly lost the advantage of surprise if someone’s here. I grab a fireplace poker.

  In the kitchen everything appears normal, but something still feels wrong. I open the drawer where I keep my metal kitchen utensils—tongs, spatulas, slotted spoons,
meat pounder, spider, potato masher, graduated graters, muddler, zester, the usual. I see my grandmother’s marrow scoop with its handle of bird’s-eye maple. I keep it for its sentimental value but it has a broken rivet so I never use it. Because of that, it ends up living in the back of the drawer, but now it’s front and center. Someone’s been in there, apparently searching. I wonder what for.

  I creep up the stairs, poker raised. I feel like I’m in a film and hope it’s not Psycho. I make the rounds of the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom without being attacked. No one’s there but, as in the kitchen, someone has been. Small clues tell me someone searched every room, but as far as I can tell, nothing is missing. This wasn’t a robbery.

  I return to the office and turn on the light. The room looks untouched except for the smashed bottle of booze—he wasted my best single malt Scotch just when I need it. Judging by the care he took to cover his tracks, I assume he dropped it by accident.

  Why would someone break into my house to search? What was he looking for? Could it have been triggered by my investigation into Lana Strain’s murder? After all this time, why would anyone care enough to take the risk? And who has the balls and the skills to pull it off?

  Scotch dries sticky. I’m on my knees cleaning the floor when Melody waltzes in. “Holy shit,” she says.

  “It’s only a broken bottle.” I wring my rag into a bucket.

  “It’s just such a shock to see you scrubbing the floor,” she says.

  “You planning to gawk? Or you planning to help?”

  She makes no move to help. “What happened?”

  “Somebody searched the house.”

  “What were they looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Notes?”

  “The Lana Strain story?”

  “Maybe. I had my notebook with me, and they didn’t take the case file, but they could have slipped something out of it. I’ve got a call in to Gloria to see if I can get my hands on the original again to compare it against my copy.”

  Mel leans over without bending her knees and puts her palms on the floor, just because she can, then she reaches between her legs toward the bottom shelf of my bookcase. To extend her stretch, she reaches for the copy of Ulysses I read during my freshman year at Princeton. My only year at Princeton. “Stately, plump,” she says then reshelves it. I’m surprised she knows the opening words of an actual book. I’ve never known her to read anything that wasn’t measured in pixels.

  “Got a suspect?” she asks.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. I can’t imagine Billy doing something like this. I guess it could have been Nathaniel Strain. But I think Gary Cogswell is the most likely. Breaking and entering would be a cakewalk for his boys.”

  “That’s just great. Your pal Vlad the Impaler is probably ordering you a dople of Molotov cocktails as we speak.” She glances out the window, checking the street in both directions before reaching up to pull down the window shade. No enabling a drive-by for this girl. “Thanks a lot, Nob.”

  I drop my rag in the Scotchy sludge and consider scooping some into a highball glass.

  TWENTY

  Gloria shimmies into the black cocktail dress, straightens the wrinkles, turns to the mirror, and frowns. “Too sexy,” she says. Considering that the slit side almost reveals her thong, I have to agree, but I don’t comment.

  She’s running out of black, having tried on and rejected two dresses and four skirts already. They lie in a pile on the bed beside me. I feel stiff and hot in my charcoal wool suit. The added warmth of Gloria’s laptop doesn’t help. I’ve been reading up on Bakatin, trying to winnow a motive for him or Cogswell to want to search my place.

  She takes off the dress and adds it to the pile. I drill through local media sites and stumble on a reference to Bakatin’s shell company, Kocibey Development.

  Gloria stares into her closet with a look of intent concentration, as if willpower can levitate the perfect outfit. She selects a fifth black skirt and slips into it.

  “Five-minute warning,” I say.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll do my lipstick in the car.”

  Gloria finds a white silk blouse and tries it on with a waist-length jacket. It’s black jacquard, like the scarf that strangled a Haitian actress I wrote about last year.

  I click through to a year-old blog entry from a real estate agent congratulating his wife and business partner on closing a big Chatsworth land sale to Kocibey Development. I click on the wife’s name and get her contact page. I punch her phone number into my cell. Then I close the laptop. We’re on the verge of running late.

  “You look great,” I say then regret it. I find that it’s generally best to keep my mouth shut about how women look in clothes, no matter what you have to say.

  “You’re just saying that because you want to go.”

  “That’s true, but you’ve looked great in everything you’ve tried on.”

  She does a half turn to look at herself from the back, then puts on two mismatched shoes, one with a three-inch heel and one with a six-inch. “Which do you like?” She turns first to one side then the other.

  “I like the practical one.”

  “You’re so predictable.”

  She kicks off the fuck-me pump and hobbles past me on one heel. I give her a swat.

  “Ow!” But she says it playfully. “Don’t you spank me, or we’ll never get out of here.”

  “Three-minute warning.”

  Gloria panics as she disappears into her closet for her other shoe. She’s a woman who rarely worries over clothes, but something about funerals stirs her inner fashionista.

  On the way to Hollywood Forever Cemetery, I call the real estate agent and mention that a friend at Kocibey Development had recommended her and wonder if there were any other properties available for sale near the parcel she sold them. She tells me that there are no other vacant lots in the area, but she gives me the address of a minimall for sale a block east of the Kocibey property.

  As Gloria pulls into the cemetery I call Melody and ask her to look up the minimall address on Zillow, get an address for the large parcel a block west, then run over to the Department of Building and Safety in Van Nuys to get copies of any permits that might have been pulled in recent years. I don’t know what I’m looking for, so I’m casting a wide net.

  The gate guard directs us to the private service at graveside where maybe thirty people stand waiting. Most of the mourners appear to be friends of Billy’s, judging by their age. It’s sad that Ginger had so few friends of her own. I recognize Belinda Carlisle, Axl Rose, Eddie Van Halen, and Taj Mahal.

  The casket hangs suspended over the tailored hole, and beyond it stand Billy, Claudine, and Sophia, who leans against a fit, muscular man with such intimacy that he can only be Dr. Karl Lynch. No sign of Nathaniel Strain.

  Lynch absently strokes his immaculate salt-and-pepper mane as if checking for perfectly combed strands gone astray. His other arm embraces Sophia protectively, a human security blanket. His hair almost matches his wide-set eyes, which are blue but so clear as to appear gray. He looks to be about fifteen years older than Sophia, but he wears the years well, looking more self-assured than age-weary. His gaze is fixed on the coffin.

  Sophia glances in my direction and sneaks a half smile. If she weren’t here with Lynch, I’d think she was flirting. Gloria notices but says nothing. I return Sophia’s smile with a sad overtone, trying to mime my condolences.

  Dumphy stands at the foot of the grave with a deputy DA I’ve seen around. I think his name is Mepum or Mopam or something like that. I wonder why the two of them would show up for a suicide but write it off to the celebrity angle. I’ve never met the DA, but Gloria once told me she’d had a fleeting interest due to his big feet but decided to pass when he’d opened his big mouth.

  There had been no chapel service, perhaps to avoid the embarrassment of empty pews. Now, at the grave, a nonsectarian minister steps forward and offers a few trite homilies. It’s clear that h
e never met the deceased. He concludes with the Twenty-Third Psalm and then asks if anyone else would like to say a few words. A man volunteers.

  He identifies himself as Zeke something, Ginger’s neighbor of nine years.

  “Ginger,” Zeke says. “What can you say? So beautiful. She had a heart as big as a blimp. Always said good morning. Always had a dog biscuit for Bertram. Always fed him and took my mail in when I was out of town. Never left her cans out after garbage day. I’m really going to miss her. I just hope that in death she finds the inner peace she couldn’t find in life. God bless you, Ginger.”

  Zeke steps back and an obese, middle-aged woman steps forward. Her hair is so thin I can see sunlight reflecting off the sweat of her scalp. One eye is a good quarter-inch lower than the other, unhappily distorting her face to resemble Quasimodo’s.

  “Hello. My name is Andrea Andrews, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “She’s at the wrong meeting,” whispers Gloria.

  “I first met Ginger when we wound up in the same hospital room. I couldn’t believe she’d slit her wrists, too. She was so beautiful—why would she want to kill herself? And it wasn’t just outer beauty, it was inner beauty. Everybody could see it. I remember when I got out and she invited me to check out her therapy group.”

  Karl Lynch stiffens beside Sophia, seemingly girding himself. He’s watching Andrea anxiously, like she’s just pulled the pin on a hand grenade.

  “She really seemed like some other person when she was there, soothing her inner child, dealing with her personal demons in group.”

  Andrea is noticeably shaking, fighting tears, finding it increasingly difficult to speak.

  Sophia stares at Ginger’s coffin almost longingly, as if wondering what it would feel like to be lying inside. Lynch turns his attention to her, touching her arm to make sure she’s all right. She starts at his touch.

  “We all thought she was doing so great. She was so beautiful. I mean, if she couldn’t make it…” She breaks down, unable to go on.