In the living room he lowered himself into the brown vinyl easy chair, rested his feet on the beanbag hassock, and stared at the lighted fish tank, listening to the hum of its electric pump, its air bubbles. Angelo liked angelfish. The little castle the fish swam through had fallen over. He got up, put the castle right, and sprinkled fish food on the water. The fish rose to the food, and he remembered the rabbits. He walked back through the kitchen and out the side door around to where the hutches were, between the house and the shop. Across the garage door “Angelo’s Trim Shop” was spray-painted in black graffiti script.
Out back his yellow mutt, Sparky, greeted him and rolled over. Angelo scratched Sparky’s belly and made guttural sounds. Then he opened the hutches and gave food pellets to the rabbits, stroking them with his big hands, mumbling at them.
He heard a car pull into the driveway. He could tell from the sound of the motor that it was Kenneth Bianchi’s Cadillac. My crazy cousin, Angelo thought. Maybe we’ll get some action.
They went into the house together. Kenneth Bianchi was twenty-six and more fashion-conscious than his cousin. This evening he wore a three-quarter-length brown leather coat, jeans, and earth shoes. His dark hair was freshly permed, not naturally curly like Angelo’s. Bianchi was just under six feet, a fairly well-knit hundred and eighty pounds. With his mustache, he looked like one of the many thousands of young men in Southern California who aspired to stardom but had not landed a role. Something in his manner suggested that he thought he was being photographed. He was Burt Reynolds without a contract but not so tan. The acne scars on his neck lent some character to a bland though not unhandsome face. Lately he had been working for a land title company, where he always wore a dark three-piece suit and carried an attaché case, the eager young executive look. He was called a title officer, though he was but a clerk. Bianchi was a man of many parts. From time to time he lost conviction in his mustache and shaved it off. The perm, too, was a matter of whim from month to month. He was a man easy not to recognize.
“Great party last night,” Bianchi said, pacing about. “Really terrific. Kelli and I and her brother and two other guys. We all hit the Circus Maximus. You wouldn’t have believed it, you know?” They had celebrated Halloween two days early.
Angelo made a low noise.
“Guess what. We went dressed as—you’re not going to believe this—slugs!” Angelo did not react. “Can you believe it? You know, like a snail or something. Really creepy. Kelli made the costumes. It was so very cool. We painted our faces green and put on these green garbage bags and green leotards and, get this, we had Saran Wrap kind of trailing off us, like slime, you know? It was so great. Fuck it! Halloween in Hollywood! Un-fucking-believable!”
“It ain’t even Halloween yet. Halloween’s tomorrow, dumbbell.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Nothing on TV,” Angelo said. Sunday was a bad night for cop shows, Angelo’s favorites. (He rarely missed an episode of Kojak or Baretta; he identified with their tough-guy heroes.) “What you want to do?”
Angelo’s speech was rough—a grunt, a grumble, a rasp, the snarl of the underdog. If you had not known that he had been born in Rochester and raised in Los Angeles, you would have guessed Brooklyn or maybe Hoboken. A slight speech impediment, trouble with r’s and l’s, made him slide from syllable to syllable as though his tongue had been greased. Articulation was not Angelo’s strong suit, but he always got his point across.
In the kitchen, he opened a can of clams, ate a spoonful of them, and followed that with a spoonful of olive oil. When he took this mixture, his ulcer never bothered him. With the back of his hand he wiped a smear of oil from his mustache, moving aside his long, arched nose.
“What’ll we do?” Angelo said. “Gotta get out of the house. Need some action.”
“It’s super chilly out,” Bianchi said. Though he had lived on the Coast for less than two years, Bianchi already spoke like a New Age Californian, inflectionless, smooth, a mellowed-out beach boy, not a trace remaining of the aggressive East in his sounds. “Hey. I wore my coat.” He gave his ingratiating grin and half-twirled, like a fashion model.
“Yeah. That ain’t what I asked. You want to do something?”
“You got something in mind?”
Angelo stared up at his cousin. Angelo’s eyes were dark under bony brow ridges, his forehead prehistoric. He said nothing. Talking was not something he did much of. He had found that a few words usually got him what he wanted. One of the things he hated about his cousin was that Kenny never seemed to shut up. But Kenny could be useful. He was not stupid, and if you just stared at him long enough, he would get the picture. He would sense what Angelo wanted and then perform as if by remote control. Kenny was a willing slave, Angelo had figured out. A pain in the ass much of the time, but very cooperative when you wanted to make use of him. He was better than most bitches that way. And Angelo knew that he could do and say certain things with Kenny that he could not with anyone else. They had the understanding of an old married couple or two cellmates. Kenny was almost, but not quite, Angelo’s punk.
“We could go scamming,” Bianchi said. “We could go scamming in Hollywood.” He sounded boyishly eager. A Beaver Cleaver. His voice lacked the resonance of manhood.
Angelo grunted.
“We could do that,” Bianchi said.
Another grunt.
“Like last time. It worked.”
“Better, mi numi. Got to be better.”
“We go cruising. We pick up a girl. Same scam. Super.”
“This time we need more time. Got to have time. Last time was rushed, man.”
“Sure. Listen, I can tell you, it isn’t super great in a backseat, either. I mean, what’s that, you know? Strictly for kids. Backseat screwing is strictly overrated.”
“You forget, asshole. I didn’t get nothing.”
“Sure, Tony.” Angelo was sometimes called Tony by family and friends. They also called him the Buzzard. “It happened too fast. We just winged it. If you’d said something, you know. Anything I—”
“We got to plan this shit. We need more time, like I said.” Angelo grunted out his words. His voice was a faulty pump spewing silt. “Scam’s okay. We need a place. Need some place. Fucking pad someplace. Need a place to nail her, man, you see?”
“Hey, how about right here?”
Angelo sat down in the brown vinyl easy chair and pulled on his right earlobe with his right hand. He let half a minute pass. When Bianchi started to speak again, Angelo said, “Shut up.” Finally Angelo said: “Yeah. Here would be good. Real good thinking. Nobody can’t see nothing here, can’t hear nothing. Perfect. You ain’t so dumb.”
“Well, I’ve got a master’s from Columbia University, don’t I?”
“Yeah, I seen it, asshole. You are some bullshitter. You oughta be rich. How come you ain’t got a dime?”
“I’m getting there.”
“How much money you owe me?”
“Give me some time, Angelo. Kelli’s pregnant, you know.”
“Dumb bitches,” Angelo said. “Goddam bitches. That goddam Becky and that fucking Sabra. Tits. Okay, bullshitter. So we bring the cunt back here. So there’s no question afterwards, we got to . . .” He drew a line across his throat. “No problem?”
“Nah. No problem at all, Tony. We can do it right.”
“They don’t fuck me over and live. They’re gonna know that.”
“They’ll know it, Angelo, they’ll know it.”
A vein in Bianchi’s neck began to pulse. He paced around, rubbing his hands on his jeans. They went over the details. The governing concept was rolling a prostitute. It had been on their minds for weeks, having sex with a prostitute and not paying and then doing what they agreed they had to do. They had had some success, but perfection had eluded them. Tonight had to be better.
“Let me get my jacket,” Angelo said. “Want to change my shirt.”
Bianchi shadowed Buono. He trailed him to the
bathroom, which was decorated with Penthouse centerfolds. Through the open door he watched him pee, apply Arrid Extra-Dry deodorant from a spray can, and splash on Brut after-shave. In the bedroom Angelo put on a clean shirt and a beige windbreaker and picked his wallet off the top of the dresser. He opened the wallet and flashed the police badge that was pinned inside, grinning, showing crooked teeth. He reached into his closet and brought out a Roi Tan cigar box, extracting from it a pair of shiny handcuffs. “Let’s get going,” he said, like a lieutenant in a war movie or a kid playing war, shoving the handcuffs down into a back pocket.
On the way out, prudent householder that he was, Angelo switched off lights, leaving one burning in the bathroom and another in the fish tank. No sense encouraging burglars. And there was one other light which he never turned off at night: the spotlight on the Italian flag which flew from a pole atop his house. Angelo’s place was easy to find at night. He secured the deadbolts on the front door and, from the outside, on the laundry-room door. Bianchi opened the black iron gate and followed Angelo to the Cadillac. Angelo got behind the wheel.
From Glendale Angelo drove west on Los Feliz Boulevard past Griffith Park toward Hollywood. He knew the way blind, had driven to Hollywood to look for girls ever since high school, just like everyone else. Cruising Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip was something to do, was one of the main reasons to get your driver’s license at sixteen. And since the sixties it had become the sex-for-sale center of Southern California. The streets were hooker-crowded, the bars and discos and coffee shops the easiest places in L.A. to score whores or boys or drugs.
In the fifties, when Angelo had been in junior high school, Hollywood Boulevard and the Strip had been lined with jazz clubs, beatnik cafés, nightclubs like Ciro’s and the Crescendo, where Peggy Lee sang, Mort Sahl shocked an audience by actually insulting Eisenhower, and, later, Lenny Bruce told jokes about Hitler and described what it was like to screw a chicken. In those days you might stop girls on the street, find out they were tourists from Salt Lake City, buy them cherry Cokes, and call it a successful night. Now Hollywood was home only to the lost ones. The movie palaces—the Chinese, with its stars’ footprints in concrete, the Egyptian, the Pantages—were old bitches gone in the teeth. Off the boulevards, people crowded the apartment buildings, shooting up, getting down, freaking out. The only living remnant of the past was the annual Santa Claus Parade, which looked okay on television and offered local-channel exposure to minor celebrities. Runaways headed for Hollywood now. You could live on nothing there, sell your butt for a bed and die young.
That night, October 30, 1977, Buono and Bianchi cruised slowly west on Hollywood Boulevard in the ’72 four-door Cadillac, white vinyl top over metallic dark blue body. A sticker bearing the official seal of the County of Los Angeles was displayed on the lower left-hand corner of the windshield. They were enjoying that presumptive arrogance peculiar to Los Angeles, that if you are driving around in a good car in L.A. you are somehow luckier and freer and more privileged and more with-it than the poor slobs in the rest of the country. You pity the people in Michigan or Iowa who can’t cruise Hollywood. Buono drove as he had since high school, slumped down, his right wrist controlling the wheel. Bianchi fiddled with the radio dial, searching out the soft rock he liked. He stopped at James Taylor.
“Turn that shit off,” Angelo said.
There did not seem to be much action.
“Sunday,” Bianchi said. “Dead.”
“They ain’t in church,” Buono said. “We’ll find something. Probably won’t get her on a main street. Better on a side street.”
He turned left on Highland. Nothing.
Angelo discoursed on strategy. He reminded Bianchi that most of the girls had pimps who watched out for unmarked police cars. He suggested that they not use the police ruse right away. They would spot a girl. One of them would get out and wait somewhere while the other picked up the girl, acting like a regular john. Buono was driving, he would get the girl. Then he would pick up Bianchi, and Bianchi would show the badge and tell her she was under arrest: get her into the back seat and handcuff her so she wouldn’t make trouble. Angelo handed Bianchi the wallet and handcuffs.
“I’ll hang a right,” Angelo said, turning west on Sunset. “The Strip is always full of ass. Any day of the week.”
The Strip began just past Fairfax Avenue at Schwab’s Pharmacy, where Lana Turner was supposed to have been discovered in her sweater, and the old Garden of Allah hotel, once home to Eastern literary refugees like Scott Fitzgerald, its Moorish bungalows now replaced by a travertine monolith called Great Western Savings. Beyond this point, Sunset Boulevard curved in and out among giant billboards announcing a new album or a Las Vegas act, motels with adult movies, the Body Shop, offering “Burlesque, Amateur Contests Mondays and Wednesdays,” and various bars and restaurants, until the boulevard straightened out and entered the heavily policed hush of Beverly Hills. About halfway along the Strip, Buono and Bianchi noticed a small girl standing alone on the sidewalk.
She stood in a driveway next to Carney’s Express Limited, a diner converted from an old Union Pacific railroad car. Buono drove well past her, pulled over, and stopped. “I’ll go around the block and get her,” Buono said. “You wait over there across the street.”
Bianchi got out, crossed Sunset, and sat down on a bus bench to wait. He was at the corner of Sunset and Sweetzer, just down from the Golden Crest Hotel, its marquee proclaiming: “Retirement Living at Its Finest. Most Luxurious Residence in L.A.” He could see the girl across the street still standing in the driveway of the railroad diner, obviously hooking.
A minute later he caught sight of the Cadillac coming up Sunset again. Angelo drove slowly past the girl and turned left, heading around the block once more. He was making it look, Bianchi figured, as though he had just spotted her. He would have made eye contact with her, continuing on as if he had not yet decided. Then he would return.
This time Buono pulled into Carney’s driveway. The girl came up to his window, and they talked. Then the girl went around to the passenger side and got in next to Angelo. They sat chatting for a bit until the traffic thinned. Angelo backed out onto Sunset, made a U-turn, passed the bench where Bianchi waited, and turned right on Sweetzer, rolling slowly down the side street. Bianchi, sensing that Angelo did not want to work the scam where there was so much traffic, followed on foot.
Sweetzer ran down a steep hill, the lights of the city glimmering to the south. At the next corner Angelo turned right and pulled over.
In seconds Bianchi was there. He opened the front door on the girl’s side, leaned in, and said, “You’re under arrest,” showing the badge.
“Oh, no, not again,” the girl said.
“Could you please step out of the car?” She did.
“Just get in the back, please,” Bianchi said, taking her arm. He opened the rear door. “Okay, now you’re going to have to go for a ride.” He guided her into the seat and climbed in after her. Angelo reached over and closed the right front door, Bianchi closed the rear door, and Angelo pushed a button that locked all the doors: a safety device for children. “All right,” Bianchi said, “I’ve got to put handcuffs on you. Would you lean forward, please?” He handcuffed her, palms outward. She had to sit on her fingers.
As Angelo drove off, he said: “There was a guy standing in that parking lot. You got a pimp?”
“No,” the girl said.
“There was a guy,” Angelo said. “Might be a problem.” He headed back up to Sunset and glanced into the parking lot of the railroad diner. Nobody there. He headed east, not rushing, obeying the traffic laws.
“Are we going to the Hollywood Division?” the girl asked.
“No,” Angelo said, looking at her through the rearview mirror. “We’re going to a special unit.”
The girl was silent as they drove back through Hollywood, turning east on Franklin to Western, north on Western to Los Feliz, east on their way to Glendale. Finally
she asked why she was being arrested.
“I haven’t done nothing wrong.”
“You’re being arrested for soliciting,” Bianchi said. “Have you ever been arrested before?”
“No. Picked up for questioning is all. I never done nothing.”
Bianchi studied her. She was tiny. She was wearing a light blouse and slacks and a dirty suede jacket. Her small leather purse sat in her lap. The handcuffs made her lean forward, her straight brown hair obscuring her face. She looked fourteen, sixteen at the outside. She wouldn’t give much trouble.
She said nothing more until Angelo pulled all the way into his driveway, under the metal awning that joined the house and the shop. The Orange Grove Apartments overlooked the shop and the house from the rear, but peering down from a second- or third-floor apartment, Angelo knew, no one could see anything except the roofs and the metal awning. There was no way for anyone to get curious. And on the east side of the house and shop was a car wash, on the west side a glass-repair shop, both closed at night. Angelo liked privacy.
“Wait here,” Angelo said. He got out and walked over to the laundry-room door at the side of the house, unlocking it. Sparky was waiting on the steps but knew not to enter the house.
“What is this place?” the girl said to Bianchi.
“This is a satellite police station.”
Bianchi looked around at Angelo, who was holding the screen door and motioning for him to come ahead. “Slide over,” he said to the girl. He grabbed her purse, took her elbow, helped her out of the car, and walked her into the house. Angelo secured the deadbolt again, as Bianchi guided the girl into the living room and sat her down in the brown vinyl easy chair. He put her purse on the dining-room table. Angelo switched on some lights and approached the girl.
Hillside Stranglers Page 3