“People could see her.”
“You got it. Maybe Hooper will find her. Like to see that.”
Quietly and quickly they picked up the girl, Buono carrying her under the arms, Bianchi under the knees. Buono stepped first over the curb, and as Bianchi followed, his foot caught under the ice plant. He stumbled, almost fell, got his foot loose, and they dropped the body parallel to the curb, heaving her slightly, as you would throwing someone into a swimming pool.
“Don’t close your door yet,” Buono whispered, getting behind the wheel. He had left the motor running. He turned around in the street, headed back the same way, made a right down La Crescenta, switching his headlights back on and telling Bianchi it was all right to close his door. They were safely away, speeding toward the city lights.
“Shall we do something?” Bianchi asked as they crossed Foothill.
“I’m heading home.”
The Italian flag hung spotlit above Buono’s house. When Angelo stopped in the driveway, Bianchi started to get out.
“Let’s call it a night,” Angelo said. “I’m beat.”
“Okay.” Bianchi held out his hand across the Cadillac. “We did it, Buzzard. We really did it this time. Wait till they find her. It’ll make the papers. It’ll be on every channel. Listen, I’ll talk to you. I’ll be in touch.”
Angelo took his hand and looked into his eyes.
“Mi numi!” Angelo said.
The words, emitted more than articulated, were a benediction. Bianchi did not understand them, although it was not the first time that Angelo had addressed him so. Bianchi took the phrase as some Italian form of affection and endearment. A bastard, he did not have the syllables in his blood. He thought that Angelo was saying “my friend,” or “my companion,” or “my beloved cousin,” or maybe something silly, like “Dumbo,” or maybe nothing more than “Here’s looking at you, kid.” It was all of that, but it was more. Had Bianchi understood it, it would have made no impact on his contemporary sensibility. It was a term that had migrated all the way from Sicily, and it came to Angelo’s lips with no more deliberate consciousness than the howling of a dog at the moon, a phrase typical of southern Italians, whose speech and customs still reflect the survival of ancient ways, even in the new world, even in Glendale.
Literally it meant “my gods.” More deeply, it invoked a pre-Christian pagan world ruled by the religion of the Numa: a time when the gods determined every man’s and woman’s fate or destiny, when the presence of divine will and inspiration was palpable in every human act; a time when a spark from the hearth was a living sign of the divine presence—Romulus had been born from such a spark, Deity was in this place—Numen Inest! And it was a time when the gods demanded that most perfect of all sacrifices, a young, newly ripe human life.
“Mi numi!” was how one tragic lover would address another, a spontaneous, pagan religious ejaculation evoking the fateful bonds of blood and death. The lover addressed would symbolize the destiny of the other. The use of mi rather than the grammatically orthodox miei indicated the southern Italian dialect. When Angelo spoke these words to Bianchi, they conveyed: “You are my fate, my destiny. You and I are bound together. Forever. In blood and in death.”
“Mi numi!” Angelo said, calling it a night.
THREE
Neither the press nor television paid much attention to Buono and Bianchi’s Halloween prank, and on radio there was not a word of it. Murder was so common in Los Angeles: there was one committed every three or four hours in the county, not counting the whores routinely overdosed by their pimps. It took something special to titillate the media, an eviscerated actress or a child stuffed down a sewer. But the girl remained unidentified for two days, and so, at the request of Sergeant Salerno, the Times ran this bulletin on the fourth page of the Metro section:
PUBLIC’S AID SOUGHT
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide detectives were seeking public assistance Tuesday in trying to identify a young woman whose nude body was found in the bushes in front of a La Crescenta residence. Investigators said the victim, described as between 16 and 22, five feet two inches tall, weighing 90 pounds, with reddish brown hair, appeared to have been sexually molested before she was strangled.
Her body was found Monday in front of a home at 2844 Alta Terrace Drive, La Crescenta.
The article was illustrated with two vivid drawings of the girl’s face as it might have looked in life, one in profile. The Herald-Examiner also ran the story, and local television news programs gave it a few seconds.
When her parents or relatives or friends still failed to appear to identify her, Frank Salerno started haunting Hollywood Boulevard every night until three or four in the morning. Salerno was acting on an educated hunch. Since no one had come forth to identify the girl, the chances were that she had been living for some time as a runaway. Either her parents did not know that she was missing, or they did not care, or she had no parents, all equal possibilities. Although her body had been found miles from Hollywood, runaways in Southern California gravitated toward the Boulevard. Some of the street people might recognize her from the drawings, might have noticed her missing, might even have seen her on the night of the murder.
It was not much, but Salerno had nothing else. The coroner had concluded only that she had been vaginally and anally raped and that she had been strangled to death by ligature within two hours of midnight, before or after. The time frame had been established by the temperature of her liver, which had cooled off quickly in the brisk air. It had been forty-five degrees or lower that night in the hills.
Not knowing the murder scene, Salerno was at a great disadvantage. Ordinarily he would take an investigation outward from there, but Alta Terrace had not been the murder scene. None of the residents aroused the least suspicion, nor had any of them heard anything unusual during the night. Charles Koehn’s peculiar work schedule checked out. One man, a truck driver, had gone to a party with his wife but had returned home before midnight, noticing nothing. The others had been home all night and asleep early. Tests on the fiber Salerno had taken from the girl’s eyelid had been inconclusive, except that it had not come from the Koehns’ toys or from their poodle.
And so Salerno began walking Hollywood Boulevard through the nights, questioning its floating citizens, showing them the drawings and asking whether they knew this girl. These were the dropouts: addicts and pushers, bikers, whores, socially and sexually displaced persons, entrepreneurs of the transitory, a new American class. They had the morals of the Forty-niners but were not prospecting for gold. Most of them had given over their lives to the next fix. They often knew one another, or were aware of one another, by sight and by name, and they knew, vaguely, when somebody overdosed or simply disappeared, wasted. Their hearts entwined by sadomasochism, they outwardly resembled refugees from the Haight-Ashbury culture of the sixties, favoring leather and denim and lots of hair, an acid-rock Paleolithic look, except for the whores, many of whom looked like whores, and the male prostitutes, who were typecast for an Andy Warhol movie. They had street names like Stinkyfoot, Sunshine Sally, Eggnog, Youngblood, Cowboy Dave, Pigvalve, Flakey, Skateboard, Lobo, Green Irene, Funny Bunny; and since they were all either selling or taking drugs, or both, Salerno could not trust their answers to his questions. But night after night, he kept asking. Through them all Miss Miller, an old lady carrying a tote bag and wearing a lampshade hat decorated with paper leaves, who had consecrated her life to sitting in the front row of Merv Griffin’s television studio audience every night, threaded her way.
The street people depressed Frank Salerno. They sometimes made him indignant. You could not be a homicide detective and have a weak stomach, but these nights tested him. He was a conservative man. He liked evenings at home with his wife and two teenage sons in their San Fernando Valley house. His pleasures were fishing trips or reading in silence or, after mass, Sunday dinner with the relatives, cooked by his grandmothers, both of whom had been born in Italy. Moving among the
street people made him feel contaminated. It was like bathing in raw sewage.
Salerno could not have been mistaken for one of the street people. He might have been a college professor who had gotten off at the wrong stop. He wore a soft tweed jacket, a muted tie, and light wool slacks. His shoes were thin-soled and expensive. He kept his straight, graying hair neatly trimmed and combed. His wire-rimmed aviator-style glasses accentuated an air of mannerly inquisitiveness. Meeting him, you would not have guessed that he carried a little .38 pistol in the small of his back.
Salerno kept his weight down and had the fluid moves of a centerfielder: if he resembled an Italian physical type, it was DiMaggio. He moved among the street people like an anthropologist, questioning, hypothesizing, inwardly calculating, outwardly impassive. “Excuse me,” he would say to a knot of bikers, appearing to grant them, for the moment, membership in civilization, showing his badge, “do you recognize this girl?” “Sure,” one would say, “I know the chick. She was here last week.” Or: “She’s from Denver. Name of Debby. Maybe Donna.” When he got what he could out of them, he would thank them and go on. He was almost courtly. They were his antithesis, but he disguised his moral indignation. That he saved for quiet talks with his wife and sons or more animated talks over many drinks with friends. Then he would use words like “scumbag” and “evil.”
Salerno made notes of everything the street people told him, but he filtered everything through his experience with liars. It was only when several of the boulevardiers gave the girl in the drawing the same name, Judy Miller, that he knew he was getting closer. The name came out among coffee drinkers at the Howard Johnson’s on Vine and again at the Fish and Chips shop, a favorite hangout of the damned that stood between the old Hollywood Theater (then showing Deep Throat) and a tattoo parlor.
At the Fish and Chips, two people volunteered the name Judy Miller. One was a whore approaching retirement age; the other described himself as an unemployed disc jockey and bounty hunter. They both claimed to know her, and both described her as a teenage runaway, a green kid who sometimes turned a trick for a bed or a hot dog. The bounty hunter, a meaty, nervous guy wearing a leather vest, said that he had seen this Judy Miller leave the Fish and Chips on Sunday evening no later than nine or ten. Salerno noted that the timing was about right. But the mature whore claimed that she had seen Judy Miller getting into a car with a light-skinned Negro as late as two or three on Monday morning, near the International Hot Dog stand. Remembering the coroner’s calculations, Salerno figured the whore was lying or hallucinating or simply mistaken, but her description of the girl did jibe with the bounty hunter’s. Salerno took their names and addresses. He would interview Markust Camden and Pam Pelletier again. If a witness knew something, you never got it all on the first interview. Sometimes you didn’t get it until the tenth. He gave them his card and asked them to phone him if they remembered anything else or heard anything.
And then everything changed.
On Sunday morning, November 6, a woman jogging near the Chevy Chase Country Club in Glendale came upon the nude body of another strangled girl, crumpled up beside a road that ran past the golf course. The case was being handled by the Glendale police, but when Salerno talked to them, he immediately saw connections with the girl he was beginning to believe was called Judy Miller. Like the first girl, this one had been found nude and, the Glendale police said, had been strangled by ligature. Checking a map, Salerno calculated the distance between the sites of the two bodies as six or seven miles. In Los Angeles, that was close.
More links established themselves the next day, when the girl’s mother identified her as Lissa Kastin, a twenty-one-year-old waitress at the Healthfaire Restaurant near Hollywood and Vine, who had been living in an apartment on Argyle, just off Hollywood Boulevard. Her parents were divorced, and the night previous to her disappearance she had spent with her mother, complaining of how little money she was making and saying that she was considering becoming a prostitute. But she was a hardworking, ambitious girl, her mother said, and very health-conscious. She did not like red meat and had her heart set on show business. She had performed with the L.A. Knockers, an all-girl rock dance group.
It was the association with Hollywood, not the girl’s dreams or dietary preferences, that struck Salerno. Lissa Kastin had last been seen leaving the Healthfaire at about nine-fifteen the night she had been murdered. If she had told her mother about considering becoming a prostitute, she might already have been one. It was possible that both girls had been picked up in Hollywood by the same trick or tricks, and had then been killed and dumped in the same general area, a twenty- or thirty-minute drive from the pickup spots. Her car, a Volkswagen convertible, was found unlocked half a block from her apartment. In her apartment, Glendale officers found a key to the car’s locking hood but not the ignition key, and the apartment had been locked. Salerno reasoned that she had been either walking the street or walking from her car to her apartment when she had been picked up. But it was odd for a girl living in Hollywood not to have locked her car.
Salerno decided to have a look at Lissa Kastin’s body. He wanted to compare it with that of the first girl. He called the coroner’s office and asked to have the two bodies displayed side by side at the morgue. The first had been kept on ice for nine days.
One glance at the two bodies, lying next to each other on gurneys, face up, made Salerno think: Xerox copy. Their necks, wrists, and ankles were encircled with nearly identical lines of bruises. “Five point ligature,” Salerno wrote in his notebook. Physically they were very different—about the same height, but the new girl was heavier, stocky, with large breasts and thick, unshaven legs. It was the bruised lines that made Salerno think of a Xerox copy. And Lissa Kastin, like the first girl, had been raped, although with Lissa there was no evidence of sodomy. Her vagina was severely bruised. There was now no question in Salerno’s mind that the girls had been killed by the same men.
And he was more certain than ever that there had been two men. Neither body showed any signs of having been dragged. They seemed certain to have been lifted cleanly from a car and placed or dropped where they were found. Of course, more than two men could have been involved, but that seemed less likely to Salerno. He conferred with the Glendale police, and they agreed with him. He also examined the place near the golf course where Lissa Kastin had been found and noticed a three-foot guard rail between the road and the body site: surely it had taken two men to get the body over that rail cleanly. Salerno then drove at a steady thirty-five miles an hour directly to 2844 Alta Terrace. The distance between the two body sites was 6.8 miles, and the drive had taken him a mere fifteen minutes. The two murders were now inextricably linked to him.
But if there were two, there would likely be another. How much should he or the Glendale officers tell the media? Salerno felt that he had made some progress, but all he had really established, to his own satisfaction, was that two murders had been committed by the same two men, with the crime beginning in Hollywood and ending in the foothills of La Crescenta and Glendale, neighboring communities. The more the killers knew about how those deductions had been made, the more likely they would be to change their modus operandi and throw the investigation off track. Their m.o. was the only solid lead Salerno had. And so it was decided, among the agencies now involved, to reveal a little but not very much. “TWO GLENDALE SLAYINGS MAY BE LINKED,” read the Times’ headline on a small story buried in Part I, page twenty-seven on November 10. There were no details except that the two girls “were strangled in the same fashion”: nothing about the five-point ligature marks nor about any of the evidence suggesting two killers. Salerno would have preferred that not even that much be disclosed, but you always had to tell the reporters something. Otherwise they would try harder to find out more on their own. Lissa Kastin was identified, but Judy Miller remained anonymous—and unburied. It was not until the evening of November 10 that Salerno finally ran down her family, such as it was.
More ti
ps from the street people had led him late that Thursday afternoon to the Hollywood Vine Motel, an establishment of no pretentions that offered bargain weekly rates. There in a room sour with old food and old diapers he came upon what was left of the Miller family: Judy’s mother and father and her two little brothers, the younger of whom resided in a cardboard box shoved into a corner. Mr. Miller was an unemployed security guard. He nodded and identified his daughter from the drawings Salerno showed him.
“Do you know where your daughter is?” Salerno asked.
Neither the father nor the mother knew. Salerno did not bother asking the older boy, who was absorbed in a cartoon on the television.
“Was she a runaway? Did she run away from home?” Salerno could not think of another word than “home,” though there was none. Obviously Judy had run away from nothing.
“She run away from home sometimes,” Mrs. Miller said. “Then she come back. I seen her last month.”
“When last month?”
“Don’t know. Middle of the month, maybe. We had the apartment in Pasadena.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Miller,” Salerno said, “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but we believe your daughter may be dead. Would you mind looking at some photographs and telling me if this is Judy.?”
He showed them the coroner’s pictures. They both agreed that the body was Judy’s. The boy watched the cartoon.
“I’m very sorry,” Salerno said. He started to say more, to try to comfort them. That was a part of his job, maybe the hardest part, one of the many roles he had to play along with the sleuth, the tough guy, the buddy to a witness, the giver of precise court testimony, and, at home, the husband and father. Sometimes he saw himself as an actor, and it was then that he liked to say that after all, this was Hollywood, wasn’t it, and wasn’t Hollywood all bullshit anyway? Sometimes he thought the real Frank Salerno emerged only in a boat on a lake in the Sierras, holding a fishing pole, silent. But comforting victims, that was the most difficult of all. If you weren’t careful, you could get so emotionally involved with these martyrs to the indifference and improvisational violence of a screwed-up society that you could go to pieces yourself, identify with the victims so much that you forgot who you were and what your primary responsibilities were, to your wife and children.
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