“You got to screw somebody else,” Angelo said. “Tell me if you like it. You don’t like it, we get married. Got it?”
Antoinette said that she did not want anyone else. Angelo was her true love and he could always trust her. But Angelo pressed his argument. Antoinette gave in, saying that she would do anything for him. He was the man she had always dreamed of, strong, alone, defiant.
“I’ll arrange it,” Angelo said.
“But Ange, I don’t see nobody else. Who would I go with?”
“That’s okay. I’ll arrange something.”
Angelo had something in mind. Through contacts in his upholstery business, he had agreed to supply girls for an afternoon’s orgy at the Triple AAA Paper Company box factory in Cudahy, a municipality in southeast Los Angeles County, the industrial heartland of Southern California, a treeless wasteland distinguished by the post-Assyrian architecture of the gigantic and abandoned Uniroyal rubber-tire factory. There would be about half a dozen men present. Sabra was good, but there was room for an extra cunt, Angelo calculated.
When Angelo and Kenny arrived at the box factory with Sabra and Antoinette, seven men awaited them, swarthy fellows congruous with the odor of cardboard. They included the box moguls and assorted civic dignitaries: Pete Werrlein, revered city councilman from the city of Bell; Red Fertig, the police chief of Huntington Park; and Warren Schmucki, chief aide to a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Angelo and Kenny ordered the girls into separate offices and directed traffic.
As the more experienced and proficient whore, Sabra dealt with five customers according to their wants. Sabra was also much prettier than Antoinette, so a majority of the men requested her. The orgy went well. Sabra was rewarded with an unprecedented cash payment, sixty dollars. Antoinette got nothing for her display of fealty except accusations from Angelo that she had shown signs of enjoying her work and might not be a good candidate for wifehood after all.
In the parking lot afterward, the men talked of their satisfaction and the desire for another orgy at the earliest possible opportunity. Kenny noticed a decal, the seal of the County of Los Angeles, on Warren Schmucki’s windshield, and Schmucki said proudly that it entitled him to free parking in county lots. He promised to send one to Bianchi.
Sabra was working out so well for Angelo and Kenny that they decided they should expand their operations. They told her that if she could recruit another girl, she could go free; otherwise she had another ten months to go on her contract. When Sabra said that she had a friend in Phoenix who might be interested, they gave her permission to fly there on condition that she stay no more than a week and return with the new girl. Could she attend the Led Zepplin concert in Phoenix? Sabra wanted to know. It was her favorite group. Yes, Angelo said, but she would be watched. “The boys” were strong in Phoenix and would find her and kill her if she tried to run off. And she could forget about going to the police. He had friends in law enforcement who owed him favors. He showed Sabra his badge to assure her of his connections. Meanwhile, in Phoenix she should keep practicing with the dildo.
Sabra returned with Rebekah Gay Spears, a fifteen-year-old biker’s daughter who was eager to leave home for a new life in California. Angelo and Kenny had refused to send the girls air fare, so they turned a trick at an airport hotel for the money. Becky was a tiny girl with a large, sad mouth, mousy but frail and defenseless-looking in a way that appealed to Angelo. He was also gratified that Becky, once threatened with death, acquiesced readily to anal intercourse. He installed Sabra in a nearby apartment and moved Becky into his house so that she would be available to him daily and nightly, when she was not earning money for him. So brutally and frequently did he attack Becky’s rear that he tore her sphincter muscles, and she resorted to wearing a tampon in her rectum to control her bowels.
Angelo made use of Becky’s compliance, but sometimes she was too passive for him. He would hit her and shake her, trying to get her angry, saying, “What’s the matter with you? Ain’t you alive? Fight me. Tits is better than you.” Tits was his nickname for Sabra. When Becky did dare complain, he would tell her about shipping disobedient girls into the desert, delimbed, and ask her if she wanted to be beaten as Tits had been. As for Sabra, he reneged on his promise to free her, saying that she had to earn more money for him and Kenny before she would be let go.
The pimping now became more sophisticated. Angelo arranged through J. J. Fenway, owner of the Foxy Ladies outcall service, to have Becky and Sabra visit clients at home. Foxy Ladies would take a 15 percent cut of any call; Angelo and Kenny would get 60 percent, with 25 percent left over for the girl, in theory, although she rarely received anything but sneers and a little food. Becky and Sabra continued to work in Angelo’s house for neighborhood clients and the Trim Shop customers, but on most evenings the Foxy Ladies driver would deliver them to men all over the city. And they played a return engagement at the box factory, Antoinette absent this time, after which Angelo had Kenny beat Becky, on grounds of her failure of enthusiasm.
The girls were proving a healthy source of extra income for Buono and Bianchi, and Kenny found owning women more gratifying than he could have imagined, although he continued to press Kelli to marry him and told her how much he looked forward to becoming a father. As her pregnancy progressed, Kelli grew irritable, but Kenny did not really mind: her bad moods gave him ready excuses for staying out late, and when he wanted sex, Sabra and Becky were his to do with as he wished. Yet his prosperity and happiness proved short.
It happened one August night that David Wood, a lawyer lonely and libidinous in his loneliness, locked up within the electronically guarded splendor of his Bel-Air house, telephoned the Foxy Ladies and asked that a girl be sent to him. Within an hour Becky Spears had been driven westward from the bungalowland of Glendale, on to Hollywood and the rich hush of Beverly Hills, along Sunset Boulevard past UCLA and through the rococo gateway of Bel-Air. This is a district that surpasses even Beverly Hills in the illusion of remoteness from the ordinary city. It is dark with trees, bright with meticulous flowerbeds, all hills and winding streets with names like Copa de Oro and Belaggio and houses forbiddingly huge and apparently impregnable, though the Manson gang had found otherwise: one of their victims, Sharon Tate, had lived on the cusp of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, high up in secluded Benedict Canyon, just a stone’s throw from a street called Angelo, a cul-de- sac. When Becky arrived at David Wood’s house on Roscomare Drive, she was overcome by a serenity and security that tapped her emotions and loosened her tongue.
David Wood was not in the habit of summoning women in this way, but that night he thought he would try something effortless and anonymous. The evening turned out to be neither. The small girl with the downturned mouth emanated such sadness and dejection that, in spite of his worldliness, Wood started asking her variations on the most threadbare of all questions addressed to whores: How did a nice girl like you . . . ? Becky did not offer him any of the usual responses, such as “I only do this in my spare time” or “I perform a special service” or “How else would I earn four to five hundred dollars a night?” Becky let go. She told him she was the prisoner of two men. She told him about the beatings, the relentless sodomy, the threats of delimbing and death. She said that she believed it was only a matter of time before Angelo Buono and Kenny Bianchi would kill her. She knew Angelo wanted to kill her. The way he forced himself down her throat until she vomited or almost passed out told her that. The way Bianchi laughed when he beat her told her that he wanted to kill her, too.
Through his law practice, David Wood knew the criminal class. He was not naive. But Becky’s tale shocked him, and her frail, sexually unattractive desperation made him want to help her. That this visitor from the moral sewers of the city had intruded on the order and expensive serenity of his home disgusted him, and he wanted to throw her out and go take a long, hot bath; but pity for her overcame disgust. Not for a second did he doubt that she was telling the truth.
He k
new that the Foxy Ladies driver would be coming back soon, so he drove Becky to his office and telephoned for a plane reservation to Phoenix: it was not that Becky’s family, from what she told him of it, offered decent refuge, but at least she knew Phoenix and had friends there. She had nowhere else to go. The plane was not leaving until early in the morning, so David Wood talked through the night with Becky at his office. The more she told him, the better he felt about what he was doing. He tried to reassure her that she would be safe, once out of the city. No two-bit auto upholsterer and his perverted cousin would have the resources to track her down. He did not believe in Buono’s boasts about the Mafia or the boys or whatever he called them. The Mafia would not bother with such a small-time operation. In the morning he drove her to the airport and waited to put her on the plane. As they said goodbye, he took her father’s telephone number and gave her his, telling her to call him if she felt she was in danger. And he told her never to come back to Los Angeles unless she heard that Buono and Bianchi were dead or safely locked up.
When the Foxy Ladies driver telephoned Angelo to tell him that Becky and her trick had left Wood’s house and gone somewhere, Angelo was annoyed but not alarmed. The trick was probably one of those guys who liked to talk to whores and had taken her out. Becky should have telephoned, those were the rules, and he would have Kenny beat her, but Angelo figured she would return in the morning. And she had better have plenty of money to show for the full night.
But when Becky did not appear, Angelo had the Foxy Ladies driver take him and Kenny to David Wood’s house for a confrontation. Wood was not home. Angelo telephoned his office. When Angelo told him he had better tell where the girl was or suffer the consequences, Wood hung up.
Once Angelo and Kenny realized that Becky was not coming back, they became enraged. Just so Sabra would not get ideas, they stuffed Becky’s abandoned clothes into a box with a dead cat and showed the box to Sabra. Did she get the message? Dead pussy. That’s what Becky was going to be and that’s what Sabra would be if she tried to leave. Then Angelo set about trying to ruin David Wood.
He called Wood and told him that he was going to bring charges against him for having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. Again Wood hung up. Angelo then had flowers sent to Wood’s employees, with a note saying that David Wood was leaving the profession of law and that his employees were being terminated.
David Wood was angry, but he was not intimidated. He called one of his clients, a three-hundred-pound bouncer named Tiny, and said he needed a favor. He told Tiny what Buono was up to and told him about Becky. Tiny said he would take care of it.
Angelo was working inside a car when Tiny walked into the Trim Shop accompanied by four friends almost as big as himself.
“You Angelo Buono?” Tiny called. Angelo continued working and gave no response. So Tiny reached one arm through the open car window, grabbed Angelo by the shoulder, and started dragging him out of the window. “Now do I have your attention, Mr. Buono?”
Angelo crawled out and struggled to his feet. Tiny picked him up under both arms, gave him a vicious shaking, and said:
“David Wood’s a friend of mine. You messing with him, you messing with me, Tiny. Get it? I don’t like people messing with my friend. You don’t want to see an instant replay of me.”
Angelo said he understood. Tiny threw him down and left. Angelo did not bother David Wood again.
Angelo and Kenny were still angry, and they were worried. They figured Becky had made fools of them. It was bad for morale. Somebody was going to have to pay, one way or another.
“Some girls don’t deserve to live,” Angelo said.
They had no concrete plans as yet, but in the next six weeks they suffered further blows to their professional pride and their rage doubled. In September, Sabra escaped. Wisely she left the state, disappeared one day without telling anyone. Now, with his extra income gone, Bianchi started missing payments on his Cadillac, and fights with Kelli became more frequent. He stole the letterhead stationery from Universal and talked of the talent-scout scam. He and Angelo told each other over and over that they could not let the girls get away with this, and for the first time they began talking about killing a prostitute to set an example. They would rape her and do her in.
“I’m gonna get my hands around some cunt’s throat,” Angelo said. “Some cunt that don’t deserve to live.”
“Me too,” Kenny said, anxious to let Angelo know that Kenny was really one tough guy. Angelo’s rage fueled Kenny’s, and Kenny made sure Angelo noticed, the cousins igniting one another.
“Let’s go get some whore and get it over with,” Angelo said one night late in September.
They cruised over to Hollywood and picked up two teenage girls. It was easy. The girls got into the car, and everyone agreed on a price. They drove up Curson Street into the Hollywood Hills and parked, and then Angelo showed his badge. If the girls did not cooperate, they would be busted. But after having sex with them in the car, they pushed the girls out, naked, and let them go.
“You chickened out,” Angelo told Kenny later.
“No I didn’t. Honest, Tony, I would have done it. I thought you didn’t want to. I thought, you know, with two of them.”
“Yeah? Bullshit. Okay, we’ll see what you’re made of tomorrow night.”
The next night they drove down Highland and spotted two girls walking. It was not clear whether they were prostitutes or just out for a stroll. At the corner of Hawthorne and Highland, Angelo swung the Cadillac around in front of the girls as they were crossing the street. One of them took off, but the other stopped when Angelo flashed his badge.
Bianchi, standing in the street with the girl, who was barely five feet tall and wearing glasses, began interrogating her:
“Vice squad. Let’s see some identification.”
“My wallet’s been stolen,” she said. “Here. I have my citizenship papers.”
When Bianchi looked over the papers, he saw that the girl’s name was Catherine Lorre. She had been born in Germany, and her father was listed as Peter Lorre, film actor. The daughter of a man who, forty-four years earlier in Germany, had achieved international fame and Hollywood offers for his role as a rapist and murderer of little girls in M was now being sized up as a potential victim on a Hollywood street corner.
“Hey,” Bianchi called to Buono, “look who we got here. It’s Peter Lorre’s daughter!”
A couple of photographs fell out of Catherine Lorre’s purse onto the street. Bianchi picked them up. They showed Catherine at nine years, with her father at Christmastime. In one, Peter Lorre, looking like a small Papa Bear, was tickling his daughter, who laughed wildly. Wrapped and beribboned presents were strewn at their feet. In the other, father and daughter posed happily before the Christmas tree. “What do you know,” Kenny said. “It really is Peter Lorre’s daughter.” He handed the snapshots to Angelo, who gave a big grin.
“Where are you going?” Kenny asked her.
“Home. Home from school. I have a ride. There.” She pointed to a car parked down the street.
Kenny checked with Angelo, who shook his head, signaling that they should let her go.
“Okay,” Kenny said. “Take care of yourself. Be careful now. You shouldn’t be out walking like this at night. Be good.”
Catherine Lorre walked briskly off, glad that she had had the presence of mind to lie about having a ride nearby, when in truth she was headed down to Sunset to wait for a bus. She wondered whether those men were really police officers.
In October, Angelo and Kenny suffered further setbacks. Angelo’s mother was operated on for vaginal cancer, and the prognosis was glum. That the woman he had always called a cunt would end up dying from a disease in that region was a coincidence that did not occur to Angelo, but when he visited her in the hospital, sometimes accompanied by his old buddy Artie Ford, he found himself torn between love and hate, or emotions for which no strong enough words exist. He calmed himself, or tried to, by indulging in th
e satisfactions of stealing objects from the hospital—syringes, hypodermic needles, a stethoscope—but the thought of his mother’s having pieces of malignant tissue cut out of her vagina intensified his already primordial emotions and impulses. He arranged with his sister Cecilia to visit Jenny on alternate nights.
He and Kenny found another girl, Jennifer Snider, to work for them and installed her in the spare bedroom. Sabra had given them Jennifer’s number before escaping. And from Deborah Noble, an experienced prostitute, Angelo purchased a list of men known to frequent whores, a trick list, as it was called, of a hundred and seventy-five men at a dollar a name. Deborah Noble delivered the trick list to the Trim Shop, accompanied by three other prostitutes, one a tall, expensively dressed black girl named Yolanda Washington.
Angelo asked Deborah Noble whether she was certain that this was an outcall list. He did not want hundreds of strange tricks showing up at his house at all hours. Deborah Noble assured him that it was an outcall list.
Angelo made his usual cocky, joshing conversation with the girls, and in the course of it Yolanda Washington mentioned that she worked the north side of Sunset near Highland. That was her turf. She could be found there practically every night.
On the night of October 17, Jennifer Snider lay in her bed in the spare bedroom. She could hear Angelo and Kenny talking in the living room. They sounded angry. She had been living in Angelo’s house for three days, spending most of her time calling, as she had been told to do, the men on the trick list. But something was wrong. All the men on the list wanted to come to her, not have her go to them. Deborah Noble’s outcall list had turned out to be an incall list. Angelo and Kenny had been cheated, and they were furious.
Kenny came into the spare bedroom, took off his clothes, and, without saying a word, began to have sex with Jennifer. He had an ugly look on his face, and he started to get rough, pinching her and slapping her breasts. Jennifer asked him to ease up, but instead, he grabbed her by the hips, turned her over violently, and tried to sodomize her.
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