Two Italians
(Brothers)
Aged about thirty-five.
Grogan thanked Dr. Shickelgruber and saw that he was driven to the airport. His Italian-family theory impressed no one.
In April Grogan was dispatched to Boston to bring to Los Angeles a prisoner, George Shamshack, who had implicated himself and another man in two Los Angeles killings still promoted by the press as Hillside Strangler cases. Grogan knew that neither of these women had been killed by the Stranglers—the m.o. did not fit—but he did not mind the trip to Boston, where he visited his mother and brother. He read the Newsweek of April 10 with rueful amusement: “A break in the case? . . . the cops are cautiously optimistic that at least two of the puzzling murders are solved. That would still leave eleven unsolved cases.” Oh well, Grogan thought, let them keep counting.
By the summer of 1978 the investigation was having its effect on Grogan’s family life. He had become caught up in cases before, but nothing like this, and there was no end in sight. He stuck to the agreement not to discuss his work at home, but he had been home hardly at all for months and could think and talk of nothing else. He had practically become a member of the Wagner family, visiting them often, eating with them, trying to keep them from cracking. Lauren’s sister was angry at Grogan for not telling her all the horrible details of what had been done to Lauren, but it was Joe Wagner, an earnest, rather naive man, who bothered Grogan the most. He took Joe Wagner to play golf and had long conversations about Lauren’s death with him at his house. Grogan sensed that he was helping Joe, offering him faith at least in the integrity and concern of the police, but this father seemed unable to assimilate what had been done to his daughter. Such acts were beyond his comprehension, beyond what his religious faith and his belief in fellow human beings permitted him to accept. One evening as Grogan was leaving the Wagners, Joe took him aside in the hallway and said:
“Bob, I’ve got to ask you something. Please tell me. What is sodomy?”
Grogan was astonished. He did not want to answer. “Just bad sex, Joe,” he said. “You know. Sex with hate.”
With Charlie Weckler the conversations were freer though equally difficult. Charlie was dealing with his despair by means of anger. He had developed a stutter since his daughter’s murder and sometimes became speechless with fury, clinging to Grogan as his one hope for vengeance. He would fly down from Sausalito, Grogan would take him to play golf, and then the two men would drink together at the Nightwatch, cursing the Stranglers, modern life, the press, Los Angeles. Charlie had heard that a national television network was planning a program about murders of prostitutes, using the Hillside Strangler case as an example of such homicides, and he told Grogan that he was suing the network to stop the program, because his daughter had not been a prostitute and treating the case that way would blacken her memory.
After a session at the Nightwatch, Grogan would pour Charlie onto the plane in the morning, and then in a few days they would start talking on the phone again: “At least you care, Bob. You really care. At least someone cares.” And Charlie would fly down for more golf and drinks and talk. The two men developed a friendship born in death that would not falter. Charlie Weckler knew that Bob Grogan was devoting his life to solving Kristina’s murder. At one point Grogan dreamed up the idea of an exhibition of Kristina’s drawings and paintings at the Art Center of Design, the proceeds to go toward a scholarship in her name. He hoped that maybe the killers or one of them would show up, and he stationed undercover police all over the gallery and had photographs of everyone taken. The exhibition was a success but it trapped no one. Everyone in the photographs could be identified as either the parent of a student, a student, a patron of the center, or a police officer.
It was strange, Grogan often thought, the way his life was being taken over. Salerno, equally conscientious but more emotionally detached, kept his family in place, Grogan could see, went to mass on Sundays with the wife and children, had to Grogan an admirable and enviable perspective: no matter what happened, the Salernos would go on, Salerno would do his work, the family would be intact. But Grogan was so involved by this case that the Wagners and the Wecklers began to haunt every moment of his life. What was Charlie thinking now? Had Joe found out what sodomy is? Grogan envied Salerno the coolness, the knack of turning off the job and embracing the family, permitting the family to triumph over the rest of life. He envied Salerno because he knew that Salerno was just as good at his job as anyone could be, just as dedicated a detective, yet he was keeping his life in one piece.
One afternoon at the Glass House, Grogan interviewed a woman who said she might have seen the Stranglers. She was agitated. The incident had occurred a month earlier, but she had been afraid to report it. Friends had persuaded her to go to the police. She had been drinking in a bar in Hollywood. She had gotten fairly tight. She was alone, and when she left the bar, she drove off at a pretty good clip, “my bra flying from the radio aerial,” as she put it. A couple of blocks away, two cops pulled her over. They had a red light, but it was an unmarked car. There had been stuff in the paper about the Stranglers posing as police officers, so when one of these guys came up to her window, she really let him have it. She cursed him, let out a stream at him. He showed her his badge. She took off, gunning it. She had worried about the incident. The men had not followed her, but she had wondered ever since whether they might be the Stranglers.
Grogan had her hypnotized. Under hypnosis she said that she recalled the badge number. She gave Grogan a detailed physical description of both of the men.
Grogan took the woman seriously. She seemed bright, and she was familiar with police work. She said that she had graduated from Reed College with a major in English and now ran a halfway house for men released from Chino State Prison. She knew criminals and had worked in various law enforcement agencies for years. She was in her thirties, tall and blond with an alert, attractive face.
Grogan had a bulletin sent out to all the LAPD stations, and he decided to check out the story himself. It turned out to be accurate but so embarrassing to the police that, if it got out, the press would have a field day and the public might panic. Two officers working vice had tried to pick the woman up. They had made what was known among the police as a “pussy stop” after an evening of watching prostitutes. It was a common enough occurrence, but under present circumstances it was potentially disastrous. The woman had actually remembered the badge number in reverse, because it had a nine and a six in it and she had seen it upside-down.
Grogan reamed the officers out, told them they would be canned if their intended pickup pressed charges, and called the woman to explain what had happened. She was understanding. She agreed when Grogan told her that the pressures of working vice were considerable: you got turned on watching whores all night. She would not press charges. She knew what the police were going through with this case.
Grogan started babbling about the frustrations of the investigation. He told her about the Wagners and the Wecklers. He complained about the unethical irresponsibility of the media. He said that he could not burden his family with everything that was going on and that he was frightened every time his daughter left the house. It was no wonder that with a job like this cops were cracking up and dropping from heart attacks. It was like being in a war that never let up.
“You can talk to me, anytime,” the woman said.
“That’s okay. Thanks,” Grogan said and hung up. I talk too much, Grogan said.
But he called her again, met her for a drink, and found himself unloading his emotions with a vehemence that surprised him. He could not stop talking to her, and when he told her about keeping Kristina Weckler’s notebook, he knew that he had crossed a certain line. The woman turned out to be an ideal listener because of her familiarity with prisoners and police work, and, unlike Grogan’s wife, she did not recoil from grisly details and violent language. She was tough, but he did not think her coarse. He let himself go. He would see her again.
/>
He began an affair with her. He disliked himself for doing it, but he allowed himself to go ahead, and he worried that he might be falling in love with her. She lived fifty miles from downtown, so he did not see her except on weekends, but he began taking her out on his boat. The intensity of the case made it easy to contrive excuses. Every few days he would resolve to break off the affair, but he did not. At home he was silent and guilty. His wife did not know anything, yet, but sometimes the sight of her sad face on the pillow made Grogan go lock himself into the bathroom, despise his own face in the mirror, and feel like crying. He would have to end the affair soon, he said to himself. His children would hate him, too.
October 17, 1978. One year to the day after the murder of Yolanda Washington. Her death had started it all. The investigation was in the doldrums. Nothing new had turned up for eight months except hundreds and hundreds of false leads. The media had become bored with the case, and in a way this made life a little easier for the officers, but they could feel the public pressure on them, unresolved anger gathering, spreading blame in the air. The parents evolved from grief toward a craving for retribution, so they could make sense of their lives again or try to. Sonja Johnson’s father attempted suicide. Over at the Glass House, Grogan, Dudley Varney, and Bill Williams, the officer who had convinced everyone else that Yolanda Washington must have been the first Hillside victim, decided that somehow they ought to commemorate the occasion. They ought to get drunk at least. They had to find some way to expiate their frustration for this one night. It was too late to go home. They had talked about the case all day and into the evening. Yolanda had been dead for a year this night.
Grogan, with his inclination to ritual, born of the mass-serving days in Boston, memories of Cardinal Cushing, the bread and the wine, suggested that they get a bottle and drink it where Yolanda Washington’s body had been found—Forest Lawn Drive, across from the movie set. It was only right, he said. They had to do something. It was the anniversary, for Christ’s sake.
They picked up the bottle and a pizza along the way. Williams brought a sheet from the morgue. He had taken it off a body in a moment of levity.
There at the very spot on Forest Lawn Drive they stopped, spread the coroner’s white sheet on the hood of Grogan’s car, opened the pizza, and drank, toasting Yolanda, cursing the Stranglers, and wishing on stars for clues. They invoked the names of the dead: Yolanda, Judy, Lissa, Jane, Dolores, Sonja, Kristina, Lauren, Kimberly, Cindy.
“You know,” Dudley Varney said, “some people would think we’re nuts, doing this.”
Grogan gathered up the pieces of pepperoni, little Italian eucharists, on the pizza and laid them down again, spelling out her name: Y-O-L-I.
“Pass the bottle,” Grogan said. “Here’s to you, Yoli.”
II
Disloyalties
What is possible is persuasive; so what has not happened we are not yet ready to believe is possible, while what has happened is, we feel, obviously possible: for it would not have happened if it were impossible.
—Aristotle, Poetics
TWELVE
February 1978 was an uneven month for Kenneth Bianchi, socially speaking. Although he achieved murder again and fatherhood, he was forced to change residence for the fifth time in the mere twenty-five months of his life in California when the men on Corona Street kicked him out. They were fed up with his irregular habits, his borrowing their cars without permission, his bringing high school students over to smoke dope and watch pornographic movies. They had invited him only as a favor to Kelli Boyd’s brother, who was their friend, but they had expected Kenny to stay three or four days. It had now been over two months and no rent paid. When they discovered a California Highway Patrol badge among their guest’s belongings, they decided he must go. They did not really suspect him, but the television and newspaper reports that the Hillside Strangler was probably posing as a police officer made them nervous; they had already concluded that Kenny must be lying about his degrees in psychology; this was not the kind of person they wanted as a nonpaying tenant. After Kenny left they told a neighbor who was a Glendale policeman about the CHP badge.
Kenny found an apartment for himself on Verdugo Road in Glendale. He was alone again. Kelli brought the baby over for Kenny to play with—he seemed to enjoy changing diapers on his little man—but refused to live with him. She was thinking, she said, of moving up to Bellingham to be closer to her parents and to raise Ryan in a healthier environment than Los Angeles. When Kenny asked her whether she wanted him to accompany her and the baby, she was noncommittal. Yes, she agreed that the boy needed a father. She was less sure that she wanted the father to be Kenny.
He bore these rebuffs to his love and paternal sense of responsibility with good grace. Surely Kelli would feel different once he began to prove himself. In the meanwhile he secured himself a new job cleaning, sterilizing, and delivering surgical instruments at Verdugo Hills Hospital. On his application he listed studies at Columbia in psychology and work at Strong Memorial Hospital in New York. As a character reference he named Angelo Buono, “re-upholsterer.” His application so impressed the hospital that although he had asked merely for an orderly’s job, he was given greater responsibilities at higher wages. With money borrowed from Sheryl Kellison he bought a car for four hundred dollars from a fellow employee. Things were looking up again. The true test of character, Kenny told himself, was whether you could endure setbacks and keep striving.
Nor did he worry much when the police came to interview him twice more. First a Glendale officer arrived at his apartment to ask him whether he owned a police badge. Kenny said he did not. That was that. The Glendale officer took his word. Then two LAPD officers, neither one a principal investigator on the Hillside Strangler case, came to call. Mrs. Wanda Kellison, Sheryl’s mother, had telephoned the task force about Kenny. Her daughter was going out with this strange man, Mrs. Kellison said. She had argued about this man with her daughter, telling Sheryl that a man who borrowed money from a girl was no good to begin with, but Sheryl would not listen. Sheryl seemed to feel sorry for this Kenny Bianchi. Mrs. Kellison was worried. Bianchi had a strange look in his eyes. The task force should check him out. She could not say exactly why, but for some reason Mrs. Kellison thought that Bianchi might be the Hillside Strangler. For one thing, her daughter said that Bianchi talked about the Strangler all the time.
Mrs. Kellison was far from the only mother calling the task force to complain about a daughter’s boyfriend. It had become a popular way for a parent to express disapproval of a prospective son-in-law. Grogan suggested that the task force set up a dating service; at least the computer could be put to good use that way. But the rule was to check everything out, so two junior officers were dispatched to investigate Bianchi. From the Department of Motor Vehicles they traced the address listed on his driver’s license. One would think that 809 East Garfield would have inspired in these officers’ minds an immediate connection to Kristina Weckler and Cindy Hudspeth. It did not. Nor, when they punched Bianchi’s name into PATRIC, the computer, did his previous police interview at 1950 Tamarind show up. So off they went to trace Bianchi, figuring that this was another of the thousands of false leads that were multiplying daily.
At 809 East Garfield the landlord remembered Kenny Bianchi well. He had been an ideal tenant, quiet, so gentlemanly. You did not find many such young men these days. There had been this other tenant, Angie Holt, who had complained about him, but she was a troublemaker. Kenny was such a nice young man. He had kept in touch, had let it be known that he had become a father. He was so proud. If only all the tenants were like Kenny! He was living over on Verdugo Road now. They could find him there.
At the Verdugo apartment the officers told Kenny right away that his name had come up in connection with the Hillside Strangler investigation.
“Okay, fine,” Kenny said, opening his door wide. “Won’t you come in?”
The officers asked him whether he had been in town from Oct
ober 1977 through the present time. Kenny said yes, he had been in Los Angeles since early in 1976. He had not been in jail? No, Kenny said, smiling as though the question were embarrassing, as though the very idea of jail were entirely alien to him. Had he ever been or was he now connected to any law enforcement agency? No, but he admired the police, the job they did, what they went through. In fact he had an application in to join the LAPD Reserves. He supposed he had not heard from them because of his changing addresses.
The officers thanked Bianchi and left. They did not ask him whether he had been interviewed before by the task force. The interview had taken less than ten minutes. Back at the Glass House the officers wrote up their report and filed it along with their photostat of Bianchi’s driver’s license. They did not bother to check on his LAPD Reserves application: his fingerprints were on that, and they could have been compared with the fingerprints from the phone booth and the Tamarind apartment, but these officers were not even aware of the phone booth and apartment prints.
It cannot be said to have been tough, but Kenny had handled the interview well. He knew Angelo would have been proud of him, and he hurried over to tell him about it. He found Angelo in the back stroking the rabbits, making Sparky jealous.
“Can you imagine,” Kenny said, “I fooled the cops again.”
“Keep your mouth shut,” Angelo said. He told Kenny to go inside.
They sat down together in the den. Could you beat that? Kenny said. Three times now the cops had questioned him and they had not even come close. They never would. Not a chance.
“I was so cool. No sweat. Those idiots, they didn’t even look at my driver’s license.” He took it out and showed it to Angelo. On the front, the Garfield address. He flipped it over and showed Angelo how he had written out in his own hand, duly accordant with the motor vehicle code, his subsequent address: 1950 Tamarind. Angelo stared.
Hillside Stranglers Page 21