“They didn’t see this?”
“Are you kidding? They didn’t see anything. I’m clean, Tony, clean and clear. They can’t touch me.”
Angelo slumped down, pulling on his earlobe. This was just great. Three times now the cops had been to see Kenny. They might really be on to something. They probably weren’t telling all they knew. All of Angelo’s misgivings about Kenny came back. The fuckup with Kimberly Martin. His telling the cops on the ride-along that he wanted to see the Strangler sites. His unhealthy lust for publicity. And now the cops were closing in on him. What else had Kenny said to people? What might he have said to Kelli or to the dudes on Corona? Angelo knew that he must act. He must get rid of Kenny.
“What’s the matter, Angelo? You got something on your mind? I know you. The Buzzard’s thinking something. The Buzzard’s got a new scam. What’s it going to be, Ange? What’s going to happen? Hey, Angelo, say something. You’re making me nervous.”
Angelo said nothing. He walked over to the gun case, took out the .45 automatic, and shoved in a clip. Then he turned and pointed the gun at Kenny’s head.
“I ought to off you right now,” Angelo said.
“Hey, Angelo, hey, put that down. What’s happening to you? Tony, why me? This is Kenny. This is your cousin Kenny. I thought we were partners. I thought we were in this together.”
“I ain’t in nothing, fuckhead, you stupid bigmouth fuckhead. How come the cops been to see you three times, they ain’t been to see me once, huh? How come the cops know who the fuck you are, huh? You don’t see no cops fucking around with Angelo Buono, right? What’s the matter with you? You want to blow this deal? You talk too much.”
Kenny hung his head in contrition. He apologized to Angelo, begged his indulgence, promised he would be cool from now on. Angelo calmed himself, put the gun away, went into the living room to stare at the fish. Kenny followed him, whining. Angelo told Kenny to leave him alone.
All through March and April, Angelo brooded, keeping to himself, fending off Kenny’s regular phone calls, rejecting Kenny’s suggestions to play pool or go cruising. He was relieved that the police did not visit Kenny again, but he was uneasy. He had broken, he knew, his cardinal rule, never to confide in anyone. He thought about Kenny, and the more he thought, the more his hatred for his cousin grew. Kenny was ready for more scamming, it was obvious. The fool had no sense at all. No timing, no feel for the right rhythm of things, no nothing. If it hadn’t been for my dead cunt of a mother, Angelo thought, I never would have got involved with the jerk. Angelo was not inclined to introspection, but he sensed that he had overvalued Kenny’s usefulness, relied overmuch on his servility, been induced by his willingness to please into sharing entirely too much with him. It was over with Kenny. But how to convey the message? Killing him would be too risky; they were too much linked together. Ignoring him seemed to draw him on. He craved abuse. He was like a woman who failed to read the score. Kenny reminded Angelo a little of Antoinette Lombardo. You could knock her up, turn her into a whore, shit on her in every way possible, and still she came back for more, a faithful dog waiting for another kick to the chops.
Angelo daydreamed of shooting or knifing Kenny, strangling him. Kenny, Angelo feared, was the kind of guy who would babble his way into trouble sooner or later. But Angelo, silent, watchful, clung to life with reptilian tenacity. Angelo blunt and rooted, Kenny homeless and euphemistic and absurdly hopeful: theirs was like a conflict between the ancient and modern worlds, with little enough to choose between the two.
As if to emphasize his determination to put distance between himself and his cousin, Angelo married again on March 29, affirming his impulse to survive and to go on with his own, separate life. The bride was Tai-Fun Fanny Leung, twenty-one years old, born in Hong Kong. For her the marriage meant that she would be able to stay in the United States, and there was a practical advantage in the union for Angelo as well. Fanny’s parents were sending her money to buy a house, and Angelo figured he would find a way to get his hands on that.
One afternoon in April, Kenny dropped by, the rejected suitor still hoping for attention. He announced, as though it were the end of something, that Kelli had abandoned him. She had gone up to Bellingham to be near her parents. It was terrible. His own son had been taken from him. How did Kelli expect the boy to grow up properly without the guidance of a father? What was wrong with women these days? Women’s liberation had gone too far. Pretty soon women would have no use for men at all. Something had to be done to wake society up.
Angelo half listened. He was working on a car in the shop, music on the radio. Kenny droned on.
“Why don’t you go up there?” Angelo said.
“What?”
“Follow the bitch, you love your son so much.”
“I couldn’t do that. What would I do? Leave L.A.? I’m going to the beach on Sunday with Sheryl.”
“You better follow Kelli.”
The more Angelo thought about it, the better the idea seemed. Getting Kenny away, out of the state. The guy was totally unreliable. Angelo wanted to be rid of him once and for all. He began encouraging Kenny to leave, but Kenny insisted that his future lay in California. Angelo pressed. At length he simply ordered Kenny to go. One day in May when Kenny was prattling about his psychology practice, how he was going to make it prosper at last, Angelo laid out the options simply and clearly. Either Kenny left the state, or Angelo would kill him. The evenness, the coolness, the directness with which Angelo delivered his ultimatum encouraged Kenny to pack his bags.
Still he dallied. He made a last stab at the psychology practice, placing an ad in the Times for an assistant. He listed his name as Dr. R. Johnson, gave the Verdugo address, and asked candidates with a degree in psychology to forward their college transcripts to him. He received several responses and selected the transcript of a Thomas Steven Walker, who held an M.A. degree in psychology from California State University at Northridge. Kenny, deciding that he ought to have college transcripts himself—with them he might land the very sort of a job he had offered Thomas Steven Walker—then sent a letter to the registrar at Cal State requesting “fully completed diplomas EXCEPT for my name. I have at additional expense retained a caligrapher [sic] that will print my name in a fancy script of my own choosing.” He enclosed Walker’s transcripts, which he had xeroxed, substituting his own name on the copies, signed the letter with Walker’s name, and included a postal money order for ninety dollars. The registrar’s office, exhibiting a surprising lack of skepticism, cashed the money order.
But before he could receive his new diploma, Kenny realized that Angelo would no longer tolerate his presence in Los Angeles. Maybe Angelo would mellow later, but for now Kenny understood that he had better get out. It took all of his persuasive powers to talk Kelli into the idea of his joining her. On the telephone he told her that he had come to a crossroads in his life. The birth of Ryan had altered his consciousness. Much to his surprise, he found himself welcoming the responsibilities of fatherhood. He now had something to live for, to work for; it was not easy, but he had come to understand his way of life up to this point had been selfish. Only through love could a person fulfill himself. And sometimes a change of scene was just what the doctor ordered. He had never liked Los Angeles anyway. It was decadent. Everything he knew about her home town, Bellingham, made it seem like the wholesome sort of place he needed. Kelli acquiesced.
Anxious, forlorn, wondering what he had done to deserve Angelo’s turning on him like this, hoping that one day the closeness they had known could be restored, Kenny hit the road in late May in his four-hundred-dollar car. His employers at Verdugo Hills Hospital wished him well when he turned in his letter of resignation. He had written that he had decided to join his family up north, asking that the letter be kept confidential. He had no reason to believe that they would keep the letter from the police, but it was worth a try. He was not as worried about the police as Angelo appeared to be. There had been nothing about the Hillside S
tranglers in the papers for weeks. Soon the whole thing would be forgotten; other murderers would grab the headlines. But he and Angelo had certainly had their moment. As he drove on up past San Francisco, past the meadows and forests and white peaks of Oregon, he felt sad and lonely, weary of wandering, dispossessed, wondering what his new life would bring. Angelo had been so insistent. What right had he to order Kenny out of the city? Now Kenny had only his clothes, his marijuana-leaf necklace, his college degrees and transcripts, his attaché case, his false beard, his bag of stolen jewelry, his psychology books. He was alone.
He drove straight through for two days, rolling northward, stopping at homey places where people praised the boysenberry pie. Bellingham would be some change. His experience of it at Christmas had made him wonder how much action a person could get from scenery. What could you do with pine trees and water? Meeting Kelli’s parents, her mother and stepfather and her father, had been nice, but they were simple people, they had no conception of the kind of success that he knew would someday be his. No wonder Kelli had been tolerant for so long of all the time he spent with Angelo; she must have known he was bored with her, was lowering himself to be with her. But she and Ryan were family now.
He made up a poem as he drove along, improvising out of Robert Frost as imperfectly recalled from high school:
Long ago the snow-bent birches.
There is much winter sadness
Along a frozen lake under moonlight
For there one’s memory tires of a squall of thought
Or a framework of white spines.
Death, he thought. The death of dreams. He continued:
Caught within the icy waters
We remembered what we once had.
What once was mine and never
Will be mine once more.
I have it pretty good,
Or so I’m told.
Lord, why then this winter
Weeping in my soul?
A frozen lake under moonlight.
That’s me, he murmured to himself, a lonely figure looking out over a frozen lake under moonlight. Not bad. If only the world would acknowledge his talent!
And so the banished acolyte, compelled into exile from the purlieu of Buono, entered a new state, the country of the pointed firs.
THIRTEEN
Dear Sir or Madam,
My objective is a position in a community oriented facility or business setting involving responsibility for coordinating or supporting education, counselling, behavior modification or related programs in furthering human development and modality application.
Sincerely yours,
Kenneth A. Bianchi, Ph.D.
Affixed to the lower right-hand corner, a photograph of Kenny, Kelli, and little Ryan, the family group. Kenny, teeth bared beneath gently drooping mustache, appeared healthy and happy, vigorous, radiating that whole-earth outdoorsy optimism indigenous to the Pacific Northwest.
Kenny distributed this letter as he had the flyer for his counseling service, to advertise his merits in new surroundings. Its trendy, mindless phrasing did not land him a job doing whatever it was it proposed. Still his first few months in Bellingham showed signs of progress and stability. He and Kelli and Ryan settled into a small rented house on North Street, and Kenny got a job in charge of security for Fred Meyer’s hardware and variety store. There he acted as a plainclothes floorwalker and, sometimes, peered at customers through an aperture in the ceiling. There were, of course, wonderful opportunities for him to indulge in kleptomania, and he took equal pride in catching thieves and being one, but as word spread of his efficiency he landed a higher-paying position as a roving security officer for a company specializing in electronic alarm systems for private homes and businesses. He was given a company pickup truck for his patrols, and his business card proclaimed impressively:
Whatcom Security
Agency Inc.
The Total Security People
Captain Kenneth A. Bianchi
Operations Supervisor
Even better, his application for membership in the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Reserves was accepted, and he began attending classes in police procedure: arrest technique, search and seizure, traffic regulation, firearm use, and so on.
To all appearances, family life and the move from Los Angeles were tonic to Bianchi. He was establishing himself as a respectable and socially responsible member of the community; he had the position of authority for which he had always longed. Yet all was not well with the inner Kenny.
Bellingham bored him. A town of about forty thousand inhabitants north of Seattle, less than fifty miles from the Canadian border, Bellingham lacked diversions appealing to someone of Kenny’s sensibilities. It was situated on the Washington coast. No setting could be more beautiful, looking out toward the pine-covered San Juan and Vancouver islands and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It was a paradise for the woodsman and the fisherman and for anyone fond of fresh air and water and the reassurance of a coherent community, where violent acts were neither common nor tolerated.
To Bianchi none of these virtues meant anything, and the very cohesiveness of Bellingham, its smallness, and its human scale were irritants. He could not be anonymous here. In such a place every citizen had an identity, an imposition painful to a chameleon, to a man who, himself being nothing, liked to pretend to everything. The people here were disconcertingly direct and sincere. The dramatic, primary blues and greens of the landscape and waterscape oppressed him, conjuring certainties, implying definitions. The blurry grays and browns of smog suited him better, the days of night; and at night in Bellingham the too-bright stars seemed to watch him like lidless eyes. There were no freeways here, no instant-access routes to anonymity where, sealed in his car with the music turned up, he could melt into the columns of millions on his way to another scam. Worst of all, in Bellingham there was no Angelo Buono.
Kenny longed for Angelo like a lover scorned. And as the days of the year began to shorten, bringing long northern nights and the steady rains of the Washington autumn and winter, Angelo came to haunt Kenny’s thoughts more and more. He found himself thinking of Angelo day and night, images of strength and anger, Angelo grabbing onto some girl with his big hands, Angelo grinning, Angelo erect, Angelo taking what he wanted in front and behind, Angelo fingering a gun or deftly manipulating a roll of twine, Angelo a magnet to girls, Angelo looking on him, his own cousin, with scorn. Kenny’s job, driving around checking on security systems, patrolling vacation houses left vacant until the next season, providing the illusion of safety to householders who were happily unaware that they had entrusted their lives and possessions to a murderer and a thief, offered few diversions. He had to content himself with stealing canned goods, telephones, gardening tools, books, light bulbs, storing everything in his basement, which soon resembled a fallout shelter. When Kelli would ask where he was getting all this stuff, Kenny would praise the generosity of the people of Bellingham, how neighborly they were, how everyone seemed to want to help out a newcomer. But he was lonely, his thoughts more and more drifting southward to Angelo as the winter darkness and dampness encroached, covering his thoughts like a shroud.
He did enjoy the authority of being Captain Kenneth A. Bianchi, Operations Supervisor, but the job left him much on his own, inviting him inward. At home he found that Kelli had lost her sexual appeal for him. At first he had made the excuse, to himself and to her, that it was difficult for him to see a nursing mother as a sexual partner, and Kelli had said she understood. Now he told himself that there was something inherently unappealing sexually about a woman who had given birth to his own child; and he and Kelli, when they were home alone together, were usually silent and distant from one another, Kenny browsing constantly in his psychology books. Lately, inspired by a pamphlet he had come across from the Bellingham Hypnosis Center, he had become interested in the subject of hypnosis because of the power it offered over others, and he was reading a book entitled Handbook of Hypnotic Techniques, by Garland H.
Fross, a dentist.
His self-absorption and the absence of sex with Kelli led to masturbation, something his activities in Los Angeles had left little time for. A small rabbit-fur rug became his favorite masturbatory aid, because it reminded him softly of the great days with Angelo. He could rub the rug against himself even as Angelo had stroked his rabbits and dream of the spare bedroom or the orgy at the box factory or a girl being gagged in the brown vinyl chair. Once, after he had played with himself on the living-room couch and jerked himself off into the rabbit’s fur, Kelli, cleaning house, found the rug stuffed under the couch, deduced what he had been doing, and confronted him with the gooed fur. She was not angry, but she wanted to talk to him about it as a sign of their problems. Kenny denied everything.
“I’m sorry. I meant to tell you. I spilled some of that turkey gravy there. Just grabbing a snack. Wasn’t that silly of me? I guess I was too lazy to clean it off. I’ve been working so hard. Sorry.”
But the secret acts pleased him, and he continued with them. They belonged to him, and they were a way of recapturing memories more vivid than anything in his present life. A vision of Angelo with Sabra Hannan would always do the trick. Angelo’s rough voice talking about Sabra’s tits and telling her to shove the dildo up her ass was surefire. Beating Sabra. Angelo reaming Becky. Jane King resisting. Those little girls so hairless and helpless. The women and girls were merely characters to him; what mattered to him was that they pleased him. His memories served as a mental bank of videotapes that could be played at will for his morose delights.
These thoughts and acts came to sadden him, moving him to self-pity. He felt neither remorse nor anything like a post-masturbatory depression but a melancholy sense of the emptiness of his present life. Me then. And me now. It seemed that nothing could or would replace the days and nights with Angelo. To what new thrills was this new, regular family life of his leading? Where were the energies of the city, the slut-crowded boulevards, the evenings of promise? Was he now condemned to a lifetime of memories? Would he always be looking backward like some old man recalling the bold adventures of youth? As his spirits sank, his listlessness increased, and with it anger welled up in him, anger not at himself but at his circumstances and most of all at Angelo. Angelo still ruled his life. Somehow he must get rid of Angelo and at the same time prove to him that he, Kenny, was worthy of respect, had been the perfect partner all along and was also capable of autonomy. He must show himself his own man, deserving of recognition in his own right. Angelo must no longer think of him as a mere sidekick. But the more he tried to banish Angelo, the more he summoned him. Or did Angelo in some mysterious way will himself present to torture Kenny in reveries of painful pleasure across the hundreds of miles separating them? Kenny’s obsession with Angelo intensified. He tried some new scams, telling girls he had met at Fred Meyer’s store that he was going to open a photography studio, but his heart was not in it. He managed a couple of clandestine dates, achieving intercourse for a change, sending girls flowers and poems for Christmas, but memories of Colorado Street became all the more insistent.
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