"You heard it," Mike groaned.
"I want to hear all of it," she said.
"Fuck you," he spat.
"You're an asshole, Mike. Not a dangerous asshole. Just a third-rate white-trash small-town asshole who hangs around gas stations threatening every sixteen-year-old who crosses your path.
You want to know something, Mike? Not even sixteen-year-olds are afraid of guys who hang out at gas stations."
"I told him the story!" Lucy snapped. "He was just repeating stuff I told him." Caroline didn't lift her gaze from the top of Mike's head. "You're right. He's an asshole. But that's all he is. Let him go and we can talk."
"Tell me now," Caroline said without looking at Lucy.
"Maybe you need to know," Lucy answered. "But they don't."
"They already do," Caroline answered.
"Not all of it!" Lucy shouted, panic flaring in her voice.
Caroline met Lucy's eyes, and the intensity of her stare lit up hairs on the back of Lucy's neck. "Joey can go first," Lucy said. "Then you let Mike go and I lock the doors."
"And what if I call the cops?" Joey Murdoch shouted.
"Then I tell them you've been hitting the glass pipe just like your brother!" Lucy told him.
Joey paled and sank back down into his chair.
Caroline gave Lucy a slight nod. Lucy jerked one thumb at the front doors and Joey bolted.
Caroline lifted Mike to his feet, walked him to the door, then kicked him square in the ass. The two men scrambled into their pickup and peeled off into the night.
Lucy locked the doors. Then she went behind the counter to turn off the sign outside. When she turned, Caroline Hughes was standing right behind her, watching her every move. She still held the long-bladed knife in one fist. Several locks of hair draped her face and her eyes were red-rimmed, her breaths rapid and shallow.
Lucy told her everything because she thought she didn't have a choice. She included the bloodiest and most baffling details, the ones she had kept from Mike because she had wanted the guy to believe her.
Caroline Hughes listened intently to the story of El Maricon, a man who haunted the Great Central Valley in search of a vengeance that was as gruesome as it was ambitious. She didn't flinch and she didn't ask questions. After Lucy finished, Caroline was silent.
"Who told your father this?" she finally asked.
"Dad was a foreman for a cotton-picking crew over in Corcoran," Lucy answered. "One of his guys was missing work all the time, so he went to find him. The guy was drunk off his ass, probably high too. Who knows? Maybe he was making it up."
"Do you know his name?" Caroline Hughes asked.
After a long silence, Lucy gave Caroline Hughes the name of the young man who had given her father a nightmare that had plagued him until he died. Lucy had thought about locating the young man herself over the years. Part of her thought she might be putting the guy in danger. But Lucy Vernon had the strange feeling that the woman standing in front of her was the only one who could give the story an ending.
Chapter 4
I slept until noon, and then I spent the afternoon on the sofa eating Ben & Jerry's and watching an intensely homoerotic movie about a group of young boys who go on a sailing excursion in the Caribbean with a taciturn but compassionate captain. When the ship sank with several underwear-clad heartthrobs inside, I got tears in my eyes.
Around six, I thought about getting some dinner the way some people think about buying a vacation home. Rod Peters called around seven. He was on his way home from work. That's when I remembered it was Monday. The excitement in Rod's voice made me nervous.
"Don't freak out," Rod said. "But I've been talking to someone about this story of yours. In total confidence, of course."
"Who?" I asked, feeling like I should care but lacking the energy.
"A writer," he said. "It sounds like he wants to help."
"Who, Rod?"
"James Wilton."
I had heard of him, but that was all. His novels took up an entire shelf at Book Soup, and I had never read a word of them. Their covers featured segments of beautiful women's faces overlaid with chalk outlines and glistening gun barrels. I figured they were the kind of hard-boiled, embarrassingly heterosexual stuff in which all the pretty prostitutes talk in precious metaphors right up until they get their throats slashed.
"You're kidding, right?" I asked. I had sworn Rod to secrecy about the story to avoid the risk of getting scooped by a reporter with a real desk. Now he had spilled the beans to a world-famous novelist. I hoped he had a good reason. Rod was the last person I wanted to be angry at that day. The list was already long and I was at the top.
"No, I'm not," Rod said. "Listen, I didn't tell him everything. Just that you were working on something big, too big for the magazine you worked for. I also mentioned that it involved the Marine Corps. But that's all. I swear."
"Wasn't Wilton in the news recently?" I asked.
Rod let out a sigh that told me whatever information he was about to reveal might discourage me from meeting with Wilton. "A year ago, he published a novel called Last Daughter. It was based on a real case. This porn actress named Jenna Hartt was found murdered in her apartment in Malibu, but the sheriff's department never caught the guy. Wilton did, in a manner of speaking."
"I'm listening," I said.
"In Wilton's novel, the woman was murdered by her Christian fundamentalist brother. Turns out Jenna Hart actually had a Christian fundamentalist brother—and he wasn't too happy about how he was portrayed. He broke into Wilton's house in the middle of the night and went to work on him with a tire iron."
"Obviously the guy didn't work hard enough."
"I wouldn't say that," Rod answered. "Wilton's wife came home early and shot him five times. Killed him."
"And this guy wants to meet with me?"
"Of course he does. You two have similar interests," Rod said, as if James Wilton and I shared an interest in rare diseases. "Come on, Adam. What could it hurt?"
"That's what my first drug dealer said."
I heard Rod shift his cell phone from one ear to the other. Then he lowered the volume on his car stereo. "I heard you had an interesting night last night," he said.
"Jesus," I said. "Can't I beat the shit out of anyone in this town without everyone finding out about it?"
"I don't know, Adam," he said. "You've never beaten the shit out of anyone before." It wasn't a joke. I realized that Rod thought I needed help on other levels as well. For some reason, he thought that help would come from a best-selling novelist with a gunslinging wife and a penchant for plagiarizing real life.
I agreed to meet with James Wilton, and Rod happily agreed to call me back with a time and a place.
A shotgun blast exploded in the center of my computer screen. James Wilton appeared inside the splintered hole. His round, suntanned face had just enough weight on it to smooth out the lines of age, and his full salt-and-pepper hair was brushed back from his forehead in several loose waves.
He looked to be in his late fifties, but his elfin features didn't support the glower he had affected for the camera.
A file cabinet appeared, each drawer labeled with the title of one of Wilton's novels. Then a quote bloomed at the top right corner of the screen in blood-red text: "Wilton is the poet laureate of crime fiction ..." said a midwestern newspaper I had never heard of. I was curious to know what lay on the other side of the dots.
I clicked on his bio.
James Wilton is widely regarded as one of America's leading crime writers. His first novel, Diamonds at the Gate, was published when the author was twenty-six years old.
Inspired in part by die author's brief but highly public marriage to seventies film star Vicky Maiden, Diamonds at the Gate was an overnight best seller and became a television mini-series.
Since then, Wilton has authored sixteen consecutive New York Times best sellers, including the nine novels in his wildly popular series featuring LA Sheriff's Departmen
t homicide detective Joe Ring, and the fact-based Blood and Flowers, based on the real-life murder of Baton Rouge high school teacher Patricia Landry. Blood and Flowers won the Edgar Award and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film in 1998. His most recent novel, Last Daughter, almost cost him his life.
Wilton's childhood was divided between Texas and San Francisco, and he moved to Hollywood after obtaining a master's in political science from San Francisco State University. He lives in the Hollywood Hills with his wife.
The rest of the site was devoted to cover images and plot descriptions of his novels, so I logged on to Amazon.com to find out whether the critics had had any say in James Wilton's being proclaimed one of Americas leading crime writers.
It became clear that Wilton had no friends at the vaunted New York Times Book Review. On Ring Makes Good, the newspaper of record wrote, "Reading a James Wilton novel is like being beaten with baseball bats by a gang of five-year-olds. His prose is as terse as a voter registration card and his characters so sullen you wonder if they're secretly bemoaning the fact that they were born too late to earn inclusion in a narrative penned by one of the authors far superior predecessors." Publishers Weekly described Ring Runs Out as "short on real suspense and high on grotesque explosions of improbable violence."
But a quote from the Washington Post's review of Last Daughter shed a different light on the previous reviews:
If critics had gotten their way, James Wilton would have stuck to the kind of exhaustive and atmospheric reporting that marked his true-crime best seller Blood and Flowers, but Wilton's over-the-top fiction has earned him commercial success and legions of devoted fans, if not critical acclaim. Last Daughter, however, is not the work of a writer trapped in a successful formula. Indeed, the critical opprobrium Wilton endures has turned him into one of our more fearless and inventive crime writers. The fictionalized tale of murdered porn starlet Jenna Hartt is a riveting and disturbing read that takes the reader smack into the dark heart of LA's porn industry, but without the condescension or hollow sermonizing one would expect from Wilton's contemporaries in the genre.
I turned up some more reviews and articles about Blood and Flowers and learned that the departure into fact-based crime had been a major risk for the best-selling novelist. Four publishers had rejected it, including his usual one. Wilton couldn't work at the speed of the sensationalist hacks who had stitched together news articles on Patricia Landry's murder to create instant paperbacks.
But Wilton had gone ahead with the book anyway. It had taken him three years, three years without the hefty advances and royalty checks he would have earned from churning out three more Joe Ring novels, three years in which the ease became a distant memory and the book lost its major publicity angle.
The result had brought the author things he had never seen before: widespread critical acclaim, a literary award, and a screen adaptation that didn't have commercials in it. Wilton had gone right back to his formula soon after. But Last Daughter, a novel based on a real-life case, suggested that Wilton was seeking to get his feet wet in the world of fact-based crime once again.
Now he was interested in meeting with me about Daniel Brady. I was eager to see whether that would involve helping me out, as Rod had said. I thought it was a great deal more likely that Wilton was looking to steal my story.
On Tuesday morning, I drove up into the hills to James Wilton's house, beneath a sky that shade of blue you can find only on an ocean in an atlas. Some desert thunderstorms had blown the smog out to sea without spilling a drop of rain on the city. Laurel Canyon is a treacherous mountain pass that the city tries to pass off as a major thoroughfare. It's lined with driveways and steep walls of bedrock festooned with tinderbox brush.
At Wilton's house on Mulholland Drive, there was a three-foot shoulder near the front gate for me to park on. As I rang the call box, a black Lincoln Navigator flew around the sharp bend in the road and swerved to avoid me. I had noticed the same SUV on Laurel Canyon a few minutes earlier and couldn't help but wonder if one of Scott Koffler's little charges might be behind the wheel.
I gave my name to the security guard, and the spiked black gate in front of me rolled smoothly to one side. I drove up a long gravel road leading through a forest of eucalyptus trees.
Their branches did a lazy dance, offering me brief glimpses of the two-story Spanish Mission revival house that sat on a bluff overlooking the San Fernando Valley. The thick concrete walls were painted the color of a fresh mud puddle, and a short tower with a rounded roof anchored the L-shaped wings. The front door had a Moorish arch and a wood carving that depicted Montezuma's last stand against the Spanish invaders.
I rolled my window down and found myself staring at the security guards slight beer belly and silver belt buckle. I reminded myself that the property had seen both an attempted murder and a real one, so I decided not to stick my head out the window.
"Jimmy wants you to fill this out," the guard said. He thrust a clipboard through the open window. The document on the clipboard did not have a heading, but there was a pen shoved through the clip.
The Black Dahlia is . . .
a)a discontinued brand of Johnnie Walker
b)methamphetamine in pill form
c)Mayor Hahn's drag persona
d)an unsolved LA homicide that no one in his right mind will ever write a single word about again
I circled D.
The greatest high-profile murder case of the last ten years is . . .
a)the murder of Nicole Simpson
b)the murder of Laci Peterson
c)the attempted murder of yours truly
d)9/11
I bypassed the opportunity for brownnosing and circled D.
The greatest mystery writer of all time is . . .
a)Ross McDonald
b)Sidney Sheldon
c)Raymond Fucking Chandler
d)I'm a pretentious navel-gazing windbag who lives in a manufactured version of reality where murder is to be leered at with passing interest, and all those who explore its ramifications are to be dismissed as arrested adolescents and gutter punks. I enjoy poring over self-indulgent and monotonous explorations of what pompous grad students think of disgruntled academics, nuclear families, and their dead parents.
(If you circled D, please leave.)
I circled Raymond Chandler just because I had read him. I handed the clipboard to the guard, and he departed. A few minutes later, he returned and gestured me to follow him down the side of the house.
A tide of perfectly tended lawn swept toward a view of the San Fernando Valley that stretched from the mirrored skyscrapers of Universal City to the dusty flanks of the San Gabriel Mountains on the northern horizon. The swimming pool had a black bottom, and the water glistened like Coca-Cola in a glass bottle. An expansive flagstone terrace sat between the house's two wings, and it was packed with enough patio furniture to host a small wedding party.
The guard escorted me down a flagstone path lined with waist-high hedges that had smatterings of pink blossoms. At the end of it, an expansive pool house was laced with the sun shadows of live-oak branches. The guard gestured for me to step through one of the French doors, and I did.
The pool house was James Wilton's office. It had a ten-foot-high vaulted ceiling and a wrought iron chandelier with seven pillar candles stuck in it. An ancient-looking computer sat in the crook of an L-shaped desk, its screen glowing black and red with the text of some word processing program from the 1980s. The only other items on the desk were a copy of that day's LA Times, some empty file holders, and my pop quiz. The sweep of corkboard on the wall above was empty. Just as I had suspected, James Wilton was between projects.
The guard asked me if I wanted anything to drink. I declined. He left me to study the wall of bookshelves. Wiltons novels were not on prominent display. Instead I found texts on criminal profiling, practical guides to homicide investigation, and probably every piece of true-crime writing ever published.
A toilet
flushed. I heard a strange scraping sound against the carpet.
The bird that waddled out of the bathroom stood about half a foot off the carpet. Its white feathers were stained yellow at the tips, and there was a metal band around its right leg. The bird and I stared at each other for a few seconds; then it raised its crown of pink feathers and let out a scream that curled the hair on my ass.
James Wilton emerged from the bathroom without glancing in my direction. His mahogany cane was topped with a chunky silver stallions head. He transferred it from one hand to the other and finished zipping up his khaki shorts. He wore a dark blue Hawaiian shirt with dancing red fish all over it, and his chicken legs were dusted with wiry brown hair. His picture had rendered him accurately, except for the moist sheen in his big blue eyes and the scars that clung to the inside of his right leg like strands of wet toilet paper.
"This is Archer," he said, his eyes on the bird. "Don't get any screwy ideas. I can't shake the son of a bitch. You Adam Murphy?"
I nodded, just so he would have to make eye contact.
"You're homosexual," he said flatly.
"How could you tell?"
"Your skin looks like margarine, and your pants are so tight I feel like congratulating the blood that can get to your ass." He eased himself down into his desk chair and gestured for me to do the same in one of the Eames chairs in front of the wall of books. "You're a good writer," he said.
"How could you tell?"
He opened a desk drawer and dropped several back issues of Glitz magazine on his desk.
"Shit," I whispered.
"I especially liked the one about the cologne that's supposedly made from real bull testosterone. You made me believe it for a second. That's talent. A lot of great journalists can't write advertising copy."
I just stared at him. He slouched back in his chair, pursed his lips, and studied me.
"Who died?" he asked.
"Excuse me?"
"You're wearing your grief, little man. You just don't know it. Your jaw's so tight it looks like you're about to take a bite out of the wall. Any sudden movement and your eyes turn to saucers."
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