“So that’s your dream, is it?” she said.
Nate said, “My dreams aren’t complicated. Any one of the Kardashians could interpret them.”
She said, “I’m surprised that when you serve twenty years as a cop you aren’t able to receive any pension money yet.”
“I’ll still be too young then,” Nate said.
“Too young,” she said with a look of melancholy. Then her eyes narrowed and she said, “Me, I’m old enough to have my cop and eat him, too.”
Talk about a cougar! This man-eater looked like she truly could come at him, fang and claw. While he was contemplating that troubling catamount image, she said, “I’m old enough for anything. Any damn thing at all.”
With that she leaned over abruptly and kissed him on the cheek and then on the mouth. Her kiss was open-mouthed and warm, with lots of tongue.
When she pulled away, she looked at him, sloe-eyed, and he figured there was no way out, not if he wanted to be in Ressler’s movie. This menopausal momma was about to debauch him right here in this goddamn marshmallow palace!
Leona stood up and unbuttoned her dress and let it hang open. He saw a lace-trimmed white bra that held breasts he guessed were helped by silicone, and a flat belly that she’d earned, and shapely thighs the color of burnished copper, compliments of a tanning bed, he supposed.
As though reading his thoughts, she said, “The tawny color is mostly mine even without tanning, compliments of my Italian old man. But my ma was Irish, so I can hold a grudge with the best of them. Don’t ever cross me, gorgeous.”
Nate watched her let the dress fall to the floor and he thought that she might be his mother’s age but that’s all they had in common. Then it occurred to him that he had actually flashed on a flittering image of his mother, and he thought, What the hell’s this, Oedipus time? Was Hollywood Nate Weiss just another Jewish momma’s boy? But no, that cliché was just too ridiculous.
Leona said, “We should behave like grown-ups and go to my bedroom for this first-timer, shouldn’t we? Yet somehow, being with a lovely lad like you I don’t want to behave like a grown-up. Do you?”
She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor with the linen dress, and he thought, Silicone for sure, but understated and very acceptable. Then it was his turn to give a command performance, so he put his glass on the table beside the sofa and stood. Just then another image flared, as hot and blinding as a red carpet spotlight. His mother still used those same words on him at least once a month: “Behave like a grown-up and find a nice woman, Nathan.” Goddamnit! If he couldn’t sweep away the terrifiying notion that he was about to shtup his own mother, he’d never even get it up!
Nate started feeling feverish and not in a good way. If ever he needed the tips he’d learned in that UCLA film class… Maybe if he were a method actor, he could go all Tom Jones sensuous and imagine something decadent, like a bathtub full of cherries jubilee or something. He had a sudden sensation of flop sweat, and he hadn’t even flopped yet. Then he heard the sound of a car clattering down the axle-cracking, fake-cobblestone driveway, and it didn’t sound like Rudy Ressler’s purring Aston Martin.
“Shit!” she said. “That’s Raleigh’s car. What the hell’s he doing back here after I gave him the fucking afternoon off? Jesus Christ!”
“I’d better get going,” Nate said with more than a small measure of relief. “Does he come in through the main door?”
“No, the kitchen door, damn him. But you don’t have to slink away, Nathan.” She picked up her clothes hastily and said, “Let me run to the bedroom and change. We can still sit and chat.”
“I’d better go,” Nate said, moving quickly to the front door, thinking that he definitely didn’t want the butler to gossip about him to Rudy Ressler. “You can tell him that I dropped you off and came in to use the bathroom for a minute so he doesn’t wonder about my Vette in the driveway, okay?”
She stood with her crumpled dress in her arms and said, “When we get back from Europe, I want you here for dinner parties, yes? And other things?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nate said with a grin, handing her a business card bearing his private cell number.
“Yes, Leona,” she prompted.
“Yes, Leona,” he said.
“Don’t ever call me ma’am or Mrs. Brueger,” she said. “Never again.”
“Never again, Leona,” he said, with an even bigger grin that required more acting skill.
When Nate was in his Corvette and driving out through her gate, he thought once more of the assistant director who’d said, “Don’t pet the cougar.” It wasn’t until he was motoring down Mulholland Drive that he began to understand his conflicted feelings in that house. Sure, it was her money, and her age, that triggered those childish thoughts of his mother, but there was something else. It was the first time in his entire life that he’d been put in the position of actually living the ultimate Hollywood cliché. She had challenged him to man-up and sell his ass for a movie role, and he had waffled like a teenage ingenue on a casting couch. She had been every inch a man-eating cougar, and Hollywood Nate Weiss had been nothing but a twitchy fucking rabbit.
SIX
As that summer was winding down, most of the dozen working detectives at Hollywood Station had to wonder what else could happen. It wasn’t just the antics of the Bling Ring by any means. Another crime spree involved the “BMW Bandits,” who had attacked more than fifty BMWs, mostly on the west side and Wilshire district. They were discriminating thieves who often ignored personal articles such as laptops and other pricey items that owners left in their cars. What they were after were replaceable air bags and high-tech headlights, costing nearly $3,000 to replace in BMW 3 and 5 series cars. Other traditionally valuable and vulnerable car parts, like wheel rims, were being ignored, and the thieves were able to access and remove the air bags very quickly. Hollywood was expected to be next on their list of favorite areas of attack.
But the wave of home and auto burglaries was nothing compared with the strange and disturbing serial murders that occupied some of the detectives at Hollywood Station. One of the most bizarre involved the stabbing of homeless people. The first murder took place midday on a lovely Hollywood afternoon near Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue. A homeless man managed to put in a call to police, saying, “I think I’ve been shot,” before falling over dead. He had not been shot but stabbed, and he died of a lethal puncture wound to the chest.
Another murder occurred on Hollywood Boulevard by the Music Box Theater. A homeless man was found dead on the ground, where he’d been lying for hours. The initial patrol officers to arrive saw no blood trail and at first did not think he’d been stabbed. After detectives arrived, they learned that one of the nearby commercial buildings had a security camera on which their suspect, another homeless man, was recorded watching his intended victim. The killer would approach the sleeping man, and whenever a pedestrian passed by, he would walk away. At one point he even seemed to spot the video camera watching him, but he was undeterred.
He’d taped a steak knife to his forearm inside two pieces of cardboard that acted as a sheath. When he felt it was safe, he simply walked over to the sleeping man and seemed to poke him. There was no slashing, no overkill. Just the chest puncture, and it was enough.
A third attack occurred at Yucca and Wilcox avenues. A homeless man awoke with pain in his chest. When he got up, blood gushed from a chest wound and he found that he could not walk. He was rushed to the hospital in time to save his life.
The killer turned out to be a former inmate of a state mental facility. Random beatings and even the senseless killing of vulnerable homeless people were certainly not rare, but this was Hollywood’s first serial attacker of homeless people who was himself a homeless person. The detectives referred to him as “the ultimate self-hating bum.”
Clearly, the most heinous case in the Hollywood detectives’ murder books in the first year of the Obama presidency involved Michael Thomas Gargiulo, wh
o was awaiting trial for serial murder. Gargiulo, a thirty-two-year-old air conditioner and furnace repairman, originally from the Chicago suburb of Glenview, Illinois, was initially linked in a peripheral way to a Hollywood actor.
Long before coming to Los Angeles from Illinois, Michael Gargiulo had been questioned as a teenager in the murder of his high school classmate Tricia Pacaccio. She was stabbed to death in what detectives called a “blitz attack” on her doorstep in August 1993, a week before the eighteen-year-old was to report to Purdue University as a freshman with an interest in environmental issues. In her high school yearbook, the bright and popular girl said she “wanted to save the world,” but as it turned out, she couldn’t save herself. Her murder went unsolved, although DNA material was found under the fingernails of the victim. Years later, Hollywood detectives became intimately acquainted with that case, following a terrible murder in the Hollywood Hills.
On February 22, 2001, actor Ashton Kutcher had driven to the Hollywood Hills bungalow of his girlfriend, Ashley Ellerin, to take her to a Grammy Awards party. She was a stunning twenty-two-year-old fashion student, a model, and an occasional Las Vegas dancer. The young actor knocked and rang the bell but got no answer. He looked through a rear window and saw what he thought were wine stains on the carpet. He left the bungalow, and Ashley Ellerin’s body was found the next day by her housemate. The first detective to arrive called the crime scene “a massacre.”
Every window in the bungalow had bars on it, and there was even a steel door. The doors were in good repair, all freshly painted with no sign of forced entry. Inside, from the front entry down a long passage, were spatter and drops of blood. Beyond that, there was a lot more blood all the way to the body lying on the top landing, described by detectives as “a bloody pulp.” Her hair looked as though she’d just washed it and was fresh from a shower at the time of attack. She wore a terry-cloth robe and pajamas. Her throat had been sawed and ripped open and her head was knocked off the brain stem. Only mangled ribbons of tissue connected her head to her body. The medical examiner stopped counting stab wounds at forty-eight.
Criminalists tried to get latent prints and DNA evidence, but all of the fingerprints in the bungalow belonged to the victim or her housemate. Later, after searching his memory for any possible suspect whom she might have let into their home, the housemate of Ashley Ellerin mentioned “Mike the furnace guy” to police. He said that Ashley and a friend had met Mike when he’d walked out of the nearby dog park one day. Mike was described as being six two, 180 pounds, and having a “dark demeanor. ” He had stopped by the bungalow one afternoon when Ashley was not at home, telling the housemate that he wanted to work on her furnace, and he had been spotted driving his truck slowly past the bungalow on another occasion.
That crime resulted in a seven-year investigation that eventually led Hollywood Division detectives to Illinois and the Pacaccio murder, as well as to other blitz attacks in the Los Angeles area in 2005 and 2007. A detective with the L.A. Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau described one of them as “the most violent murder I ever saw, bar none.” The attacker had done horrible “staging” with body parts on that one, and it looked as though the victim had been ravaged by a pack of sharks.
And finally, in 2008, a Santa Monica woman was attacked in her home but managed to fight off her assailant and survive, despite serious stab wounds. DNA evidence was collected and coordinated and it brought everything together. Michael Gargiulo was at last in custody, awaiting trial in 2010. And Hollywood paparazzi would be ready for Ashton Kutcher if he should be required to testify, drooling over the possibility that his wife, Demi Moore, might accompany him to court.
So there was no dearth of violence and other serial crimes for the dozen overworked detectives at Hollywood Station to deal with, and the detectives at the Major Assault Crimes table got their share of domestic violence cases in that first year of the recession. The MAC detectives who responded late on a blistering hot afternoon to an unusual domestic violence call from a woman in an apartment building in Little Armenia were both cops with more than twenty years on the Job. Gina Villegas, a forty-three-year-old energetic Mexican American, and Carl Cheng, a forty-two-year-old laconic Taiwanese American, were both children of immigrants who got to use their language skills frequently in the polyglot community that was Hollywood.
They hadn’t needed their foreign-language skills when they got ordered to Little Armenia. They were responding to a telephonic plea made to their D3 supervisor by a terrified woman who said that she had been stalked and threatened by an ex-lover who was father to the baby she had given birth to only five weeks prior. Thelma Barker, their detective supervisor, was a bootstraps-up black veteran with thirty-one years on the Job. She was born and raised in Compton and had been a victim of domestic violence herself during a brief marriage at the age of nineteen.
The old three-story building in Little Armenia, consisting of twenty-eight rental units, was a rectangular block of gray stucco, and was possibly the most protected apartment building in that part of east Hollywood. Because of episodes of tagging by street gangs in the area, the owner had taken the extraordinary step of hiring local pensioners as watchmen. The geezers took turns sitting in a tiny office off the lobby from 9 P.M. to 6 A.M. seven days a week, when vandalism was a threat. There were no fire escapes or any exterior balconies that could be easily accessed.
The detectives rang the manager and were buzzed inside by a retired plumber who also did handyman jobs in the building. When he learned who the detectives were looking for, he said, “Confidentially, I don’t like it when the owner of this property gets so charitable. The girl in three-ten is his niece, or so he claims. She’s behind two months in the rent and still he lets her stay. Don’t tell her I told you, but she leaves her two babies alone sometimes. I’ve felt like calling you when she does it, but she’s the boss’s special tenant, if you know what I mean, and I don’t wanna lose this job.”
Gina Villegas thanked him, and when they got to the one-bedroom apartment on the third floor, a dangerously thin woman met them at the door. She was a twenty-five-year-old strawberry blonde with frightened, darting eyes, trembling hands, and suspiciously stained teeth.
Carl Cheng’s glance toward his partner said, Tweaker.
Before either cop could say anything to her, the woman said, “I’m the one who called your office. My name’s Cindy Kroll. My ex-boyfriend is threatening me. I think he wants to kill me.”
“And why would you think that?” Gina Villegas asked while Carl Cheng glanced around the little apartment.
There were two chairs at the small Formica table in the kitchen. And in the living room, if you could call it that, was a sofa, a shabby overstuffed chair, an infant’s crib, and a playpen, all crowded together around a big-screen Sony TV.
Carl Cheng smirked subtly in his partner’s direction as if to say, No matter how crappy they live, they always have a better TV than I do.
Cindy Kroll said, “Sorry there’s no place to sit down.” She pointed to a thirteen-month-old in the playpen. Then she said, “My five-week-old baby boy’s asleep in my bedroom. We don’t have much room here.”
Gina Villegas said, “A thirteen-month-old and a five-week-old? You’re not wasting time starting a family, are you?”
“My baby boy was an accident, and that’s what’s causing the problem,” Cindy Kroll said. “His father wants me dead for demanding child support.”
“Are you married to him?” the detective asked.
“No,” she said. “After my first baby was born, my husband, Ralphie, took off and left us. I had a tough time and could only make a few bucks cleaning houses. I had a job cleaning the apartment of Louis Dryden every week for four months. He lives up on Franklin Avenue and has a pretty good job at a real-estate company in Santa Monica, selling vacation rentals. He’s maybe ten years older than me, and, well, we started getting intimate while I was working for him and pretty soon I got pregnant.”
“Pregnant by h
im?” Gina Villegas said.
“Of course by him.” Cindy Kroll’s darting eyes flashed. “I’m no slut.”
“No, I didn’t mean that you were. But you also have a husband, right?”
“He’s outta my life. I got pregnant by Louis and nobody else.”
“Go on,” Gina Villegas said.
“He gave me some cash to get an abortion but I didn’t do it. I decided to have the baby and hire a lawyer. For the past couple of months my lawyer’s been calling him, but Louis says the baby isn’t his. He says he’s engaged to a terrific woman now and I’m ruining his life with my lies.”
“How about a paternity test?” Gina Villegas said. “That should settle the matter.”
“That’s what my lawyer’s working on now. We’re gonna take him to court.”
Carl Cheng spoke for the first time and said, “Why’re we here, ma’am?”
“He stalked me today,” Cindy Kroll said. “He caught me at the Seven-Eleven store I always go to and told me this is my last chance. He said he’d give me five thousand dollars to leave him alone and quit saying the baby’s his.”
“And what’d you say?” Carl Cheng asked.
“I told him to talk to my lawyer.”
“And when you were at the store, where were your babies?” Gina Villegas asked.
After a long pause, Cindy Kroll said, “I was only gone for a few minutes.”
“You can’t leave babies alone like that. It’s child endangering and it’s against the law,” Gina Villegas said.
Cindy Kroll said, “I asked the woman in the next apartment to look in on them every few minutes. Don’t you wanna hear what I got to say? This man threatened me!”
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