Brushed-aluminum plaques affixed to the rear wall of the building marked two reserved parking places: his own and his wife’s. Arlene Khoury’s Silver Cloud was not there; and, since she allowed no one else to drive it; he could assume she had left for the day.
He entered the store through the rear entrance, which opened directly onto the main merchandising floor, the ground floor. He glanced around and, with his experience, saw that business was brisk. People were buying, not just looking.
The main floor had departments for jewelry, crystal, china, silver, prints, paintings, small sculpture, and bric-a-brac. Some articles were antiques, but most were of contemporary craftsmanship. Many were museum-quality reproductions. Although the store did not sell clothing, occasionally it would offer a Japanese kimono, a Chinese robe, or something of the like. A popular item was the authentic English “brolly,” imported from London: an innovation introduced by Khoury fils in 1975, after his father died and could no longer pronounce it trivial. A new department, introduced only in 1987, sold a line of small appliances: digital clocks, telephones and digital telephone-answering machines, coffee makers, multiband radios, and tiny portable television sets—all of them outstanding examples of dramatic yet functional modem design, all of them bearing the Khoury name.
As he walked through the store, sales clerks glanced away from their customers for an instant to nod a greeting. Customers left the counters for a moment to speak to him. A few came to shake his hand and exchange pleasantries.
The store had no windows, so the light inside never varied. It had been carefully designed to display merchandise under the best possible tones —cooler light in the appliances section, warmer in the jewelry section, and so on. No music played. That, in Khoury’s judgment, distracted customers from what they were here for: to see and buy. On the other hand, they could step into the Khoury Cafe and enjoy complimentary coffee or tea while they waited for someone or pondered a purchase. For those who wanted to smoke, there was a smoking lounge with quiet, concealed fans that exhausted the stench and did not allow it to escape into the store.
“Hi, Joe!”
Yussef Khoury suggested his friends call him Joe. Damon Christopher strode across the carpet with outstretched hand. His new film, Iron Man, was playing to great reviews and big box office; and his equity in it was going to earn him five or six million dollars, minimum. He was of course a big fellow, like the heroes he played, blond and ruddy faced, with a cleft chin and sensual blue eyes.
Christopher pumped Khoury’s hand, then tapped the box he was carrying. “From upstairs,” he said with a wide, suggestive grin. “Damned good thing it comes from Khoury’s, or she’d never even consider wearing it.”
He had been to the second-floor lingerie shop. His box was wrapped in the distinctive Khoury aluminum-colored paper and tied with the Khoury ribbon: rich metallic blue. Wherever a package like that went, people immediately recognized it as something from Khoury’s.
“I’m glad you found something you like,” said Khoury, smiling warmly. “I wish you good luck with it.”
“Oh, it will do the trick,” said Christopher. “A little argument. This will do the trick.”
Christopher slapped Khoury’s arm and walked on. He would never have come into the store, probably, if not for the lingerie shop opened in 1975; and he was probably correct in guessing that his wife—if in fact the gift was for his wife—would be far more likely to wear the boldly revealing item in that box because it came from Khoury’s. It was a fact that women would wear lingerie from Khoury’s that they might have considered cheap and demeaning if it had come from anywhere else.
Khoury had wanted to do the lingerie collection for years before his father died. The old man would never allow it, arguing that it would surely offend some of their lady customers. The son understood otherwise. He had given the second floor over to a group of boutiques, some of them operated by concessionaires—for example, the perfume and cosmetics boutique and the chocolate shop. Placed discreetly out of the sight of those who did not want to shop for scanty undies there, the Khoury Collection boutique was a busy profit center.
Khoury could have taken an elevator up, but he preferred to climb the broad stairway to the second floor, then a narrower stairway to the third.
The third floor was the office floor, where he and his wife, Arlene, occupied executive offices: his a suite, hers a simpler office. All the rest of the administrative functions required for a major retail operation were on the third floor also.
As he walked along the long corridor between the stairs and his suite, the door to his wife’s office opened. Her secretary—a dark-haired, attractive woman of forty-six—came out. She was intent on using her keys to lock the office and did not notice him until he was upon her.
“Oh—Hello, Joe,” she said, a bit startled.
“Hello, Puss,” he said. Her name was Cathy Murphy, but she liked the nickname Puss, so that’s what he called her. “How’s everything?”
She smiled. “It’s a little difficult, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “Hang in there. We’ll do something about it.”
He had hired her to work in his own office, as a second secretary. His wife hadn’t liked it, hadn’t liked an attractive woman with an intriguing past working for him. Arlene had first demanded he send her back to the sales floor, where she had worked before, then had agreed to her remaining on the third floor, provided she would be her secretary, not one of his. Arlene didn’t like her, just the same, and seemed to take every chance she could find to humiliate her. It was a situation that would have to be remedied, sooner or later, one way or another.
Khoury knew all about Cathy Murphy. She had spent several years of her life in prison. In fact, she had learned her secretarial skills in the women’s reformatory at Fontera. Twenty-five years ago, she had been one of the Manson girls, though not one of those involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders. She had gone to prison for something else entirely. Charlie Manson had bestowed a nickname on her, as he did on most of the girls who clung to him as his “Family”: Puss Dogood.
She had dark-brown hair which she still wore long and straight, a style she had adopted when she was a… well, a hippie: the word that came to Joe Khoury’s mind. She was an attractive woman with regular features and a good figure. She wore no makeup, ever. At work she dressed modestly in blouses and skirts, but he had encountered her in a shopping mall one evening and learned that off duty she dressed like an earth child. He also knew that from time to time she slipped out to smoke a cigarette on the loading dock.
“We’ll straighten it out, Puss,” he said. “Just hang in and be as patient as you can.”
“Thank you, Joe. Your assurance is what makes it possible. Otherwise—”
He held up a hand, stopping her.
“No. Don’t think of quitting. Puss. Don’t worry, we’ll straighten things out.”
Cathy Murphy—Puss Dogood—nodded and walked toward the stairs. She stopped and turned. “Joe…” She grinned. “If you want to help me get even with her again sometime, just say the word.” Khoury smiled but said nothing and went on into his office.
His secretary was not at her desk in the outer office. She had gone home apparently. But Kimberly was waiting for him. She was sitting on the leather-upholstered couch, smoking a cigarette and reading Vanity Fair.
The name she used was Kimberly Dana. She was twenty-nine years old, a tall, slender, athletic young woman, strikingly beautiful: a blonde with near perfect facial features—accented nevertheless with makeup so skillfully applied that even Khoury could not always be entirely sure it was there. She was an archetypal California beach girl, so much so that she played women’s beach volieyball on television and had a small following of fans.
“You know, if you didn’t smoke those damned cigarettes you would be utterly perfect,” he said to her.
She crushed the cigarette in the ashtray on the table in front of the couch and pulled a breath spray from her
handbag. “Only the second one today,” she said. “I got bored waiting for you.”
“Was Arlene still here when you came in?” he asked.
“No, dear. I waited until the Silver Cloud was out of the parking lot before I came upstairs. Eleanor was gone. The flower child was still here, though.”
“Yes. I saw her as I came in. It’s hard to believe the double life she leads—working here until six- thirty as the loyal, honest secretary, then going out into the mountains and spending the night with her… With whatever you call it. Her commune.”
“Her tribe,” said Kimberly.
“Well, let’s not knock it. Her tribe is going to be very useful to us.”
“What we need is in the car. Locked in the trunk.”
“Not everything,” said Yussef.
He went to a Chinese-style lacquered black cabinet and opened it, exposing a large safe. He worked the combination and swung back the heavy steel door. From inside the safe he withdrew two oval steel batons about seven inches long. They were hollow and perforated with a dozen or so half-inch holes that fit fingertips and afforded a secure grip. Hinged at one end, the two halves of the batons could swing apart.
He handed one to Kimberly. Using both hands, she seized the baton at the end opposite the hinge and pulled the two halves apart. The two halves were in fact the halves of a steel sheath for a six-inch blade. It was a singularly deadly weapon, called a Bali-Song. With the handles closed, the Bali-Song was a heavy bludgeon. With them fully open, that is, swung back against each other, it was a conventional knife. With the handles swung out halfway, to a 90° angle with the blade, an attacker could grip a Bali-Song with both hands and thrust forward with the force of two arms.
It was maybe the most expensive knife in the world. Yussef had never considered offering them for sale in the store, but he had bought half a dozen of them because he admired the design, and he had given several to friends. He had explained to Kimberly when he first showed her a Bali-Song that the Philippines, where they originated, had outlawed them; it was a crime to own one there.
She had smiled and commented, “Well, Joe, you always have the best.”
“They will lend a certain elegance to a dirty job,” he had said.
She dropped both of them into her handbag before they left the office.
Two
1
Puss drove an old, battered Chevy Vega. It made smoke and noise and leaked oil, and it barely passed the California emissions tests, but it got her where she wanted to go. Only the pigs were obsessed with cars. Joe Khoury was obsessed with cars and drove that Mercedes that must have cost him enough to feed two dozen families for a year. Arlene drove the Rolls, a nauseating squander. The Vega was car enough for anybody—or had been, anyway, years ago when it was newer.
Nothing was good enough for the royal Khourys. Nothing was good enough for the bloated pigs they catered to. Most of what they sold in the store was utterly useless. Even the useful things were disgustingly extravagant. Stuff that cost a fraction of Khoury’s prices would have served people’s purposes just as well and maybe even better. What good was a gold-handled letter opener? A little paring knife would open letters better. The store stank of moronic extravagance. It was enough to make an honest person vomit.
And none of the nauseating pigs gave a thought to what they wasted or to what the money they threw around could do for human beings in need.
She knew she was right about this. She knew because Charlie agreed with her. She wrote Charlie a long letter every week, and once or twice a year Charlie wrote back: a rambling letter full of wisdom. He told her she was right, so she knew she was right.
She begged him to tell her what to do about Arlene Khoury, but he never responded to that. She didn’t know if his advice would be to go on tolerating Arlene’s abuse, or to quit her job, or to do something else.
She hadn’t seen Charlie for twenty-five years. More than that actually, because the night Charlie sent Sadie and Katie and LuLu and Tex up to Cielo Drive she, Puss, had been in jail in Bakersfield, doing six months for relieving a john of his money and his car. She hadn’t seen any of them for more than twenty-five years, because by the time she got out of the Bakersfield jail, all of them were locked up in L.A. and charged with the murders of Sharon Tate and those other people: Folger and Frykowski and Sebring and.…
Anyway… She never had got all the names just right. Not that they didn’t make any difference. They did. Because of them she’d been cut off from Charlie and her very best friends in the world for twenty-five years. As LuLu—Leslie Van Houten— had put it, “You couldn’t meet a nicer group of people.” She, Puss, had never met nicer people. They were her family. The Family.
She smoked a cigarette as she drove. When she got home, she’d smoke something better.
Charlie… Anyone who had seen the face of Charlie Manson knew they were seeing the face of God, except the ignorant pigs who couldn’t see it. She remembered every moment she had ever spent with him, every touch he had ever bestowed on her, every word he had spoken just to her. In the Family her name was Puss Dogood. Charlie gave everyone a name—that is, he gave names to people he cared about. Their new names gave them new identities, in which they could be completely free.
In his letters he still called her Puss. The girls didn’t answer her letters anymore. They wanted out and pretended they didn’t want contacts with the Family. Sadie—Susan Atkins—even denied now that she had anything to do with the murders. She had stabbed Sharon Tate and had explained why: “You have to have a real love in your heart to do this for people.” And now she denied it all.
Squeaky, who was doing long federal time for trying to assassinate President Gerry Ford, was about the only one in prison who had kept the faith. Cute little Squeaky had even escaped once. Prison broke people and apparently had broken the other girls, but it had not broken Squeaky.
Or Charlie. Nothing could break Charlie. By definition. They couldn’t break Charlie any more than they could break God. Man’s Son. Manson.
Nothing could hurt him. But nothing. Even where he was, he was just as powerful as he had ever been. And he was the world’s only hope.
She had done everything she could for Charlie. She had become pregnant by him but had lost the baby, which wasn’t her fault. She had worked topless, first as a cocktail waitress, then as a blackjack dealer. She had hustled. She had stolen from johns. All to get money for Charlie, for the Family. She had gone to jail for it, but she had never regretted anything. She knew when she came out the Family would be there, Welcoming her back into its circle of love.
But it wasn’t there. They had locked up Charlie. The others were still the Family, but it wasn’t the same. Squeaky had done what she could to keep them together, but Squeaky wasn’t Charlie. Without Charlie, the weak ones drifted away. Only a few still called themselves the Family.
Of those few, two lived with Puss: a man her own age, that is forty-six, and a woman of forty-two who had been only seventeen when the pigs took Charlie away from them and had had love from him only once. The man was Warren Douglas, named Bum Rapp by Charlie. The woman was Jenny Schmidt, named Kid. Three others who did not live with Cathy came to the house nearly every evening. Together, they were a branch of the Family, and they acknowledged Puss Dogood as their leader.
She drove north on the San Diego Freeway and northwest on the Golden State Freeway until she turned off onto Balboa Boulevard and eventually onto a half-paved road called Pitillo Road. The place she and the others rented was a ramshackle, unpainted old house with a rusty corrugated-steel roof. Bum’s old Chevy pickup sat in front. The Toyota parked beside it belonged to Buddy Drake, a Family member Charlie had not renamed.
She went in. Someone had been smoking grass; she could smell it; but right now they were drinking beer. The guys wore T-shirts and tattered, faded old jeans; Bum’s had both knees out. Kid wore a pair of ragged khaki shorts and nothing more. Even if she wasn’t a girl anymore, the guys liked to look
at her bare breasts, and Kid had always been accommodating. She had probably accommodated them other ways during the afternoon.
“The working girl,” said Bum. “Tillie the Toiler.”
“Gimme a joint,” said Puss.
“Jeez, sorry, Puss. There isn’t any left,” said Kid. Puss had begun to strip out of her workaday clothes. She tossed her blouse onto a chair and lifted her skirt over her head. “We’re damn well goin’ out and get some,” she said.
“Like, after we eat somethin’,” said Buddy. “We been waitin’ for you and gettin’ damn hungry.” Puss stripped naked before she picked up and began to put on her other clothes: a white T-shirt with dark-blue stripes, plus a pair of jeans with holes in the knees, like Bum’s. She felt no hesitation about changing clothes in front of Bum and Buddy and Kid. They were, after all, her sister and brothers. Besides, privacy had never been important to her. She’d never had any.
“Okay,” she said. “But we’re goin’ out and get some. I feel like a swim, too. Go to the beach maybe.”
2
Arlene Khoury and Steve Heck sat beside the swimming pool at Casa Khoury—the name another Khoury affectation—and sipped Scotch while they watched the sun set into the Pacific. The ridgetop house had a view of the city and the ocean on a clear day. Both wore swimsuits styled for people with better-cared-for physiques.
Arlene was her husband’s age, fifty-four. Unlike him, she did not work out in a gym, though he encouraged her to, and she had not aged elegantly; she was no longer a Khoury trophy. She smoked heavily, which had thickened her complexion, and she drank heavily, which had thickened her body. Because her cosmetician and hairdresser labored over her, her hair remained jet black and was stylishly cut, but her face spoke age and weariness. Her belly bulged out over the top of her bikini bottom.
Steve was forty-five. He had sandy hair and laughing light-blue eyes. He had a ready, winning smile and made friends easily. The sun was not kind to him; he turned tan on his arms and shoulders, red on his chest and belly and hips, tan again on his legs, and freckled all over. At Arlene’s urging, he wore a green bikini bottom as skimpy as hers. It pinched in his paunch and made it spill forward.
Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders Page 2