In Cold Blonde

by James L. Conway

  Fuck! She had a terrible feeling about the missing gun but couldn’t dwell on it now. She pulled out the only weapon she had left, the scalpel.

  CLICK.

  An unmistakable sound.

  The sound of a gun being cocked.

  Behind her.

  She turned. Blake, blood pouring from the wounds on his face, stood in the kitchen, aiming the .25 at her.

  She cocked her arm to throw the knife.

  He fired.

  FORTY-THREE

  “I’m looking for Alice Waterman.”

  “Alice, why Alice is my daughter, but she doesn’t live here,” Betty Waterman said from her doorway.

  The drive down to Santa Ana had been tough on Syd. She’d spent the hour and fifteen minutes obsessing on Ryan and Anne, trying to convince herself not to jump to conclusions. Anne had practically forced him to kiss her. And just because he left the lounge with her, didn’t mean he was going to jump into bed with her.

  Then Syd got pissed at herself for trying to excuse Ryan’s behavior. He was just another asshole with a cock attached and she berated herself for thinking Ryan was somehow different.

  Finally, she refocused on the case and the looming possibility that she was about to meet the Lady in Red’s parents. And that thrilling prospect fueled the last, suddenly-hope-filled miles of her drive. So now, here goes…

  “Alice lives in Hollywood,” Betty said. “I’m sorry, I’m being rude. Come in, please.”

  Syd walked in and was hit by a wave of déjà vu. The layout of the house was almost identical to her Mom’s house in Overland Park. Small living room with lace curtains draped across a narrow picture window, tiny dining room with red and orange paisley plastic tablecloth connected to the undersized kitchen by a swinging door.

  “That hunk of blubber on the couch is my husband, Cliff. Cliff, this is a police Detective, Syd… what was your last name again?”

  “Curtis. Syd Curtis.” Syd stepped forward, shook Cliff’s hand. He actually wasn’t a hunk of blubber; he had a bit of a beer belly, but there was a lot of muscle on his body, and steel in his handshake. He had a friendly face, with rosy cheeks and a full head of gray hair.

  Betty was thin with reading glasses perched on her slender nose, and shoulder length chestnut brown hair. “She wants to talk to us about Alice.”

  A frown creased Cliff’s face as he indicated for Syd to sit in one of the chairs. Cliff and Betty sat across from her on the couch. “What’d she do now?”

  “Well, to be honest I’m not sure she’s done anything. I’d like to show you a picture.” Syd had brought her backpack into the house; she fished out the surveillance picture of the Lady in Red. She handed it to Betty. “Do you recognize this woman?”

  Betty and Cliff looked at the photo. “It’s not a very good picture but that’s her, all right,” Cliff said, disapprovingly. “The new improved version, she calls it. Me, I think she looks like a slut.”

  “Cliff!” Betty said.

  “You don’t like it either, admit it.”

  “No, but I’m not going to call my daughter a slut.”

  Cliff looked like he was about to say something else, then his eyes cut to Syd, and he thought better of it and shut up.

  “Have you seen the news today?” Syd asked.

  “I never watch the news. It’s all way too depressing for my taste. Cliff watches the news sometimes, though.”

  A light bulb seemed to go off in Cliff’s head. He took the picture from his wife, looked at it. “Oh, no… Is this that surveillance photo from TV? The Lady in Red, that’s what they called her, she’s killing people, right?”

  “That’s right,” Syd said

  “Dear God,” Betty said. “But I thought she was finally getting better. That the new therapy was working.”

  Hallelujah, thought Syd. Now for some answers. “I know something happened to Alice in high school, something involving Colin Wood and Adam Devlin, both killed by the Lady in Red. And I know there was some kind of financial settlement handled by Zachary Stone. He also killed by the Lady in Red. What I don’t know is what happened. Could you tell me, please?”

  Cliff’s face hardened at the memory and he leaned back on the couch, his body language shutting down. Tears ran down Betty’s face now and she turned away from Syd.

  “I’m not here to judge,” Syd said. “For Alice to act the way she has after so many years is a testament to the horrible things that must have been done to her. I’m just trying to understand why she is doing what she is doing.”

  Betty reached across her husband for the box of tissues. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose. Then her eyes met Syd’s. “Do you have children, Detective?”

  “No.”

  “There is no greater joy, or burden.”

  “We got little of the former and a more than our share of the latter,” Cliff said.

  Betty ignored her husband with practiced ease. “Alice was such a delightful child. We didn’t have much money when she was growing up, but we spent a lot of family time together. Cliff always wanted a son so Alice was raised a tomboy; she loved sports and they would go hunting together every fall. And she was smart. She got into Camden Hall on a full scholarship. We’d talk about how one day she’d go to an Ivy League college and make a name for herself in corporate America. She promised us a ride on her first corporate jet.

  “But things started to change when she turned fourteen. Boys suddenly became very important to her and Alice became very critical of her own looks. To be honest, Alice took a while to get pretty. She was a bit heavy, a little awkward and just didn’t seem to fit in.”

  “This country’s obsession with looks and sex is disgusting,” Cliff said. “You want to blame someone for all this, blame Britney Spears, blame Paris Hilton, blame Lindsey Lohan. Blame all those bubble-headed, big-boobed, empty-headed teen queens on the cover of all the magazines and flaunting their skinny asses on TV. How’s a normal girl supposed to compete with that?”

  “Alice and I are about the same age,” Syd said. “And I know the feeling. I grew up in suburb of Kansas City but was nuked by the culture bomb, too.”

  “Alice used sex,” Betty said. “That’s how she competed. I didn’t know at the time, but later she told me.”

  “Do we have to talk about this?” Cliff asked, clearly uncomfortable with the conversation.

  “The more I know, the better chance I have of helping her,” Syd said.

  “You mean catching her, don’t you,” Cliff said. “You want to catch Alice and put her in jail.”

  “She’s killed three men already; I’m trying to stop her before she kills anyone else.”

  “Even if they deserved to die?” Cliff asked.

  I’ve been asking myself that same question, Syd thought. But gave the answer she was trained to give. “That’s for a jury to decide. She’s also in danger. She could be hurt or killed. The sooner I catch her, the safer she’ll be.”

  Cliff didn’t like it but he settled back in the couch, a scowl on his face.

  Betty Waterman took that as permission to speak, and she did. “When Alice was fourteen, she discovered that giving boys sexual favors made her more popular. And if a boy paid attention to her, she flew to cloud nine, but the slightest inattention would send her spiraling down. In hindsight it was so clearly manic-depressive behavior, but kids act out, right? We now know she was sick, bi-polar the doctors say, but who imagines their little girl is mentally ill.”

  “I did,” Cliff Waterman said. “I used to say there had to be something wrong with her, that she was just like your loony sister, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Cliff, please.” Betty Waterman turned back to Syd. “What Alice didn’t realize, of course, was that her sexual behavior gave her a certain reputation and boys started taking advantage of her. They would be nice to her, she would reward them with sex, but once the boys got what they wanted, they’d dump her.”

  “And she’d go into a depression.”

 
Betty nodded. “Then her senior year of high school she got this huge crush on a boy, Adam Devlin. They’d shared a bus ride on a school trip and he’d been very nice to her. He was very popular and she convinced herself that he’d ask her out and she’d suddenly become one of the popular kids. And then one day he asked her to a party. It was a dream come true for Alice. She went there with such high expectations, but there was no party. Just Adam and a couple of his friends playing pool and drinking.”

  “She was the party,” Cliff said.

  “That’s right,” Betty said. “They gave her a drink; it must’ve been spiked with something because Alice passed out. When she woke up hours later, she was on the pool table, naked. She had pain in her vagina and… well everywhere. And Alice realized they had drugged and had sex with her.”

  “They drugged and raped her,” Syd said, anger burning inside her. “Make no mistake Mrs. Waterman, sex without consent is rape.”

  “But as bad as that was,” Betty said, “for Alice, it wasn’t the worse part. A couple of days later dirty pictures of Alice were emailed to all the kids at school. You couldn’t see the boys’ faces, but you could clearly see Alice, naked and having sex.”

  “And that’s when the lawyer showed up,” Cliff said. “They were suddenly worried Alice would go to the police and file charges so the lawyer basically threatened us. Take his money or he would ruin Alice’s reputation. So we took the money.”

  “Our single biggest mistake.”

  “It was not a mistake,” Cliff snapped and Syd realized she had stumbled into a well-worn argument. “If we hadn’t taken the money, how would we have paid for all those doctors and that damned institute?”

  “If we hadn’t taken the money she may not have needed the doctors and institute.” Betty turned back to Syd. “Three days after we agreed to the settlement Alice tried to kill herself.”

  “And you think humiliating herself in court, having the world find out what a slut she was would have been better?”

  “I didn’t then, I do now.” Betty’s eyes found Syd. “Alice hates us; she thinks we sold her out.” Betty turned back to Cliff and added pointedly, “And we did.”

  Cliff shook his head, defensive, angry and frustrated. “Well, we can’t go back in time, so get used to it.”

  The friendly couple act was just a veneer, there was such obvious rancor between the two that Syd wondered how their marriage had survived. “Tell me about the suicide attempt. What did she do?”

  “I had some sleeping pills, I’d have trouble sometimes, and she took them, all of them, a brand new prescription of twenty pills.”

  “If she hadn’t knocked over a lamp when she passed out, we wouldn’t have found her until morning,” Cliff said. “But when I heard the crash I went upstairs to check on her.”

  “We put her into therapy immediately, that’s when we found out she was bi-polar. They put her on drugs, lithium to stabilize her moods and an antipsychotic, but whenever she was feeling good, she’d stop taking her meds, then she’d get depressed and try to kill herself again. It was more than we could handle, frankly, so the doctors recommended putting her in a full-time facility. The Riverview Institute in Riverside. You know it?”

  “No.”

  “A wonderful hospital.”

  “Wonderfully expensive,” Cliff said. “And, if it was so wonderful, why’d they have to keep her for so many years?”

  “She could get violent,” Betty said to Syd. “When she got depressed she’d act out and sometimes attack the attendants or other patients. And every time she’d come home the old resentments about our taking the settlement would come up and well…” Betty trailed off, suddenly holding something back.

  “Go ahead, tell her,” Cliff said. “If Alice is killing people, a little arson won’t matter.”

  “Three years ago she came home. Everything was fine at first, Cliff even got Alice a job at one of the Knott’s Berry Farm gift shops.”

  “I maintain all the rides,” Cliff said.

  “I even began to daydream about Alice going back to school. She wasn’t too old for college, so maybe some of those childhood dreams could still come true. Then Cliff did something really stupid.”

  “Damn it, Betty, don’t say it like that. The car broke down, what was I supposed to do?”

  “He bought a new car, a luxury car, a Lexus with all the trimmings.”

  “I was smart with that settlement money,” Cliff said defensively. “I didn’t blow it; I invested, carefully. Good thing, too, because Alice’s medical expenses are ridiculously expensive. Anyway, my old Dodge was shot; I had hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, so why not buy a nice car?”

  “Because it was rubbing Alice’s face in your betrayal.”

  “She went with me to pick it out,” he said practically throwing the words at Betty. Then, to Syd, “You have to understand that Alice’s moods swing wildly. When we went to buy the car, she really enjoyed it. Hell, she even picked out the color, Amber Pearl.”

  “But at breakfast the next morning she had that look in her eyes — like someone else was inside her head — and she said we paid for the car with blood money.”

  “I’m sure she was off meds,” Cliff said. “Though she swore she took them. She caused trouble at work too, yelling at customers and she got into an argument with her boss.”

  “She seemed calmer at dinner,” Betty said. “But looking back I realized she was too calm. She had a plan.”

  “That night she doused the inside of the Lexus with lighter fluid and set it on fire,” Cliff said. The car was a complete loss, we barely saved the garage and she almost burnt down the house.”

  “The police were going to prosecute her for arson,” Betty said. “But when we explained she was bi-polar and promised to send Alice back to the Institute for treatment, they dropped the charges.” Betty reached out and took her husband’s hand. A gesture that shocked Syd considering the way these two sniped at each other. “When we brought Alice back to Riverview, she told us she never wanted to see us again. That we were dead to her.”

  “The doctors told us it might be a good idea for us to not see her for a while,” Cliff said. “Being around us was a catalyst for her resentment and rage and we’d become a psychotic trigger.”

  “We’ve only seen her a of couple of times in the last three years.” Betty said. “She’ll call every so often and we get reports from the Institute. And the last report was very encouraging. Over the years they’ve tried a wide range of drugs and therapies, but just a few months ago they seem to finally find one that stabilized her.”

  “What was it?” Syd asked.

  “The craziest idea I ever heard,” Cliff said.

  “It was an experiment. The doctors ran it by us first; I had my doubts, but they said it was very successful in a European trial, and we’d tried everything else so…”

  “They lied to her,” Cliff said. “Told her she had cancer and only a few months to live.”

  “The idea was to focus her,” Betty said. “Give her a reason to apply herself. The risk, of course, was that she’d just give up, but Dr. Samuels ‘sensed a stubborn spirit inside Alice,’ his words; and felt that with a deadline on her life she might finally focus. If she did, they’d eventually tell her she beat the cancer, another reinforcer he called it, and she might finally be on her way to a productive life. And it seemed to be working. Dr. Samuels said it was almost like a light went off. She checked out of the Institute two months ago, she rented an apartment and got a job at the Best Buy in Hollywood. And she let us buy her a car so she could get around. She seemed to be doing so well the doctors said we could visit. So we drove up to Hollywood about a month ago and surprised her.”

  “Crappy apartment,” Cliff said. “I wanted to get her something nicer but she said she was happy.”

  “The cancer-scare therapy seemed to really be working so we hoped that maybe this time…” Betty trailed off at the obvious reality of the situation. Alice’s focus wasn�
��t on getting a job and straightening out her life, it was on seeking revenge.

  “What kind of car did you get her?”

  “A white Prius,” Betty said. “She really cares about the environment.”

  The irony of someone who cuts off men’s cocks caring about global warming wasn’t lost on Syd. “You know the license number?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Do you know Alice’s address and phone number?”

  Betty frowned. “I don’t remember her apartment address, do you, honey?”

  He thought about it. “No, I think I threw it away when we got home. It was near a famous corner, though. Just a couple blocks south of Hollywood and Vine. It was on Vine, though, I remember that.”

  “How about a phone number?”

  Betty looked embarrassed. “She wouldn’t give it to us. She said she would call us if she wanted to talk to us.”

  Syd knew they could canvas the buildings south of Hollywood Boulevard but that would take time. Syd’s best bet would be to figure out who Alice’s next victim might be and get to him as soon as possible.

  Syd asked, “How many boys raped Alice that night?”

  “Three,” Betty said. “Adam, of course. Colin Wood, it was his father who offered the settlement and the third boy was…” Betty shook her head, unable to remember. “Cliff, do you remember?”

  He thought about it and then shook his head. “No, sorry, I don’t.”

  Syd reached inside her backpack and pulled out the list of names she’d culled from Wood and Devlin’s phone books. She handed it to Betty. “Do any of these names seem familiar?”

  Betty went over the list. “A number of them, but I don’t know which of them might have been the third boy.”

  She passed the list to Cliff who glanced at it, then shook his head. “Sorry.” He started to hand it back to Syd then stopped. “Wait a minute,” he pulled the list back. “This name here, Blake Hunter, I remember the name Blake. I had an Uncle Blake, and I remember thinking about that when we heard the name eleven years ago.”