The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  “At the time it was the best blow job I had ever gotten,” he says. Oh god. No. No. No. Please. “And then in the morning, her hair was all over the place, and that was endearing.” I want him to stop. I hope he stops. There couldn’t be more.

  We’re both looking out at the falls, and I don’t know how to react. What would an appropriate follow-up question be to this? There isn’t one. And suddenly I know this is over. I can’t make myself ask any more, feel any more, go through any more with this man. He has nothing else for me, and I have nothing else for him. I had hoped to get a glimpse of a private Ashley I had never seen, but instead what I got was another void—a somewhat disrespectful one at that. Oliver wasn’t the person here who knew Ashley intimately; that was me. The depth of the memories I had of her were mine alone—to him she was just a barely recollected one-night stand.

  Oliver wouldn’t be leading me anywhere; I would have to lead myself.

  I look at him now, all of him. Our eyes connect, and I notice how blue his are. I notice his receding hairline and the sideburns I used to love. I think of how we first met ten years ago on a warm summer night this month, when we were young and New York was brand-new. Before 9/11, before Nick would be the first to break my heart, before Ashley would take her last breath. I am sad.

  Oliver turns and begins walking off the deck and I follow him, cursing as I lose my footing a bit on the first few steps up the next hill. “Walk in front of me,” he calls out, saying he’ll catch me if I slip again. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  8

  GOOD LUCK TO YOU

  THE NEXT STOP was Los Angeles. It had to be. It was crazy it had taken me this long to get here. It’s September 30, 2009. The GPS in my compact from Hertz leads me down the 405 while the radio blares aggressive rap. I’ve never rented a car before or driven in this city, so just making it to the Airport Courthouse on time feels like a minor triumph. The city is charged with a sunny energy that the East Coast couldn’t dream of having—it’s magic hour all day long.

  After Oliver and Seattle, I had taken a few months to process everything. Seeing him had left me bitter and annoyed, as much at myself as at him. It wasn’t supposed to go like that! I was supposed to be on a truth-seeking journey and in control, what was going on? I thought about giving up entirely.

  But then I remembered how I’d felt on that cold fall day in 2008 when my LexisNexis search had turned up reports that a suspect had been charged with Ashley’s murder. I had been scared and excited and felt as though I were on the cusp of some path forward toward the next stage of my life. My childhood was dead, and there was an alleged serial killer attached to the whole mess. I couldn’t just leave it at that; I had to find a new story, a bigger story, both for me and for her. Fuck Oliver. He wouldn’t be the end. He wasn’t even the beginning.

  Another ex–crime reporter friend at work helped me with the next steps. Although I had worked in media for some time—I currently edited our magazine’s online travel, restaurant, and events sections—nothing in my background had prepared me for this. I should call the court system’s Media Relations Division, my friend said, and ask about the next date on the docket. She had even told me what to say: “Hi, I’d like to find out the next court date for case number SA068002, Michael Gargiulo.” That was it. A different friend of a friend inside the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office had given me the defendant’s name and case number, so I had that much to go on. I didn’t know if real reporters or investigators or whoever else actually called the Media Relations Division actually spoke that way, if using the case number that way would out me as a rube, but I went with it. I said it just like that, holding my breath all the while. “Oh, the serial guy?” asked the operator on the other end of the line, gum chewing implied but not audible. “Hang on a minute.” I hung on, and when she returned I wrote down what she said on the back of my reporter’s notebook at my desk at work. There would be a pretrial hearing in a few months’ time, at the Airport Courthouse on La Cienega. That was all there was to say. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I knew I would be there.

  My DA friend explained a little bit more. California is a death penalty state, and the prosecution was asking for Gargiulo to receive the death penalty. Death penalty trials are different from typical murder trials in a few key ways; cases take longer to actually get to trial—often more than a year—and the trial itself has two parts instead of one: the guilt phase and the penalty phase. Prosecutors and defense attorneys prepare for both parts of the trial at once, and there are often twice as many attorneys for both sides during proceedings. Before the case could go to trial, the state would have to prove probable cause, which would happen in something called a preliminary hearing, which is sort of a minitrial without a jury. And before all that, there would be numerous, shorter pre-preliminary court appearances for both sides to discuss the discovery process and other issues. I was about to attend one of those.

  • • •

  I had been to LA only once before, in my early twenties, to the funeral of my then boyfriend’s grandmother. We’d flown in late and stayed in some shitty motel near the airport and cabbed it straight to the service in Santa Monica and back. I can still picture the lit-up colors of the Ferris wheel on the water as we passed, the families and couples licking ice cream on the boardwalk, my black funeral dress creased and sweaty. This time I’m here on my own, with a rented car and a spot on my friend’s couch and a suitcase full of versatile warm-weather outfits.

  • • •

  The building looks nothing like what I was expecting. Instead of marble, columns, and Latin inscriptions like I’m used to from New York, this place is early-nineties office-park style with ten floors of blue reflective glass and a clear elevator you can see going up and down from outside. There are palm trees and parking meters that tell me I’ll need approximately twenty-eight quarters to make it through the day.

  Inside Department 100 on the eighth floor, the scene feels workaday and a little hectic. Harried DAs, detectives, and witnesses shuffle in and out, everyone lost in his or her own agenda. There are more than a dozen cases on the docket that day, and there doesn’t seem to be an order to what’s going when. The judge is a sassy sort, given to proclamations that vacillate between bored annoyance and parental sincerity. “This is your chance to go out and make a better life,” she tells one female defendant, released after being an accomplice to a drug crime. To another, sentenced to ten years for a repeat offense of robbery and violent assault, she gives barely a glance.

  I sit in the back row and try to be inconspicuous. Courts make me anxious as a rule—regardless of why I’m there. I always feel just a step away from being fined, ticketed, or arrested for some infraction I wasn’t aware I was committing. Hours go by, and I wonder if I might have missed everything when I went down to feed the meter. A bizarre hearing is going on, which I glean has something to do with identity theft. “The defendant was going through a divorce,” says her lawyer, “and met a woman at Ruby’s who told her she knew an easy way to make some extra money.” I zone out. An overweight man in a wheelchair is pushed in by his younger, ponytailed aide. Both of them converse with the clerk, and the older man appears flustered. There’s a pause, and they exchange glances with the judge.

  “All right, let’s just bring Gargiulo in,” the judge says tiredly. Everything suddenly snaps into focus. My heart starts beating fast enough to make me feel off balance, and then the bailiff opens a side door and in walks a skinny, hunched guy wearing an orange state prison jumpsuit. He looks dried out, vulnerable, nothing like the menacing face I had held in my mind or the snide image from his mug shot. He is utterly unremarkable, just another white male anybody I might have passed on the street and forgotten a moment later.

  Is this the man who stabbed Ashley forty-seven times? Is this the person who crushed her skull and left her to bleed to death on that cream-colored carpet? I try to picture what he might have looked like gripping the knife, standing o
ver her, but I can see his hands only the way they are now: cuffed and impotent.

  The wheelchair-bound man turns out to be Gargiulo’s defense attorney, Charles Lindner, and the ponytailed man, his paralegal and son. Later, I would google him and learn that, according to his website, he had been part of O. J. Simpson’s Dream Team and had cowritten the defense closing arguments for the case. Legal jargon is batted back and forth between the judge and the DA. I strain to hear and comprehend, but all I can pick up is dates and numbers. I look around to see if anyone else is paying attention, but they’re not. In just under two minutes, the scene I traveled three thousand miles to witness is over.

  The judge issues a continuance, and Gargiulo’s next appearance is set for a few weeks later. Her parting words for him are brief but echoing, and she hasn’t said them to anyone else all day. I realize in that moment that they’re the same ones I’ve been wanting to hear myself: “Good luck to you.”

  PART

  THREE

  9

  EVERYTHING IN RETROSPECT

  LOTS OF FUZZY math gets thrown around when you talk about the dead. Words are spoken slowly. Sentences come out in the second and third person conditional; phrases whip up politeness and magical thinking into an airy soufflé that falls flat if you look at it the wrong way.

  “It would have meant a lot to her to know you were here,” Detective Thomas Small told me on the first day of Gargiulo’s preliminary hearing in June 2010. This was the first time I was meeting the detective, but I recognized his name immediately from Ashley’s coroner’s report. I didn’t tell him that.

  It had been about nine months since the first court appearance I attended, dizzy and biting my cuticles, not making eye contact with anyone.

  Now I was back. Looking up. Speaking, albeit slowly. Trying to meet curious gazes squarely in hopes that a sense of confidence would follow. I was introducing myself as Ashley’s friend, but what did that really mean at this point? I was still coming to terms with the answer and how I fit into the criminal proceeding that was soon to unfold.

  I was about to meet a whole cast of Hollywood characters and learn details about the last year of Ashley’s life that before I could only have imagined, but I didn’t know any of that yet. I didn’t yet know that in a few days I’d find myself outside this very building, squinting up at the afternoon sun and looking desperately for a sign about what to do next. I didn’t yet know that I’d hear things about Ashley so surprising, so unbelievable, that I’d wonder whether I might have been hallucinating.

  All I knew at that moment was that I had made it this far and I would continue putting one foot in front of the other until I came up with a better idea.

  • • •

  “It would have meant a lot to her to know you were here.” I considered that. It had been ten years since I’d last seen Ashley (nine of which she’d been dead for), and I was now at the preliminary hearing for the man who’d likely killed her, who was also accused of killing another woman and attempting to kill a third.

  It was a clear, sunny Los Angeles day outside, but what did it matter? Ashley was dead, and therefore she couldn’t think or feel anything. And the reason I was here was because she was dead. If she wasn’t dead, I doubt I would have been in this city at all—I certainly wouldn’t have been in this courthouse. Maybe Ashley and I would be having margaritas right now down the street—downtown LA is a happening neighborhood now, can you believe it?—or maybe we’d be getting pedicures or smoothies or whatever else you do with your old friend of twenty years. I wouldn’t know—Ashley was the last one I had.

  I knew it was just a thing you say and that the detective had meant something kind, but I interpreted it as more like a logic puzzle. The sentence made me feel caught in my throat and full of adrenaline, even though it inherently made no sense. What was the best way to hold two mutually exclusive ideas in my head at the same time? Ashley was dead . . . but it still meant a lot to her; I was in a courthouse . . . because she wasn’t. After you die, it seemed to assume, what you want is for people to care—to ask questions about your passing, to rant and rave against the unfairness of it all. Not to let go easily. That’s what would make you happy. Right?

  If I had been murdered, would it make me happy to know that my childhood best friend had taken vacation days from her job—because we were adults now, we had jobs—to fly across the country and rent a car and put on a tasteful dress and closed-toe heels and show up in a courthouse almost a decade after I’d died to find out what had happened? Or would I just be like, “Aw, that’s cool of you, for sure, but maybe just stick with what you’re doing; make chicken for dinner, fuck your boyfriend, plan a summer trip. Have an extra glass of wine for me, and watch the sun set. This all sucks and you can’t change that, so you may as well carry on, my friend. Remember the good times we had, forget about the crappy ones. They were all so long ago, anyway. And hey, actually, it’s great up here—you’ll love it! Michael Jackson just arrived not too long ago. Oh, and the food is amazing.”

  Maybe part of me worried that Ashley would be angry, pissed off, raging. That death and time had hardened her and she had decided the people she left behind deserved the pain they felt because it wasn’t nearly as bad as what she’d gotten. Maybe she’d think I was a fraud. “Oh, hi there: go fuck yourself. Am I supposed to believe you’ve been crying about me all these years? Do you light a candle on my birthday? Do you speak to me at night? Whatever. Where were you when you could have done something? You think this is all exciting now, worthy of your time, but where were you when I was getting stabbed forty-seven times? Or all the times you didn’t come out to visit me in California? Millennium New Year’s? We went to Melissa Joan Hart’s house, and she was wearing some crazy Marie Antoinette getup! Where were you when I turned twenty-two? Like what you’re doing here matters at all. Seriously. Have a great time listening to all this bullshit—it won’t change anything.”

  It was hard to imagine Ashley coming from a place of bitterness, though—she had never been like that in life. Bitchy sometimes, yes. Cynical, sure. But not bitter. Though who knows what being murdered does to a person? Maybe it could flip you into another dimension altogether, make you totally unrecognizable by the people who once knew you. Maybe your clothes wouldn’t even fit the same way. Maybe your eyes changed color, maybe you could see into people’s souls. Maybe you were the one who decided who would live and die now, and how you made the call would change based on what you ate for lunch. The weather’s always perfect in this infinite hypothetical thought loop, though; you could stay here for weeks.

  • • •

  But before all of that, I was twenty minutes early. Everything had changed since the last continuance I had attended—the judge, the prosecutor, all of it—we were in the big leagues now. The new courthouse downtown was huge and dark, with paparazzi at the ready slinking along the perimeter. We were in the same building where the O. J. Simpson murder trial had taken place. I had been sixteen during that trial, a senior at Exeter, with a sexy older girl from Bogotá named Silvia as a roommate. I was so sure he’d be found guilty that I had bet my friends that if O.J. was acquitted, I’d ask out the boy I had a crush on, Tom, a curly-haired hippie who played the banjo and had done a semester away on a farm in Vermont. He’d said yes, then later stood me up.

  Phil Spector was tried for the murder of Lana Clarkson on this same floor. It was the maximum-security floor; I had to go through another round of metal detectors after getting off the elevator even though I had already cleared the ones downstairs. Lindsay Lohan would show up at this building multiple times, and across the street was where the Charles Manson murders were tried in 1970. If you were famous and did something wrong in LA, you’d find your way here eventually, it seemed.

  • • •

  After seeing Gargiulo in court I had spent a few months letting it all sink in. How far would I take this? I still didn’t know. It felt as though the stakes would only be mounting as time went on. What would be
next: interviewing Gargiulo? Seeing the trial – whenever that would be—through to the end? I couldn’t imagine handling all of that, but I put those thoughts aside and focused on as many baby steps as I could think of. I focused on the big questions that had kept me in the room: How did Ashley and I start out so similar and end up in such different places? The motto of my fancy boarding school that I had nearly flunked out of—Finis origine pendet, the end depends on the beginning—was that really all there was to it? If that were really true, why was she dead while I was still here?

  • • •

  Back in New Jersey earlier in the year, I had reconnected with some of Ashley’s and my grade school friends, and a few of them who were still local had even met me for drinks. A guy who had become a video game designer said the clearest thing he could remember about either of us was that we were always together.

  “Ashley was cool without trying,” said Sarah as we sat in her family’s dining room while her son played in the next room. There were references to outfits I had forgotten—that jean jacket she always wore!—or a flash of her personality that would make the loss feel fresh all over again. There were a few tears and a few laughs, though nothing happened that really broke anything wide open. Mostly I came away feeling lucky that the years had gone for us in the way that they had. As adrift as we might have felt from time to time, we were alive.

  I visited our childhood piano teacher, the woman who had taught us duets side by side for years. She was semiretired now, but it turned out she had saved a copy of every program from every student recital she had ever hosted, stretching way back into the eighties. She pulled a few of them from when Ashley and I had played together and we looked at them silently on her couch. “Did Ashley keep up with the piano, do you know?” she asked, her cat leaping across my lap.