The club was a grungy, trashily hip spot in a desolate area on Western about fifteen minutes off the strip, the kind of place you probably wouldn’t wander into on your own unless you were a local or you drunkenly fell into a cab that dropped you there because the driver was getting a kickback. I had done my research beforehand and learned it was known as something of a lower-end spot, a little divey, a place where back in 2000, when enforcement was way looser, the girls might do extras if you were a regular and management would look the other way.
Cheetah’s didn’t have the capacity of the better Vegas clubs like Olympic Gardens or the big names like the Crazy Horse. Its claim to fame was Showgirls, the much-maligned Elizabeth Berkley vehicle that was shot there in 1995. Take a look at that scene near the beginning where Nomi asks a table if they’d like a private dance and one guy answers, “Can I suck your tits?” and you’ll get the picture.
It was a P&P (panties and pasties) club, which meant that dancers had to keep their G-strings on because the establishment served alcohol. According to the complex laws governing strip clubs in Clark County, booze and nudity couldn’t legally go together in public unless you were at the Palomino, which was grandfathered in.
The place looked anything but inviting when we pulled up. The exterior was one unremarkable windowless expanse with stone tiling on the facade. You might have mistaken it for a roadside Italian restaurant if it hadn’t been for the ninety-foot sign off to the left proclaiming TOPLESS CLUB. There were bouncers who ushered us in—right past the entrance we paid Diana, who took our cash and photocopied our IDs. I tried not to think too hard about the fact that my presence here was now on someone’s record.
Inside, the scene was sadder and danker than I had anticipated. I understood that things were probably different now than they had been fourteen years before, but somehow I had always pictured Ashley in environments that were at least a little bit aspirational; Cheetah’s was anything but. There was no artifice here; this place was unabashedly low-rent. The cheap carpeting had some spacelike cosmos pattern in black and purple, and girls in Day-Glo bikinis milled about selling shots. Things were dark, as if we were in some basement bunker. There was a game on the televisions behind the bar.
There was a plastic, lit-from-below stage in the middle of the room, but no one really seemed to be there for the dancing. Crumpled dollar bills were all over, and girls spun lazily around the shiny silver poles; jaded guys clutched dollar bills in their fists and occasionally folded them lengthwise, which seemed to be the signal for a girl to go over to him and squat down for him to stick the bill inside her G-string. The girls onstage weren’t making eye contact with anyone, and my primary takeaway was how young and bored they all looked. All the materials and textures were synthetic, whether it was the muted, soft faux velvet upholstery, the neon signs decorating the walls, or the clawlike scrape of fake nails running up a man’s arm. No one was particularly sexy or even all that pretty, and as I pictured Ashley among this crowd I couldn’t help but consider things in a new way: this was a place she could go to hide. I imagined that the fact that it was so divey was probably part of the appeal to her; she had likely easily gotten a job here as a newbie, and she hadn’t had to have the same level of commitment as she would at some of the slicker places. She could try on a different life here part-time, all the while convincing herself it wasn’t real.
I knew that in all this speculating I was making a leap. I hadn’t been mature enough at the time Ashley told me about her sex work to ask her a lot of questions about how it all felt to her, so I knew I was just projecting when I assumed that she had to have been performing with a bit of distance. How could it have been any other way? I also knew it was a bit of wishful thinking on my part. Somehow I needed to keep the Ashley I knew—the earlier Ashley—separate from this world in my mind.
At five foot three, with her compact, curvy body and reckless attitude, I could picture Ashley dominating the scene, at least at first, with her body glitter and the Lucite heels and the feeling of superiority I imagined she felt over the customers. She had told me and Nick she was using Prada as a stage name, and I imagined it wasn’t because she liked the brand but because it sounded like someone she might like to be: icy, European, with a backstory that took adventurous twists and turns. I knew she liked buying new costumes at clubwear stores, and perhaps she tried on different personas depending on the day. She didn’t have a dance background, but I knew she could have picked up how to move in a very watchable way.
As my group settled in to one of the tables and I treated everyone to a round of overpriced prosecco, I realized that Ashley would have been a natural at the business side of things, too: the bait and switch, the push and pull of the authentic versus the image. That she could make the kind of eye contact with a customer that had him imagining their future together or give him a look that made him want to rescue her from it all. She could take the male gaze and monetize it while she could—it was easy to do. She knew just how much to let her real self peek through and when to yank it back. Ashley understood that everyone there was searching for something—including her.
I watched the guy next to me be led away to the VIP area, and I had a passing thought that I wondered if Ashley had ever felt, fourteen years ago standing in this same room: in just a short while, I’ll be out of here.
• • •
Back on the stand, the defense’s questioning of Justin has shifted toward Michael: specifically, what they knew about him and when they knew it.
“Do you recall telling police that Ashley thought Mike was a nice guy?” Lindner asks.
“I don’t recall.”
“Do you know if they slept together?”
Before I can even process that question, Justin answers flatly without seeming taken aback. Clearly he’s considered this before. I haven’t.
“I heard possibly.”
Whoa. I do a double take even though I’m still staring straight ahead. I squeeze my eyes shut and open them again. Yup, still here. No one has moved. My feet are still touching the floor, and my ass is still attached to the seat of this courtroom bench. I did not make up that moment—it really happened. We have just learned that Ashley may have actually had sex with the guy who may later have killed her. This person whom countless witnesses have now testified to being a creep, a weirdo, someone they didn’t want to be around—she was potentially intimate with him, naked with him, vulnerable with him. She honestly didn’t see what the others saw or didn’t care or—this one’s hard for me—was possibly excited by it.
Was he what relationship experts might call a “bad boy”? As in, someone to avoid at all costs if you know what’s good for you but of course he’s got that irresistible allure? I shiver just thinking about it. Did he have some sort of dangerous sex appeal that worked a number on your pheromone receptors? Would I have thought he was hot if I’d met him in the same circumstances? It’s difficult to fathom, especially now, when looking at him only makes me feel dizzy and disgusted.
I would later learn that Gargiulo never seemed to have a problem finding sexual partners. They never do, I can hear Rainn saying. You might have even called him a ladies’ man. He had one girlfriend with whom he moved to LA from Illinois; there was another one after that who was a doctor, and in Justin’s recollection Gargiulo managed to get a prescription from that one to give to Ashley for her carpal tunnel syndrome—and he’d go on to have two children with different partners before he was arrested in 2008. With that track record, he’d probably be the type to reel in some hot wife while in state prison. I don’t think too much about that outrageous side of things, though, as I never encounter anyone from Gargiulo’s side in court; the idea of him as an actual partner and father—or even a person in the world—feels safely tucked away in the surreal conceptual realm.
All of this also opens up the complicated notion that things weren’t quite as simple as the more appealing interpretation that Ashley’s friends were judgmental and catty and she w
as the inclusive, kinder, more trusting one. That they were like, “This guy’s weird, let’s blow him off” and she was all, “Stop being such an asshole, he’s perfectly fine.” Before I heard this sex detail, that was how I wanted to think of her as well. But now. Now? I start to fear that it may have been something different altogether. Maybe her friends were the ones who saw him clearly and she was the one with something reckless, heat seeking, or immature about her. Maybe her risk tolerance had ratcheted way up since getting to LA, and besides, she was twenty-two and invincible and what was the worst that could happen? Did she have a lack of skepticism? Or a lack of scrutiny, a fear instinct, what some might call good judgment? Maybe her time dancing had dulled that part of her, all the transactions with men, security always nearby. Or maybe she never had it to begin with.
I think back to the resigned tone she had when she recounted her night with Oliver. Almost as if it had been easier to sleep with him than not to. Might it have been the same with her murderer?
• • •
It feels as if something is breaking open for me. It feels as though I’m starting to make out the outlines of who Ashley was as her own person, not just someone I saw only in reference to me. I was so used to considering us as a pair, and in fact it felt as though our peers and parents regarded us that way, too; when we were younger, it was that Ashley wasn’t simply good at piano, she was better at piano than I was; Ashley wasn’t just okay at tennis, she was not as good at tennis as I was. When we were older—when we were in New York—Ashley was of course hot on her own, walking down the street with no one around, but put her next to me, and she was “the hot one.” You couldn’t have two of those, regardless of how I might have looked.
On the flip side, that made me, it seemed, “the smart one” when I was next to Ashley, regardless of how smart she was, because clearly you could be only one or the other—at least that’s how the world made it out to be. Of course I guess you could be neither, but it seemed as though put a group or a pair of women or girls together, and someone, somewhere, was ranking you and choosing a winner on those two crucial scales.
I always had a sense that when you were young—when we were both young—somewhere along the way you made the decision, knowingly or not, about which side you’d lead with, looks or brains, perhaps based on a preliminary understanding of which side was already getting more mileage. Things could change in various stages of life, of course, but the stuff that happened to you in puberty and your teen years was what started to force those self-assessments to the surface; later, in young adulthood—first loves, first breakups—they’d gel even further.
What I hadn’t understood until recently was that Ashley and I might have developed those self-assessments in reference to each other. Next to each other as kids, I was smart and Ashley was perhaps less so; while Ashley was pretty and I was perhaps less so. Over time the descriptions took on weight and became internalized, and soon they felt true on their own whether we were next to each other or not.
I could now imagine Ashley as a twenty-year-old in LA—ground zero for hotness and image-based living and everything in between—taking it all in at first, as if she had found her home. Though as her peer I didn’t see it at the time, now I know that of course she had suffered from insecurities, we all did, especially a sensitive person like she was. Of course she was “finding herself,” as we all were—as we all still are—and trying to make her way using what she thought were her best—or most easily accessible—assets. Why not make something of the things she had that everyone else couldn’t stop validating her for? Why not let them make her money in Vegas and take her on dates with movie stars and who knew what else? You’d have to be crazy not to.
But what if things had gone another way long ago? Maybe with a different best friend, Ashley could have been the smart one. I could have been the hot one—how might our lives have turned out differently? I felt as though, for the first time in this courtroom, I was beginning to get a sense of the possibilities.
• • •
Throughout all this, Gargiulo is staring straight ahead, looking intently at the witness on the stand, scrawling furiously on a legal pad, or trying to get his attorney’s attention. What must it be like for Chris and Justin and Jen to have to look him in the eye? I’m thankful for being a few rows behind him and mostly just seeing the back of his head. I am, in spite of myself, curious about how the room must look from the witnesses’ perspective, as terrifying as it must be. Gargiulo, the creep from almost a decade ago, the creep who sat in their living room and their cars and then maybe mutilated their friend: looking out, challenging, sociopathic, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with a hotshot attorney by his side. Beyond him there’s law enforcement and strangers and reporters, and beyond all that, me.
• • •
I’m waiting for the elevator on the ninth floor at afternoon break when Lindner rolls up next to me, his ponytailed son by his side. My heart rate picks up; it’s that about-to-get-caught-at-something feeling again. I’m wearing a navy blue silk dress and tall stacked heels—I make a point of dressing up for court every day—and for a second I worry that my ankle is going to roll and I’ll lose my balance.
I nod at him from the side, but internally I’m hoping we can just keep ignoring each other. It’s the elevator way, after all. And furthermore, is this even allowed? Aren’t we on opposite sides? Aren’t we supposed to be keeping our distance from each other? My eyes stay fixed on the elevator box, willing the numbers to ascend quickly and reach us before anything happens. I can hear his labored breathing and his son adjusting the stack of binders in his hands. Three . . . four . . . there’s a long pause on four. The elevator is not moving. Why isn’t the elevator moving? What is wrong with this elevator?
“I saw you in our courtroom,” Lindner says, his voice coming from my left side. I turn my head to face him, my chest constricting into a twister of adrenaline. He saw me; my delusional cloak of invisibility has fallen off even further. He saw me and wondered about me, just as Christine had, just as Marna Miller had, and likely just as Gargiulo had.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m a childhood friend of Ashley’s.” I don’t hold out my hand, and I don’t say my name. Part of me is expecting him to go silent after this, like “Oops, OK, wrong answer. Never mind.” It’s impossible to imagine that he could have anything else to say.
“You’re here to bear witness,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do.” He speaks with gravitas, his words carefully chosen and his voice husky. Part of me is impressed. If I had been back at work, I might have called him highly quotable. If only he really were just a character in an article I could hold at arm’s length, none of this would be sinking in in the topsy-turvy way that it is. The elevator box is still stuck at four.
I blink. I inhale. I exhale. What’s the most enigmatic thing I can think of to respond with? And what’s really happening here? Should I hate this person? Should I spit at him? How do this man and his son make sense of defending alleged killers? Are they addicted to the theater of it all? The danger? How can they feel good about trading in slut shaming and a woman’s promiscuity as fuel to inflate reasonable doubt? How can they justify this kind of victim blaming? How can they sit next to Gargiulo every day? How can Lindner talk to me right now?
Or is he just a person doing his job? Compartmentalizing his wants and values and natural skepticism and empathy to complete the task at hand? It’s a similar logic to the one I use to rationalize when someone is an asshole to me at the DMV. I’m not sure I can make myself buy it in this instance.
“I want to know what happened,” I say, giving the line that has become something of a mantra, internally as well as publicly. It is becoming truer and truer by the day, yet with each person I deliver it to, the meaning shifts slightly. Even still, it is one of the few things I know with confidence.
“Sometimes that can turn out to be a lot to handle, knowing what happened,” Lindner says. There he goes with those aphorisms again. So
quizzical, so dense. So inscrutable. We stare straight ahead again, settling into the natural pause of the exchange: he spoke; I spoke; he spoke; I spoke; he spoke again—a perfect conversational pentagon. There is nothing left to say. Is there anything left to say?
As if on cue, the elevator doors open.
13
SOME GRAPHIC IMAGES
IF THERE WERE an award for the witness in this hearing who would be most likely to play himself in the movie version of this story, it would go to Mark Durbin. Ashley’s next-door neighbor, sometime lover, and the property manager of her house is so camera-ready, it’s almost as if he’d been created by screenwriters, right down to the way he rubs his brow when he’s nervous and the way his ass looks in those black jeans as he takes the stand.
Even his name is movie star–sounding, and in fact, he has a long list of IMDB credits, as I learn after googling him about thirty seconds after he starts speaking. His bio reveals that he really is one of those quintessential Hollywood types: the slash person. Waiter-slash-actor, makeup-artist-slash-model—you know the type; they have them in New York, too. Unless you’re a casting director or an agent meeting them at an audition, you can always recognize them by the fact that they’re way too good-looking for whatever situation you’ve found them in. They are the most magnetic people at the club door, fixing your shower, refilling your water glass. Sometimes they don’t realize this; most of the time they do. For Durbin, I discover, the slash-actor part hasn’t changed much in the past decade or so, but the whatever part has been filled in with everything from handyman to tour guide to dockworker. Dockworker?
The Hot One Page 16