The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  Instead I say nothing. I am afraid of not appearing as I should, hewing to the expectations she has of me, a friend of the victim, a victim myself. I am afraid of looking demented, of sullying her trust in me and her belief that I am a good-hearted person who showed up in this place to honor her long-lost friend. I should be taking care of my treasured memories, holding them tight in a locked vault in my mind. I should be protecting them from anyone or anything that could encroach upon them.

  I know in that moment that tomorrow I will stay in the room.

  “Thank you,” I mumble weakly. And then we make a bit of small talk about parking and traffic and some such typical meaningless LA filler, and suddenly I am back in my rental car in the underground parking structure not quite remembering the steps I took to get there. It is hot, and I reach for a half-drunk bottle of water I tossed on the floor in the morning and take a sip. The liquid is the temperature of soup that’s been sitting out.

  After a few more minutes I put the key in the ignition, and it’s only then that I notice that my hands are shaking.

  • • •

  That night I dream of her, for the first time in a long time.

  We were at the trial—her trial—both of us somehow. She was my age, and we were watching everything together. Lindner was there, the mood was light.

  “What did you do on the break?” I could hear Lindner say to Gargiulo in the front. We’re waiting for the proceedings to start, and the judge hasn’t entered yet. “Let me guess—you read feminist polemics,” he added, and then they both guffawed.

  Ashley was wearing elegant teal leather low heels with pointy-toes—they could have been Manolos. She had on a tailored gray suit with a smart single-breasted blazer and a pencil skirt. Her hair was her natural brown, cut short in a bob. She looked businesslike with a fashion edge, like a lawyer but “Julianna Margulies from the The Good Wife”–style.

  She sat in the front, and I was a few rows back. I went to her. We had not seen each other in many, many years. “What are you doing here?” she asked, laughing, happy. Isn’t all of this hilarious? Isn’t it surreal and just the funniest thing you could ever imagine? It’s as if the both of us have inhaled nitrous oxide. I burst into tears, crying, crying, crying hard, like the time I had surgery on my wrist and the anesthesia wouldn’t leave my body for a whole day. “I’ve always been here,” I said, my nose running all over the place. “It was you who wasn’t here.”

  I wake up with a start—a jolt, an electric stab in the middle of my ribs. I am on an air mattress in a dark room in West Hollywood. Marisa and Rainn’s cat has slipped through the door and is perched on Rainn’s desk in front of me, her eyes glowing an uncaring topaz. My apartment is empty in Brooklyn. My parents are asleep in New Jersey. I am scared. I am safe. I am scared. I am safe.

  • • •

  My flight back to New York is at nine in the evening. I have packed my bags and am set to drive my rental car directly to LAX after court. I am tired. The rest of my sleep was fitful after waking up in the middle of the night, and the morning time-change bounce I typically get in my first few days of flying west has faded. Tomorrow will be New York, the subway, my office. Tomorrow all of this will be behind me.

  When I reach my regular spot in Department 108—last row to the left—I stretch my legs out like a courtroom veteran. I feel calm knowing I am on my way home. Christine is already here, same with the woman from Dateline and another from CBS. Lindner and his son make their way in, and behind them is Miller. She nods at me as she walks up to the front, stacks of folders in her hand.

  I am a known entity in this courtroom now, and that fact is not lost on me as I prepare for the pictures. Today I am the only one in this room besides the defendant who knew Ashley, and almost everyone in this room knows this. I know that people will be looking at me when the photos come up, that my reaction will be observed. So will his. That it will amplify the pressure, that people will be able to see my feelings. DA Miller will see me as well, and she won’t understand why I am still sitting there watching. I’m not sure I will, either.

  I have no frame of reference for what might happen to my body when I see them, but I am trying to prepare for multiple scenarios. Noises might come out of me, I have considered. Noises I have never produced before and rarely heard. They might be loud, they might be alarming to others. For this I am sorry in advance. Shooting pains in my head might overtake me, a spontaneous onset of deep unrest within my skull. I might also begin to feel light-headed and slump down in my seat. Maybe I won’t be able to take all of this in even if I think I want to. Vomiting is another reaction I am wondering about, but it seems the least likely.

  I have decided that at the moment the pictures start—the house, then the hallway—I’m going to look at the ground. If DA Miller is motioning for me to leave the room at that point, I won’t be able to see her. She will have to continue, and then I will raise my head. No one else will know that I was warned about that moment; the only person who will be confused is Miller, but I’m sure it will be minor. She has much bigger things to contend with.

  When the judge arrives, he announces that we will be adjourning before lunch today and that testimony will be out of order because of a certain forensic investigator’s vacation schedule. Instead of starting with the pictures, we will be starting with testimony relating to 2005 murder victim Maria Bruno. My anxiety starts to pick up. I have no idea how much evidence is about to be discussed regarding Bruno, but I do know we now have only four hours in the day in which to get through it so we can resume the original timeline and Miller can present the crime scene photos. Part of me feels cold thinking in those terms. This other victim—a thirty-four-year-old, stunningly beautiful mother of four from El Salvador who lived in the LA suburb El Monte—deserves as much time and attention as Ashley does for the facts of her story to be told. Only her friends aren’t here, no one is, and I have spent the past twelve hours in knots preparing for something else to happen. I haven’t bargained for Maria.

  Over the past few days, during testimony and later in my research, I have picked up bits and pieces about Maria and gotten a little more background on the other charges against Gargiulo and the gruesome crime he was ultimately arrested for. Christine also emailed me when I got back to New York with snapshots from the testimony I had missed. From the lengthy story she published about the case a few months later in LA Weekly, I learned that in late 2003, Gargiulo had begun a relationship with Grace Kwak, a woman he had met on Match.com and with whom he would later have a child. By 2005, they were living together in an apartment complex in El Monte. Kwak moved out during Thanksgiving weekend, saying that the relationship had become abusive. Maria Bruno moved into the building around the same time, and just ten days later, she was founded murdered at home, her body mutilated. Police ran the records of neighbors in the building, but no one had a background of major criminal activity.

  I learned that by 2008, Gargiulo was married and living in Santa Monica, across an alley from a woman named Michelle Murphy, who often worked out in the space between the buildings. On April 28, 2008, he allegedly climbed through the window of Murphy’s bedroom and began stabbing her as she slept. It was dark, and he covered his head with the hood of his sweatshirt and used his dominant left hand to wield the knife while he held her down with his right. Fortunately for her, she had been sleeping naked, and the wounds oozing blood against her bare skin made her slippery as she raged and roiled fighting him. He had trouble restraining her, and he accidentally caught his hand on the blade as he hammered down blows upon her. Then, panicking, he tried to switch the knife into his other hand. In that moment, she was able to kick him off her. He murmured a slurred “I’m sorry” and then darted back out the window.

  The victim was unable to ID him, but she didn’t need to—detectives found a trail of his blood leading straight from her building to Gargiulo’s. He was arrested in June and charged with Murphy’s attempted murder, and later that year charges for Maria Bru
no’s and Ashley’s murders with burglary were added. He was also a person of interest in the unsolved murder of his high school classmate Tricia Pacaccio in Glenview, Illinois, in 1993, but that wasn’t being handled by California authorities.

  I take a deep breath. I slip out for a bathroom break, and I take an extra long time washing my hands. When I return to the room, the same witness is on the stand, discussing what to me sounds like exactly the same thing as he was before I left the room. It’s all very technical. I’ve stopped taking as many notes. More expert witnesses are testifying about intricate measurements of blood spatters and footprints around this other crime scene. There are diagrams and references to angles and circumferences. They are mostly in black and white.

  I find myself reading the news on my laptop, occasionally G-chatting with a friend from New York who’s bored at his office. Time ticks by slowly, and then all at once we are into the last hour before lunch. It is nearing break time, and part of me is holding out hope that this witness will abruptly end her testimony and then we’ll get to the photos under the wire, and part of me is making peace with the fact that I won’t be seeing them, at least not today. I am slowly letting go of the personal reckoning I did to be ready for this moment: my plan of obfuscation toward Miller, the smooth rock I had put into my bag to hold on to in case I felt faint. I would release those things into the “unlived experiences” file. Perhaps I would use them another time; perhaps I wouldn’t.

  The judge calls a recess until the following morning. I knew it would be coming, but I still feel a jolt of panic. Suddenly I don’t want to accept things going down this way. I was ready to make my own decision, and now it’s being made for me. It doesn’t feel fair. Should I change my flight? Should I tell work something came up? Should I stay here for as long as this takes? How long will that be? How much would that cost? Would a real friend change her flight to be there? Would Ashley want me to?

  I had already told the DA I was leaving today, so if I did show up here again tomorrow, it might look even weirder. Either way, I have a little bit more time to decide. I go up to the front of the room anyway and say good-bye to Miller. “I’m leaving today,” I say. “I guess the pictures aren’t happening.” Part of me is hoping that she can read my mind and she’ll offer to show them to me right then. She doesn’t. She is kind, she speaks in platitudes—“It’s for the best”—and we shake hands.

  On the elevator ride down to the exit I’m still feeling up in the air. Am I leaving tonight, or am I staying? Do I take this as a sign that I’m not meant to see these pictures, or do I take it as a sign that I’m supposed to dig in harder? Which is right, and which is correct? Who can help me decipher what my heart knows to be true? Would Rainn know the answer?

  I’m making my way out the door to the sidewalk when I see Lindner and his son smoking cigarettes at the top of the ramp. I will have to do an about-face to avoid them. Of course I wouldn’t be able to just slip out of the state in peace. I nod and they nod. I am exhausted and emotionally depleted. It feels like as good a time as any to try out my new skills: I am now a person who can casually chat with high-powered attorneys who are defending my childhood best friend’s killer in a capital murder case. Sure, why not?

  We talk about my travel plans; they ask about my job. I have gotten over the idea that we aren’t allowed to be talking at all, and now I just wonder what we are allowed to be talking about. I yearn to ask them something about the case, about Gargiulo, about what he’s really like. What he says to them and how he makes sense of this and why they’re doing it all. Instead I say nothing.

  “He’s evil,” the son says at one point. Whoa. Okay. The two then go on to explain a bit more about their process, how their job in a capital trial is to make sure their client receives the protections he’s entitled to under the law. I take this as permission to discuss the case, and I tell them I thought I’d see the pictures today. “You don’t want to see that,” says the son. “She was mutilated. Her head was practically severed.” Will I be back for the trial? they ask. Will I speak?

  I respond with something, but I’m not really listening to myself as I talk. Did I say yes? Did I say maybe? I look out into the parking lot ahead of me: the big space, probably more than an acre, reserved for jurors and legal officers of the court. The cars are white and red and blue and silver and black. Behind me I can hear someone stopping to chat with Lindner; the tone is jovial. They haven’t seen each other in a while, it’s a good-old-boy “You still kicking around?” kind of conversation. In two years this lot will be covered in green, the cars moved out and the ticket booth knocked down and the whole thing filled in with palm trees and open lawn and pink benches where homeless people and city workers will eye each other warily. In three years after that, I’ll be back here getting prepped to testify in Ashley’s trial.

  I don’t know any of that yet, though. I don’t know what will happen next or all the times I’ll roll this moment over and over in my head. What I do know—what I feel suddenly as if a drug has just kicked in—is that it’s time to go home.

  PART

  FOUR

  14

  GLENVIEW

  IN THE MONTHS after the preliminary hearing, my mind was a jumble of names and dates and facts and allegiances, like the climactic scene in a hacker movie where the computer screen finally floods with blinking characters after a big data dump and the nerds’ eyes go googly. You intuit that whatever’s turned up is valuable and hard-won, but what does it all mean? How do you organize it all and make use of it?

  Who was good, who was bad, and what those days in Department 108 meant to me took a similar amount of unpacking. The answers were less clear-cut than I would have expected going into things. Everything didn’t just neatly distill down into narratives like “Defense = evil; prosecution = valiant” or some similar binary. After all, I had talked to Lindner, I had heard empathy in his voice, even though the next day he had turned around and questioned witnesses about Ashley’s pole dancing and how much of a party girl she was. Which was an act? Or maybe both were? I had talked to the prosecutor and felt comforted by how kind she had been to me, but maybe some of that was serving her own interests as well. Also: Do they all genuinely believe in the death penalty? An eye for an eye—really? It would require years of mental inventory taking to sort through it all; there were too many threads and obscured motivations doubling back on top of themselves.

  The trial was still ahead of me and with it a chance to review and sort through the information anew and hear a verdict delivered. This, it would say, is what happened. I knew that of course that would never be the final word on my feelings about Ashley’s death—those feelings would grow and change just as I would over the years—but part of me still fantasized about the potential for finality that a verdict might bring. I had been told that, on average, trials usually started about twelve to eighteen months following the preliminary hearing, so that put things at mid- to late 2011.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, jarring images from that week would come back at random moments and stop me in my tracks like PTSD-induced flashbacks. A walk up West Broadway near my office where Ashley and I had gone into that clubwear store all those years before would trigger a flash of that party photo they’d kept showing in court—the smiling faces with Ashley in the middle and that mock turtleneck and the white flower in her hair. Youth, beauty—not a fear in sight on any of them. It made me want to hop a train to New Jersey and hug my parents, to feel protected and safe from the unknown, if even for just a moment.

  I called my building super to fix a leak under my kitchen sink, and I’d see Durbin’s face at the other end of the line and hear his words about Ashley and the light fixture. “I wasn’t so sure the light thing was really an issue or it was a reason to get me over to visit,” he’d drawled. That jawline, those perfectly weathered black jeans—the swagger of entitlement I projected onto him. For a second I’d commit to never letting myself be vulnerable to another man again, and
I wouldn’t notice until a moment later that I was shaking my head in the air. I’d blink my eyes at the too-bright sun overhead in New York and suddenly be in California, outside with Lindner and his son on that last day at Clara Shortridge Foltz, emotional exhaustion and anxiety dropping down on me all over again. How quickly I passed out on that flight home, the crease on my cheek I woke up with after leaning against the plane cabin wall. How my clothes still smelled like court when I unpacked. Was any of it really in the past? Would it ever be?

  Part of me also felt as though crucial pieces in my understanding were still missing. While I continued to try to make sense of what had lead Ashley to end up dead in her home in Hollywood and me to a courtroom in Los Angeles to bear witness to it all, there was a third and very large piece of the puzzle that remained a mystery: her alleged killer.

  Who was this guy, and why had his path really crossed with Ashley’s—and later mine? Michael Gargiulo had been charged with Ashley’s murder, Maria Bruno’s, and the attempted murder of Michelle Murphy, with DNA linking him to the last two, plus he was still a person of interest in the Illinois murder of his high school classmate, Tricia Pacaccio, in 1993. As I’d learned from the hearing, he wasn’t a hit man or a wild drug addict or another type you instinctively knew to avoid. He had been “passing” for years, and he had infiltrated himself into Ashley’s life and social group without too much difficulty before allegedly killing her when he was just twenty-five years old.