The kindness of strangers, indeed.
Despite all that, she’d reached deep within herself again and produced works of transcendent beauty.
Only to be garroted and laid out and posed in a filthy bathroom.
Finding the person who’d done that suddenly seemed very important.
It wasn’t until hours later- after finishing and mailing reports, paying some bills, making a run to the bank to deposit checks from lawyers- that something else hit me about Julie.
A gifted, damaged soul snuffed out violently, during the first blush of comeback.
The same could be said about Baby Boy Lee.
I compared the two cases. Both had been Saturday night, back-alley killings. Five weeks had lapsed between them. Neither Milo nor Petra- nor anyone else- had seen any link because there were no striking similarities. And as I checked off the differences a nice-sized list materialized on my scratch pad.
Male vs. female victim.
Late forties vs. midthirties.
Single vs. divorced.
Stabbing vs. strangulation.
Outdoor vs. indoor crime scenes.
Musician vs. painter.
I decided I was being overly analytic; no sense calling Milo. I went for a forty-minute run that challenged my heart and lungs but did little to clear my head, got back on the computer, and searched for murders of creative types within the last ten years.
Despite setting that arbitrary limit, a lot of extraneous material cropped up: scads of dead rock stars, mostly, almost every demise self-inflicted. The West Hollywood stabbing death of Sal Mineo, too. That had gone down in 1976, well before the one-decade cutoff. Mineo’s murder, long a subject of film-biz intrigue and believed to be related to his homosexuality, had turned out to be a street burglary gone really bad.
The actor had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe that’s how Baby Boy- and Julie- would shake out.
I kept searching and refining, ended up, hours later, with four possibles.
Six years ago, a potter named named Valerie Brusco had been bludgeoned in an empty field behind her studio in Eugene, Oregon. I found no direct reporting of the crime, but Brusco’s name came up in a retrospective of Pacific Northwest ceramic artists, written by a Reed College professor, in which her violent end was noted. This one had been solved: Brusco’s boyfriend, a cab driver named Tom Blascovitch, had been arrested and charged and incarcerated. But murderers get out of prison, so I printed the data.
The second case was the stabbing death of a saxophonist named Wilfred Reedy, outside a Washington Boulevard jazz club, four and a half years ago, documented in the obituary column of a musician union’s magazine. The obit lauded Reedy’s gentle nature and improvisational skills and noted that, in lieu of flowers, contributions to the widow could be made care of the union.
Reedy, sixty-six, had been a friend of John Coltrane and played with many of the greats- Miles Davis, Red Norvo, Tal Farlow, Milt Jackson. I logged into the
Homicide number three was the three-year-old stabbing of a twenty-five-year-old ballet dancer named Angelique Bernet in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bernet had been part of a touring New York company performing in Boston, and she’d left her hotel around 2 A.M. Friday evening and never returned. Two days later, her body was found behind an apartment on Mt. Auburn Avenue, not far from the Harvard campus. Cross-references to the
The final hit took place thirteen months later- another Hollywood murder. During an all-night recording session, a punk-rock vocalist named China Maranga had unleashed a drunken tirade at her backup band over what she viewed as lackluster playing, stomped out of the studio, and vanished. Two months later, her skeletal remains were discovered by hikers, not far from the Hollywood sign, barely concealed by brush. ID had been made using dental records. A broken neck and the absence of bullet holes or stab wounds suggested cause of death as strangulation, but that was about all the coroner could come up with.
China Maranga’s teeth had been easy to identify- as a youngster, she’d undergone extensive orthodontic work. Her birth name was Jennifer Stilton, and she’d grown up in a big house in Palos Verdes, the daughter of a grocery- chain executive and an interior decorator. She’d earned good grades in prep school, where a sweet soprano earned her a starring role in the glee club. Admitted to Stanford, she majored in English Lit, got hooked on alternative music and whiskey and cocaine, amassed a collection of tattoos and piercings, and assembled a band of like-minded sophomores who joined her in dropping out. For the next several years, she and China Whiteboy toured the country, playing small clubs and garnering cult status but failing to get a record contract. During that period, China morphed her sweet soprano to a ragged, atonal scream. A tour in Germany and Holland garnered larger audiences and brought about a deal with an alternative label back in L.A. Sales of China Whiteboy’s two albums were surprisingly brisk, the band began attracting attention from people-with-clout, rumors of a deal with a major label were rife.
China’s murder ended all that.
China could barely play guitar, but she wielded one as a prop- a battered old Vox teardrop that she treated rough. I knew that because two members of the band- a pair of slouching, inarticulate wraiths named Squirt and Brancusi- were serious about their gear, and when they needed repairs, they came to Robin. When China snapped the Vox’s neck during one of her more ebullient stage tantrums, the boys passed along Robin’s number.
I remembered the day China dropped by. A particularly unpleasant July afternoon, strangled by West Coast pollution and East Coast humidity. Robin was working in back, and I was in my office when the doorbell rang. Eight times in a row. I padded to the front and opened the door on a pallid, curvaceous woman with spiked hair as black and shiny as La Brea tar. She hefted a guitar in a soft canvas gig bag and looked at me as if I was the intruder. Parked below the terrace was a big, dusty Buick the color of ballpark mustard.
She said, “Who the hell are you and am I as lost as I feel?”
“Where do you want to be?”
“In Paradise feasting on boy virgins- is this the guitar lady’s place or not?”
She tapped her foot. Rolled her shoulders. Her left eye ticced. Her features were unremarkable but might’ve been pleasant if she’d relaxed. Some of the pallor came from ashy pancake makeup, laid on thick, and set off by kohl-darkened lids. The rest implied unhealthy habits.
Black ink tats- snaky, abstract images- covered what I could see of her left arm. A blue-and-black iron cross marked the right side of her face, where the jawline met the earlobe. Both ears sagged under an assortment of rings and plugs. All that and the eyebrow pierces and the nose studs said
“The guitar lady’s out back,” I said.
“Where out back? I’m not prancing around without knowing. This place freaks me out.”
“Why?”
“There could be coyotes or some other shit.”
“Coyotes come out at night.”
“So do I- c’mon, man, my eyes hurt, show me.”
I walked her down the terrace steps, around to the side of the house, and through the garden. She had very little stamina and was breathing hard by the time we reached the pond. As we approached the water, she overtook me and raced ahead, swinging the gig bag. Stopped and stared at the koi.
