were in town back then you must remember it.'
'I was ten, living in South Central,' Hitch told her. 'The Crips moved onto my block in eighty-one so I spent most of that year hiding under my uncle's car.'
'Why don't you tell us?' I said. 'Start at the beginning.'
'In 1981 Thomas Vulcuna had piled up a lot of debts at Eagle's Nest, a studio which he owned privately. I know a little about all this because his house on Skyline was actually put up as collateral on the Eagle's Nest bank loan. We had to untangle that mess before we could sell the property.
'Back then, Eagle's Nest had six TV series on the air, but the problem was they were spending more for each episode than the network gave them in licensing fees. Tom Vulcuna was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode, and with the production company making over a hundred episodes a year, despite his success in getting his shows programmed, he was quickly outrunning his bank loan and going broke.'
I was vaguely beginning to remember this now. It had been a big TV and newspaper story. A murder-suicide if I recalled correctly.
'Tom Vulcuna had all these production company debts and his bank was about to foreclose on the loans,' she went on. 'Then on Christmas Eve 1981, he came home from a Christmas party at the studio. He was distraught, he'd had too much to drink, and the police thought he got into an argument with his eighteen-year-old daughter, Victoria. When his wife, Ellen, tried to break it up, apparently he just snapped. He picked up a ball-peen hammer that was lying around to hang Christmas wreaths and, in a frenzy, he beat both of them to death right there in the living room.'
'I remember this now,' I said. 'He brought a handgun home from the studio or something. The police speculated he had already decided to commit suicide.'
'That's right,' Beverly said. 'It was an old World War One Luger that he checked out of the studio prop department. Eagle's Nest was making a six-hour miniseries about Hitlers rise after World War One, and they had a bunch of those old Lugers for the SS officers to carry in the movie. They were props, but apparently the ones that weren't going to be fired didn't get altered by the prop master and still worked. He brought one of those home in his briefcase. After he killed his wife and daughter he went upstairs to the master bedroom, lay down on the bed, opened a copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy to a passage about death that he'd underlined, then he fired a shot into his head. When the maid arrived the next morning, she found them all dead.'
'I remember,' I said as my vague memory of it kicked in. 'Big, big media case.'
She nodded. 'Because of the horrible, gory nature of the murders, the house was almost impossible for me to sell. Prime Properties assigned me the listing, but as soon as I took a client up there and they realized it was the Vulcuna house, any interest I had going evaporated.'
'It's owned by the Dorothy White Foundation now,' I said.
'I was the one who sold it to them,' she said. 'The foundation bought it at the Vulcuna estate sale less than a year later, in eighty-two. When we closed escrow, the Christmas tree with all their unopened presents was still in the living room. Last I heard, it was all still there.'
'It is,' I confirmed.
She gave us a weak, apologetic smile. 'Anyway, it was quite a project selling that place. The production company owned the house. The bank had the production company in receivership. After the sale of all the studio's assets the bank only got twenty-five cents on the dollar and the sale eventually ended up in tax court.
'I finally got an offer from the Dorothy White Foundation. The easiest way for me to consummate the escrow was for the foundation to just buy the whole mess to pay back taxes. When escrow closed, they got the house and the defunct production studio along with some minimal tax loss carryforward.'
'How much did they pay for it?'
'The house was a steal because of the murders. I think the end number was something like two point six million, but that's in eighty-two dollars. It would be worth a lot more today.'
Hitch leaned forward. I could tell he had a question so I nodded for him to go ahead as if I actually had any control over him.
'Mrs. Bartinelli,' he began, 'it seems strange to us that a house worth that much money would stay vacant for over twenty-five years.'
'Yes, it is, and it soon became apparent that the foundation had no intention of selling it either. Long after the stigma of the murders had passed, they were still turning down offers. We didn't represent the property any longer, but from time to time, people would be driving around up on Skyline and see it. We got our share of random inquiries.
'That mansion has the prime location right on the promontory point. People would want to buy it and fix it up to live in. I once submitted an offer for over seven million dollars to the Century City law firm that represents the foundation.'
'Sheedy, Devine, and Lipscomb,' Hitch said.
She nodded. 'I dealt with one of the senior partners, Stender Sheedy. It didn't matter how good the deal was, he always said no. The place just wasn't for sale.
'After a while, none of the Realtors around here bothered to even submit offers to them. It's just been rotting up there empty and rundown with that old dust-covered tinsel tree and all those unopened presents sitting in the living room, waiting for the Vulcunas' ghosts to float down and open them.' Then she added, 'Somebody ought to make that into a movie, don't you think?'
Hitch just nodded and smiled.
Chapter 24
We stood out by our cars in front of the duplex apartment. Hitch was writing frantically in his red leather journal. It was just before noon.
'Put that away for a minute and let's talk about this,' I said.
'You were right. There was a second shooter. The only problem was our time frame was off by over a quarter century. This story doesn't start with the Prostitutes' Ball and the Sladky triple. We gotta back it all up and start it on Christmas Eve 1981, the night Thomas Vulcuna bludgeoned his wife and daughter to death with a hammer then killed himself. Which, not for nothing, is a monster inciting event and the opening scene of our movie!'
'Listen, Hitch, put the movie on hold for a minute. Let's think this out.' 'Right.'
'I think World War One Lugers fire 7.65 ammo.'
Hitch was grinning. 'Its all one case, dude. Beginning in 1981 with the bloody Vulcuna double murder with the ball-peen hammer, then the suicide. The investigation and the closed case ends Act One. Then we move into Act Two with the Prostitutes' Ball triple-murder case that just went down on the same crime scene. The exciting cast of characters grows and now we got Thayer Dunbar and his cadaverous attorney who bought the house from Vulcuna's estate in eighty-two and then for some still-unknown, Act Three reason won't let anybody get inside for almost thirty years. We got little coked-up Brooks and the Scott Berman/Yolanda Dublin thing with the two gorgeous dead hookers. I mean, can you stand this? Topping it off, we're simply lousy with subplots. We got a once-powerful production company run by Vulcuna in eighty-one, which is today a shell of itself with Brooks making cheesy Paris Hilton videos. And tying the whole thing together is the German Luger and the 7.65 ammo that turns up in both triple kills, and we're just getting started. I'm telling you, dawg, this is one big, magnificent, kick-ass, go-to-the-bank movie.'
He had again started to jot something down in his journal, so I took the leather book out of his hand.
'Stop writing and listen to me,' I insisted.
He tapped his foot impatiently. 'I'm listening, but can I have my book back?'
I gave it to him, then posed a question.
'If Vulcuna checked the gun out of the prop room and brought it home on Christmas Eve, and if the L. A. homicide cops found him dead with a 7.65 bullet shot through his head upstairs, then how come we found the 7.65 slug in the backyard by the trash shed? It should be in a wall upstairs in the master bedroom.'
'I don't know. Maybe he test-fired the gun in the backyard first,' Hitch said. 'I can tell you this much, it isn't simple. Which means Dahlias gonna freak with all her KISS bullshit. We say anything about this, she's gonna try and
