The Murder Book

"Fu

"Short, fat, zits. Odd- spaced-out. But he immediately got all kissy-kissy with her, and I could see Janie didn't like that." Waters shook her head. "She'd known the guy all of fifteen minutes, and she was jealous."

"Janie do anything about that?"

"No, she just got this ticked-off look on her face. I could read it because I knew Janie. Burns didn't see it- or he didn't care. Threw one arm around the dumpy girl, the other around Janie, and led both of them off. That little purse of his bouncing on his shoulder."

"And you?"

"I stayed behind. Someone handed me a beer and hands started groping me. Not delicately. It was dark, and whoever was doing it started to get rough, yanking at my clothes. I broke away, started walking around, looked for a quiet room to mellow out in, but there was none. Every inch of that place was party-time. Guys kept putting their hands all over me, once in a while someone would pull me hard onto the dance floor and rather than fight it, I'd just dance for a while, then make my escape. Then the lights went out and the house got even darker and I could barely see where I was stepping. The Southern Comfort in my system wasn't helping, either. I felt nauseous, dizzy, wanted to get out of there, looked some more for Janie, couldn't find her, and got angry at her for bailing on me. Finally, I told myself forget her and the next time someone pulled me onto a dance floor, I danced for a while. And when someone offered me a pill, I swallowed it. The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor of an upstairs bathroom, hearing shouts that the cops were going to roust the party and ru

"Whose truck?"

"A bunch of guys. Surfer types. They ended up at the beach, Santa Monica or Malibu, I couldn't tell you which. We partied some more, and I fell asleep on the sand. The next morning, I woke up and I was alone. Cold and wet and sick to my stomach. The sun was rising over the ocean and I suppose it was gorgeous but all I could think about was how lousy I felt. Then I thought about my father- stationed up at Mugu and I started crying and got it into my head that I had to go see him. It took me four hitches to get up there and when I reached the base, the sentry wouldn't let me through the gate. I started crying again. It had been a long time since I'd seen my dad. He'd remarried, and his new wife hated me. Or at least that's what my mother was always telling me. Whatever the truth was, he'd pretty much stopped calling. I bawled like a baby, and the sentry made a call and told me my dad wasn't there, he'd shipped out to Turkey three days before. I just broke down and I guess the sentry felt sorry for me because he gave me all the money in his pocket- thirty-three dollars and forty-nine cents." She smiled. "That I remember precisely."

Reaching under her glasses, she fingered the inside corners of her eyes. "Finally, someone was being nice to me. I never thanked him, never knew his name. Walked back to PCH, stuck out my thumb, caught a ride with some Mexicans heading over to Ventura to pick cabbage, just kept thumbing my way up the coast. My first stop was Santa Cruz, and I stayed there a while because it was beautiful and there was this retrohippie thing going on, plenty of free food and parks to sleep in. Eventually, I moved on to San Francisco, Crescent City, Oregon, Seattle, back down to Sacramento. The next ten years are kind of a blur. Finally, I got it together- you don't want to know the boring details."

"Like I said, we want to maintain your privacy."

Melinda Waters laughed. "Thanks for the thought."

CHAPTER 26

Milo asked her a few more questions- more gently, unproductively- then we left her sitting at her desk looking dazed. As I drove out of the lot, the smoke from the Italian restaurant's chimney caught my eye.

"Want lunch?" I said.

"I guess… yeah, why not."

"No fast food, though. Let's aim high. We deserve it."

"For what?"

"Making some progress."

"You think so?"

The taverna across the street was divided into four small, whitewashed rooms, each warmed by a beehive-shaped fireplace and topped by low ceilings striped with rough-hewn logs. We ordered beer, a mixed antipasto, spaghetti with capers and olives and garlic, and osso bucco from a lithe, young woman who seemed genuinely happy to serve us.

When she left, Milo said, "Progress."

"We can place Janie with Willie Burns and Caroline Cossack the night of the murder. You don't have doubts she was the dumpy girl, do you?"

He shook his head.

I said, "Melinda's story also supplies a possible motive: jealousy. Caroline had a thing for Burns, thought Janie was moving in on her territory."

"The eternal triangle leading to that?"

"The eternal triangle combined with dope and psychopathology and a low-inhibition party scene and Janie's racism. No shortage of triggers. And something else fits: Janie's murder presented as a sadistic sex killing and we've been wondering why other victims haven't shown up. Because cold, sexual sadists don't quit. But if the murder resulted from a passion-of-the-moment flare-up, a sole victim would make sense."

"Janie in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Melinda's description of Janie makes her the perfect victim: drugged-out, not too bright, prone to fantasy, a tendency to irritate people, a history of sexual abuse. Throw enough ingredients into the stew, toss in a few careless 'niggers,' and who knows."

"What do you think about Janie's blasé reaction to the downtown rape?"

"Doesn't surprise me," I said. "People expect rape victims to react the way they do on TV. And sometimes that happens. But pseudocalm is pretty common. Protective numbness. Given Janie's victimization by her father, it makes perfect sense."

"For her it woulda been more of the same," he said. "Poor kid."

He picked at his food, slid his plate away. "There's a discrepancy between Janie's description of the rape as Melinda remembers it and what Schwi

"That could've been Janie prettying up the picture," I said. "Grasping for a shred of dignity."

"Pathetic," he said.

"Any idea who Schwi

"Nope. He never gave me a single bit of insider info. I kept waiting for him to clue me in, to help me learn the ropes, but we just went from call to call and when the time came for paperwork, he went home. And now here he is, pulling strings from the grave… If Janie made up the part about walking home, maybe the young guy in a Jag was bogus, too. Her not wanting to admit he was a drooling, scabby hunchback in a jalopy? The alleged wino."

"Could be. But if she was being truthful, the Jag story's interesting. A young guy with hot wheels checking into a fleabag hotel wouldn't be safe. Unless he had co

"You're thinking some real estate honcho. The Cossacks. Or Larner." He told me about Playa del Sol, rubbed his face. "I remember a few of the hotels down there. The scuzziest ones were on or near Main, between Third and Seventh. SRO flops, full of winos. The Exeter, the Columbus- there must've been a good half dozen, mostly propped up by Federal subsidies… so now I'm supposed to solve a twenty-year-old rape with no victim as well as a murder. Don't think so, Alex."