Hillside Stranglers (14 page)

Angelo did not give Sabra any of the take, nor did Kenny. And to complete the circle of servitude, sometimes when they took her out for a meal, they would not permit her to eat anything. Angelo would order a plate of his favorite stew at Henry’s and then grin at Sabra, saying he bet she was real hungry. The
techniques of intimidation worked splendidly. Every day either Angelo or Kenny reminded Sabra what would happen to her if she tried to escape.

Both Angelo and Kenny had sex with Sabra, Angelo every day, even if he had other girls around. Sometimes Sabra would be awakened in the middle of the night by Angelo’s harsh shout from his room: “Get in here and give me a head job.” She would obey; she was as enslaved as any harem girl. The one thing she had managed to resist was anal intercourse. He was too big and she was too small. She had never done that and did not want to do it.

But Angelo was determined to break Sabra in to sodomy. One evening, with Kenny present—as Kelli’s pregnancy advanced, Kenny was spending more and more time with Angelo—he handed her a big dildo and commanded her to force it up her anus. If she refused, she would be beaten. Naked and afraid, she tried to comply. She sat on the floor of the spare bedroom, Buono and Bianchi looming over her directing her, spitting obscenities at her and playing with themselves. But she failed to accomplish the act. She wept, but Bianchi beat her anyway, thrashing her with the wet towel as Angelo looked on, grinning. Angelo told her to keep the dildo with her and to practice with it.

Among the many girls still seeing Angelo while Sabra lived in the house was the devoted Antoinette Lombardo, now a senior in high school, none the wiser for an abortion and a miscarriage, still hopeful that one day Angelo would be her groom. Angelo, beginning to tire of her matrimonial obsession and anxious to teach her a lesson, told her that he could not possibly marry her unless he could be sure that she would not screw around when she became his wife. There was only one way to be sure of her devotion. She had never been with anyone but him. What if she went for another guy? What if she liked it with somebody else? Maybe she was just like other women, hot to trot, indifferent to loyalty, randy, ready and willing.

“You got to screw somebody else,” Angelo said. “Tell me if you like it. You don’t like it, we get married. Got it?”

Antoinette said that she did not want anyone else. Angelo
was her true love and he could always trust her. But Angelo pressed his argument. Antoinette gave in, saying that she would do anything for him. He was the man she had always dreamed of, strong, alone, defiant.

“I’ll arrange it,” Angelo said.

“But Ange, I don’t see nobody else. Who would I go with?”

“That’s okay. I’ll arrange something.”

Angelo had something in mind. Through contacts in his upholstery business, he had agreed to supply girls for an afternoon’s orgy at the Triple AAA Paper Company box factory in Cudahy, a municipality in southeast Los Angeles County, the industrial heartland of Southern California, a treeless wasteland distinguished by the post-Assyrian architecture of the gigantic and abandoned Uniroyal rubber-tire factory. There would be about half a dozen men present. Sabra was good, but there was room for an extra cunt, Angelo calculated.

When Angelo and Kenny arrived at the box factory with Sabra and Antoinette, seven men awaited them, swarthy fellows congruous with the odor of cardboard. They included the box moguls and assorted civic dignitaries: Pete Werrlein, revered city councilman from the city of Bell; Red Fertig, the police chief of Huntington Park; and Warren Schmucki, chief aide to a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Angelo and Kenny ordered the girls into separate offices and directed traffic.

As the more experienced and proficient whore, Sabra dealt with five customers according to their wants. Sabra was also much prettier than Antoinette, so a majority of the men requested her. The orgy went well. Sabra was rewarded with an unprecedented cash payment, sixty dollars. Antoinette got nothing for her display of fealty except accusations from Angelo that she had shown signs of enjoying her work and might not be a good candidate for wifehood after all.

In the parking lot afterward, the men talked of their satisfaction and the desire for another orgy at the earliest possible opportunity. Kenny noticed a decal, the seal of the County of Los Angeles, on Warren Schmucki’s windshield, and Schmucki
said proudly that it entitled him to free parking in county lots. He promised to send one to Bianchi.

Sabra was working out so well for Angelo and Kenny that they decided they should expand their operations. They told her that if she could recruit another girl, she could go free; otherwise she had another ten months to go on her contract. When Sabra said that she had a friend in Phoenix who might be interested, they gave her permission to fly there on condition that she stay no more than a week and return with the new girl. Could she attend the Led Zepplin concert in Phoenix? Sabra wanted to know. It was her favorite group. Yes, Angelo said, but she would be watched. “The boys” were strong in Phoenix and would find her and kill her if she tried to run off. And she could forget about going to the police. He had friends in law enforcement who owed him favors. He showed Sabra his badge to assure her of his connections. Meanwhile, in Phoenix she should keep practicing with the dildo.

Sabra returned with Rebekah Gay Spears, a fifteen-year-old biker’s daughter who was eager to leave home for a new life in California. Angelo and Kenny had refused to send the girls air fare, so they turned a trick at an airport hotel for the money. Becky was a tiny girl with a large, sad mouth, mousy but frail and defenseless-looking in a way that appealed to Angelo. He was also gratified that Becky, once threatened with death, acquiesced readily to anal intercourse. He installed Sabra in a nearby apartment and moved Becky into his house so that she would be available to him daily and nightly, when she was not earning money for him. So brutally and frequently did he attack Becky’s rear that he tore her sphincter muscles, and she resorted to wearing a tampon in her rectum to control her bowels.

Angelo made use of Becky’s compliance, but sometimes she was too passive for him. He would hit her and shake her, trying to get her angry, saying, “What’s the matter with you? Ain’t you alive? Fight me. Tits is better than you.” Tits was his nickname for Sabra. When Becky did dare complain, he would tell her about shipping disobedient girls into the desert, delimbed,
and ask her if she wanted to be beaten as Tits had been. As for Sabra, he reneged on his promise to free her, saying that she had to earn more money for him and Kenny before she would be let go.

The pimping now became more sophisticated. Angelo arranged through J. J. Fenway, owner of the Foxy Ladies outcall service, to have Becky and Sabra visit clients at home. Foxy Ladies would take a 15 percent cut of any call; Angelo and Kenny would get 60 percent, with 25 percent left over for the girl, in theory, although she rarely received anything but sneers and a little food. Becky and Sabra continued to work in Angelo’s house for neighborhood clients and the Trim Shop customers, but on most evenings the Foxy Ladies driver would deliver them to men all over the city. And they played a return engagement at the box factory, Antoinette absent this time, after which Angelo had Kenny beat Becky, on grounds of her failure of enthusiasm.

The girls were proving a healthy source of extra income for Buono and Bianchi, and Kenny found owning women more gratifying than he could have imagined, although he continued to press Kelli to marry him and told her how much he looked forward to becoming a father. As her pregnancy progressed, Kelli grew irritable, but Kenny did not really mind: her bad moods gave him ready excuses for staying out late, and when he wanted sex, Sabra and Becky were his to do with as he wished. Yet his prosperity and happiness proved short.

It happened one August night that David Wood, a lawyer lonely and libidinous in his loneliness, locked up within the electronically guarded splendor of his Bel-Air house, telephoned the Foxy Ladies and asked that a girl be sent to him. Within an hour Becky Spears had been driven westward from the bungalowland of Glendale, on to Hollywood and the rich hush of Beverly Hills, along Sunset Boulevard past UCLA and through the rococo gateway of Bel-Air. This is a district that surpasses even Beverly Hills in the illusion of remoteness from the ordinary city. It is dark with trees, bright with meticulous flowerbeds, all hills and winding streets with names like Copa
de Oro and Belaggio and houses forbiddingly huge and apparently impregnable, though the Manson gang had found otherwise: one of their victims, Sharon Tate, had lived on the cusp of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, high up in secluded Benedict Canyon, just a stone’s throw from a street called Angelo, a cul-de- sac. When Becky arrived at David Wood’s house on Roscomare Drive, she was overcome by a serenity and security that tapped her emotions and loosened her tongue.

David Wood was not in the habit of summoning women in this way, but that night he thought he would try something effortless and anonymous. The evening turned out to be neither. The small girl with the downturned mouth emanated such sadness and dejection that, in spite of his worldliness, Wood started asking her variations on the most threadbare of all questions addressed to whores: How did a nice girl like you . . . ? Becky did not offer him any of the usual responses, such as “I only do this in my spare time” or “I perform a special service” or “How else would I earn four to five hundred dollars a night?” Becky let go. She told him she was the prisoner of two men. She told him about the beatings, the relentless sodomy, the threats of delimbing and death. She said that she believed it was only a matter of time before Angelo Buono and Kenny Bianchi would kill her. She knew Angelo wanted to kill her. The way he forced himself down her throat until she vomited or almost passed out told her that. The way Bianchi laughed when he beat her told her that he wanted to kill her, too.

Through his law practice, David Wood knew the criminal class. He was not naive. But Becky’s tale shocked him, and her frail, sexually unattractive desperation made him want to help her. That this visitor from the moral sewers of the city had intruded on the order and expensive serenity of his home disgusted him, and he wanted to throw her out and go take a long, hot bath; but pity for her overcame disgust. Not for a second did he doubt that she was telling the truth.

He knew that the Foxy Ladies driver would be coming back soon, so he drove Becky to his office and telephoned for a plane reservation to Phoenix: it was not that Becky’s family, from what she told him of it, offered decent refuge, but at least
she knew Phoenix and had friends there. She had nowhere else to go. The plane was not leaving until early in the morning, so David Wood talked through the night with Becky at his office. The more she told him, the better he felt about what he was doing. He tried to reassure her that she would be safe, once out of the city. No two-bit auto upholsterer and his perverted cousin would have the resources to track her down. He did not believe in Buono’s boasts about the Mafia or the boys or whatever he called them. The Mafia would not bother with such a small-time operation. In the morning he drove her to the airport and waited to put her on the plane. As they said goodbye, he took her father’s telephone number and gave her his, telling her to call him if she felt she was in danger. And he told her never to come back to Los Angeles unless she heard that Buono and Bianchi were dead or safely locked up.

When the Foxy Ladies driver telephoned Angelo to tell him that Becky and her trick had left Wood’s house and gone somewhere, Angelo was annoyed but not alarmed. The trick was probably one of those guys who liked to talk to whores and had taken her out. Becky should have telephoned, those were the rules, and he would have Kenny beat her, but Angelo figured she would return in the morning. And she had better have plenty of money to show for the full night.

But when Becky did not appear, Angelo had the Foxy Ladies driver take him and Kenny to David Wood’s house for a confrontation. Wood was not home. Angelo telephoned his office. When Angelo told him he had better tell where the girl was or suffer the consequences, Wood hung up.

Once Angelo and Kenny realized that Becky was not coming back, they became enraged. Just so Sabra would not get ideas, they stuffed Becky’s abandoned clothes into a box with a dead cat and showed the box to Sabra. Did she get the message? Dead pussy. That’s what Becky was going to be and that’s what Sabra would be if she tried to leave. Then Angelo set about trying to ruin David Wood.

He called Wood and told him that he was going to bring charges against him for having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. Again Wood hung up. Angelo then had flowers sent to Wood’s
employees, with a note saying that David Wood was leaving the profession of law and that his employees were being terminated.

David Wood was angry, but he was not intimidated. He called one of his clients, a three-hundred-pound bouncer named Tiny, and said he needed a favor. He told Tiny what Buono was up to and told him about Becky. Tiny said he would take care of it.

Angelo was working inside a car when Tiny walked into the Trim Shop accompanied by four friends almost as big as himself.

“You Angelo Buono?” Tiny called. Angelo continued working and gave no response. So Tiny reached one arm through the open car window, grabbed Angelo by the shoulder, and started dragging him out of the window. “Now do I have your attention, Mr. Buono?”

Angelo crawled out and struggled to his feet. Tiny picked him up under both arms, gave him a vicious shaking, and said:

“David Wood’s a friend of mine. You messing with him, you messing with me, Tiny. Get it? I don’t like people messing with my friend. You don’t want to see an instant replay of me.”

Angelo said he understood. Tiny threw him down and left. Angelo did not bother David Wood again.

Angelo and Kenny were still angry, and they were worried. They figured Becky had made fools of them. It was bad for morale. Somebody was going to have to pay, one way or another.