Mary, Mary (16 page)
AT 4:00 IN THE MORNING,
a twenty-two-year-old actress named Alicia Pitt left Las Vegas and headed for L.A. The open casting call started at 9:00, and she didn’t want to be blond chick number three hundred and five in line—the part would already be gone before she even got to read.
Her parents’ Suburban, which the highly imaginative Pitts called Big Blue, was a gas-guzzler without a conscience. Other than that it was a free ride, so all in all, the price was close to being right. Once Alicia got some kind of real work, maybe she could afford to actually live in L.A. Meanwhile, it was this endless back-and-forth for auditions and callbacks.
Alicia ran her lines as she drove west on I-10, trying not to glance too much at the dog-eared script on the seat next to her. The familiar ritual continued almost all the way to L.A.
“‘Don’t talk to me about pride. I’ve heard everything I need to from you. You can just—’”
Wait, that wasn’t it. She looked down at the script, and then up again at the road and passing traffic.
“‘Don’t talk to me about pride. I’ve heard it all before from you. There’s nothing you can tell me now that I’ll believe. You can just—’
Oh, shit!
What are you
doing,
Alicia? You numbskull!”
Somehow, she had shuttled off the highway and then onto an exit ramp. It brought her down to a traffic light at an unfamiliar intersection.
She was in L.A., but this definitely wasn’t Wilshire Boulevard.
It wasn’t anywhere she’d ever been, from the look of it. Abandoned buildings mostly, and one burned-out car sitting on a far curb. A taxi, actually.
Then she saw the men, boys, whatever they were. Three of them, standing on the corner and staring her way.
All right, all right,
she thought.
Don’t freak out, Alicia. Just get yourself turned around and back on the highway. You’re right as rain; everything is cool
.
She willed the red light in front of her to change as she craned her neck, looking for the ramp back onto the highway.
One of the young guys had wandered out into the intersection now, his head tilted for a better view through her windshield. He wore baggy cargo pants and a sky-blue sweat jacket; he couldn’t have been more than sixteen, seventeen.
Then the two others came along slowly behind. By the time Alicia thought to run the red light, the boys were standing in front of the hood of her car, blocking the way. Oh, great. Now what?
SHE SQUEEZED HER EYES SHUT
for just a half second. What were you supposed to do in this situation? And why had she never gotten around to buying a cell phone? Um, maybe because she was almost dead broke.
When she opened her eyes again, the one in the blue jacket was at her side window, a menacing look on his face, a tattoo of a red dragon on his neck.
She screamed in spite of herself—just a small yelp, but enough for him to see how scared she was.
Then her panic level crept even higher. It took her a moment to realize the kid in blue was saying something. His hands were held up flat, in a “calm down” sort of gesture.
She cracked the window. “W-what?” she said, unable to keep her voice from quivering.
“I said, ‘you lost?’” he asked. “That’s all, lady—
you lost?
You look—
lost
.”
Alicia choked back a sob. “Yes. I’m so sorry.” It was a bad habit; she apologized for everything. “I’m just looking for—”
“’Cause I
know
you don’t live around here,” he said. His expression shifted, and hardened again. The others laughed at the joke. “This your car?”
Fear and confusion locked Alicia into subservience, which she hated. All she could think to do was answer his question. “It’s my parents’.”
The guy in blue rubbed his chin whiskers as if considering her answer. “Lotta people looking for a car just like this one,” he said. “Don’t you read the papers? Watch TV?”
“I’m just trying to get to Westwood. For an audition. A TV movie. I got off the highway before I was supposed to—”
He howled with laughter, turning away from the car to his group, and then back again. His movements were casual and slow. “She’s trying to get to Westwood to be in a movie. A
film
. Damn, that’s about exactly what I expected. ’Cause I know you ain’t got no interest in anything or anybody ’round here.”
“Nah, man,” said one of the other boys. “She do her killing in the rich neighborhoods.”
“I got no problem with that,” said another. “Kill the rich, eat the rich, whatever.”
“What are you saying?” She looked at each of them now, desperate for any kind of clarity, a clue about what she should say or do to get out of there. Her wild-eyed gaze fell on the rearview mirror.
Could I back out of here? Fast? Really, really fast? Pedal-to-the-metal kind of thing?
The kid at her window lifted his jacket to show a pistol tucked into the waistband of his jeans. “You
don’t
want to do that,” he said.
The idea that she could be murdered before she had her morning coffee came over Alicia with an ugly reckoning. “Please, I just . . . please. D-don’t h-hurt me,” she stammered.
She could hear the helplessness in her own voice. It was like listening to someone else, someone pathetic. God, she was supposed to be an actress.
The man in blue nodded slowly, in a way she couldn’t decipher. Then he stepped back from the car and put out his hand to let her pass.
“Highway’s that way,” he said. The other two moved off to the side, too.
Alicia felt as if she might faint from relief. She gave the men a watery smile. “Thank you. I’m so sorry,” she said again.
Her hands were shaking on the steering wheel, but at least she was safe.
The Suburban had barely inched forward when, with a sickening crack, the front windshield shattered into a spiderweb of about a million glass pieces.
An instant later, a heavy metal pipe smashed through the driver’s-side window.
Paralysis overtook Alicia. Her arms and legs wouldn’t function. She couldn’t even scream.
The impulse to floor the accelerator got to her brain a moment too late—about a second after her car door flew open and large, powerful hands dragged her out onto the street. Alicia landed on her back, the air rushing out of her lungs in a gasp.
“What kind of stupid are you?” she heard someone say—and then she felt a shock of pain on the side of her head. Then she saw a pipe rise up high and come down really fast, a blur aimed right at the center of her forehead.
EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED
suddenly and dramatically on Mary Smith. Jeanne Galletta was out; she was completely off the case. She’d been reassigned.
I tried going to bat for her, but within hours of Alicia Pitt’s murder, she was history on Mary Smith. That evening, Police Chief Shrewsbury announced that he would be personally overseeing the Hollywood Stalker murders, and that Detective Galletta was on temporary leave pending an investigation into the unfortunate murder of a young Las Vegas woman driving a blue Suburban.
Jeanne was inconsolable, but she was getting the full spectrum of experiences on the case, including a turn as sacrificial lamb. “The mayor of Las Vegas telling the mayor of L.A. to tell the chief of police how to run an investigation?” she ranted to me. “When did this stop being about professionals doing good work?”
“Somewhere around the dawn of time,” I said.
The two of us met for a drink around 8:00 that night. She picked the spot, and said she wanted to make sure I had everything I needed from her on the murder investigation. Of course, she also wanted to vent.
“I know Alicia Pitt’s my fault, but—”
“Jeanne, stop right there. You aren’t responsible for what happened to that woman. It might have come as a result of a decision you made, but that’s not the same thing. You made the best call you could. The rest is politics. You shouldn’t have been taken off the case, either.”
She didn’t speak for several seconds. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “That poor girl is dead.”
“Do you have any vacation time?” I asked her. “Maybe you should use it.”
“Yeah, like I’m going to leave town now,” she said. “I may be off the case, but—”
She didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t need to. I had been in her position before. It’s best not to say out loud that you’re going to break the rules. Just go ahead and break them.
“Alex, I’m going to need my space,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to meet you here.”
“I understand completely. You know where to reach me,” I told her.
Jeanne finally cracked a half smile. “You’re a really good guy,” she said. “For FBI.”
“You’re okay for a cop. For LAPD.”
Then she reached across the table and put her hand on mine. But she quickly took her hand away.
“Awkward,” she said, and smiled again. “Sorry, if I’m being goofy.”
“You’re being human, Jeanne. That’s different, right? I wouldn’t apologize for it.”
“All right, I won’t apologize anymore. I have to go, though, before I cry or something incredibly embarrassing like that. You know where to reach me, if you need to.”
Then Jeanne got up from the table. She turned back before she got to the door. “I’m not off this case, though. I’ll be around.”
WEIRD.
When I got back to my room that night, an envelope was waiting for me at the front desk.
It was from James Truscott.
I opened it on my way to my room, and I couldn’t stop reading the contents all the way there.
SUBJECT: WOMEN ON DEATH ROW IN CALIF.
There were fifteen at the moment, and Truscott included a brief write-up on each of them.
The first woman was Cynthia Coffman. In 1986, she and her boyfriend robbed and strangled four women. She’d been sentenced in 1989 and was still waiting. Cynthia Coffman was forty-two years old now.
At the end of the long note, Truscott said that he planned to visit some of the women in prison. I was welcome to tag along if I thought it might be useful.
After I finished reading the pages, I leafed through them a second time.
What was with James Truscott? And why did he want to be my Boswell? I wished he would just leave me alone, but that wasn’t going to happen, was it?
THE PHONE IN MY HOTEL ROOM
woke me at just past 2:30 in the morning. I was having a dream about Little Alex and Christine, but I forgot most of it as soon as I heard the first ring.
My first coherent thought:
James Truscott
.
But it wasn’t him.
Around 3:00
A.M.
I was driving through an unfamiliar Hollywood neighborhood looking for the Hillside condo complex. I might have found it sooner in daylight, and if my mind hadn’t been racing the whole way there.
Mary Smith’s game had changed again, and I was struggling to understand it. Why this murder? Why now? Why these two victims?
The condo complex, when I finally found it, looked to have been built in the seventies. The units were flat-roofed three-story structures in dark cedar, with fat columns for legs and open parking underneath. There was also parking on the street, I noticed, and that would offer an intruder privacy.
“Agent Cross! Alex!” I heard from across the lot.
I recognized Karl Page’s voice from somewhere in the dark. My watch read 3:05.
He caught up with me under a streetlight. “Over this way,” he said.
“How’d you hear about it?” I asked him. Page was the one who had called me in my hotel room.
“I was still in the office.”
“When the hell do you sleep?”
“I’ll sleep when it’s over.”
I followed the young agent through a series of right and left turns, to where a square of buildings faced a common garden and pool area. Several residents, many of them in nightclothes, were gathered around one of the front doors. They were craning their necks and whispering among themselves.
Page pointed to a third-floor unit where the lights were on behind drawn curtains. “Up there,” he said. “That’s where the bodies are.”
We made our way past the officers on duty and up the front stairs—one of two ways into the building.
“Check.”
Page shorthanded his response to the stickers on the apartment door as we passed inside. Marked with two
A
s and a
B
. This was Mary Smith all right. The stickers always made me think of that clown doll in
Poltergeist
—benign on the outside but completely ominous in context. Child’s play turned inside out.
The door opened onto a good-size living room. It was crowded with cardboard moving boxes and haphazardly arranged furniture.
In the middle of the room, a man lay dead, facedown over a stack of fallen boxes. Several dozen books had spilled onto the sand-colored carpet, several of them streaked with blood. Copies of
The Hours
and
Running with Scissors
lay near the body.
“Philip Washington,” Page told me. “Thirty-five; an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Well-read, obviously.”
“You too, I guess.”
There was no arranging the body this time, no artful tableau. The killer might have been in a hurry given all the neighbors so close by, the lack of sufficient cover.
And Philip Washington wasn’t the only target. Nearby, another body lay faceup on the floor.
This was the one I couldn’t reconcile, the murder that would dog me.
The victim’s left temple showed an ugly wound where the bullet had entered, and the face had been repeatedly slashed in Mary Smith’s signature style. The flesh around the forehead and eyes was crisscrossed with knife marks, and the cheeks, constricted in a scream, had both been punctured.
I stared at the body, just beginning to piece together what had happened, and the events that had led up to it. Two questions burned in my mind.
Did I have some hand in causing this murder? Should I have seen it coming?
Maybe the victim I was staring at had the answer—but
L.A. Times
writer Arnold Griner wouldn’t be able to help us again on the Mary Smith case. Now Griner was one of the victims.