Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 16 - The Murder Book

by The Murder Book(Lit)

  'He came on to you?' said Milo.

  'I never gave him a chance, but his intentions were obvious -leering, undressing me mentally. Plus, I knew what he'd done to Janie.'

  'He abused Janie sexually?'

  'Only when he was drunk,' said Waters, in mocking singsong. 'She never told me until shortly before she was... before I last saw her. I think what made her talk about it was she'd had a bad experience a month or so before that. She was hitching, got picked up by some deviant who took her to a hotel downtown, tied her up, had his way with her. When she first told me about it, she didn't seem very upset. Kind of blase, really, and at first I didn't believe her because Janie was always making things up. Then she pulled up her jeans and her top and showed me the rope marks where he'd tied up her ankles and her wrists. Her neck, too. When I saw that, I said, "Jesus, he could've strangled you." And she just clammed up and refused to say any more about it.'

  'What did she tell you about the man who did this?'

  'That he was young and nice-looking and drove a great car -that's why she said she went with him. But to tell the truth, she probably would've gone with anyone. A lot of the time Janie was out of it - stoned or drunk. She didn't have much in the way of inhibitions.'

  She removed her glasses, played with the sidepieces, glanced at the photos of her family. 'Some lawyer I am, running my mouth. Before we go any further, I need your assurance that anything I tell you will be kept confidential. My husband's a semipublic figure.'

  'What does he do?'

  'Jim's an aide to the governor. Liaison to the Highway Department. I keep my maiden name for work, but anything unsavory could still be traced back to him.'

  'I'll do my best, ma'am.'

  Waters shook her head. 'That's not good enough.' She stood. 'I'm afraid this meeting is adjourned.'

  Milo crossed his legs. 'Ms Waters, all we came here for are your recollections about Janie Ingalls. No assumption was made of any criminal involvement on your part-'

  'You bet your boots no assumption was made.' Waters jabbed a finger. 'That didn't even cross my mind, for God's sake. But what happened to Janie twenty years ago isn't my problem. Safeguarding my privacy is. Please leave.'

  'Ms Waters, you know as well as I do that I can't guarantee confidentiality. That's the DA's authority. I'm being honest, and I'd appreciate the same from you. If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. And refusing to cooperate won't shield your husband. If I wanted to complicate his life, all I'd have to do is talk to my boss and he'd make a call, and...'

  He showed her his palms.

  Waters slapped her hands on her hips. Her stare was cold and steady. 'Why are you doing this?'

  'In order to find out who murdered Janie Ingalls. You're right about one thing. It was obscene. She was tortured, burned with cigarettes, mutilat-'

  'No, no, no! None of that shock treatment, give me some credit.'

  Milo's palms pressed together. 'This has become needlessly adversarial, Ms Waters. Just tell me what you know, and I'll do my utmost to keep you out of it. That's the best I can offer. The alternative means a bit more overtime for me and a lot more complication for you.'

  'You have no jurisdiction in New Mexico,' said Melinda Waters. 'Technically, you're trespassing.'

  'Technically, you're still a material witness, and last time I checked New Mexico had diplomatic relations with California.'

  Waters looked at her family again, sat back down, put her glasses back on, mumbled, 'Shit.'

  The three of us sat in silence for a full minute before she said, 'This isn't fair. I'm not proud of the kind of kid I was back then, and I'd like to forget it.'

  I said, 'We've all been teenagers.'

  'Well, I was a rotten teenager. A total screwup and a stoner, just like Janie. That's what drew us together. Bad behavior - Jesus, I don't think a day went by when we weren't getting loaded. And... other things that give me a migraine when I think about them. But I pulled myself out of it - in fact, the process started the day after Janie and I split up.'

  'At the party?' said Milo.

  Waters grabbed for another pen, changed her mind, played with a drawer-pull - lifting the brass and letting it drop, once, twice, three times.

  She said, 'I've got kids of my own now. I set limits, am probably too strict because I know what's out there. In ten years, I haven't touched anything stronger than Chardonnay. I love my husband. He's going places. My practice is rewarding -1 don't see why any of that should be derailed because of mistakes I made twenty years ago.'

  'Neither do I,' said Milo. 'I'm not taking notes, and none of that goes in any file. I just want to know what happened to Janie Ingalls that Friday night. And anything else you can tell me about the man who raped her downtown.'

  'I told you everything I know about him.'

  'Young and nice-looking with a nice car.'

  'The car could've been Janie's fantasy.'

  'How young?'

  'She didn't say.'

  'Race?'

  'I assume he was white, because Janie didn't say he wasn't. And she would've. She was a bit of a racist - got it from her father.'

  'Any other physical description?'

  'No.'

  'A fancy car,' said Milo. 'What kind?'

  'I think she said a Jaguar, but I can't be sure. With fur rugs - I do remember that because Janie talked about how her feet sank into the rug. But with Janie, who knows? I'm trying to tell you: she was always fantasizing.'

  'About what?'

  'Mostly about getting loaded and partying with rock stars.'

  'That ever happen?'

  She laughed. 'Not hardly. Janie was a sad little girl from the wrong part of Hollywood.'

  'A young guy with a Jaguar,' said Milo. 'What else?'

  'That's all I know,' said Waters. 'Really.'

  'Which hotel did he take her to?'

  'She just said it was downtown, in an area full of bums. She also

  said the guy seemed to know the place - the desk clerk tossed him a key the moment he walked in. But she didn't think he was actually staying there because the room he took her to didn't look lived in. He wasn't keeping any clothes there, and the bed wasn't even covered. Just a mattress. And rope. He'd put the rope in a dresser

  drawer.'

  'She didn't try to escape when she saw that?'

  Waters shook her head. 'He gave her a joint on the ride over. A huge one, high-grade, maybe laced with hash, because she was really floating and that's what hash usually did to her. She told me the whole experience was like watching someone else. Even when he pushed her down on the bed and started tying her up.'

  'Her arms and legs and her neck.'

  'That's where the marks were.'

  'What happened next?'

  Anger flashed behind Waters's eyeglass lenses. 'What do you think? He did his thing with her. Used every orifice.'

  'She said that?'

  'In cruder terms.' The gray in her eyes had deepened, as if an internal light had been dampened. 'She said she knew what he was doing, but didn't even feel it.'

  'And she was blase about it.'

  'At first she was. Later - a few days later - she got loaded on Southern Comfort and started talking about it again. Not crying. Angry. At herself. Do you know what really bugged her? Not so much what he did to her, she was out of it during the whole thing. What made her mad was that when he was finished, he didn't drive her all the way back home, just dropped her off in East Hollywood and she had to walk a couple of miles. That ticked her off. But even there, she blamed herself. Said something along the lines of, "It must be something about me, makes people treat me like that. Even him" I said, "Who's him?" and she got this really furious look on her face, and said, "Him. Bowie." That freaked me out - first the deviant, now incest. I asked her how long that had been going on, but she clammed up again. I kept nagging her to tell me, and finally she told me to shut up or she'd tell my mother what a slut I was.'

  She laughed.
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  'Which was a viable threat. I was no poster child for wholesome

  living. And even though my mother was no Betty Crocker, she wasn't like Bowie, she would've cared. She would've come down on me, hard.'

  'Bowie didn't care,' said Milo.

  'Bowie was scum, total lowlife. I guess that explains why Janie would do anything to avoid going home.'

  I thought of the bareness of Janie's room. Said, 'Did she have a crash pad, or somewhere else she stayed?'

  'Nowhere permanent. She'd sleep at my house, crash once in a while in those abandoned apartments north of Hollywood Boulevard. Sometimes she'd be gone for days and wouldn't tell me where she'd been. Still, the day after the party, after Janie and I had split up, I called Bowie. I despised the ground that lowlife walked on, but even so, I wanted to know Janie was okay. That's what I was trying to tell you: I made an attempt. But no one answered.'

  'When did you split up?'

  'Soon after we got there. I cared about Janie. We were both so screwed up, that was our bond. I guess I had a bad feeling about the party - about her just disappearing in the middle of all that commotion. I never really forgot about her. Years later, when I was in college and learned how to use a computer, I tried to find her. Then after I got to law school and had access to legal databases, I tapped into all kinds of municipal records. California and the neighboring states. Property rolls, tax files, death notices. But she was nowhere-'

  She picked up Milo's card. 'L.A. Homicide means she was murdered in L.A. So why wasn't an L.A. death notice ever filed?' 'Good question, ma'am.'

  'Oh,' said Waters. She sat back. 'This is more than a reopened case, isn't it? Something got really screwed up.' Milo shrugged.

  'Great. Wonderful. This is going to suck me in and screw me up no matter what I do, isn't it?'

  'I'll do my best to prevent that, ma'am.'

  'You sound almost sincere.' She rubbed her forehead, took a bottle of Advil out of a desk drawer, extricated a tablet, and swallowed it dry. 'What else do you want from me?'

  'The party,' said Milo. 'How'd you and Janie hear about it, for starters.'

  'Just street talk, kids talking. There was always plenty of that, especially as the weekend approached. Everyone trying to figure out the best way to party hearty. So many of us hated our homes, would do anything to be away, Janie and I were a twosome, party-wise. Sometimes we'd end up at squat-raves - promoters sneaking into an abandoned building, or using an outdoors spot - some remote corner of Griffith Park, or Hansen Dam. We're talking bare minimum in terms of entertainment: some tone-deaf band playing for free, cheap munchies, lots of drugs. Mostly lots of drugs. Because the promoters were really dealers, and their main goal was bulk sales. Other times, though, it would turn out to be a real party, in someone's house. An open invitation, or even if it wasn't, there was usually no problem crashing.'

  She smiled. 'Occasionally, we got bounced, but a girl could almost always crash and get away with it.'

  'The party that night was one of those,' said Milo. 'Someone's house.'

  'Someone's big house, a mansion, and the talk on the street was mucho drugs. Janie and I figured we'd check it out. To us a trip to Bel Air was like blasting off to a different planet. Janie was going on and on about partying with rich kids, maybe finding a rich boyfriend who'd give her all the dope she wanted. As I said, she loved to fantasize. The truth is we were both such losers, no wheels, no money. So we did what we always did: hitched. We didn't even have the address, guessed once we got to Bel Air we'd figure it out. I picked Janie up at her place Friday afternoon, and we hung out on Hollywood Boulevard most of the day - playing arcade games, shoplifting cosmetics, panhandling for spare change but we didn't get much. After dark, we walked back down to Sunset where the best hitching was, but the first corner we tried was near some hookers and they threatened to cut our asses, so we moved west - between La Brea and Fairfax, where all the guitar stores are. I remember that, because while we waited for a ride, we were looking at guitars in windows and saying how cool it would be if we started a girl band and got rich. No matter that neither of us had a lick of talent. Anyway, finally - we must've

  been waiting there over an hour - we got picked up.'

  "What time?' said Milo.

  'Must've been nine, ten.'

  'Who picked you up?'

  'A college student - nerdy type, said he went to Caltech, but he was heading to the U because he had a date with a girl there and that was really close to Bel Air. He had to tell us that, because we had no idea - I don't think either of us had ever been west of La Cienega, unless we were taking the bus straight to the beach, or, in my case, when I visited my father at the Navy base in Point Mugu. The nerd was a nice guy. Shy, probably picked us up on impulse and regretted it. Because we immediately started hassling him -turning the radio to our station, blasting it loud, teasing him -flirting. Asking him if he wanted to come to the party with us instead of some lame date with a college girl. Being real obnoxious. He got embarrassed, and that cracked us up. Also, we were hoping he might take us all the way to the party, because we still had no idea where it was. So we kept nagging him, but he said no, he liked his girlfriend. I remember Janie getting really rude about that, saying something to the effect of "She's probably colder than ice. I can give you something she can't." That was the wrong thing to say. He stopped the car at Stone Canyon and Sunset and ordered us out. I started to, but Janie held me back, started ragging on him to take us to the house, and that just made him angrier. Janie was like that, she could be extremely pushy, had a real talent for getting on people's nerves. The nerd started shouting and shoved Janie and we got out and she flipped him off as he drove away.'

  'Stone Canyon and Sunset. Close to the party.'

  'We didn't know that. We were ignorant. And drunk. Back on

  the boulevard, we'd also boosted a bottle of Southern Comfort,

  had guzzled our way through most of it. I hated the stuff, to me it

  tasted like peaches and cough syrup. But Janie loved it. It was her

  favorite high. She said it was what Janis Joplin had been into and

  she was into Janis Joplin because she had some idea that her mom

  had been like Janis Joplin, back in the hippie days. That she'd

  named Janie after Janis.'

  'Another fantasy,' I said.

  She nodded. 'She needed them. Her mom abandoned her - ran

  away with a black guy when Janie was five or six, and Janie never saw her again. Maybe that's another reason Janie always made racist comments.'

  Milo said, 'What'd the two of you do after you were dropped off?' 'Started walking up Stone Canyon and promptly got lost. There were no sidewalks, and the lighting was very bad. And no one was around to ask directions. All those incredible properties and not a soul in sight, none of the noises you hear in a real neighborhood. It was spooky. But we were having fun with it - an adventure. Once we saw a Bel Air Patrol car driving our way, so we hid behind some

  trees.'

  She frowned. 'Complete idiocy. Thank God my boys aren't

  hearing this.'

  'How'd you find the party?'

  'We walked in circles for a while, finally ended up right where we started, back at Sunset. And that's when the second car picked us up. A Cadillac, turning onto Stone Canyon. The driver was a black guy, and I was sure Janie wouldn't want to get in - with her it was always "nigger" this, "nigger" that. But when the guy rolled down the window and shot us this big grin, and said, "You girls looking to party?" Janie was the first one in.'

  'What do you remember about the driver?'

  'Early twenties, tall, thin - for some reason when I think of him I always think of Jimi Hendrix. Not that he was Hendrix's spitting image, but there was a general resemblance. He had that rangy, mellow thing going on, loose and confident. Played his music really loud and moving his head in time.'

  'A Cadillac,' said Milo.

  'And a newer one but not a pimpmobile. Big conserva
tive sedan, well taken care of, too. Shiny, fresh-smelling - sweet-smelling. Lilacs. Like it belonged to an old woman. I remember thinking that, wondering if he'd stolen it from an old woman. Because he sure didn't match the car, dressed the way he was in this ugly denim suit with rhinestones all over it, all these gold chains.'

  'What color?'

  'Something pale.'

  Milo opened his briefcase, removed Willie Burns's mug shot, handed it across the desk.

  Melinda Waters's eyes got big. 'That's him. He's the one who killed Janie?'

  'He's someone we're looking for.'