by R. G. Belsky
“That was just a few weeks ago.”
“I know.”
“Anyone else?”
I took out a sheet of paper with the names Abbie had listed. I put it down on the desk in front of Dahlstrom. He read through the names.
“Okay, let me get this straight,” he said when he was finished. “You think that this Sign of the Z group killed Laura Marlowe thirty years ago and then killed this Kincaid woman last month? And along the way over the past three decades they may just have killed these other people too. Is that right?”
“It’s possible.”
“Do you have any proof of that?”
“No.”
“Any evidence of any kind?”
“Not really.
“So this is all just a theory of yours?”
“I’m kind of winging it here,” I admitted.
I told him everything I knew. About my conversation with Abbie, the one where she told me about her serial killer theory. About finding the Sign of the Z verses. About how Abbie seemed afraid of something and was carrying a gun for protection.
“She apparently thought there was a connection between the deaths of Laura Marlowe and all of the other people on that list. She was trying to find out what that connection was. Now she’s dead. Ergo, maybe she was killed by whoever murdered all those other people. There is a certain symmetry to it all, don’t you think?”
Dahlstrom stared at me blankly. He was probably about my age, but he looked a lot older—with a quickly receding hairline, a bit of a paunch that probably came from sitting behind a desk too much, and a colorless wardrobe. I figured him for a guy who was very cautious. Not the type to make a lot of waves in the department or play a hunch. But he was all I had to work with.
“Let me tell you about Sign of the Z,” he said. “First off, we’re talking about ancient history here. They haven’t even been around since the early ’80s. Like you said, the leader—this weirdo, Russell Zorn—was a Charles Manson wannabe. After the Sharon Tate killings and all the publicity over the Manson family, we got a lot of people who tried to be like Manson. Zorn called his group Sign of the Z—which fits nicely with his last name, huh?—and set himself up on an abandoned ranch out in the desert. People drifted in and out, but there was a hard core of regulars. Zorn; his sidekick, some guy named Bobby Mesa he hung out with; Zorn’s girlfriend, a spaced-out chick named Sally Easton; and about a half-dozen other men and women followers. He seemed to have some sort of hypnotic power over them, I have no idea why. Maybe because they were all strung out on drugs most of the time. But like I said, this was a long time ago.”
“What happened to all of them?”
“Sometime back in ’83 or ’84, I think, they robbed a convenience store in the valley. When the guy behind the counter didn’t open the cash register fast enough, Zorn shot him dead. Another worker hiding in the back of the store identified him to authorities.
“A whole SWAT team swooped down on their ranch. It turns out they were armed pretty heavily. They held off the cops for a couple of hours. When the SWAT guys did go in, they found them all dead except for Zorn, Mesa, and Zorn’s girlfriend. Two of them had been shot by police bullets, and the rest did some kind of weird mass suicide so they wouldn’t be arrested. Zorn and the girl surrendered. Some leaders, huh? Mesa somehow got away. But they eventually caught up with him too.
“Anyway, Zorn was convicted of first-degree murder, and he died in the gas chamber later. Mesa got a life sentence as an accomplice to murder. He was stabbed to death in prison a few years after that. The only one still alive is the girl. Her name’s Sally Easton. It came out at the trial that she was waiting outside in the car during the robbery, so they gave her a twenty-year sentence. She got out a while back, and now she’s a born-again Christian affiliated with some kind of church up in Barstow. It sounds kooky to me. Once a kook, always a kook, I guess. But at least she’s not killing people anymore.
“My point in all this is that it’s pretty hard to imagine people from this group carrying out a whole series of murders over the past thirty years, including the one that just happened in New York. They’re either all dead or in jail. When most of these other murders you’re talking about happened. Including Laura Marlowe’s death.”
“There could be another member of the group still out there,” I said.
“Unlikely.”
“But it is possible.”
“Anything’s possible.”
“So will you look into it for me?”
“Look into what?”
“The group. The other killings on this list. Just see if there’s any possible link between any of them.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes when you’re looking for something specific like this, you see things everybody else might have missed.”
“After thirty years?”
“Sure, why not?”
I handed him my card with my cell phone number as well as the name of the hotel where I was staying in Los Angeles written in the corner.
“Get in touch with me if you find out anything, lieutenant.”
“Now why would I do that?”
“The exchange of information is crucial to a free democracy,” I said.
Dahlstom made a face and looked down at my card.
“Does that charming personality of yours usually get the cops back in New York City to help you, Malloy?”
“Well . . .”
“It won’t here either,” he said.
* * *
When I got back to my hotel, I tried to figure out what to do next. There was a small balcony outside my room. I stood on it for a long time, thinking about Laura Marlowe. Below me, the evening traffic was starting to pick up on Wilshire Boulevard. Maybe the next Steven Spielberg was in one of those cars. Or a young Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, or Brad Pitt. The southern California sky was calm and still—and off in the distance I could see the hills of Hollywood. The Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Laura Marlowe had followed her dream here, and she wound up dead.
My phone rang. There was no caller ID visible, but I answered it anyway. What the hell did I have to lose?
“Is this Gil Malloy?” a woman’s voice at the other end said.
“Yes.”
“My name is Jackie Sinclair.”
Aha!
“I understand you have some business you’d like to discuss with me, Mr. Malloy.”
“Yes, I’m an attorney here from New York and I . . .”
“Meet me at the bar of the Beverly Wilshire hotel in an hour,” she said.
Then she hung up.
Chapter 27
THE bar at the Beverly Wilshire was everything a bar should be. The lounge was dark and spacious with a long mahogany bar running alongside one wall and a handful of small tables next to a window overlooking the entrance to the hotel. Soft jazz music was playing on a stereo system. There were about a dozen people in the place, most of them scattered around the tables and a few at the bar.
There was only one woman sitting by herself in the place. She was at a table by the window. I walked over to her.
“I’m Jackie Sinclair,” she said.
“Gil Malloy. As I said on the phone, I represent a lawyer in New York who . . .”
“So I heard.”
I sat down. She looked pretty much like she did in the newspaper picture that had been taken a few years ago. Like most of the people in Laura Marlowe’s life, she had to be well into her sixties by now. But she had a nice face with a deep California tan, she’d clearly had plastic surgery done over the years, and her body looked in good shape too. She was wearing a beige miniskirt, a Los Angeles Lakers T-shirt with cut-off sleeves, and high-heeled sandals. Her arms were tanned too, and there was a tiny tattoo on one of them. She looked like she’d been around. Even though I couldn’t make it into bed with S
herry DeConde, maybe I could score with this senior citizen. Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.
She was drinking a tequila. She asked me if I wanted one. I said sure. I figured I’d just go with the flow and see what happened.
“You said something about a lot of money I was going to get,” she said.
“Well, actually . . .”
“Actually, that’s all bullshit, isn’t it? Just a story you made up to meet with me. Not a very good one, to be honest with you. I’d have to be pretty stupid to believe it, and I’m not stupid. You might have come up with something a bit more original.”
“I kind of had to improvise in a hurry,” I said.
“The truth is your name is Gil Malloy, but that’s about the only honest thing you’ve told me so far. You don’t work for a law firm and there is no inheritance from a long lost relative. You’re a newspaper reporter for the New York Daily News.”
“How did you know that?” I asked.
“There’s a video security camera outside my house. It took a picture of your car. I ran the license plates with a friend of mine in the state government, and it came back as a rental that had billed to the New York Daily News. So I called the Daily News and asked for Gil Malloy. They said you were out of town working on a story.” She shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not stupid. It wasn’t exactly brain surgery to figure all that out.”
She took a drink of her tequila. “So what’s this all about anyway?”
“Glimmer Productions.”
“My God, I’d forgotten all about that. ‘Artistic videos for the serious connoisseur of the human body.’ That’s how we billed the stuff we sold. The times were different back then. But every society has its own brand of pornography. People never change.”
“So you owned Glimmer Productions?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you have any partners? Any silent owners who didn’t want to bear the public scrutiny of being upfront about their involvement in the business?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Sure you are. From what I understand, Glimmer Productions was probably bankrolled by the mob. They called the shots. You were the front person. The person who made the operation look at least semi-legitimate.”
“What’s your point?”
“I want to know who the money man was.”
“I’m not talking to you about this.”
“Was it Thomas Rizzo?” I asked.
“I’m certainly not talking to you about Rizzo.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not a healthy thing to do.”
“So you’re saying it was Rizzo?”
“No, I’m not. But even if it was, so what? More to the point, why does a reporter from New York come all the way out here to ask me about a company that I ran thirty years ago?”
“I think it’s connected to a story I’m working on.”
“What story?”
“The death of Laura Marlowe.”
“The movie star?”
“Yes. Did you know her?”
“I may have run into her a couple of times at parties.”
“That’s all?”
“Why are you asking me these questions?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure why you agreed to see me. Maybe you wanted to find out what I knew. Maybe you were just curious or bored or wanted to see where it all went. But you are a smart lady. If you called the Daily News and found out where I was, you probably also checked and discovered I’d written a big story this past Sunday for the News on Laura Marlowe. You and I both know why I came here. So, at this point, let’s not waste any more time. I’m saying to you what you said to me when I sat down here. Let’s cut out the bullshit, huh?”
Jackie Sinclair stared at me.
“Well, well,” she said, “you’ve got quite the mouth on you, haven’t you?”
“Everybody I meet out here keeps telling me that.”
“And in New York everyone just accepts it?”
“Actually they say it there too.”
She smiled, finished off her tequila, and ordered another one. She was drinking a lot faster now. My kind of girl.
“So what is it you want to know?” she asked.
“Tell me everything you know about Laura Marlowe,” I said.
Chapter 28
SHE talked about herself first. There is a pace to any interview, a rhythm that you need to follow to get the subject to open up to you. It is a dance of sorts, a series of steps that culminate—if a reporter does it right—in a good story. It was a dance I had done many times before. I knew the steps.
“I came out here to try to make it as an actress,” Sinclair said. “From Birmingham, Alabama, if you can believe that. I had a nice little southern drawl back then. It’s pretty much gone now. But it used to drive the guys wild, they told me. So I really laid it on thick when I went on auditions. Back then, I was like thousands of other girls here. I had such big dreams. I was just a couple of months past my eighteenth birthday, and I was young and naive. I thought I’d get discovered right away, become a big movie star, and all the people back in Birmingham would see my picture on the cover of magazines very soon. The funny thing is it almost happened that way. Almost.
“I got parts right away. Like I said, they loved that southern accent. My first part in a movie was small, I only had one line—but I delivered it like I was going for an Oscar. The parts got bigger after that. I did about a half-dozen pictures, a few TV episodes, and some commercials. Then I got my big break. A co-starring role in one of those beach party movies. I was going to be the lead actress’s best friend. It was a juicy role, which might have catapulted me into being a real star. But there was one catch. I had to sleep with the producer.”
“I’ve heard about the Hollywood casting couch,” I said. “Is that what we’re talking about here?”
She nodded. “Oh, I’d done it before. I’d slept with producers to get as far as I had. I knew it was just a reality of life out here then. I knew it was all part of the game you had to play to make it in Hollywood. And I was willing to play the game to get what I wanted.”
“So what went wrong?”
“This guy—the producer—took me to a house up in the Hollywood Hills. He was really nice at first. He took out champagne, and we drank it and talked about all sorts of things. The movie. My career. How beautiful he thought I was. He promised me wonderful things. Then he started to kiss me. Well, he’d had quite a bit to drink by this point and he couldn’t perform in the bedroom. That made him mad. He had to blame somebody, so he blamed me. He started calling me all sorts of terrible things. I decided I better leave. That’s when things got rough.
“He grabbed me, pulled me away from the door, and shoved me back onto the bed. He tried to force himself on me, but he still couldn’t do anything. That made him even madder. So he started to hit me. I remember his fist hitting my face over and over. Then I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed. I found out later he’d panicked and dumped me off at the emergency room. One of my eyes was swollen shut, but I managed to get it open enough to look at myself in the mirror. I was a mess. Bruises, scars, bandages. There was no way I was going to be able to go in front of a camera for a long time until it all healed.
“The next day the producer came to my room. He said they were going to begin shooting the picture in a few days, and he’d have to give the part to someone else. He said there’d be other parts for me in the future though if I just stayed cool. Staying cool meant not going to the police or telling anybody what happened. When he left, there was a wad of cash on the table next to my bed. He never said he was sorry though. Not once. If he’d just said he was sorry, maybe I wouldn’t have done what I did.”
“What did you do?”
“I told the police everything.
I swore out a complaint for his arrest on assault and battery charges. I didn’t want what happened to me to happen to anybody else. I didn’t want him to get away with it.”
“Did they arrest him?”
She shook her head no. “The cops came back to me the next day. They said there was insufficient evidence to proceed. They said he claimed I’d shown up at his door, offering to have sex with him in exchange for a part in his picture. He said I’d attacked him when he said no. He said he knew nothing about the bruises on my face, that I must have gotten them later from a pimp or someone else. He even threatened to file a counter police complaint against me for harassment.”
“And he had enough clout with the cops to pull that off?”
“This guy was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. What do you think?”
“What happened then?”
“I tried to get on with my life. I healed, got my good looks back, and tried to get other parts. But suddenly there weren’t any more parts. Everything my agent tried to put me up for they said no. ‘What’s going on here,’ my agent finally asked me. So I told him what happened. When I finished the story, he just shook his head sadly. He said I’d really screwed myself. He said I’d never get hired in Hollywood again. The next day, he sent me a letter saying he was no longer my agent. The producer had blackballed me all around Hollywood. If I wanted to live here, I was going to have to do something else besides being a movie star.”
She looked down at her tequila, picked it up, and took another gulp. She seemed a long ways away. Maybe she was thinking about those long-ago days. About how scared and confused she was back then. But then she smiled across the table at me. She didn’t seem scared or confused at all. There was a look of satisfaction on her face.
“So I decided that I was tired of being the victim,” she said. “If someone had that much power in Hollywood to be able to do what he did to me, then I wanted to have that kind of power too. That’s what I did. First in the porn industry. Then in real estate. I became a player in this town. Money, power, influence—that’s what it’s all about. I became one of the hunters, not the hunted.”
