City of Lost Girls Read online

  But sitting outside eating eggs Benedict and drinking coffee and juice as the sightseers mingled with the Rollerbladers and the skateboarders and the dog walkers, he realized the last time he had done this was in 1994, on the Tuesday morning the news of Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ronald Goldman’s murder in Brentwood appeared in the L.A. Times. Loy remembered sitting in pretty much the same spot, facing the Santa Monica Pier, eating pretty much the same breakfast, poring over the details of the crime: the history of domestic violence, the bloodstained glove, the flight to Chicago—well, it wouldn’t take the greatest detective on the force to nail that down tight, Loy remembered thinking as he turned the page and read the account of a man’s body being found in a house on Westminster Avenue in Venice, and it occurred to him that that was where his boss and mentor CJ Ramsey lived, a split second before the dead man was named in the second paragraph as Charles J. Ramsey. He leaped to his feet and wiped egg yolk and Benedict sauce from his mouth and threw some bills on the table and ran up Horizon and across Abbot Kinney and Electric to Westminster and Sixth, all the time thinking, why had no one called him, why had no one let him know?

  There were scraps of yellow police tape on the steel door frame of the modernist concrete bunker CJ had called home, and Ed Loy stood on the street staring at them, realizing the crime scene had been preserved and released and he had missed it all, missed it because, in those days before mobile phones, he had taken a date to a new movie, Speed, and then to dinner, and one thing had led to another and he had been at her place ever since, two nights without checking his calls or watching the news. He stood and caught his breath as the door opened and a woman in a black sheath dress with blond hair tied back beneath a black lace mantilla stood in the porch and waited for him.

  As he sat here now, Loy remembered that moment so well, the look Barbara Ramsey gave him, grief-stricken but indomitable, wounded but forgiving, waiting for Loy to comfort and take care of her, and assuming he would, of course, assuming, at some level that could not be displayed, even between them, not yet, but that she took for granted, that he would take CJ’s place, not just at the agency, but in this house, by her side, in her bed. And didn’t she have every right to expect that? Hadn’t he been in her bed, and she in his, every chance they got those past six months? Wasn’t Barbara in love with him? So in love she had killed her husband so they could be together. When had he begun to suspect her? Was it after he’d gone in to be interviewed by the Santa Monica Police Department? Once he’d gotten hold of his girlfriend, a dental hygienist in Ocean Park, and she’d provided the cops with an alibi that convinced them he was, if not exactly in the clear, at least not involved in the physical act of murder, and once he’d made no bones about the affair, the cops made it very clear that they didn’t just suspect, they wouldn’t be looking for anyone else in connection with the murder. Oh, they had asked questions about recent cases the agency had worked, divorce, mostly, and Loy had suggested various candidates who had felt so aggrieved to have been caught cheating on their partners they might have been moved to violence, but he wasn’t sure he believed in the likelihood of any of them having murdered CJ himself, and he suspected his lack of conviction communicated itself to the cops.

  He knew they felt he was guilty, too, if only of standing to profit by CJ’s death—the business, the widow—and he began to feel guilty there in that hot, stuffy room in police headquarters on Olympic Boulevard, guilty that he didn’t and hadn’t given a damn about Barbara, her hopes and dreams, about anything much beyond the momentary thrill, amounting to obsession, of what she brought to the bedroom. If she had killed CJ for him, then the cops were right: even if he didn’t plan to profit from it, he bore his share of the guilt. When had he begun to suspect her? When she opened the door to the house on Westminster. In that instant.

  It took him six months. Six months of looking like he’d been in league with her, six months of cocktails at Shutters and dining at Chinois on Main and taking every crack and threat the SMPD could throw at him, six months of seeing the agency almost go under because every regular claims adjuster and divorce attorney of CJ’s had heard the rumors and refused to pass work his way. He found it hard suppressing his own grief, because for Ed Loy, whose father had been lost to him long before he disappeared for real, Charles J. Ramsey had been like an elder brother, in truth like a father to him. And of course, his guilt over the affair would have made it difficult for him to grieve in the first place, but this masquerade he had embarked on made it grotesque; he had found so many friends through Charlie, and to be blanked and shunned by each of them, often several in the course of one evening, was very upsetting.

  The worst was one night in Mother MacGillacuddy’s, the Irish bar he had worked behind for ten years. He had come there in the hope he could let his guard down and find a little slice of home. Admittedly he had been a bit drunk, but Mother M’s was the kind of place where it wasn’t important if you could hold your drink, so long as you could hold your glass. And they wouldn’t serve him. Serve him, they wouldn’t even look at him. Finally, because he had begun to shout, the manager, Brian O’Rourke, whose brother Kevin Ed had been at school with, clasped a firm hand on his forearm and swept him through a crowded bar—crowded with faces every one of which he had known for years—and out into the lane around the side.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, Ed,” Brian said. “And because you’re not, because you’ve lost even that, we have to be ashamed on your behalf. Go home.”

  We have to be ashamed on your behalf. With that broad York Road accent, as if he was speaking on behalf of the people of Dublin. It still made him plunge his head into his hands when he thought of it. Was that the worst? He would have had to compile a list of low points and compare and contrast, and in the intervening years, he somehow hadn’t amassed the wherewithal of spirit and guts to do that.

  Six months it took. And he hadn’t elicited a single fact, a single hint as to how it had been done in all of that time. A burglary gone wrong was what it looked like: two cameras and twelve hundred dollars in cash and some jewelry stolen, Charlie wakes and interrupts the intruders, signs of a scuffle, Charlie gets shot four times, 9mm Parabellum cartridges, classic gang rounds. The alarm had not been set, but there had been a spate of alarms going off at all hours in that neighborhood, and local residents had been increasingly barring their windows and doors and hoping for the best, so that was not in itself suspicious. A window had been forced. Barbara had been at the Mark Taper Forum at a celebration party for Tony Kushner, who had won an expected second Tony Award in New York that day for his play Perestroika, the second part of Angels in America. Charlie had taken two Zimovane, had been asleep half an hour or so, and had a blood alcohol content of 0.23 percent, where 0.4 percent is generally a lethal intake. He had a firearm by his bed, but the combination of alcohol and sedatives had hindered his ability to reach it in time.

  All of this was plausible: Charlie was an alcoholic who had trouble sleeping. There was no other physical evidence. The SMPD figured the reason he didn’t go for his weapon was that he didn’t think he’d need to defend himself against his wife, and wanted to bring a case against Barbara, but no one at the district attorney’s office thought there was a hope in hell: as far as they were concerned, it just another gangland break-in; if Charlie had scarfed a third Zimovane or had another shot of Scotch, he’d’ve slept through it all. Token raids were made on Crip homes and hangouts; none of the stolen goods were recovered.

  And then, through no great ability or endeavor on his part, through nothing but dumb luck, Loy caught a break. He had tracked down a girl from Ann Arbor called Karen Short, who had run away from her suffocating family, her controlling mother and passive father and perfect straight-A sister, had run away and wanted to run right back, now she had become Alicia Streams and her life had turned into a round of increasingly badly paid, increasingly extreme porn clips—there was a hierarchy even in the San Fernando Valley, and entry level mattered just as much as i
t did in the legitimate film industry whose infernal shadow it was, and if you started your career with group anal sex, there was only one direction you were headed.

  The charmer who had introduced her to this world of glamour and distinction called his production company Ramrod, and it was Loy’s good fortune that the 18 USC 2257 Records Keeping Compliance Statement that every porn producer is obliged to make, certifying that his performers are eighteen or over, was faulty in respect of Alicia Streams, aka Karen Short, who had traded favors with her elder sister’s straight-A boyfriend in return for an extremely convincing forged ID, and was in fact seventeen years and eight months when she made, Loy didn’t want to remind himself what it had been called, her debut, but it filmed her at seventeen doing things that could see Mr. Ramrod, who called himself D-Rod for reasons Loy didn’t want to think about, locked away for a very long time indeed.

  And D-Rod said, can we trade?

  And Loy said, what have you got? (Because frankly, Karen Short had been seventeen rising, and she looked about twenty-five, and she wasn’t on anything stronger than speed and coke and a few ludes, which in the Valley amounted pretty much to sobriety, so it wasn’t as if D-Rod had done anything but make a genuine mistake. Apart from being a scum-sucking sleazebucket, of course, but that was all legal and aboveboard in the great state of California, hence the official system of compliance.)

  And D-Rod said, I can give you that lady.

  That lady being Barbara Ramsey.

  In the time between first and second visits to the house in Glendale that was D-Rod’s residence, D-Rod had done his homework on Ed Loy and made a startling discovery: that assorted business associates of D-Rod’s had been on and off friends of CJ Ramsey’s widow Barbara for many years, those years including the married years up until she met Ed Loy, on account of Mrs. Ramsey taking a special interest in the particular physical attributes of certain kinds of performers, if Ed knew what he meant. Ed said he did know what he meant, and D-Rod said no offense, and Ed said no offense given, and D-Rod said well, good for you, man, which wasn’t quite what Ed had meant but never mind. In any case, one of the associates Mrs. Ramsey had been involved with about a year back, name of Richard “The Hose” Hill, had contracted the virus but was continuing to perform, with condoms generally but not always, and how Mrs. Ramsay found out was, she wanted to chug his load but he wouldn’t let her and when she wouldn’t take no for an answer the Hose had to come clean, so to speak, and alert her to his HIV status.

  And within a few weeks, Mrs. Ramsey saw her opportunity. She told the Hose, who had a gangbanging thing going on both sides of the camera and was said to have Shoreline Crip connections, that she needed a piece. Otherwise she would tell what she knew and his life in porn would be over and he could be looking at jail time on account of some of the actresses he worked with getting sick. Piece needed to be an identifiable gang weapon that five-oh would connect straight off to local bangers, but would never find, because he would collect it from her after use. Some hassle would come down on the Crips, but strictly low level.

  So the Hose got her a TEC–9 semiautomatic.

  And Mrs. Ramsey blows her husband away and the Hose is waiting in a car parked at the Music Center that houses the Mark Taper Forum, and she parks back there and returns the freshly fired pistol to him. The pistol is clean of prints.

  He had something on her but she had something on him. Crisscross, like in that movie. Only what she got on him is more powerful than what he got on her. It’s only his word against hers, and what is he, some low-rent porndog with AIDS? She was so confident, rather than toss the weapon and risk being spotted by some passerby, she insisted the Hose take it back.

  The Hose has still got it. Don’t mean a thing without some way of connecting it to the lady.

  No CCTV at the Music Center that night. That’s how Mrs. Ramsey thought of the venue, she’d been there a couple weeks before, got into a conversation with the attendant in the booth on Grand Avenue, he said for safety’s sake he’d recommend valet parking at the Hope Street entrance on account of how the closed-circuit system they had installed had all sorts of problems that would take months to resolve. The cameras were up, but they weren’t shooting.

  What the Hose did was, he got a cameraman buddy to park across the way and use a handheld camera to shoot the lady crossing to the Hose’s car and sitting into the backseat. He couldn’t pick up Mrs. Ramsey dumping the TEC–9, but he got her leaving, and then the Hose getting out of his car. The tape made the connection between them.

  The Hose was ready to come clean about his status anyway: he had found God, and his pastor had advised him that it was not enough just to repent, he needed to make amends to everyone he had harmed, like you do in the twelve steps. And the Hose wondered whether it was right to tell what Mrs. Ramsey had done, because he wasn’t supposed to make amends if they brought harm to anyone. But he reckoned the one who had harm done to him was Mr. Ramsey, on account of him ending up dead, so the Hose was ready to talk.

  Was that enough?

  Not quite.

  Loy had spent a lot of time already trying to break Barbara’s alibi for that night. Many of the guests at the Taper Forum’s Kushner party were too important or busy to consider talking to him; some of those who would meet him either didn’t know Barbara Ramsey or didn’t remember her that night; those who did remembered her being there but not when she left; three said she was definitely there at the end, and the coat check girl specifically remembered her, because there was some confusion over which coat was hers, and Barbara had gotten angry, before realizing she had forgotten herself which coat she had worn; she apologized and gave the girl a big tip. Loy realized now that this must have been a charade staged to nail her alibi tight. There would be no record of her leaving the car park or returning. Loy doubted very much that the amateur film shot by the Hose’s buddy would be admissible in court, even if, as D-Rod claimed, the cameraman was one of the best in the business and well used to shooting scenes in car parks. The SMPD confirmed this to Loy when he went to them with everything D-Rod had told them. They also said since Richard Hill had gangland connections, it was more logical to assume that if he was in possession of the murder weapon, he had committed the murder himself.

  In the end, Loy had worn a wire, and played the part of a jealous lover, and, sticking roughly to the truth, but avoiding any reference to Charlie’s murder, charged Barbara with infidelity and Barbara, who was desperately in love with Ed Loy now and had jettisoned all her playmates and wanted to be true, finally, tearfully, confessed to a relationship with Richard Hill.

  Was that enough? The cops had the murder weapon, they had the confession of a connection to the man who held the weapon, which automatically gave the Hose’s testimony a credibility it would otherwise have lacked. They had no physical evidence, but they felt that yes, they had enough to make a case now, and the DA agreed.

  The defense and the prosecution initially agreed on one thing: Barbara Ramsey’s passion for Ed Loy lay at the center of everything that happened. The prosecution case was that Barbara Ramsey’s midlife passion for a younger man overwhelmed her judgment and caused her to plan and execute a ruthless murder. Initially, the defense sought to deny that Barbara had anything to do with the murder, and in cross-examination did as much as it could to implicate Richard Hill in the crime. Loy found himself cast by the defense as a feckless, callous figure toying cruelly with the affections of a vulnerable older woman who had been grievously neglected by her alcoholic husband. This was a pitch to the women on the jury, and it seemed to have some effect; Loy himself in cross-examination presented a shifty, shamefaced figure who denied any role in murder but was apparently content to be portrayed as a complete and utter shit.

  But the prosecution had not rested, and with the help of D-Rod, uncovered at least three other porn performers with criminal sheets willing to testify to intimate relationships with Barbara Ramsey, and at least one who claimed the subject of firearms had been rai
sed. It became clear that Barbara had been a regular in singles bars in North Hollywood and around the southern end of the Valley. And while none of this made her a murderer, it certainly complicated and qualified her image as a woman swept off her feet by sudden passion, and lent D-Rod’s testimony enhanced credibility.

  As the trial progressed, Loy found himself soul-sick with the reek of it all, with the thoughtless way he had behaved, with the memory of other women he had treated in this fashion, used just as functionally as Barbara used her playmates in the Valley. But Loy had dressed it up, had let Barbara believe he cared, had maybe even kidded himself on that he cared, too. He knew Barbara wasn’t the victim here, that she hadn’t been driven to the brink of madness by love for him, but she had committed murder, and that was a kind of madness he hadn’t thought her capable of. And while she deserved to be punished, and he had worked hard to bring her to justice, he couldn’t join the chorus against her.

  He didn’t need to. For all that the prosecution case was weak, and notwithstanding the defense’s skill at casting Barbara Ramsey as a classic lost woman of a certain age, disappointed in love and in life, the fact remained that they had built a strategy around pleading not guilty to murder, and where a voluntary manslaughter plea would probably have succeeded, resulting in a much shorter sentence and eligibility for parole, the jury eventually found Barbara Ramsey guilty of murder, and she got life.

  That was quite a wave of memory to break over a man’s head and his breakfast not eaten. His eggs had gone cold, the fat had congealed on his ham and his coffee tasted bitter. The sun would burn the mist away eventually, but it was taking its time; there was a salt chill in the air, and the tourists on Ocean Front Walk looked like mutinous overgrown children in their shorts and their colored tops, promised a slice of Californian sunshine and bounty that was unaccountably being withheld from them; Ed Loy smiled at their confusion and disappointment and put his jacket back on. He pushed his breakfast away and lit a cigarette and thought about what had happened after the trial: how, once the guilty verdict was in, all the men who had shunned him welcomed him back with open arms, but how so many women had difficulty meeting his eye; how the agency soared on the back of its sudden notoriety, but attracted the wrong kind of clients, amoral sleazebags with too much money who assumed Ed Loy was just like them, and would be on their side if the price was right; how he went to work every day with rage in his head and shame in his heart. Most of all, he thought of the look Barbara Ramsey had given him across the courtroom when the jury foreman read out the guilty verdict. He knew what she had done, she seemed to say, but did he know what he had done? Did he know how he was going to live with it?