The Murder Book (34 page)

“L.A.,” said the receptionist. “The police. You’ve come all that way to talk to Mel.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her eyes scanned the card. “Homicide.” No surprise. No inflection at all. She reached for the phone.

Melinda Waters was five-five, curvy and chunky and busty in a tailored, moss green pantsuit turned greener by the wall of maroon-bound law books behind her. Her eyes were a lighter green edged with gray and her hair was honey blond, cut short and swept back from a well-formed face softened by full lips and the beginnings of a double chin. Big, round tortoiseshell eyeglasses were perfectly proportioned for the thin, straight nose upon which they rested. Her lips were glossed, her manicure was impressive, and the diamond ring on her finger looked to be two carats, minimum.

She barely looked at us, gave off an air of bored competence, but seemed to be working at that. The moment I saw her my heart jumped. Same face as in the Hollywood High yearbook. Milo knew it, too. His expression was pleasant, but cherry-sized lumps had formed where his jaw met his sideburns.

Melinda Waters stared at his card and waved us into two cane-backed chairs that faced her desk.

Her private office was rust-colored and small — tiny, really, with barely enough room for the bookcase and the desk and a red lacquer stand off to one side, set with a single white orchid in a blue-and-white pot. The walls perpendicular to the books were hung with watercolor landscapes — green hills above the ocean, live oaks, fields of poppies. California dreaming. The rest of the space bore family photos. Melinda Waters with a slim, tall, dark-bearded man and two mischievous-looking boys, around six and eight. Skiing, scuba diving, horseback riding, fishing. The family that plays together…

“Homicide detectives. Well, this is certainly different.” Soft voice, edged with sarcasm. Under normal circumstances, she was probably the image of professionalism but a quaver at the tail end said she wasn’t pretending this was routine.

“Different from what, ma’am?” said Milo.

“From what I thought I’d be doing right before lunch. Frankly, I’m confused. I’m not working on any L.A. cases at all, let alone homicide. I specialize in tenants’ rights and financial—”

“Janie Ingalls,” said Milo.

Melinda Waters’s sigh stretched for a very long time.

She fiddled with papers and pens, closed her laptop, tamped her hair. Finally, she punched an intercom button on her phone, and said, “Hold my calls please, Inez.”

Wheeling her chair back the few inches that remained between her and the law book backdrop, she said, “That’s a name from a long time ago. What happened to her?”

“You don’t know?”

“Well,” she said, “your card says homicide, so am I safe in assuming?”

“Very safe.”

Melinda Waters removed her glasses, made a fist, knuckled one eye. The glossy lips trembled. “Oh, damn. I suppose I knew it all along. But… I didn’t really — damn. Poor Janie… that is so… obscene.”

“Very,” said Milo.

She sat up straighter, as if drawing upon a reserve of strength. Now her eyes were different — searching, analytical. “And you’re here, after all this time, because… ?”

“Because it remains an open case, Ms. Waters.”

“Open or reopened?”

“It was never closed, officially.”

“You’re not saying the L.A. police have been working on this for twenty years?”

“Does that matter, ma’am?”

“No… I suppose not. I’m rambling… this is really… this takes me by total surprise. Why are you here?”

“Because you were one of the last people to see Janie Ingalls alive, but no one ever took your statement. In fact, it was only recently we learned you hadn’t been a victim, yourself.”

“A victim? You thought… oh, my.”

“You’ve been hard to locate, Ms. Waters. So has your mother—”

“My mother died ten years ago,” she said. “Lung cancer, back in Pennsylvania, where she was from. Before that, she had emphysema. She suffered a lot.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“So was I,” said Waters. She picked a gold pen from several resting in a cloisonné cup, balanced it between the index fingers of both hands. The office was a jewel box, everything arranged with care. “All this time you really thought I might be… how strange.” Weak smile. “So I’m reborn, huh?”

The pen dropped and clattered to the desk. She snatched it up, placed it back in the cup.

“Ma’am, could you please tell us everything you remember about that night.”

“I did try to find out where Janie was. Called her father — you’ve met him?”

“He’s dead too, ma’am.”

“How’d he die?”

“Car accident.”

“Driving drunk?”

“Yes.”

“No surprise there,” said Waters. “What a lowlife, always plastered. He couldn’t stand me, and the feeling was mutual. Probably because I knew he’d grope me if he had a chance, so I never gave him one — always made sure to meet Janie outside her building.”

“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 blasé, 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 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 D.A.’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 — I 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 blasé 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.

“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—”