the Prostitutes' Ball (2010) (15 page)

"Sheedy, Devine, and Lipscomb," Hitch said.

She nodded. "I dealt with one of the senior partners, Stender
Sheedy. It didn't matter how good the deal was, he always said no. The place just wasn't for sale.

"After a while, none of the Realtors around here bothered to even submit offers to them. It's just been rotting up there empty and rundown with that old dust-covered tinsel tree and all those unopened presents sitting in the living room, waiting for the Vulcunas' ghosts to float down and open them." Then she added, "Somebody ought to make that into a movie, don't you think?"

Hitch just nodded and smiled.

Chapter
24.

We stood out by our cars in front of the duplex apartment. Hitch was writing frantically in his red leather journal. It was just before noon.

"Put that away for a minute and let's talk about this," I said.

"You were right. There was a second shooter. The only problem was our time frame was off by over a quarter century. This story doesn't start with the Prostitutes' Ball and the Sladky triple. We gotta back it all up and start it on Christmas Eve 1981, the night Thomas Vulcuna bludgeoned his wife and daughter to death with a hammer then killed himself. Which, not for nothing, is a monster inciting event and the opening scene of our movie!"

"Listen, Hitch, put the movie on hold for a minute. Let's think this out." "Right."

"I think World War One Lugers fire 7.65 ammo."

Hitch was grinning. "Its all one case, dude. Beginning in 1981 with the bloody Vulcuna double murder with the ball-peen hammer, then the suicide. The investigation and the closed case ends Act One. Then we move into Act Two with the Prostitutes' Ball triple-murder case that just went down on the same crime scene. The exciting cast of characters grows and now we got Thayer Dunbar and his cadaverous attorney who bought the house from Vulcuna's estate in eighty
-
two and then for some still-unknown, Act Three reason won't let anybody get inside for almost thirty years. We got little coked-up Brooks and the Scott Berman/Yolanda Dublin thing with the two gorgeous dead hookers. I mean, can you stand this? Topping it off, we're simply lousy with subplots. We got a once-powerful production company run by Vulcuna in eighty-one, which is today a shell of itself with Brooks making cheesy Paris Hilton videos. And tying the whole thing together is the German Luger and the 7.65 ammo that turns up in both triple kills, and we're just getting started. I'm telling you, dawg, this is one big, magnificent, kick-ass, go-to-the-bank movie."

He had again started to jot something down in his journal, so I took the leather book out of his hand.

"Stop writing and listen to me," I insisted.

He tapped his foot impatiently. "I'm listening, but can I have my book back?"

I gave it to him, then posed a question.

"If Vulcuna checked the gun out of the prop room and brought it home on Christmas Eve, and if the L
. A
. homicide cops found him dead with a 7.65 bullet shot through his head upstairs, then how come we found the 7.65 slug in the backyard by the trash shed? It should be in a wall upstairs in the master bedroom."

"I don't know. Maybe he test-fired the gun in the backyard first," Hitch said. "I can tell you this much, it isn't simple. Which means
Dahlias gonna freak with all her KISS bullshit. We say anything about this, she's gonna try and get our bosses to transfer us to a traffic detail."

"I know. Too much collateral info for her Sladky jury."

"So we can't tell her, right?" Hitch continued. "We do what she wants, go up to Skyline right now, get the evidence techs working on a grid and graph, let them wave the little metal detector 'til there's no more joy in Mudville. While they do that, we work on this."

"Except what are we working on?" I said. "Is this somehow still part of the Sladky triple or are we now just working on Thomas Vulcuna's double murder / suicide, which was closed by our own department over twenty-five years ago and doesn't even have a case number?"

"1 don't know," he said. "But you gotta admit, this is as intriguing as hell." He was excited; his foot was tapping maniacally. "By the way, this is exactly what happened on Mosquito. Things kept turning up, making the story better and better."

"You're saying we got two separate crimes here, but they're somehow connected? They happened twenty-eight years apart, both are triple killings, both occurred within days of Christmas, at the exact same location. In both instances, the guy who owns the house where the murders took place also owns the same Hollywood production studio, except because of the time span they're completely different guys and one wasn't even born when the first crime happened? I'm gagging here, Hitch."

"I don't know the answer, but it's certainly provocative."

"We need to get inside that house," I said, running the problem in my mind. "Except nobody's gonna write us a warrant. Vulcuna was solved years ago. That case is down. No need for further investigation. With the video we found of Sladky shooting up the party, that case is also down. Since both cases are solved, we got no PC to investigate that mansion. Sheedy will fight a search warrant saying the crime didn't occur inside the house and our spineless political hack DA will fold like a deck chair. So if we want to go in there we'll have to do it without a warrant."

"Right. Good one. Kiss your ass good-bye."

"I think we need to take a vow of silence," I said. "We pledge to keep this between us. Nobody knows. Not Jeb. Nobody. At least not until we figure out how we want to play it."

"That also include your wife?" he asked.

I didn't like keeping things from Alexa but Hitchens was standing there, his body language going more and more rigid by the moment, so I finally nodded.

Then his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his holster and answered. "Yeah, sure . . . you bet." He hung up and put it away.

"Sadly, I won't be able to join you for the fabulous Dahlia dig up on Skyline Drive, which we've scheduled for this afternoon. That was the skipper. IA wants me over at the Bradbury Building ASAP for my shooting review board. I'm counting on you to handle my end of this search, bro. I want you to find every last piece of missing evidence for our exalted prosecutor. I wish I could be there cause I live for this shit, but sadly I'm needed elsewhere."

He shot me a peace sign, got in the Porsche and powered off, leaving me standing in the street.

Chapter
25.

The week after Christmas is when all LAPD department heads have to prepare the year's budget review. They have to work up an annual cost-of-operation estimate for the coming twelve months and tender it to the chief, who then assembles the overall department budget and submits it to the mayor's office the first week of January.

Alexa is always completely buried by this fiscal process so I knew she would most likely be working until well past midnight.

I was thinking about what I would do for dinner as I faced six angry CSIs up on Skyline Drive, trying not to communicate my own displeasure about being forced to be here.

It didn't seem to be working because after I told them what Dahlia Wilkes wanted, they were glaring at me like I'd just delivered the wrong pizza.

"Is she kidding? We went through this place very carefully/' Lyn Wei, the lead CSI, said. She was a twenty-nine-year-old Asian woman with a round face that wasn't helped by her severe helmet-shaped hairstyle.

"I don't think she was kidding," I told them. "Look, it never hurts to be thorough. I know you guys started with an inward spiral search pattern when you first got up here, then yesterday did a grid and graph, so why don't we try a parallel search today?"

Lyn Wei wrinkled her nose. "Did you and Hitchens do something to piss her off?"

"Miss Wilkes is a fine prosecutor," I said. "She tends to be a little obsessive on evidentiary and procedural stuff but let's bear in mind the terrific results she gets."

While they went to work, I sat on a pool chaise and looked at the big, empty house.

I thought about a distraught Thomas Vulcuna coming home all those years ago with that old prop Luger in his briefcase. Maybe coming out here half drunk to test-fire it, his hands shaking as he held a pillow on the barrel so he wouldn't alert his family inside. Then getting into an argument with his daughter, Vicki, killing her and his wife with a ball-peen hammer. Ugh.

A lot about that didn't track.

If he had the Luger, why use a hammer? I guess if it wasn't in the same room with him when he snapped and started swinging, you could find a way to get there. But still, I was suspicious of it.

Then after committing those ghastly murders he goes upstairs to the master bedroom where he opens The Divine Comedy to an underlined passage about death before he shoots himself.

I didn't like the Divine Comedy suicide note at all. I've been working homicide and suicide cases for a long time. Never seen that one before. People who write suicide notes are usually communicating important last thoughts to someone. Its something you do in your own words, not with a passage out of a book.

I also wondered if Thomas Vulcuna had removed his shoes before shooting himself. I'd noticed that on a large majority of suicides I'd worked, the victim had removed his or her shoes before doing the deed. It happened something like seventy percent of the time.

Td asked a psychologist about it once and was told that the act of removing ones shoes prior to death was a ritual. This doc told me when we remove our shoes and socks before bed at night it symbolizes an ending. A suicide victim is involved with a final gesture the end of life. By performing this task, the vie was subconsciously acknowledging the end of one state and the beginning of the next. At least that's what the shrink said.

I don't know how much of that I believed, but I certainly believed the overwhelming statistic I'd observed. It made me want to examine the autopsy and crime-scene photos of the Vulcuna murder to see if his shoes were on or off.

Of course, the fact that the '81 murder-suicide was closed almost thirty years ago was going to be a problem. But I'd find a way to deal with it.

I dialed Alexa to check on her schedule. She told me what I'd already suspected.

"I'm not going to make it home 'til very late," she said. "I'm collecting budget estimates from my division commanders right now and I'd like to get a preliminary worksheet done by the end of the night."

"Okay. I'm gonna pick something up," I said. "See you when you get home."

"If I get home," she sighed.

I stayed true to my promise to Hitch and didn't tell her about what we'd found out from Beverly Bartinelli, but I felt guilty as hell about it.

After I hung up with Alexa I called the Records Division and talked to an old sergeant named Leroy Porter.

I'm looking for an eighties case file," I told him. "It was a murder
-
suicide that occurred in December of eighty-one."

"Vulcuna?" he said without hesitation.

"How'd you know?"

"Guy came in here and checked it out an hour ago. Two boxes. They were in the old evidence warehouse. That case was before we went on computers and it was stored in the hard copy room."

"Was Detective Hitchens the one who took it?"

"He'd be the one," Sergeant Porter said.

Damn, I thought as I hung up. Hitch had swung by on his way to IA. He beat me again.

My partner had a reason to be AWOL from our crime scene. He had his shooting review board. I, on the other hand, was stuck here. I didn't trust Dahlia Wilkes not to unexpectedly drop by to make sure we were following her instructions to the letter. She was gunning for us and certainly wasn't above that. I asked Lyn Wei when her team was scheduled to go into overtime.

"Six P
. M
.," she said.

It was four in the afternoon, so that meant I had to cool out up here for two more hours while Hitch was doing god knows what with the Vulcuna evidence boxes.

At quarter to six, I let the team of CSIs off fifteen minutes early. The crime scene had now been shrunk to just the property. The press had moved on to sit on another fence waiting to tear the flesh off L
. A
.'s next juicy disaster.

We all walked down the drive and got into cars parked by the sagging wood gate. I drove down Skyline and took a left on Mulholland on my way to Sumner Hitchens's house.

Chapter
26.

According to the detective roster at Homicide Special, Sumner Hitchens lived in the hills above Nichols Canyon in an expensive L
. A
. development called Mount Olympus, which was only a few miles from Skyline Drive.

I found I couldn't get there from Mulholland, which was the quickest route, because the feeder road, Woodrow Wilson Drive, was torn up and blocked by sewer repair. I had to go all the way down into Hollywood and approach Mount Olympus using Laurel Canyon.

Ten minutes later, I pulled through the kitschy, ornate, Olympian
-
style monument that marked the main entrance.

Sumner Hitchens, Apollo of Bullshit, appropriately enough lived on Apollo Drive.