Hillside Stranglers (31 page)

“How’d it all start?” Grogan asked.

“I’m not going to sit here and say that there perhaps wasn’t something in the back of my mind as a fantasy sort of thing. It may have been just the chemistry between two people.”

“Did this become a sexual motive? Why the sex?”

“I thought about this a lot. Was this a thing to get the thrill of killing and the sex was just an extra bonus, or was the sex the main thing and the killing was just a necessity afterwards? I’m not sure. It could be either one of those. It could be a variation of both of those.”

How lucid, Grogan thought. How perfectly well formed his thoughts are. He knows as much about it as anyone ever will, and he is telling us so. Of course, Grogan knew, Kenny was leaving out the original or immediate motivation, to take revenge for Sabra’s and Becky’s running off and for the bad trick list, which by now the police had become aware of. But all in all, Kenny was telling the truth. Sex or murder or a variation on both.

Nor had Grogan really doubted that Kenny had been more of a follower and Angelo more the leader. Kenny, Grogan believed, was a nowhere man; he was whoever someone else wanted him to be. He would never have taken this or any initiative on his own. After the Lauren Wagner interview was finished, Grogan drew his chair up to Kenny’s as the others were drifting out of the room and talking among themselves.

“This is off the record, Ken,” Grogan said, “just between you and me.” Grogan wanted to see whether he could break through Kenny’s psychological defenses. With Angelo he had tried, and failed, with threats and a little physical persuasion. With Kenny he would try the buddy-buddy approach.

“There’s no tape recorder going now, Ken, and I’m not taking any notes and this isn’t going to affect what happens to you one way or the other. You know something, Ken, I think you and I are a lot alike, you know that?” He let this sink in. Kenny said nothing. “I’ll tell you what I mean. Look at us. Two Catholic boys from the East, right? Me from Boston, you from Rochester; Catholic school, the nuns, doing what’s right, you know what I mean. Okay, then we get to California, and what happens? I tell you what. I meet a bunch of cops and I join the police force and, well, here I am. We both had that Catholic guilt, right? Don’t do this, don’t do that. And you wanted to be a cop too. We wanted the same thing, had the same background. But what happened to you? You meet up with Angelo Buono, you live with the guy, and what happens? All that pussy! Instead of all that don’t do this, don’t do that, suddenly it’s do whatever you damned want. Pussy, dope, money. California! You just couldn’t resist. You gave in and then pretty soon, what do you know, here you are! See? We’re really alike. I could have gone the same way. What do you think?”

Kenny said nothing. He just stared blankly at Grogan. This guy, Grogan thought, is completely dead inside. He can’t even pretend to believe me, because he knows it won’t help his case. He can’t even pretend if he doesn’t think he’s going to get something out of it. The guy is a zero. What a fucking shame he won’t be executed.

Grogan did not bother trying to get through to Bianchi again. But Finnigan and Salerno could not let Bianchi go without telling him what they thought of him. After the Cindy Hudspeth interview, which was the last and took two days, Salerno was drained, but his hatred for Bianchi gnawed at him. It had taken hours to get Bianchi to admit that he had been up at Angeles Crest a month before the murder, that this was one dump site which he had chosen—he did not quite admit the latter but he almost did when confronted with Liz Ward’s recollection of sex with him on the mountain trail. Liz Ward had recorded the event in her diary. Salerno and Finnigan also had the idea that Bianchi might well have known Cindy Hudspeth or have met her before the killing and might have lured her to Angelo’s, perhaps telling her that his cousin wanted to take dance lessons, but Bianchi denied any of this. At the same time Salerno and Finnigan, through various trick questions, satisfied themselves that on the whole Bianchi was telling the truth in his icy narrative of the events. They tested him on his memory of the interior of Cindy Hudspeth’s Datsun, for instance, suggesting at one point that the upholstery had been torn. When Kenny emphatically denied this untruth, he verified his general credibility. He insisted that the car had been pushed over the cliff front first, even though it had been found with its rear pointing down the mountain, and his version eventually checked out with informed analysis of the car’s plunge and final position.

Salerno and Finnigan mocked Bianchi’s multiple personality scam with sarcastic questions, referring to their own discovery of the real Steve Walker.

“Do you realize now,” Finnigan asked, “that it was probably one of your biggest screwups, using that name [Steve Walker]?”

“I have no idea what it was.”

“Of all the names you [could have] picked, you picked the one that could be traced. What were you going to do with those diplomas?”

“I have no idea.”

It was highly irritating to the officers, not that it mattered as far as their case against Bianchi was concerned. But here was a man who would admit to murder but not to an error in manufacturing a defense; even when the error was obvious. They asked him why, given his deviousness, he expected them to believe anything he had to say. Why would he be telling them the truth now when he had spent his entire life telling lies? “I’ve learned from John Johnson,” Bianchi had the nerve to say, “that it’s the truth that sets you free.” Salerno and Finnigan restrained their laughter.

Salerno felt about Cindy Hudspeth much the same as Grogan did about Kristina Weckler and Lauren Wagner. Although he had not become emotionally entangled with her mother as Grogan had with the Wagners and Wecklers, Salerno did feel rage against Bianchi for Cindy’s death, and somehow he wanted Bianchi to know it. But he knew Bianchi would not care a damn about a homicide detective’s opinion of him, so he thought and thought about some way to get through to him and make him squirm. At the very least Salerno wanted to go on record as despising him. At last Salerno decided to try to burn Bianchi with whatever might be left of a Roman Catholic conscience in the black recesses of his soul. At the end of the last session, Salerno said:

“Are you seeing a priest?”

“Yes,” Bianchi said. “Father Don Warner.”

“On a regular basis?”

“Yes. Every Sunday at least and sometimes a couple times a week.”

“Are you a practicing Catholic?”

Bianchi hesitated. “Practicing Catholic?” he asked the air. He took the question as though he were being asked by a bank officer whether he owned a Visa card. “Yes, I am,” he said at last.

“Does Father Warner bring you communion?” Salerno was thinking that for a Catholic to take communion without having repented of his sins meant eternal punishment. “Do you go to mass?”

“He brings communion. I don’t go to mass.”

“They don’t have a service for mass in here?”

“No.”

“He’s heard your confession and all that?”

“That is correct.”

“Do you believe in God?” Salerno asked, his voice with an edge to it now. Salerno for this moment was no longer a mere detective but the Grand Inquisitor. It was time, Salerno believed, for a truth greater than a legal or any merely mortal truth to be served. Again there were seconds of silence.

“Yes,” Bianchi said blandly, “I do.”

“Do you believe in hell?”

“Yes, I do. Some form of punishment. Yes.”

“You had better,” Salerno pronounced. He stared at Bianchi, hoping but not believing that he had made some impression.

Pete Finnigan wanted to put himself on record, too. He could not try to weigh Bianchi down with the weight of religious conviction because he did not share Salerno’s intensity of faith, but he could make clear his hatred.

“Just so you know where you and I stand,” Finnigan said to Bianchi, “it really galls me to spare you your life. The only reason we’re going through this bullshit, as far as I’m concerned, is so that we can lock you and Angelo both up forever.”

“Yes,” Bianchi said quietly.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well, I’m through,” Finnigan said.

That night the detectives gathered at the Bellingham Yacht Club for cocktails and dinner: Grogan and Varney, Salerno and Finnigan. Bill Williams had already returned to Los Angeles. They were in a good mood, and they kidded Varney as he consumed dozens of steamed clams: Varney always wore cowboy clothes and boots but never ate meat. They talked about how slithery Bianchi had been in the interviews, how he would give
them a lot and then hold back a little. Some of his revelations, such as that he and Angelo had tried to pick up Peter Lorre’s daughter, they would have to check out in Los Angeles; others they knew they would never be able to prove. But the important thing was whether Bianchi would be consistent in testifying against Angelo, because there was far more evidence against Bianchi than against Buono. They thought the plea-bargain agreement was regrettably lenient but probably necessary: Bianchi would plead guilty to the two Bellingham murders and would serve consecutive life sentences for those; in California he would plead guilty to five of the Hillside Stranglings (Washington, King, Weckler, Martin, and Hudspeth), one count of conspiracy to commit murder, and one count of sodomy, for all of which he would receive a sentence of life plus five years. Theoretically parole was possible. No one believed he ever would be paroled, but the idea of it annoyed them. To a man they wished him dead.

But they were men used to making the best of what was. Tearing into slabs of salmon, they anticipated the pleasure of escorting Bianchi back to Los Angeles. Grogan had chartered a private jet for the trip. It was a shame, he said, that Bill Williams would not be along for the ride. After a couple more bottles of wine all the detectives agreed to chip in and pay Williams’s way up from L.A., so he could be in on the fun. “It’s only right,” Grogan said. He rushed off to telephone Williams.

Back at the table Grogan became philosophical. The world was turning rotten. In the old days men like Buono and Bianchi would have been hanged without claptrap and decent people could go on with their lives. Yet he wondered. The problem was with human beings, the world was populated by shits, history was nothing but betrayal and killing. He had been reading a book,
The History of the Irish Race,
by Seamus MacManus. “We were a great people,” Grogan said. “Read that book. What happened?” He ruminated about what cold bastards Bianchi and Buono were. They were the worst he had encountered, but the world was full of such people. Not all of them murdered,
but everywhere you looked there were cold sons of bitches who would as soon cut your throat as ask the time of day. His wife was a decent person. Did he know any others? The devious sleek self-gratifying phonies were conquering the world. You met them every day of the week. Businessmen. Reporters. Politicians. Policemen and hypocritical priests. Half-wit lying psychologists. Whores. Married whores. Fake waiters. Self-serving two-faced owners of newspapers. Everybody had a gimmick. America was Hollywood. If the truth were known, Grogan said, sipping, there were not a hell of a lot of good people in the world. Look at all the Hollywood assholes. Look at the Latin American community in L.A.: if he ever told the press, he said, what he knew about the Latins and their gang warfare, he’d be crucified. The Irish, they were always killing each other and stabbing each other in the back. It was funny. Strange. Everybody talked about how good people were, with all the evidence to the contrary. To listen to the Jews, you would think Auschwitz was an aberration. “It’s not an aberration,” Grogan said. “Don’t people understand? World War Two was
normal!”
The truth was that it would be hard to find a table in the world like this one, with four good guys sitting at it and no sons of bitches. At least when they did something wrong, they felt guilty about it.

“You know, I kind of envy those two bastards. They can do anything and never give it a second thought. Me, I steal a newspaper and I feel like a shit. I must be an idiot. I look at another woman and I—”

“Okay, Grogan,” Varney said, who knew about Grogan’s girlfriend, K.O. “You’re laying it on a little thick. Let’s just say you’re not what we call an asocial personality. Except I sometimes wonder about you.”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” Grogan said, “it’s my Catholic goddam guilt, and I know where it all started. I was a kid maybe fourteen, fifteen, back in Boston, see? That’s when my guilt started. I walked into this shop, this little grocery store, and I was the only customer and this lady that owns the shop, she’s standing in the back. So she motions to me to come into the back of the store. Okay, I go back there, and what do you know?

First thing I know is, this lady, she was real attractive, about thirty, thirty-five, she’s kneeling down and she unzips my fly and she starts sucking on my pee-pee.” Grogan drained another glass. “And I didn’t know what she was doing, you know, in those days, we didn’t know from nothing. But it sure felt good. So afterwards I ran out of there and I went and told my buddies. They didn’t believe me. They said, ‘Grogan, you’re nuts. No woman would ever put her mouth where a guy pees!’ Anyway I knew what happen d was a sin, see, it had to be a terrible sin. But I didn’t know what it was called. Maybe nobody had ever done it before! Maybe I had committed the worst sin there was! I looked in my catechism and there wasn’t any name for what I’d done. I knew adultery wasn’t it. Maybe getting your pee-pee sucked was the sin against the Holy Ghost! So how was I going to confess a sin without a name? I couldn’t see myself actually
describing
what had happened to some priest, he’d throw me out. So I never confessed it. I just kept it secret on my soul and it’s been there ever since and that’s why I feel so goddam guilty all the time. So who do I blame? I’ll blame the Pope, he can take the heat! Pass the wine. Let’s have cognac.”

The detectives discussed the mysterious relationship between Buono and Bianchi, what Kenny had referred to as the “chemistry” between them, as always viewing human behavior as the result of impersonal forces. Dudley Varney stressed a homosexual link and argued that Buono and Bianchi had actually been having sex with one another. Grogan doubted this, while accepting that !Buono was basically a sodomite and didn’t care what sex he plunged into. To Grogan, Buono and Bianchi had been engaged in a sexual competition, each one trying to prove to the other what a master he was of women. A competition like that was obviously homosexually inspired, but actual sex between the two would have spoiled the game. Of all the detectives, Salerno was most content simply to call Angelo and Kenny evil.