Hillside Stranglers (3 page)

Angelo Buono, inaptly named, looked like a gargoyle, but the resemblance was only skin-deep. Great roots of hands, with thumbs on them the size of zucchinis, hung down from his long, sinewed arms. The hands swung backward as he walked. He was wiry, about five foot ten. He had Sicilian coloring. He was kind to animals and had a way with the ladies.

That Sunday evening in the autumn of his forty-fourth year, Angelo was lying on his king-sized water bed, dressed in his customary blue workpants and short-sleeved shirt, bored. There was nothing on TV. He got up to straighten one of the framed family photographs on the wall: his son Peter, in full Marine dress uniform, posed before an American flag. Below Peter, Angelo Buono, Sr., deceased, looked content in his dark security guard’s uniform, grinning. Farther along the wall hung a small Italian flag. And next to it, a print of an anonymous early
Italian Renaissance Madonna, eternally serene, gazed at the room with ancient eyes.

Angelo wandered through his house, straightening, checking for dust. In the den he tidied shelves of knickknacks: his Zippo lighter collection, antique model cars, a plastic sphinx, a miniature barber’s pole, poker chips and playing cards, against which was propped a little wooden sign, reading, “Candy Is Dandy but Sex Won’t Rot Your Teeth.” He made sure his files of
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines, two neat piles on a bottom shelf, were in order. He opened the glassed door of his gun case and dusted his five rifles, two .45 pistols, and Thompson submachine gun. Everything was shipshape.

Angelo was house-proud. He had tired of sharing apartments, putting up with other people’s habits and tastes, having others’ eyes on him. Angelo trusted no one. He had found this place at 703 East Colorado Street in Glendale in 1975, one of a very few inhabited one-story frame residences left on a street that was now four lanes and franchise restaurants, small businesses and the general offices of Bob’s Big Boy hamburgers. It was ideal for him because he could live in the house and have his auto upholstery shop in a converted garage at the back. His girlfriends or children could come to stay, but he could kick them out when he chose. He had worked hard on the house, painting the outside a homey yellow with brown trim. Inside he selected an eggshell white for the walls and put down Mexican tile in the kitchen and dining area. He covered the spare bedroom’s floor with wear-resistant auto carpeting. He hung his pictures, mingling family sentiment with aesthetic preference, a romantic seascape with Italian fisherman, for instance, next to a photograph of his daughter and another of a girl called Peaches. He did no cooking, but other than that Angelo was a domestic sort of fellow.

In the living room he lowered himself into the brown vinyl easy chair, rested his feet on the beanbag hassock, and stared at the lighted fish tank, listening to the hum of its electric pump, its air bubbles. Angelo liked angelfish. The little castle the fish swam through had fallen over. He got up, put the castle right, and sprinkled fish food on the water. The fish rose to the
food, and he remembered the rabbits. He walked back through the kitchen and out the side door around to where the hutches were, between the house and the shop. Across the garage door “Angelo’s Trim Shop” was spray-painted in black graffiti script.

Out back his yellow mutt, Sparky, greeted him and rolled over. Angelo scratched Sparky’s belly and made guttural sounds. Then he opened the hutches and gave food pellets to the rabbits, stroking them with his big hands, mumbling at them.

He heard a car pull into the driveway. He could tell from the sound of the motor that it was Kenneth Bianchi’s Cadillac. My crazy cousin, Angelo thought. Maybe we’ll get some action.

They went into the house together. Kenneth Bianchi was twenty-six and more fashion-conscious than his cousin. This evening he wore a three-quarter-length brown leather coat, jeans, and earth shoes. His dark hair was freshly permed, not naturally curly like Angelo’s. Bianchi was just under six feet, a fairly well-knit hundred and eighty pounds. With his mustache, he looked like one of the many thousands of young men in Southern California who aspired to stardom but had not landed a role. Something in his manner suggested that he thought he was being photographed. He was Burt Reynolds without a contract but not so tan. The acne scars on his neck lent some character to a bland though not unhandsome face. Lately he had been working for a land title company, where he always wore a dark three-piece suit and carried an attaché case, the eager young executive look. He was called a title officer, though he was but a clerk. Bianchi was a man of many parts. From time to time he lost conviction in his mustache and shaved it off. The perm, too, was a matter of whim from month to month. He was a man easy not to recognize.

“Great party last night,” Bianchi said, pacing about. “Really terrific. Kelli and I and her brother and two other guys. We all hit the Circus Maximus. You wouldn’t have believed it, you know?” They had celebrated Halloween two days early.

Angelo made a low noise.

“Guess what. We went dressed as—you’re not going to believe this—slugs!” Angelo did not react. “Can you believe
it? You know, like a snail or something. Really creepy. Kelli made the costumes. It was so very cool. We painted our faces green and put on these green garbage bags and green leotards and, get this, we had Saran Wrap kind of trailing off us, like
slime,
you know? It was so great. Fuck it! Halloween in Hollywood! Un-fucking-believable!”

“It ain’t even Halloween yet. Halloween’s tomorrow, dumbbell.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Nothing on TV,” Angelo said. Sunday was a bad night for cop shows, Angelo’s favorites. (He rarely missed an episode of
Kojak
or
Baretta;
he identified with their tough-guy heroes.) “What you want to do?”

Angelo’s speech was rough—a grunt, a grumble, a rasp, the snarl of the underdog. If you had not known that he had been born in Rochester and raised in Los Angeles, you would have guessed Brooklyn or maybe Hoboken. A slight speech impediment, trouble with r’s and l’s, made him slide from syllable to syllable as though his tongue had been greased. Articulation was not Angelo’s strong suit, but he always got his point across.

In the kitchen, he opened a can of clams, ate a spoonful of them, and followed that with a spoonful of olive oil. When he took this mixture, his ulcer never bothered him. With the back of his hand he wiped a smear of oil from his mustache, moving aside his long, arched nose.

“What’ll we do?” Angelo said. “Gotta get out of the house. Need some action.”

“It’s super chilly out,” Bianchi said. Though he had lived on the Coast for less than two years, Bianchi already spoke like a New Age Californian, inflectionless, smooth, a mellowed-out beach boy, not a trace remaining of the aggressive East in his sounds. “Hey. I wore my coat.” He gave his ingratiating grin and half-twirled, like a fashion model.

“Yeah. That ain’t what I asked. You want to do something?”

“You got something in mind?”

Angelo stared up at his cousin. Angelo’s eyes were dark under bony brow ridges, his forehead prehistoric. He said nothing. Talking was not something he did much of. He had found
that a few words usually got him what he wanted. One of the things he hated about his cousin was that Kenny never seemed to shut up. But Kenny could be useful. He was not stupid, and if you just stared at him long enough, he would get the picture. He would sense what Angelo wanted and then perform as if by remote control. Kenny was a willing slave, Angelo had figured out. A pain in the ass much of the time, but very cooperative when you wanted to make use of him. He was better than most bitches that way. And Angelo knew that he could do and say certain things with Kenny that he could not with anyone else. They had the understanding of an old married couple or two cellmates. Kenny was almost, but not quite, Angelo’s punk.

“We could go scamming,” Bianchi said. “We could go scamming in Hollywood.” He sounded boyishly eager. A Beaver Cleaver. His voice lacked the resonance of manhood.

Angelo grunted.

“We could do that,” Bianchi said.

Another grunt.

“Like last time. It worked.”

“Better,
mi numi.
Got to be better.”

“We go cruising. We pick up a girl. Same scam. Super.”

“This time we need more time. Got to have time. Last time was rushed, man.”

“Sure. Listen, I can tell you, it isn’t super great in a backseat, either. I mean, what’s that, you know? Strictly for kids. Backseat screwing is strictly overrated.”

“You forget, asshole. I didn’t get nothing.”

“Sure, Tony.” Angelo was sometimes called Tony by family and friends. They also called him the Buzzard. “It happened too fast. We just winged it. If you’d said something, you know. Anything I—”

“We got to plan this shit. We need more time, like I said.” Angelo grunted out his words. His voice was a faulty pump spewing silt. “Scam’s okay. We need a place. Need some place. Fucking pad someplace. Need a place to nail her, man, you see?”

“Hey, how about right here?”

Angelo sat down in the brown vinyl easy chair and pulled
on his right earlobe with his right hand. He let half a minute pass. When Bianchi started to speak again, Angelo said, “Shut up.” Finally Angelo said: “Yeah. Here would be good. Real good thinking. Nobody can’t see nothing here, can’t hear nothing. Perfect. You ain’t so dumb.”

“Well, I’ve got a master’s from Columbia University, don’t I?”

“Yeah, I seen it, asshole. You are some bullshitter. You oughta be rich. How come you ain’t got a dime?”

“I’m getting there.”

“How much money you owe me?”

“Give me some time, Angelo. Kelli’s pregnant, you know.”

“Dumb bitches,” Angelo said. “Goddam bitches. That goddam Becky and that fucking Sabra. Tits. Okay, bullshitter. So we bring the cunt back here. So there’s no question afterwards, we got to . . .” He drew a line across his throat. “No problem?”

“Nah. No problem at all, Tony. We can do it right.”

“They don’t fuck me over and live. They’re gonna know that.”

“They’ll know it, Angelo, they’ll know it.”

A vein in Bianchi’s neck began to pulse. He paced around, rubbing his hands on his jeans. They went over the details. The governing concept was rolling a prostitute. It had been on their minds for weeks, having sex with a prostitute and not paying and then doing what they agreed they had to do. They had had some success, but perfection had eluded them. Tonight had to be better.

“Let me get my jacket,” Angelo said. “Want to change my shirt.”

Bianchi shadowed Buono. He trailed him to the bathroom, which was decorated with
Penthouse
centerfolds. Through the open door he watched him pee, apply Arrid Extra-Dry deodorant from a spray can, and splash on Brut after-shave. In the bedroom Angelo put on a clean shirt and a beige windbreaker and picked his wallet off the top of the dresser. He opened the wallet and flashed the police badge that was pinned inside, grinning, showing crooked teeth. He reached into his closet and brought out a Roi Tan cigar box, extracting from it a pair of
shiny handcuffs. “Let’s get going,” he said, like a lieutenant in a war movie or a kid playing war, shoving the handcuffs down into a back pocket.

On the way out, prudent householder that he was, Angelo switched off lights, leaving one burning in the bathroom and another in the fish tank. No sense encouraging burglars. And there was one other light which he never turned off at night: the spotlight on the Italian flag which flew from a pole atop his house. Angelo’s place was easy to find at night. He secured the deadbolts on the front door and, from the outside, on the laundry-room door. Bianchi opened the black iron gate and followed Angelo to the Cadillac. Angelo got behind the wheel.

From Glendale Angelo drove west on Los Feliz Boulevard past Griffith Park toward Hollywood. He knew the way blind, had driven to Hollywood to look for girls ever since high school, just like everyone else. Cruising Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip was something to do, was one of the main reasons to get your driver’s license at sixteen. And since the sixties it had become the sex-for-sale center of Southern California. The streets were hooker-crowded, the bars and discos and coffee shops the easiest places in L.A. to score whores or boys or drugs.

In the fifties, when Angelo had been in junior high school, Hollywood Boulevard and the Strip had been lined with jazz clubs, beatnik cafés, nightclubs like Ciro’s and the Crescendo, where Peggy Lee sang, Mort Sahl shocked an audience by actually insulting Eisenhower, and, later, Lenny Bruce told jokes about Hitler and described what it was like to screw a chicken. In those days you might stop girls on the street, find out they were tourists from Salt Lake City, buy them cherry Cokes, and call it a successful night. Now Hollywood was home only to the lost ones. The movie palaces—the Chinese, with its stars’ footprints in concrete, the Egyptian, the Pantages—were old bitches gone in the teeth. Off the boulevards, people crowded the apartment buildings, shooting up, getting down, freaking out. The only living remnant of the past was the annual Santa Claus Parade, which looked okay on television and offered local-channel exposure to minor celebrities. Runaways headed
for Hollywood now. You could live on nothing there, sell your butt for a bed and die young.

That night, October 30, 1977, Buono and Bianchi cruised slowly west on Hollywood Boulevard in the ’72 four-door Cadillac, white vinyl top over metallic dark blue body. A sticker bearing the official seal of the County of Los Angeles was displayed on the lower left-hand corner of the windshield. They were enjoying that presumptive arrogance peculiar to Los Angeles, that if you are driving around in a good car in L.A. you are somehow luckier and freer and more privileged and more with-it than the poor slobs in the rest of the country. You pity the people in Michigan or Iowa who can’t cruise Hollywood. Buono drove as he had since high school, slumped down, his right wrist controlling the wheel. Bianchi fiddled with the radio dial, searching out the soft rock he liked. He stopped at James Taylor.