Crime Wave

Bill asked her if she’d like to see her mother’s case solved. Leah started back on her father. Bill clenched up. So did I. Victimhood was a summons to exploit and explore. Love the one you lost only if they deserved it.

Know your dead. Learn how you derive and diverge from them.

Leah said her father was the key suspect. She didn’t know her mother was murdered for years. Her father hid the fact. That was suspicious. That meant he was hiding things. Her grandfather said he saw the apartment the day after her mother vanished. The place was a mess. Clothes were scattered around. Her baby brother sat in a pool of urine.

Bill said, “Your father passed a polygraph test.”

Leah shrugged.

I asked her where she got her information.

Leah said, “My grandfather.”

I asked her if she ever read newspaper accounts.

Leah said, “No.”

Bill gave me his “more questions?” look. I shook my head.

Bill thanked Leah. I said we might clear this thing. It might help her get on with her life.

Leah looked right through me.

I dropped Bill off and drove back to my hotel. I stretched out on the bed and turned the lights off. I dropped their male surnames and ran with Betty Bedford and Geneva Hilliker.

Not doppelgangers. Not symbiotic twins. Inimical personalities and antithetical souls.

My mother drank Early Times bourbon. She fucked cheap men and cut them off if they cloyed or messed with her solitude. She got pregnant in ’39 and aborted herself. She rammed literacy and the Lutheran Church down my throat and made me grateful as a middle-aged man.

Betty fell into things. My mother hid out in El Monte. She lived out the dreams and crazy expectations that drive bright and beautiful women. Betty hid out in El Monte. It was a good place to live the lie that life was hunky-dory.

Two Jeans.

My mother went to nursing school and shortened Geneva to Jean. She was 19. It was 1934.

She could shoot men down with stern words or a look. She wanted sex on her own sweet and unconscious terms. She knew how to say no.

She said yes, no, or maybe that night. She didn’t sense danger. She could have walked away from the drive-in. She had options that Betty Jean didn’t. Her unconsciousness made her passively complicit. Betty Jean went to the drugstore and bought baby food. Her life ended nineteen years short of my mother’s.

I wanted to find the piece of slit who killed her and fuck him for it.

Bill called first thing in the morning. He said he just got off the phone. He talked to Tom Armstrong, Joe Walker, and Lee Koury.

They traced the kid. He was serving three-to-life. He got out on parole in ’75. He stayed out two years and went down behind a fresh rape.

AND:

Koury said the kid almost confessed to the killing. He almost gave it up at his polygraph test. He said, “My dad’s got heart trouble. This would really kill him.”

II

4

I replayed the words from L.A. to Fresno. Koury and Meyers made the kid for the Scales snuff. The kid was 42 now. He was locked down at the California Men’s Colony. He fell behind a kidnap-rape in Bakersfield. Tom Armstrong just received a full report.

Bakersfield was a hundred miles from Fresno. Bill was from Fresno. Betty Jean’s parents lived in Fresno.

We drove up in Bill’s car. We took Bill’s father along. Angus Stoner was 86. He knew Kern County. Kern County was all new to me.

Dirt fields and shack towns. Wind and dust and a big flat sky.

Angus supplied travel notes. He identified orchards and harvesting contraptions. He talked up his hobo adventures, circa 1930.

He picked walnuts and grapes. He slept in boxcars. He poured the pork to numerous women. He cut a wide indigent swath. Butch queers rode the rails then. They dogged his handsome ass. He kicked their asses good.

Bill and I laughed. Bill called Kern County “El Monte North.” I called it “Dogdick, Egypt.” We were white-trash postgrads. Disorder and poverty scared us. We trashed it with postgrad license. We were like blacks calling each other “nigger.”

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