The second case was the stabbing death of a saxophonist named Wilfred Reedy, outside a Washington Boulevard jazz club, four and a half years ago, documented in the obituary column of a musician union’s magazine. The obit lauded Reedy’s gentle nature and improvisational skills and noted that, in lieu of flowers, contributions to the widow could be made care of the union.
Reedy, sixty-six, had been a friend of John Coltrane and played with many of the greats—Miles Davis, Red Norvo, Tal Farlow, Milt Jackson. I logged into the L.A. Times archives and found a back-page squib on the crime and a single follow-up paragraph one week later. No leads or arrests. Anyone with information to call Southwest Division.
Homicide number three was the three-year-old stabbing of a twenty-five-year-old ballet dancer named Angelique Bernet in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bernet had been part of a touring New York company performing in Boston, and she’d left her hotel around 2 A.M. Friday evening and never returned. Two days later, her body was found behind an apartment on Mt. Auburn Avenue, not far from the Harvard campus. Cross-references to the Boston Herald and the Globe pulled up brief accounts of the crime but no arrests. Something else the Globe reported caught my eye: Bernet had recently been promoted to stand-in for the prima ballerina and had, in fact, performed her first solo the night of her disappearance.
The final hit took place thirteen months later—another Hollywood murder. During an all-night recording session, a punk-rock vocalist named China Maranga had unleashed a drunken tirade at her backup band over what she viewed as lackluster playing, stomped out of the studio, and vanished. Two months later, her skeletal remains were discovered by hikers, not far from the Hollywood sign, barely concealed by brush. ID had been made using dental records. A broken neck and the absence of bullet holes or stab wounds suggested cause of death as strangulation, but that was about all the coroner could come up with.
China Maranga’s teeth had been easy to identify—as a youngster, she’d undergone extensive orthodontic work. Her birth name was Jennifer Stilton, and she’d grown up in a big house in Palos Verdes, the daughter of a grocery-chain executive and an interior decorator. She’d earned good grades in prep school, where a sweet soprano earned her a starring role in the glee club. Admitted to Stanford, she majored in English Lit, got hooked on alternative music and whiskey and cocaine, amassed a collection of tattoos and piercings, and assembled a band of like-minded sophomores who joined her in dropping out. For the next several years, she and China Whiteboy toured the country, playing small clubs and garnering cult status but failing to get a record contract. During that period, China morphed her sweet soprano to a ragged, atonal scream. A tour in Germany and Holland garnered larger audiences and brought about a deal with an alternative label back in L.A. Sales of China Whiteboy’s two albums were surprisingly brisk, the band began attracting attention from people-with-clout, rumors of a deal with a major label were rife.
China’s murder ended all that.
China could barely play guitar, but she wielded one as a prop—a battered old Vox teardrop that she treated rough. I knew that because two members of the band—a pair of slouching, inarticulate wraiths named Squirt and Brancusi—were serious about their gear, and when they needed repairs, they came to Robin. When China snapped the Vox’s neck during one of her more ebullient stage tantrums, the boys passed along Robin’s number.
I remembered the day China dropped by. A particularly unpleasant July afternoon, strangled by West Coast pollution and East Coast humidity. Robin was working in back, and I was in my office when the doorbell rang. Eight times in a row. I padded to the front and opened the door on a pallid, curvaceous woman with spiked hair as black and shiny as La Brea tar. She hefted a guitar in a soft canvas gig bag and looked at me as if I was the intruder. Parked below the terrace was a big, dusty Buick the color of ballpark mustard.
She said, “Who the hell are you and am I as lost as I feel?”