He shook his head. “I was there, listening to her end. ‘Your mother fucks scabrous Nazi dicks and drinks Hitler’s cum.’ Granted she’d told them no, but what was the logic behind that?”
“Remember the name of the zine?” I said.
“You think some journalist type murdered China because she talked mean to him? Give me a break.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “But if the editor was a fan, maybe he’s got some ideas.”
“Whatever,” he said. “You’ve obviously got plenty of spare time . . . Groove something—GrooveRut or GrooveRat. He sent us a copy, and we chucked it. Cheap little desktop deal, probably out of business by now.”
“What was the gist of the article?”
“We were geniuses.”
“Did you keep a clipping?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Along with my Grammys and my platinum records.”
He shot to his feet, smoked and coughed and walked, hunch-shouldered to the grape-jelly door. Shoved it hard and went back to work.
14
I drove to a magazine stand on Selma Avenue off Hollywood Boulevard, and looked for GrooveRat. Fifty feet of stand, containing plenty of alternative publications and newspapers in two dozen languages, but no sign of the zine. I asked the turbaned Sikh proprietor, and he said he’d never heard of it but I might have some luck at the comics store/piercing parlor three blocks up the boulevard.
I cruised by the shop, found a CLOSED sign barely visible behind an accordion-grated front, and returned home wondering if Paul Brancusi’s comment about too much leisure time had been on target.
The more I thought about it, the weaker the links between the cases seemed. I considered the three other murders I’d found Web-surfing.
The only other L.A. killing was the old saxophonist, Wilfred Reedy, and there’d been no suggestion he’d been on the verge of a comeback or career-climb. The killer of Valerie Brusco, the Oregon potter, had been caught and jailed, and Angelique Bernet, the ballet dancer—a young woman who had been offered a potential career boost—had died three thousand miles away in Massachusetts.
Subtotal: zero. Still no reason to bother Milo; he had his hands full investigating Everett Kipper—by my own reckoning the best bet for Julie’s murderer.
The dinner hour was approaching, but I had no appetite. Another human voice would be palliative, but Allison was working at the hospice tonight.
I might do well by following her example: do some gut-wrenching clinical work that drew me miles from my own self—the kind of work I’d done years ago on the cancer wards of Western Pediatric Hospital.
I’d spent nearly a decade on those wards, a too-young, newly minted psychologist, pretending to know what he was doing. Seeing too much, too soon, feeling like nothing but an impostor.
Paying dues. But that was rubbish; oncologists and oncology nurses devote entire lives to the cause, so who the hell was I to self-aggrandize?
Allison’s husband had died of cancer, and she spent one night a week with the terminally ill.
Not a comforting line of thinking. I returned to pondering China Maranga’s death. Her verbal assault had been business as usual, but some people don’t take well to abuse. And when I’d asked Robin to speculate about the case, her first instinct had been that China had run into someone on the street, accepted a ride, shot her mouth off one time too many.
Despite Paul Brancusi’s dismissal, the stalker element couldn’t be ignored. You didn’t have to be famous to incite irrational attachment. And alternative zines were sometimes little more than glorified fan-club bulletins. Fanatic-club bulletins.
Had the editor adored China from afar? Had the way she’d treated him twisted his passions into rage she’d been ill equipped to handle?
I let my imagination run. Maybe he’d agreed to give China one last chance. Watching, waiting, outside the studio. China, stoned, unstable, angry at her band, leaves, and he follows her.
Pleased to be with someone who appreciated her, she accompanies him.
Then things turn.
China reverting to type.
And he’s had enough.
Thin speculation, but it was that or introspection.
I booted up the computer and searched for GrooveRat. Not a single hit.
That surprised me. Every self-deluded purveyor of triviality has a Web site. So the zine had been beyond obscure. And, as Brancusi predicted, long out of circulation.