At the indictment hearing, no single tenant of the Floyd Avenue house would admit to having heard enough of the proceedings on the day that Evelyn Mangold had beaten Marge Ademian to death to be able to identify the voices of the persons then within the apartment, even as to whether they both were female. In the end, all that the well-meaning
and thoroughly frustrated young Commonwealth Attorney was able to do was to get the woman indicted and convicted of resisting her arrest and assaulting two police officers while in performance of their duties. She was sentenced to eight months in the city jail, but given credit against this sentence for the nearly four months she had spent in jail awaiting trial.
His innate sense of fairness, of rightness, deeply offended by this turn of events, this particular Commonwealth Attorney quickly became a willing—eagerly willing—accomplice of Rupen, Boghos, Mariya, Kogh, Bagrat, old Vasil, Boghos’s attorney, a city police sergeant of Armenian antecedents, a local private investigator and his staff, and a sometime public defender from New York State (half Armenian, by chance happening) who still was galled by his belief in the innocence of a convicted client.
Large inputs of cash by Kogh, Vasil, and Boghos lubricated the gears of the device that mutual effort and a desire for justice had assembled. And Evelyn Mangold herself made it even easier, her first vicious actions upon her release from durance vile playing directly into the hands of the family she had wronged.
It was Rupen who received the first batch of obscene photographic prints, and it was all that his family could do to prevent him from throwing over the meticulously laid plans and going after the evil woman with tooth, nail, and hard, scarred knuckles.
Richmond attorney Greg Zaroukian—he who had once before tried to bribe Evelyn Mangold into leaving the state— telephoned the number included with the photos and set an appointment to meet with the murderous woman in his downtown office.
“Them pitchers got to the damn furrin bastid, din’t they, huh?” crowed the tall, big-boned, flat-chested woman, a dirty grin on her broad face. “I got lots an’ lots more of ’em, too, lawyer. An’ I got some spools of tape, too, with her tell in’ me how I’m a better lover than any goddamned man she ever had afore. I wants ten grand fer the lot, lawyer. But none thishere shit ‘about me leavin’ town, this time; I likes it
here, I already got me a nice HI gal lined up fer to move in with at a apartment up on Monument Avenue. Met ‘er the same damn day I got outen met fuckin’ jail, I did, too!”
Greg Zaroukian knew all about that part of it, although he was careful to keep a blank face. The investigator had found the “lil gal” for them—an attractive actress, somewhat older than she appeared, with four years as a WAAF and a thorough grounding in combat judo behind her, plus a few more years in undercover aspects of law enforcement. Her services had not come cheaply, but the Ademians had been more than happy to foot the bill.
The purpose for the hired woman had been dual. For one thing, they had not wanted Evelyn Mangold to even consider leaving the Richmond area; for the other, the furtherance of their plans for her called for her to have immediate access to enough money to allow her continuance of her interrupted addiction to injected narcotics. Considering her history, Boghos had estimated that a mere two weeks would guarantee her being again firmly hooked.
“You know, you slimy bitch,” remarked Greg Zaroukian, “I should immediately turn you over to the police. Extortion is frowned upon in this area, and you just might wind up on the Women’s State Farm, a couple of hours’ drive west of here. You wouldn’t like it there, I think; no sitting around, like in the city jail. There they’d put you to work—hard, manual work, in the fields—and beat the crap out of you three times a day.”
He placed a hand on the receiver of his telephone and regarded the ugly woman seated across from him as he might have some vile creature born of filth under an overturned rock. She sat stiffly, tensely, obviously ready to bolt from the chair in an instant, and he noted with some satisfaction the glitter of true fear in her muddy-brown eyes.
He slowly, grudgingly, removed his hand from the receiver. “But, alas, I have specific orders from my clients in your regard, you perverted sow. I can’t get that large a sum for you at once, you understand. However, I should have it all in about a week. But I must insist, for that much money, that I receive all of the prints and the negatives as well, and also all of the copies of these tapes you just mentioned. Should you hold out on us and try this again, we will have no choice but to have you killed . . . slowly, painfully. Do you understand me, bitch?”
Evelyn Mangold was quite pleased in regard to her progress, so far. True, she had not yet managed to get into the new girl’s pants, but that would come, and the girl was already regularly, obtaining prescription drugs for Evelyn’s “affliction.” The Monument Avenue apartment was large-roomed, airy, and exceedingly comfortable after that bare cell in the city jail and the Floyd Avenue dump that had preceded it.
She was convinced that Millicent Mavore had at some time been in bad trouble with the law, no matter how often and vociferously the girl denied it. She knew too much, understood too much for it to be otherwise, but Evelyn was assured that she’d get everything out of her latest victim, eventually. Silly women—and men, too, for that matter—would stupidly tell anything and everything to a lover, holding nothing back, even when it was clearly to their best interests to do so.
The accused murderess was overjoyed when Millicent expressed a desire to drive her out to the midnight meeting scheduled by the Ademians’ attorney near the Duck Lake in Byrd Park. This involvement of the girl in extortion would be another unexpected club to hold over her head when the time came for threats.
Millicent’s Ford Victoria had been parked in the agreed-upon spot for barely five minutes, lights out but engine purring softly, when another vehicle pulled in behind and cut its own lights. Evelyn’s hand was already on the door handle when a second vehicle came up from behind and pulled in to park in front of the Ford.
“Sumpthin’s fishy ‘about thishere!” she snapped. “Git us out’n here, Milly!”
It looked to Evelyn as if Millicent tried, but ineptly. She first ground the gears, then let up on the clutch at an inopportune moment and the engine stalled. When she tried to restart it, she flooded it. Seeing men emerging from the two cars,
knowing that she lacked the wind to outrun them, Evelyn used her right elbow to depress the door lock. Then she began searching through her commodious handbag for the big switchblade and her brass knuckles, the blackjack, too, though she wasn’t sure she’d remembered to bring it along on this occasion.
But before she could lay hands to any of her arsenal, there was a clicking and a big, burly man had opened the locked door with a key, grasped her upper arm in a bone-crushing grip, and jerked her out of the car as if her big body had been that of a rag doll. In the dim glow of the Ford’s courtesy lights, Evelyn could see the squat, powerful man’s face and she felt real fear. She could sense without conscious thought that this man despised her and that, furthermore, he was every bit as calculatedly cruel as was she herself.
“Give me some trouble,” he softly rumbled from his barrel chest. “Please, give me some trouble. They done told me I can’t hurt you none, ‘less you give me some trouble.”
Evelyn found herself unable to take her gaze off his face—a face scarred by the effects of knuckles and sharp knives—his thin lips that barely moved as he spoke, his black eyes that were as flat and expressionless as those of some deadly serpent. She only half felt her bladder empty, soaking the crotch of her slacks and then beginning to spread the hot moisture down her thighs. From close behind, she heard a voice that sounded a lot like Millie’s, but harder, far more mature.
“Better get that bag away from her, one of you. I took the knucks and a six-inch switchblade out of it before we left, but could be she has other little playthings hidden in it that I didn’t find. She’s as bad as they come, worse than most I’ve ever seen. Don’t trust her an inch, I’m warning you.”