Chapter 31

August 22, 1996

Thursday

About a week later, well after I put my invoice in the mail, I called Sheila Karpinski.

"I know who killed Vera," I said. I'd already let her sons know, but I felt I ought to talk to her myself.

"I know. I'm so glad." I could hear her lighting a cigarette as she said that.

"It was a man named Manny Marker."

"Do you know why he did it? Edwin wasn't clear."

I knew why he wasn't clear. Sheila seemed to have gone to great lengths not to see her brother's sexuality. Could I talk about his fiancée being killed over an affair she'd had with another woman? Would that tip Sheila off? Did I want to be the one who'd tipped her off? It didn't feel like my business.

I sidestepped the question by saying, "She wasn't the only woman Marker killed. He killed another woman in the sixties."

"Oh dear, Edwin didn't tell me that. How horrible. You are turning him into the police?"

Just a day after my trip to Eagle Rock there was a newspaper article about an elderly couple involved in a murder-suicide. The wife had stolen a gun from the neighbors and used it to kill her terminally ill husband and herself.

"I'm afraid he passed away."

"So that poor girl won't get any justice."

"Not in a traditional sense, no." I decided to move off this topic. "Now you have something to tell Patrick."

"Yes. Manny Marker killed Vera."

Unfortunately, I think he already knew that, and I wasn't sure saying the guy's name was going do anything but terrify him. "You know, I think Patrick will still feel responsible. You might want to just tell him it wasn't his fault. And now you know that for certain."

"Yes, we do know for certain. Thank you. I appreciate what you've done for my family."

Of course, I understood how Patrick felt. From what I'd pieced together, Vera and Gigi had meant to go away that weekend but didn't. That led to Vera's death. Patrick's guilt came from the fact that he hadn't, and probably couldn't have, saved Vera. I knew what that felt like. There were people in my life, those I'd loved, liked, even disliked, who I wish I'd been able to save. I suppose the grown-up thing to say is that we can't save others, we can barely save ourselves. But that doesn't help with the guilt.

Later that afternoon, Ronnie came home unexpectedly.

"What are you doing home?" I asked. "Did the bottom fall out of the real estate business?"

"You wish," he teased back. "I have something I want to show you."

That was a little nerve wracking. ‘I have something I want to show you' often resulted in our spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a piece of property.

"Are you feeling up to a walk?"

I was supposed to, doctor's orders, so I said, "Yeah, I guess."

We walked a block to 1st Street and then turned west toward our co-op. I hoped that was where we were going, it wasn't that far. We chatted a bit about this and that, then as we were walking by Bixby Park I asked, "How are you feeling about your mother?"

"Who?"

"Don't joke about it. It was an honest question."

"I don't feel much about her. It's been coming for a long time. One of us has to change and I'm not expecting to wake up heterosexual one morning, so I think it has to be her."

"Just to go on record, I would be very unhappy if you woke up heterosexual one morning."

"I should hope so."

When we got to the El Matador, we walked into the courtyard and then up the stairs to the co-op. I was healing, so I very nearly walked like a healthy person. Ronnie took out his keys and opened the front door.

Immediately, I saw that the living room was completely decorated. The paint job had gotten finished somehow and was a lovely, mottled honey color. The ceiling was a crisp white. Someone had painted the beams with a pattern I assumed was at least similar to the original.

The room was completely furnished. Without telling me, Ronnie had made the deal with the Karpinskis for the Melchor/Gill household. I recognized the sofas from storage. One of them was the tufted leather sofa—later, Ronnie explained it was called a Chesterfield. Across from it was the other, a gold sofa with swatches sitting on it. The black-and-brown plaid wingback chairs were sitting with the sofas, completing the grouping.

"There wasn't enough time to get anything covered," he said. "I haven't decided about those chairs. They almost work."

"How did you get this place painted?"

"John helped me."

There was a Deco chest between the doors to the Juliet balconies that was set up as a bar—complete with a selection of liquor and a mirrored tray. He'd even hung velvet drapes in a deep brown velvet. Pointing, I asked, "Were those in storage?"

"No. Linens 'N Things."

And there was artwork. Sketches and a couple of oils. "And the pictures?"

"Ivan's. Worth a little. More curiosity than art." He'd been doing some research.

Then I looked into the dining room. There was a gorgeous dining table with scrolled legs and six matching chairs. "I don't remember that."

"No, it was buried. Rosewood. Deco. That's worth more than the artwork."

"Did we rip these people off?"

"Maybe. I don't know. I had to go up to fifteen thousand. But I made half that back selling the piano."

The dining room had been painted by painters. The color went with the living room but wasn't mottled. The coved ceiling was a different complementary color.

The kitchen was nearly finished. The tile was on the counters. It was busy. Pretty but busy. I'd get used to it though. There were still empty places where the stove and refrigerator would go.

We walked down the hallway to the bedrooms. The smaller bedroom had been turned into an office, the walls a deep green. In the center the partners desk I'd searched through. One side for me, one for Ronnie. It was then that I realized there was no place for guests or roommates. I have to say, I was happy about that. It would be just us.

"This is basically it. We still have a lot of work in the bathroom, and I can't decide what color to paint the bedroom."

I hugged him and kissed him. Then I whispered in his ear, "It's a beautiful home."

I sat down at the desk; the chair was leather and tufted like the sofa in the living room. Remembering something, I opened the bottom drawer to my right. It hadn't been cleared out yet.

"I haven't gotten rid of everything. I was going for impact."

"That's okay. Impact was lovely."

In the drawer, the cassettes marked with the letter P were still there. I took them out and set them on top of the desk. There were thirteen of them, labeled P1-P13.

"What happened to that funky word processor thing from the seventies?"

"I took over the lease on the storage units. I've cleared out two of them and let them go. That word processor and a bunch of other stuff is in the remaining unit."

"I want to find out what's on these tapes."

Afew days later, Ronnie, John and I drove up to the storage place near Silver Lake. There was no electricity in the storage unit itself. Ronnie had called ahead and arranged for an extension cord to be waiting for us at the front desk. We had a one-hour window. They didn't want to pay for the electricity.

Of course, we weren't even sure we could get the thing running again. The one unit left was three quarters full of things Ronnie was still trying to sell or otherwise dispose of. We moved things around so we could get to the word processor—which John called a Wang, so that's probably what it was.

Luckily, there was a handbook. John, I'd learned, had put himself through nursing school as an office temp, so he actually had some experience with typewriters and computers and all of that. He read through the computer while Ronnie and I figured out how to plug it in. There was a moment of suspense as we actually waited to see if it would come on. It did.

I had a bag filled with the tapes labeled with a P, which I assume meant Patrick, though it could also have meant personal. I'd also brought a ream of paper snagged from Ronnie's office. John put one of the cassettes into the machine, rolled a piece of paper into the typewriter part, and then hit the special key on the side that said AUTO START.

Miraculously, it began typing. It took a few hours to go through the thirteen tapes. Eventually, I had to go downstairs and give the kid at the desk forty bucks to ignore the fact that we were taking too long. Two of the tapes wouldn't play, one was actually broken. The remaining tapes only contained a page or two of broken text.

I was immediately excited because the first page contained Vera's name and a date: February 1973. Sometime shortly after Ivan's death. I imagined that Patrick had created these documents himself, without the help of a secretary. Patrick's private grief and the personal nature of his relationship with Vera almost demanded it. I imagined him in an office, waiting for his secretary to go home so he could make these tapes.

Something else became apparent quickly. Patrick didn't have a grasp of how the processor worked. The pages John printed out had long gaps, repeated lines, and multiple errors. Some lines just simply stopped, words like lemmings falling off a cliff… abrupt endings, half-thoughts. Reading through the pages John printed out, it felt like the first draft of a story that longed to end differently. In its way, it was a confession from someone who wasn't guilty.

Patrick and Vera met during a sheriff's raid of the Blue Fox. Ivan was there, so was Gigi. None of them were arrested. Afterward, they went to Ivan's home in Holmby Hills. The four of them got on well. Initially, Patrick liked Vera quite a lot.

A week or so later, she called his office and asked to have lunch. He'd thought she wanted a secretarial job, and he was inclined to give her one. But, no, what she proposed was a proposal. During the raid of The Blue Fox, they'd pretended to be a straight couple. Vera had the idea they could both benefit by doing that more often.

She offered to pose as his fiancée for his family and business associates. In return, he went on double dates with Gigi and her husband, Manny Marker. It was a simple ruse that worked well for six months or so. Then, Patrick began to be annoyed by Vera's independence. She was quick to state an opinion and slow to consider its impact. His family didn't really like her and neither did his co-workers.

And the time he spent with the Markers was increasingly unbearable. In the spring of forty-nine, he began making himself less and less available to Vera. He also stopped bringing her around his family. The less he relied on her the less he owed her.

Meanwhile, Vera's relationship with Gigi was deepening. Vera wanted Patrick to help with getting Gigi out of the marriage. But he wasn't a divorce lawyer. And divorce was not as easy as it was in 1973 when Patrick was writing these. In the late summer of 1949, Manny Marker was putting pressure on Patrick to get Vera in-line and keep her away from Gigi.

And that's where it ended. P13 was one of the tapes that had broken. I could only assume that things continued to get worse. At some point, Patrick cut Vera out of his life. She didn't give up; she continued trying to rescue Gigi. And then Manny Marker killed her.