Page 9 of The Happy Month
“Something old.”
“I mean to the commitment ceremony.”
“Something like this. It’s not black tie, is it?”
“God, no. We need to buy Hawaiian shirts.”
“Is that on the invitation?”
“No, but that’s what everyone’s doing. Robert and Doug met in Hawaii. Don’t you think that will be cute if we all show up that way?”
I knew Robert and Doug from working at The Hawk. Actually, I knew most everyone in town from working at The Hawk. They were more Ronnie’s friends though. He’d helped them buy a three-bedroom Spanish house in California Heights and they all volunteered at The Center. I was pretty sure they were the ones trying to get Ronnie onto the board of directors.
After dinner, I drove Ronnie the three blocks back to the co-op and dropped him off in front of his car. He kissed me and said, “See you at home.”
I got there and found a parking spot before he did. Walking up the front steps, I grabbed the mail and went inside. In the living room, Junior Clybourne was watchingJeopardy!as he did most every night. He loved the show and spent most of the half an hour shouting out the wrong answers.
I shuffled through the mail as I walked across the room.
“Hello, darling,” Junior said. “The questions are so easy tonight.”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” I said.
Our electric bill, an invitation to a charity event for Ronnie, a credit card statement for our roommate John, something official looking for Junior, and a card for me. I spread it all out on the breakfast bar in the kitchen.
The card had an Illinois postmark and no return address. I got them from time to time, though it was unexpected since we weren’t close to any holidays. I opened it. The front of the card was a bodybuilder in a tiny speedo. Inside, it said ‘I know what you want for Christmas.’ Beneath that, handwritten, it said, ‘Going on a cruise. Willbe at the Westin for one night. Can you meet at the lobby bar around four on Sunday afternoon?’ Per our agreement, it wasn’t signed.
When I heard the front door open and Ronnie come in, I threw the card into the trash. I didn’t want him to see it. Usually, when the cards came he’d tease me and sometimes ask to see them. If he saw this one, he’d want to go with me to the Westin. And that couldn’t happen.
Ronnie usually had clients most of Sunday. I could probably go and he’d have no idea. But that wasn’t the question. The question was, did it feel safe?
CHAPTER THREE
July 23, 1996
Tuesday morning
Every morning now, I have coffee and read theLos Angeles Times. I could read thePress-Telegram, but it’s a little too conservative for me. That Tuesday morning, the Olympics in Atlanta took up a lot of space. I didn’t bother reading it, I wasn’t interested. They’d found some big chunks of the plane that had gone down off Long Island. People were still saying someone had taken it down with a missile from the shore. There was a little article about the problems they were having establishing a new area code for the valley. Which reminded me, I needed to take my cellular phone with me. I had a habit of forgetting it.
Instead of going to the office, I drove past it to the Long Beach Public Library. I parked in the parking structure and walked out to the bunker-style building, which was nearly buried in the ground. It looked as though someone had said, “Hey, let’s build a library that will survive nuclear war.” I was sure it would.
The reference area was downstairs, even deeper into the bunker, and to the right. I looked for the thickLos Angeles Timesindex that would tell me the dates of any articles that mentioned Vera Korenko but couldn’t find them. Stopping at the reference desk, I asked about that and was told that the index had been computerized. That didn’t make me happy. I was much better at turning real pages than digital ones.
The nice young woman pointed me toward a computer. I put in Vera Korenko’s name and got one result. I took me a moment to realize what had happened. I’d accidentally put her name into the card catalogue and gotten a book titledCanyon Girlfrom nineteen eighty-one. I wrote down the call number and walked around until I found it.
I sat down at a table and looked it over. The cover was lurid. The jacket black-and-white with red bars over the intimate parts of a reclining woman. The author was a man named Wallace Philburn. I flipped the book over and read the blurb on the back:
“Not since the Black Dahlia has there been a crime so shocking in its depravity. On a clear, crisp morning in the fall of 1949, Vera Korenko’s brutally beaten body was found in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco. For more than two decades, the Los Angeles Police Department has been flummoxed. Clue after clue has failed to lead to Vera’s killer. Now, after years of exhaustive research,Canyon Girlpresents the likely killer of poor Vera Korenko.”
My first question was,Are canyons andarroyos the same thing?It bugged me so much I went and grabbed a dictionary. No, they are not the same thing. A canyon is a small valley with steep, hilly sides. An arroyo is a generally dry riverbed, basically one of the ‘now-you-see-em, now-you-don’t’ rivers that surround Los Angeles. Of course, Canyon Girl was a better title than Arroyo Girl, since ninety percent of the country—me included—didn’t even know what an arroyo was.
Getting back to the book, I read the author’s biography which was on the back below the blurb:
“Wallace Philburn, a noted Harvard graduate, has spent decades in Hollywood. He has worked under distinguished producers Roger Corman and William Castle, writing films for each:Rock-N-Roll WerewolfandCurse of the Space Alien. All the while, building a career as a noted journalist contributing to monthlies likeConfidential,The Q.T.andThe Lowdown. He is also the author of the well-reviewed novel, Penny’s Plight. He lives in Hollywood, California with his wife, actress Sophia Hadley.”
Okay, that was a lot of hot air. I mean, I didn’t know much about the industry but none of this rang any bells. If you were good at writing movies, then why work at cheesy sounding magazines? And why write a true crime book that I was dubious of even before reading the first page.
I flipped to the back of the book to see if there was an index. There was. I scanned through it looking for Patrick Gill’s name. I didn’t find it. Next, I looked for the word engagement. It wasn’t there. Something here was fictional. But was it Patrick Gill’s engagement or was itCanyon Girl? For that matter, was it both?
