The Little Black Dress Read online

  “And you don’t think anyone showed a particular interest in Carmen?”

  “Not that I noticed. Really. The girls just go there for the exercise and the music. Nobody goes there to pick up guys.”

  “This other club you went to, Shakespeare’s? You said before that you were planning to go there on the day Carmen was abducted. That Carmen was going to do a reading?”

  “Yes, it was poetry night.”

  “So this is some kind of coffee house? Some kind of alternative hangout?” he asked.

  “Exactly,” I told him. “We liked to go there because it was so cool and unusual. Most of the kids who go there are under eighteen, but there are some college kids too. Shakespeare’s doesn’t serve alcohol, though, so not too many older kids hang out there.”

  “And the clientele was mainly gay?” he asked, looking at me oddly again.

  “Well, what I meant was that it was the kind of place where you could be yourself, whether you were gay or just hopelessly nerdy like me.” That comment made the lieutenant smile. “A lot of arty kinds of kids hung out there, musicians and poets and maybe some of them are gay. That’s all.”

  “I see,” he said. “Did you happen to notice anyone paying particular attention to Carmen?”

  “Never. We knew the owners and most of the regulars. Everybody there is friendly and supportive, like about our writing and stuff, but no one was stalking us or anything.”

  “Did you notice any SUVs or off-road vehicles parked in their parking lot?”

  “No. I mean, there’s a popular guitar store upstairs, so the parking lot is always full of cars. I never paid any attention to them. I was only happy to find a space for myself to park.”

  “Okay, then, Lucy. We’re almost done here.” He put down the pile of papers he was scanning and looked at me with his surprisingly gentle eyes. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to ask you again about that ten minutes between the time Carmen called you on your cell phone and the time you drove to the phone booth and found she wasn’t there.”

  I grimaced. There were those damned ten minutes again. If only it had been five minutes, and I had driven down there five minutes earlier. Would Carmen still be alive?

  “Is it possible that she never even made it down to the phone booth at all?” he asked. “Could someone have picked her up outside her own house?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Do you?”

  Captain Greenberg surprised me by actually answering. “I think it is entirely possible that she could have been picked up anywhere, in front of her own house or on her way down the street. We don’t know. But, Lucy, we’re going to find out. Please believe me. We’re going to find whoever it was who murdered your friend.”

  “Will you? Because nobody’s found anything yet,” I said.

  “We’re going to be a lot more thorough now that I’m in charge of the investigation. I’m interviewing everyone who was questioned before, but I’m also going to interview anyone else who might have been home that afternoon, which means we’ll be interviewing all the gardeners and housekeepers who didn’t get questioned the first time around.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. “Maybe somebody actually saw the car that took her.”

  Before he left, the lieutenant took photos of the tires of my car. He said they had photographs of the tire tracks around that telephone booth from the day Carmen disappeared, and they were pretty scrambled up and overridden by the police as well as by my Mazda. But they had a program that could sort them out.

  Damn! If only I had known…. But how could I have known when I swept my little car around the corner and pulled up alongside that telephone booth that I needed to be careful how I parked that day? I didn’t know then it was going to be the worst day of my life. I didn’t know then that it was going to be the day I lost Carmen.

  CHAPTER 15

  MORTIFIED

  IT TURNED out Seth was a formidable computer hacker, so with his skills, combined with his dad’s lax attitude toward computer security, he had easy access to his dad’s passwords, and from there, to his dad’s data. He really did get a copy of the transcript of my interview by the very next morning, and within a week, Seth had downloaded the entire Carmen case file, including the autopsy and forensic reports, put them on a memory stick, and brought the lot over to my house the following weekend.

  I already knew it was going to be rough reading those case files, especially the autopsy and forensic reports, but I wanted to know what was in them. I needed to know. Before Seth got there, I took one of my mom’s Valiums. I had been tapering off of them ever since I started back at school and was only taking one or two at night now. But that day I made sure I had a little cushion before I looked at those files. They were only the little 2 mg ones, so I wasn’t worried about my judgment being impaired, and I certainly wasn’t afraid of falling asleep.

  We decided to print out the entire thing all at once to make it easier to collate and share the information between us, so after we let Constanza make us some fresh coffee, we locked the door to my bedroom and went to work. My parents were cool with this. They never questioned my life choices or my work patterns, but just in case, I told Constanza we had an important exam coming up, and we were going to start cramming for it.

  First, I uploaded everything from the memory stick into my computer, and then, trying not to read anything yet, I printed out the entire batch. I ran out of ink in the middle, but I had been prepared for this, so I had another cartridge ready, and after a time-out for restarting the printer, it was done. Seth collated everything while I prepared the folders, then we filed them into their separate file folders, and when we were finished, we sat down on the floor, our backs against my bed, and I took a deep breath, and we opened the copy of the autopsy report and started reading.

  It was worse than I had ever imagined.

  “Oh my God,” I moaned. “I forgot there would be photographs!” The first thing I saw was a vivid photo of my beloved Carmen, naked and dead, her skin unnaturally white where it wasn’t covered with hideous wounds or purple-and-red bruises. She looked terribly vulnerable and terribly dead, lying on that metal table.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t look at those,” Seth said, clumsily trying to take them out of my hands so that they spilled over my lap and onto the floor, and when I looked down, all I could see were dozens of pictures of my poor Carmen, dead and naked on the metal table with every wound and violation up close and in living (or dead) color. It was all so ghastly, my head began to spin, and I started to feel sick. Then I started to cry.

  “Look,” Seth said, realizing immediately that it was too much for me, “I think we’ve seen enough of these. Let’s just put them away for now. See? I’m putting them away.” And he got down on his knees and gathered them together and slid them upside down inside a file folder.

  I was too stunned to go on. “Seth,” I said through my tears. “Just read the report to me, okay? I don’t think I can look at anything else right now.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll just scan this and try to summarize it for you without too much gruesome detail.” He took the folder out of my hand and opened it.

  “The gist of this autopsy report is that Carmen died of strangulation. She was strangled by hand and not with any device, like a ligature,” he said. He stopped and looked over at me, but I just nodded my head for him to continue, because now I knew. Someone had wrung the life out of Carmen with his bare hands!

  Seth went ahead with the next part. “Carmen had been raped multiple times.” Seth stopped again. “Are you sure you want to know all this?”

  I nodded again, but now I just stared down at the rug. “Yes, I need to know,” I said finally. “You can go on. I’m all right.” But I wasn’t really all right. I was thoroughly not all right.

  “They found evidence of violent rape in every orifice on Carmen’s body and they were able to collect DNA from these violations, as well as skin and hair samples.” Seth turned to me again. “I’m not g
oing to read any more detail about that. Just that they found three separate specimens of DNA from three separate perpetrators. The medical examiner also states that she was injured so badly and in so many places, both internally and externally, that she might well have died from blood loss due to her injuries if she hadn’t been strangled.”

  “Oh God, my poor Carmen,” I moaned.

  “She appeared to have been severely beaten, because her face and body were covered with contusions. However, the medical examiner could not determine if all the bruises were caused by physical blows or from being raped in the back of a moving vehicle.”

  I was sobbing softly now, and Seth went on reading to himself.

  “Listen to this, Lucy,” Seth said suddenly, looking up from the next part he had been scanning. “Evidently, they’ve got some machine that uses the latest technology to determine the extent of internal injuries. It says they found evidence of scarring caused by vaginal trauma consistent with an earlier rape! The ME was able to ascertain that Carmen had been raped before, sometime between ten and twelve years of age!”

  I began to feel chills then, as if Carmen’s ghost was in the room with us, and I thought to myself, so there it is. This is where that rage came from.

  “Oh, Seth, I knew it,” I said. “I knew something terrible had happened to her when she was a little girl. It was her father! It had to be.”

  “So Carmen was molested by her own father?”

  “Yes, I’m sure of it. That’s why she would never talk about him. That’s why they don’t have any pictures of him at their house. That was what James was trying to tell me!”

  I stopped crying then. Somehow, this latest information hardened me. My grief was replaced with hatred and anger at the men who had hurt my beloved. I felt a new resolve to make them pay.

  “Are you all right?” Seth asked. “Do you want me to go on? There’s only a little bit more.”

  “I’m fine now. Yes, go on.”

  “Using that same technology—” Seth stopped just then. “Oh, Lucy, this is even more disgusting than what I’ve told you so far.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Go ahead. Read it.”

  “By carefully studying the ratio of healing and blood loss in the internal injuries in her vagina and rectum, it was determined that Carmen was already dead for a great portion of her attack.”

  “Oh, that’s horrible,” I said.

  “Whoever they were,” Seth added, “they raped and brutalized her body even after she had already died!”

  After hearing this last bit, it was impossible to think about reading anything else. All these past months, I had wanted to know exactly what had happened to Carmen, but now that I knew, it was too awful to live with. I wanted to scream. Seth didn’t know what to do, either. He didn’t know how to comfort me, and honestly, what comfort could anyone offer?

  “I think that’s enough for one night,” he said. “Let’s go over to Pips and grab a piece of cheesecake.”

  I didn’t feel like eating anything, but suddenly I felt like I would faint if I didn’t get out of that room. “Yes. You’re right. Let’s go.” I practically leapt off the floor and grabbed my black jacket from the desk chair and ran to unlock the door.

  “I’ll just bring these case notes along just in case,” Seth mumbled as he scooped some files up and ran after me.

  I let Seth drive and blanked out my mind for the ten minutes it took to get to Westwood Village. We sat in our favorite booth at Pips like two shell-shocked soldiers. The waitress offered us coffee, and we mumbled our thanks. Seth asked if I wanted cheesecake, but I couldn’t even summon the strength to pretend this was a social occasion, and I shook my head.

  After the waitress came back with our coffee mugs and left us alone again, Seth suggested we move on. “I think we had better leave the next part of the forensics for now. But try to keep what you know in the back of your mind, because any anger you feel is good. It will keep us focused, but we should take a look at some of this other stuff to see if they’ve made any progress on the case and if they even have any suspects at all.”

  He opened the top file. “This looks like the list of suspects. Oh, wait, it’s not much of a list. It’s actually a list of those who have already been ruled out, either by alibi or by obvious nonconnection with Carmen’s death—like being black.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Isn’t there a list of suspects?”

  “No,” Seth said. “They actually don’t seem to have any suspects at all.”

  “Shit,” I mumbled. “What’s in that next file?”

  Seth opened the next file. “It seems to be the forensics’ evidence file with the DNA evidence and the findings from the fibers and skin cells and anything else they had gleaned from Carmen’s dress or corpse.”

  “Oh, let’s skip that for now,” I said, inwardly cringing at the word “corpse.” I didn’t like to hear that word in relation to my Carmen.

  “This next one has all the transcripts from the recent interviews with you and your neighbors, along with a telephone interview with James.”

  “Is there anything new in there? Do you have time to read them?”

  “I can scan my dad’s notes. In the new interviews with the neighborhood housekeeping and gardening staff, it looks like a few of them reported seeing a black SUV driving through the neighborhood at the time.”

  “Lots of our neighbors have black SUVs,” I said, disappointed.

  “Two housekeepers reported seeing a red SUV in the area,” Seth added.

  “Well, that’s new. Red isn’t classy enough for the likes of us. Too garish. So that could be interesting. Any license plates?”

  “Sadly, no. No one took note of any license plates.”

  “Oh well, what’s next?”

  “Here’s a request for footage from the CCTV camera located at the closest exit off the 405 freeway. Whoops, then there’s a letter stating that the camera had been broken that week, so the request was turned down. Oh, here’s the request for CCTV footage from the private cameras at the residences along your road. There’s no reply to that yet.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s a bit more promising. What’s next?”

  “This file is full of new interviews they conducted with the residents of Malibu in the area near the Pt. Dume Shopping Center next to that part of the Pacific Coast Highway where Carmen’s body was discovered.”

  “Great,” I said. “The police questioned those folks last year but hadn’t found anything. Maybe your dad’s people can turn something up.”

  “Yeah, it mentions that the CCTV footage from that area had been erased, but they’ve put in a request for the footage from a service station on the corner of Heathercliff Road, next door to the shopping mall. It says they still have footage from last year.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, sipping the last of my coffee.

  “Also, they’re still in the process of questioning the residents along Dume Drive and Heathercliff Road too.”

  “That sounds like a good plan to me,” I said, beginning to feel that at least something was being done.

  We stopped there. Seth put away the files, and we put down our coffee mugs. I looked across at Seth. He looked tired and worried, and I knew it was my turn to cheer him up.

  “Hey, I’m okay now. I’ll be all right. I won’t sleep tonight with all this coffee, but I’ll survive,” I said to him, trying to smile. “Thanks for doing all this for me.”

  “No problem,” he answered. “Anytime you want me to drag you through the depths of hell, just give me a call.”

  “No, really. I needed to know. I’m not sorry. I’m just, I don’t know, really shaken by the cruelty and disgustingness of it all. I’m just really shaken.” And I felt my resolve begin to crumble, and I was afraid I would start to cry again.

  And then Seth did a surprising thing. He got up and came around to my side of the booth and sat down next to me. He put his arms around me and just let me cry on his shoulder. It was a
good thing to do. And afterward, I wiped my face with a napkin, and he drove me home.

  That night, I put myself to sleep thinking about the folks in Malibu. I thought up a little scenario wherein some nice rich old lady had happened to notice this strange SUV driving around that night, because it was where it ought not to be. In my fantasy, she had actually written down its license plate number and tucked it away on her refrigerator door with a big sunny refrigerator magnet. If only.

  CHAPTER 16

  STEPHANIE

  I MET Seth the next morning before homeroom.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I answered.

  “How are you doing?” he asked when I climbed out of my car.

  “I’m okay. Better,” I said.

  “Good, ’cause I have some good news to report.”

  “They didn’t catch her killers, did they?”

  “Not that good, but the CCTV footage from Malibu arrived at my dad’s office last night.”

  “The footage from the service station on the corner?”

  “Yes, from the one on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Heathercliff Drive. It was the closest camera to where they had found Carmen’s body. The service station had stored all the recordings from the previous year, so they included the timeline between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. on that Wednesday night. They also sent along the next day’s recordings, just to be on the safe side, so there’s loads of footage to review.”

  “They seem amazingly helpful,” I said. “But I guess that’s Malibu for you. I just don’t understand why the police didn’t check them out last year. We’re lucky those guys stored the videos.”

  “Yeah. Well, at least you know my dad’s on the ball. The video team are studying them already, but they say it might take them a couple of days to go through it all.”

  “What about the door-to-door? Did they question the residents in the neighborhood again?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. I read those notes too, but disappointingly, the door-to-door on Heathercliff Drive didn’t turn up anything new. No one reported or noted anything unusual that night, and no one saw or heard anything worth remembering.”