After saying goodbye to Mrs Connor, I left their house and made my way home. The warm air coupled with the start of summer vacation had brought people out of their houses. Across the road a couple walked a teacup poodle on a thin lead. A group of kids skated past me, the wheels of their boards making a long, rolling sound like an incoming wave, building to a crescendo then disappearing as they sped away into the shadows.
My mind wandered. I looked into the windows of houses, some dark, others illuminated by the light of television sets. I thought about the Manson Family. On nights like this they would go out and do what they called a ‘creepy crawly’. A group of four or five Family members would target a house entirely at random, break in and proceed to ‘creep’ around the place. The idea was to move around the house unnoticed, making sure they didn’t wake the occupants. Occasionally they would take something, like cash if it was left lying around, or food to feed the Family back at the ranch. But it was more about moving around undetected, the excitement and power that came with infiltrating someone’s house as they slept.
Richard Ramirez—the ‘Night Stalker’—was one of Los Angeles’s most infamous serial killers, and also favoured neighbourhoods like this. The neatly trimmed hedges and manicured front lawns were a far cry from the bleakness and despair of downtown Los Angeles, where he regularly scored drugs at the bus terminus and slept in whatever car he had stolen at the time. The suburbs made the Night Stalker angry, just like they did the Manson Family. The warm little houses in tidy rows were a reminder of every comfort he didn’t have. The order of suburbia affronted his need for chaos.
Aunt Lynette’s house was a California bungalow with a large front yard and an old-fashioned porch. The light was on in the living room and I could see Lynette bent over her books, a glass of red wine in her hand. From a distance she looked just like my mother, with her hair hanging loose and those thick-rimmed glasses. It wasn’t until you got closer that her features became her own. Green eyes instead of brown. A mole on her chin where my mother had none. From a distance I could imagine it was my mother, and for a brief moment everything was as it used to be. But the closer I got the more reality came crashing back.
Aunt Lynette and I were always being mistaken for mother and daughter, something that made us both equally uncomfortable. It was easier not to correct people as that would involve going into details, which neither of us wanted to do. But there was no denying the family resemblance. The same round face, the same large, Kewpie-doll eyes. I didn’t get much from my dad’s side of the family, except a healthy suspicion of authority that my teachers liked to call an ‘attitude problem’.
Aunt Lynette was an assistant District Attorney. She prosecuted people on behalf of the county, regardless of whether she thought they were guilty or not. This didn’t seem to bother her. She’d worked hard all her life to make it this far, and whether clients were guilty or not was largely irrelevant to her career. She had prosecuted battered wives and mothers, and sent innocent men to jail. But still she slept well at night. All that seemed to matter to her was that she was doing her job effectively.
Lynette also had the alarming habit of flashing her DA badge. Once when I was nine she took me to Disneyland, and two guys got into an argument in the line at Splash Mountain. She pushed through the crowd, walked straight up to them, flipped open her little leather wallet and watched the blood drain from their faces. No one even looked closely enough at her badge to see that an assistant DA wasn’t actually a real cop. The two men held up their hands and stepped back as if she was going to taser them, or perhaps cuff them to the fence where they’d have to listen to ‘Zipadeedodah’ all day long. I remember being mortified and hiding behind a corn dog stand as everybody stared at us. Lynette wasn’t fazed by the attention. She was proud of working for the county.
As I walked in the front door she looked up from her casebooks. Next to her on the dining table were two plates, one stacked high with some kind of casserole, the other scraped empty.
‘I’ve already eaten,’ I said as I kicked off my shoes. Lynette looked at the casserole, brown and congealing on her fine china. I watched her swallow her anger.
‘Maybe we should get you a cell phone,’ she suggested, ‘so I can call and check whether you actually want dinner or if I’m going to all this trouble for no good reason.’
‘Cell phones give you cancer,’ I said, ‘and the government use them to track your movements.’
‘That sounds like something your father would say,’ she said, a comment I chose to ignore.
‘So what exactly did you and Benji get up to today?’
‘Just stuff.’
‘Oh really?’ She put her pen down. ‘What kind of stuff?’
I opened the fridge and took out a carton of milk. ‘Went to Universal Studios, took the tram tour. Can I take this?’
She didn’t say anything, just nodded then looked down at her books. ‘I saw the most horrible thing on Oprah today.’
‘Hmmm?’
‘They had a story about a woman whose car was stolen and her baby was still in the backseat. She tried to grab the baby but the car sped off, her child still hanging out, attached to the car seat. She watched her child being dragged along the side of the road.’
‘That’s a repeat.’
Lynette pursed her lips. ‘Stories like that make you put your life in perspective,’ she continued. ‘Makes you realise how lucky you really are.’
‘Just another day for you and me in paradise.’
She examined me through her thick black lenses. ‘Have you done something to your hair?’
‘It’s pink.’
‘So it is. Do you like it?’
‘I just love it.’
‘Good. As long as you’re happy.’
I leant over her casebooks. ‘What are you working on?’
‘It’s a murder case,’ she said as she scribbled something on her notepad. ‘It’s gang-related.’
‘Cool. Got any crime scene photos?’
She put her pen down and adjusted her glasses. ‘Hilda, I find your fascination with murder a little disconcerting. This is a very sad and horrific crime.’
‘But you said it was gang-related.’
‘So?’
‘So then he probably had it coming.’
‘Life isn’t as black-and-white as that, Hilda. It’s not fair for you to judge other people when you have no idea what they’ve been through, the social and economic circumstances they were born into—’
‘All right, you don’t have to give me a sermon. I’m not the jury.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Anyway, you’re the one obsessed with murder, not me. You made a career out of it.’
‘I’m not obsessed with murder, Hilda. I’m helping people.’
‘Come on, just one look—’
I tried to slide one of the case folders away with my finger but Lynette snatched it back.
‘No, Hilda. Trust me when I say you are better off not seeing this.’
I had never viewed any of Lynette’s case files. She kept them under lock and key, never once made the mistake of accidentally leaving one out. Did she have any idea what I had access to on the internet?
‘You’re probably right,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t want to warp me now, would we?’
I was halfway out of the room when Lynette spoke again. ‘You know, we could feed a third-world country with the amount of dinners I’ve made for you and you’ve never eaten. It’s very wasteful.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘And I suppose you got everything you needed at the Connors’ house?’
‘No, I’m just not hungry,’ I lied, my stomach still full of chocolate chip cookies.
‘Well, I hope you’re more grateful to Mrs Connor than you are to me. I’d be very embarrassed if you weren’t.’
I went back over to where Lynette was sitting and gave her a kiss on the forehead. ‘Sorry.’
‘Next time call.’
‘Okay!’ I yelled over my shoulder as I left the room, taking the milk carton with me.