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“Attorney-client privilege?”
“No. He passed away last year. AIDS.”
That hit me like a hard slap in the face. It took a few moments for me to pull it together. I mean, he wasn’t always my favorite person in the world, but I hated that he was dead. Dead people never apologize for their bad behavior.
“Tell me about Operation Tea & Crumpets,” Richland said, sipping a giant Coke.
I spent the next three hours telling him everything I knew. We ended up getting four more sodas and three more orders of fries so they wouldn’t throw us out. He took notes the whole time in an imitation leather journal. When I ran out of things to tell him, he said, “I’ll have questions. Let me dig into this and we can—”
“Call me,” I said. “It’s probably better if we don’t get together again.” Telling the whole story reminded me of how many people might enjoy dumping my dead body into a large body of water.
I stood up, ready to leave, but I had one final thing to say.
“Don’t forget. I’m dead.”
3
April 1, 1996
Monday
Ispent a lot of that Monday reading the three files Lydia had given me. Immediately, I saw that the rapes were not likely to be connected. I hadn’t expected them to be, but it was a good thing to verify. Locations, victims and modus operandi were all different. The only thing they seemed to have in common were the investigating detective, Brenda Wellesley, and that I happened to be familiar with all the locations.
The first rape I looked at took place August 22, 1987, on the Los Angeles City College campus. It happened at eleven-thirty at night after classes were over and most students had gone. A young woman named Selma Martinez was walking to her car after a late conference with her professor. The car was parked on North Heliotrope, but before she got there she was beaten and raped behind the theater building. When she regained consciousness, she drove herself to the emergency room at County USC.
The second rape occurred on November 12, 1987, in a private home at 2145 Avon Court in Elysian Heights. The rapist broke in through the back door of the house around two in the morning and raped thirty-six-year-old Joanne Yardley, a props person for Lorimar Studios. She was blindfolded and tied to her bed. She remained tied there for ten hours until her neighbor came over to complain about Joanne’s howling Chihuahua.
The third attack happened January 29, 1988, at five-thirty in the morning. A twenty-seven-year-old jogger on the running track around the reservoir was pulled into a small, wooded area near Earl Street. Cammy Wainright was punched in the face until she passed out. She was raped while unconscious. Another jogger discovered her two hours later when he heard moaning.
Those were the basics.
The files also contained wince-inducing Polaroids of the victims’ injuries, statements collected by uniformed officers from potential witnesses, and the blood tests Lydia had talked about. Then there were the descriptions; long, detailed descriptions in each file. I felt like the descriptions of the rapists should have been included on the incident reports, but for some reason they were not.
Selma Martinez described her assailant as a young Black man in his early twenties, about six-foot-two and a hundred-and-seventy pounds. She said he was very dark-skinned and had Jheri curl in his hair. Detective Wellesley found Alan Dinkler, who took a history class that met an hour earlier in the classroom across from the one where Selma took American Literature, Part II. Even though Dinkler’s mother said he was home and in bed by the time of the rape, he was convicted on the strength of Selma’s identification. A photograph of Dinkler showed that he was very dark-complected and wore Jheri curl in his hair.
Joanne Yardley’s attacker wore a ski mask during the rape. She didn’t see him, though she knew he was around six-feet tall, white and wore Aramis. Her ex-husband had worn the cologne, so she was familiar with it. The stronger description came from Joanne’s neighbor—a woman named Candy Van Dyke—who had seen the man, later identified as Stu Whatley, coming out of the house without the mask. She added blond hair, blue eyes and muscular build to the description.
Detective Wellesley did a search of the area for sex offenders and found Whatley. He’d been arrested for felony rape, but not charged. Instead, he’d pled to a misdemeanor assault charge and had gotten probation. Wellesley put him in a lineup. Joanne didn’t recognize him until he was asked to speak; then she knew him. They searched his apartment and found that he wore Aramis.
Despite being beaten to unconsciousness, Cammy Wainright remembered quite a lot about her attacker. Somewhere in his early twenties, he was white with light brown hair, dark eyes. He was several inches taller than she was—five-seven—and strong. Very strong. Wellesley focused on a list of men Cammy had met through a classified ad she’d placed in theLA Weekly. Her assailant was not one of the men she’d dated. He was, according to Wellesley, a man named Peter Linder who was the roommate of one of the men she’d gone on a date with. Linder had an arrest for assault stemming from a bar fight he’d been involved in while in college.
Once I’d read through the basics, I took a break. Getting this far had taken most of the day. Something was bothering me. Around four, I went for a walk around the neighborhood. The Freedom Agenda occupied an old storefront in a not-so-great neighborhood between Long Beach’s gay ghetto—a neighborhood called Alamitos Beach—and the downtown area. There was an art supply store on one side and a record store—a relic of a bygone era—on the other. Nearby was a Vons nicknamed Ghetto Vons, a Jack in the Box with bulletproof glass, and an empty shopping mall. Not exactly urban blight but well on its way.
On that afternoon, I wasn’t paying much attention. Something nagged at me about the rapes and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Their only connection was Detective Brenda Wellesley. She had solved three rapes in three months. Not just solved but made arrests that led to convictions.
And that’s what was bothering me. I’d read an article in theLos Angeles Timesthat said very few rapes led to convictions. I probably should have known that from my time on the job in Chicago back in the seventies, but things like rape didn’t matter in the same way then. Nobody bothered to count.
So how does it happen that one brand-new detective manages to hit three in a row out of the park? That’s what I needed to find out.
****
I would have gotten home sooner, but I stayed an extra half hour talking to Karen, Lydia’s assistant/office manager, about Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He was on trial for assisting in the suicides of two different women. She thought he should go to prison; I thought he’d get off, as he had before. I didn’t say whether I thought it was right or wrong. In all honestly, I wasn’t sure.
“I don’t think you should call murder a personal favor or a kindness,” was her point.
Having killed a couple of people in self-defense, I thought it might not be so terrible to kill someone who wanted to be dead. I didn’t say that though. Instead, I said, “I don’t know. We kill animals when we know there’s no hope. We think of that as being kind. Why can’t we be kind to each other?”
“So you think doctors should just kill anyone who asks?”
