Chapter 3
July 23, 1996
Tuesday morning
Every morning now, I have coffee and read the Los Angeles Times. I could read the Press-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 thick Los Angeles Times index 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 titled Canyon Girl from 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 Girl presents the likely killer of poor Vera Korenko.”
My first question was, Are canyons and arroyos 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 Werewolf and Curse of the Space Alien. All the while, building a career as a noted journalist contributing to monthlies like Confidential, The Q.T. and The 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 it Canyon Girl? For that matter, was it both?
Opening the book, I noticed that the pages in the middle were glossy. That meant there were photos. I skipped to those. The first was a black-and-white photo from the mid-twenties. A woman in a black dress with a scarf on her head held a fat, surprised looking infant. That suggested to me that Wallace had spoken to Vera’s family. The next photo was Vera’s high school graduation in 1942, also black-and-white. She wore a soft-looking sweater with three buttons at the neck, a gold cross and a big smile. Curls framed her face, she wore dark lipstick—most likely red—and had a mischievous glint in her eye. There was another photo, taken around the same time with Vera seated on the wrought iron railing of a couple of concrete steps. The entrance to some building? A different sweater, fluffier, tighter, but the same big smile and curls framing her face. Could that also have come from a family member? Or did Wallace have other sources?
On the next two pages were four crime scene photos that all showed a naked woman from different angles, lying on the ground as though thrown. Black bars, like the red ones on the cover, had been added to each photograph to hide her breasts and genitalia. It appeared she was lying under a tree, some kind of evergreen. There was trash around her body. Photos like this never looked real. It was a person reduced to a thing. That alone made it disturbing and unreal.
Turning the page, I found photographs of a Detective Andrew Schmidt taken around the time of the case. He looked to be in his mid-forties. He’d be over ninety now. It seemed unlikely he was alive. Also on that page was a photo of a teenage boy named Carmichael Crampton on a bicycle. He’d found the body. Then there was a couple named Harper and Georgia Dawson who were described as friends. The photo, one of the few in color, was taken some time in the fifties. Clearly after Vera’s death. Last was a nice color shot of Vera Korenko’s grave at Forest Lawn. 1924-1949. She was only twenty-five when she died.
I didn’t have time to look at the book any further. I went upstairs to the checkout counter and gave the librarian my card. I had two weeks to read the book and return it without a fine. In the parking garage, I found my Jeep Wrangler on the second floor where I’d left it. I tossed the book into the backseat.
Before I got in, I reached under the seat and touched my gun. It wasn’t the Beretta 92S I used to own, the one I’d killed Stu Whatley with. The police had taken that one from Lydia. Of course, it wasn’t legally registered, so they’d asked her a lot of questions about where she’d gotten it. She’d steadfastly claimed attorney client privilege making them think she’d gotten it from a client. Given the somewhat political nature of the situation, they decided not to prosecute the nice lady lawyer who’d killed a rapist in self-defense for having an illegal gun. None of that got me my gun back.
I went up to South Central and bought myself another gun on the street. This one was a Colt Detective Special, which had a certain irony to it. It was older model, used 38 caliber bullets which was a lot of bang for the buck. It cost me five hundred dollars, which was my last paycheck at The Hawk and some other money I’d put into a hidey-hole or two. It’s never a bad idea to hide some cash no matter how your life is going.
So, yeah, I liked to know it was still there. After I checked, I climbed in and took the 710 all the way up to the 5. The thing that was nice about living in Long Beach was that you had pretty easy access to the Eastside and surrounding suburbs: Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena. And also, the Westside: Santa Monica, Venice and the beach cities. Silverlake and Hollywood weren’t too bad. West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the like were pretty awkward. They were far away from any freeways, which is probably why people lived there.
When I called Shelia Karpinski, she’d given me an address in Burbank. 1830 Riverside Drive. I’d assumed it was a house. One with pillars and a couple of floors. I didn’t know Burbank well. Actually, not at all. What I hadn’t expected was a stable.
It looked like a long red barn and had a sign over the front double door that said SHEILA K’S STABLE. Below the name it offered horse boarding and riding lessons. There were a few parking spaces in front, so I pulled in and parked. By the time I climbed out of my Jeep, a woman in her later-sixties came out of the stable. She wore stiff jeans rolled up at the bottom and a loose-fitting blue gingham shirt. Her hair was cut in a severe page boy, and her skin was dark and wrinkled, as you’d expect on someone who’d spent a great deal of time outside.
“I assume you’re Dominick Reilly?” she said.
“I am. Sheila?”
“You betcha. You weren’t expecting a stable, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Sorry, it’s one of my favorite jokes. People expect a house or an apartment. ’Course it wasn’t like this when I bought the place thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, this was the middle of nowhere if you can imagine that.”
“Is there someplace we can chat for a few minutes?” I asked.
“Why don’t I show you around?”
I wasn’t what you’d call keen on that. The place was dusty and it smelled. I’d rather sit in the car, but I followed her into the stable. Inside it was dark, much cooler than it was outside where it had to be ninety degrees. When I left Long Beach, it was in the mid-seventies. Thirty miles made a big difference.
“I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always loved horses. I didn’t grow up around them, never sat one until I was well into my thirties, but I’d always dreamed of them. I wanted my oldest, Lorraine, to ride. I actually thought I’d get her into dressage. But she wasn’t interested. She didn’t even want to ride the horse we bought her. Copperhead she was called. Good name for her actually. If you crossed her, she bit like a snake. My husband complained about the cost, especially when Lorraine lost interest. I was coming out, though, every day to exercise Copperhead. Beautiful horse. Seventeen hands. Then in 1966 I heard this place was for sale. I mentioned it to my husband, didn’t really say much but he knew me. Boy, that man knew me. Bought the place for me. Said he did it to save money. And you know what, he was right? At different times I’ve had up to five of my own horses. I don’t pay any fees. Everyone else does. Their fees pay for mine.”
“Your husband is gone?”
“He is. Rest his soul.”
“You don’t live here, do you?”
“Oh no, I still have the house I raised my kids in over in Toluca Lake.”
We came out of the stable and were standing in front of a large corral. “This is where we teach kids to ride,” she said. “That over there is The Equestrian Center. The horse trails in Griffith Park are just beyond. It used to be easier to get to them, but we manage.”
“Did your brother ride?”
She seemed to withdraw for a moment, and then said, “We should go and see Patrick.” Before I could agree she started walking over to an old pickup truck from the sixties. A Dodge. I think it had originally been blue but was now a sun-scorched gray. The paint on the hood was peeling off.
Sheila climbed into the driver’s seat while I walked around to the passenger side. I got in. The interior was nicer than the outside: clean, cigarette butts in the ashtray but nothing like the mess I used to make; the thirty-year-old blue vinyl seats were in good condition. It was a four-speed with the shift sticking up from the floor. Four on the floor as they used to say. She fired it up and threw it into first before I’d gotten my seat belt on.
There was no air conditioning, but she drove about fifteen miles above whatever the speed limit was so there was plenty of air coming in the windows. I quickly decided it would be wise not to watch the road, so I asked her to tell me about her brother. Which prompted her to tell me about herself.
“Well, Patrick is almost fifteen years older than I am. I was barely in grade school when he started college. USC. I think I was nine or ten when he got his law license. That was just before the war. He was in the Navy, doing something important. I’m not even sure he could say what, but it was stateside. D.C. And then, let’s see, after the war I was a bobby-soxer, boy crazy, God I loved Frank Sinatra. I got to see him at the Hollywood Bowl, forty-seven, forty-eight, I don’t remember. It was scorching hot, and I screamed so hard I gave myself laryngitis. I went to USC just like Patrick. Only for a year though, that’s how long it took me to find a husband. Jacek Karpinski. Jack. He was a senior. My parents were appalled, my marrying a Polack, but he was a Catholic so what could they say. I had Janie in 1950, John in ’53, Karen in ’54, Becky in ’56, Lorraine in ’58 and Edwin in ’60—the year we elected Kennedy.”
At Barham we basically ran a red light. Being the middle of the day there wasn’t a lot of traffic. I tightened my seat belt, and asked,
“Do you remember Vera Korenko?”
“I only met her once. Patrick brought her to the house to meet my parents. It must have been 1948, maybe. Thanksgiving or Christmas. I’m not sure. I was already in college, so I’d met Jack. It wasn’t serious yet so I wouldn’t have asked him to dinner.”
“What do you remember about Vera?”
“Oh, she was a beauty. And they were in love. The way they looked at each other. It was like they had a secret that only they shared. They smiled and giggled through dinner.”
“Do you know why the engagement wasn’t announced in the newspapers?”
“Well, they were taking it slow. She was only a few years older than me. And Patrick wanted to give her time to grow up some. Which I think is awfully wise. I started having kids so young that I missed a lot. Oh, I didn’t think that then, but I do now. I wish that we could be nineteen more than once. Like two or three times. No one needs to be sixty-five. I mean, people started telling me I was old at thirty, which means I’ve been old for most of my life.”
“Did he buy her an engagement ring?”
“He must have. I mean, I didn’t see it when they came to dinner. I remember he said it was being made. He’d designed it himself, you see. I couldn’t imagine Jack doing something like that. My ring was large but nothing to write home about. Which doesn’t mean Jack wasn’t a wonderful husband. He was, he really was.”
“So did you see a lot of your brother?”
“I’m a terrible sister. I mean, six children and then a stable to run. No, I didn’t see him often. Not until the last ten years. After Jack died. I started to make more of an effort. Patrick was already starting to decline, though… I suppose I was there when he needed me.”
“Can you tell me about the things he’s saying that disturb you?”
“He says he killed her. He says, ‘I killed Vera.’ I’ve tried asking him to explain but he gets agitated easily.”
We were in the Cahuenga Pass. We’d crossed the bridge over the 101 and were on the west side. I was gripping the door as subtly as possible.
“I found a book at the library called Canyon Girl. Have you heard of it?”
“I have. I’ve even read parts of it.”
“Does it mention your brother? I couldn’t find his name in the index.”
“No, it doesn’t. But it wouldn’t. The author, terrible little man, contacted us several times. Finally, Jack threatened to sue if he mentioned any of us. I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous. I think he made the entire book up.”
“What kind of law did your husband practice?”
“Jack was the kind of lawyer who was always in the background doing things for his clients, very rich, very powerful people. I could never quite put my finger on what he did for them, but he charged a fortune for it whatever it was. Now Patrick was an entertainment lawyer. Contracts and things. That I understood.”
“What was it like when you found out Vera had been killed?”
“Oh, it was awful. Jack and I had already gotten married, and I was pregnant with my first having the worst morning sickness. You know, now that I’m thinking about it, Vera wasn’t at the wedding. She was supposed to come, but she’d gotten sick. Stomach flu, food poisoning. Something with vomit.”
“I’m guessing the police interviewed your brother.”
“My goodness, I have no idea. Would they have done that?”
“Boyfriends, fiancés, husbands. They’re usually the first suspect.”
“Oh, but this was so violent, so horrible what was done to her. No one who cared about her would have done those things. They couldn’t.”
I decided not to contradict her on that. We were passing the Hollywood Bowl.
“Last year, my girls got together and took me to Palm Springs to see Frank Sinatra at a hotel there. I mean, he’s a fat old man now, but my God, he’s still got it.”
“What did your parents think of Vera?”
“Oh, well, they thought it was horrible that both of their children were marrying Poles. Even though we explained that she was Czech, they just never remembered that. She barely had an accent at all. I remember that. And she smelled lovely. Patrick was destroyed of course.”
“By her perfume?”
“Oh my God, no. Don’t be ridiculous. You asked about what it was like when Vera was killed. Patrick was like a ghost. And he was still that way at Janie’s christening. I wanted to ask him to be the godfather, but I was afraid it would remind him of Vera. I mean, if she’d been alive, I’d have asked them both. I asked a friend of mine from USC and her husband. Not that they did much. I haven’t seen them in years. And Janie certainly hasn’t.”
We turned right at Hollywood Boulevard, heading west. She was tailgating a Buick LeSabre when she asked me, “Do you mind if I smoke?”
Given the way she drove, the thought of adding a cigarette to the mix was terrifying. I said, “Actually, I kind of have asthma.”
I didn’t.
“Oh, but the windows—” she said and then thought better of it. “It’s fine. We’re almost there.”
She seemed more emotional about having to postpone a cigarette than anything she’d talked about.