At 6:15 on a chilly January morning, Tim Marcia parks in front of Dave Lambkin’s house, which is nestled on the side of a canyon, not far from Mulholland Drive. Today they will discover whether Vincent Rossi killed Stephanie Gorman.
Stars still dot the sky and the clouds are rimmed with moonlight. The air smells of acorns and damp hillsides. Marcia bangs on the door, setting off a cacophony inside. A crazed Schipperke, a breed better suited for guarding Dutch canal boats than roaming a Los Angeles home, barks furiously, evading Lambkin’s attempts to corral him in a back room. When he finally lets Marcia inside, Lambkin grumbles about his Schipperke’s high-strung personality. His toy Manchester terrier is a model dog, he boasts.
The décor in Lambkin’s house is eccentric. On the wall hang Salvador Dalí prints and lithographs; and frightful Day of the Dead skulls and skeletons—which his wife collects—are scattered about. First editions of Stephen King and Anne Rice line the bookshelves.
Marcia hops into Lambkin’s maroon Cutlass and they head down to the freeway. The rising sun illuminates the ridges along the canyon with the smoky light of dawn, and a vast sea of lights glimmers below, from the foothills to the sea.
“I know we’ve done everything possible,” Marcia says. “We’ve left no stone unturned.”
“I think when he sees us at the door, he’ll say, ‘I’ve been waiting thirty-five years for you guys,’” Lambkin jokes. “He’ll break down and confess.”
He pulls off the freeway in West Los Angeles, and Marcia picks up a dozen doughnuts at Primo’s, where his family once breakfasted every Sunday before church. After nervously negotiating the rush-hour traffic all the way to Orange County, Lambkin parks at a police station near Rossi’s residence. Waiting inside are the lieutenant of the Rape Special section, Debra McCarthy; two detectives who will help search the house; and two members of an LAPD undercover unit who have tailed Rossi and his wife for the past week. As the group munches on doughnuts in the parking lot, the undercover officers report that Rossi’s wife usually departs at midmorning. Rossi generally stays home until lunchtime.
“We want to play it a little Colombo-ish, a bit dimwitted,” Lambkin tells McCarthy. “We’ll tell him we reopened the case last year, his name came up and we want to see if he has any connection. We’ll try to get him over here, where we’ve got an interview room arranged. We want him away from his house as soon as possible, to get him out of his comfort zone. We’ll tell him we want him to look at some pictures.”
The key to the interview, Lambkin says, is to ensure that Rossi denies ever visiting the Gorman house. They are hoping for a confession because the district attorney might be reluctant to file a case based on a single fingerprint.
“I get the feeling he’s a deviant of some sort,” one of the undercover cops says. “The way he moves. The way he looks at people. He gives them hard looks.”
Encouraged by the insight, Lambkin and Marcia, along with McCarthy and the other two detectives, drive off to a nearby mall parking lot. The undercover officers will watch Rossi’s house, and when his wife leaves, they will notify Lambkin. As the detectives wait in the parking lot, McCarthy, who is about six months pregnant, asks Marcia for another doughnut. They talk about children.
“I’ll show you a picture of my daughter, but I won’t bother showing Dave,” she says, laughing. “I know he doesn’t like kids.”
Lambkin and Marcia become increasingly anxious as they wait for the phone call. They pace beside their car in silence.
McCarthy says she thought about the case all night and slept fitfully. She dreamt that Rossi denied knowing the Gormans, which is a favorable omen, she believes. She tells one of the detectives that she joined the police department partly because of the murder of another young girl: her sister. “It was sixteen years ago, back in Rhode Island. He was a neighbor. It was a stalking, Fatal Attraction type thing.”
“What happened to him?” the detective asks.
“He did fifteen years and got out. My family was totally flipping out. I said, ‘Stand by. He’ll screw up.’ And he did. He developed a drug habit in prison. He was violated his second week out. He peed dirty. He was thrown back in prison.”
At 10:15 A.M., Lambkin’s cell phone finally rings. The detectives hop in the car and cruise through Rossi’s modest neighborhood to his small white house with blue trim, ringed by palm trees. When Rossi opens the door, Lambkin is surprised. In his 1971 booking photo, he looked like a thug, a cast member of The Sopranos. Now, standing in his doorway, the detectives see nothing menacing about him. Pudgy and gray-haired, he is dressed in a beige polo shirt and polyester slacks. He looks like an amiable grandfather who spends his days puttering in the garden.
Lambkin and Marcia introduce themselves and shake Rossi’s hand. “We’ve reopened an old murder case and we just need a few minutes of your time,” Lambkin says, smiling reassuringly. “We have some names we’d like to run by you.”
Rossi, who appears composed, invites them inside. Lambkin sits on the sofa and Marcia pulls up a chair. Rossi remains standing. His house is immaculate and the walls are covered with pictures of his children and grandchildren.
“This is a very old case,” Lambkin says.
Rossi scrunches up his face in a baffled expression, which encourages the detectives.
“It was in West Los Angeles,” Lambkin says.
Rossi says he is not familiar with any old West L.A. murders.
Lambkin and Marcia are elated. They have obtained a crucial denial. Now all they need is a confession.
“But I was the property manager of sixty properties at that time,” Rossi says. “They were on the West Side.”
Lambkin thinks, He’s already making excuses.
“The name of the victim is Stephanie Gorman,” Lambkin says.
Rossi, still standing, walks over to the kitchen counter and writes her name down on a business card. Then he turns toward Lambkin and asks, “Is this about that sixteen-year-old girl who was killed?”
“Yes,” Lambkin says.
Rossi crosses the room and sits on the L-shaped sofa beside Lambkin. “How is it that you’ve come to talk to me now?”
“We saw your name listed in the original investigation,” Lambkin says. “There were hundreds of people interviewed, but we discovered you never were.”
Rossi explains that on that day in 1965 he stopped by the Beverlywood home of a doctor friend from New York. The doctor was not home from work yet. While Rossi waited for him with his wife, a frantic woman came to the door, pleading for the doctor.
“I went back to the house with her to see what I could do. I’m not a doctor, but I could tell the girl was obviously dead. I was only there a few minutes.”
“Did anyone ever interview you?”
“No,” Rossi says. “The cops told me to get out. So I did.”
Lambkin feels as if he has been punched in the stomach. For a moment, he cannot breathe. He recalls Stephanie’s sister saying that she ran to the doctor’s house to get help, but the doctor was not home.
Rossi’s voice is measured. His hands are steady. He sits right beside Lambkin on the sofa, calmly answering his questions. No killer is that good an actor.
After a few more minutes of desultory conversation, Lambkin and Marcia stagger out the door and drive to the mall parking lot.
“I feel sick to my stomach,” Marcia says.
“Three months of work down the drain,” Lambkin grumbles.
“What are the fucking chances of him looking so much like the composite?” Marcia mutters.
At the parking lot, Lambkin says to McCarthy, “Just shoot me.” He recounts the conversation with Rossi. Marcia leans against the car, looking like a whipped dog.
“I could never imagine the case going this way,” Lambkin says. “Over twenty-five detectives and officers worked this case. They tracked down hundreds of people, even the kids selling candy in the neighborhood. Why couldn’t they track this guy down?”
Lambkin is angry because he has wasted so many months, invested so much in the case—unnecessarily. If the DNA evidence had not been lost, he could have cleared Rossi in an afternoon. He had thought that the lost evidence was the only snafu in the case. Now he discovers another egregious LAPD blunder. One of the most elementary rules police recruits learn is “Secure the crime scene and secure the witnesses.” Patrol officers are required to fill out “field interview cards,” which identify everyone at a crime scene. This enables detectives to contact all prospective witnesses. Also, their fingerprints can be compared against all those at the crime scene, for the specific purpose of preventing the kind of debacle that has befallen Lambkin and Marcia.
McCarthy attempts to comfort the detectives. She tells them their investigative work was excellent and their preparation superb. The props they devised will be a model for future cases. The abortive investigation was not their fault. The detective supervisor who destroyed the evidence and the patrol officer who failed to identify Rossi sabotaged the case. She tells Lambkin and Marcia they are among the best detective teams she has ever supervised. She hugs them and says, “I feel sorry for the family. And I feel sorry for you guys. I know how much work you’ve put into the case.”
“With all the physical evidence, it would have been so simple,” Lambkin says.
“If the patrol officer had identified him, it would have saved us months of work,” Marcia says. “They ought to use this at the academy when they teach recruits how to handle a homicide scene.”
After a session of cathartic complaining, the detectives call the doctor whom Rossi visited. He confirms Rossi’s story. They then deliver the bad news to Stephanie’s sister, a call they had been dreading.
Lambkin tells McCarthy and the other detectives, “The day is shot. I’m not really hungry, but we might as well eat lunch.” He is familiar with a nearby beachfront restaurant that serves one of his favorite dishes: pumpkinseed-crusted three-cheese chiles rellenos with papaya salsa.
Lambkin drives along the Pacific Coast Highway, toward the restaurant. The storm that battered Southern California the past few days has moved east and the cloudless sky now is a dome of radiant blue. The beach is desolate on this crisp winter afternoon and the ocean glitters in the sunshine. A faint onshore breeze kicks up patches of frothy surf.
At the restaurant, nobody has much of an appetite. McCarthy and the detectives pick at their food. They stare glumly at the sea. After lunch, as the detectives head back home, Lambkin says he is going to take his wife tonight to an appropriate setting: a blues club. He will drink a bottle of wine with her and drown his own case of the blues. Marcia intends to spend the rest of the afternoon playing baseball with his son.
Lambkin snakes along in the afternoon rush-hour traffic. The detectives sit in silence for a half hour. Finally, Lambkin says, “This is fucked.”
After another stretch of silence, Marcia tells Lambkin that at least they still have one suspect—Goldsmith.
“From the beginning, I had an uncomfortable feeling about him,” Lambkin says.
“His story sucks,” Marcia says.
“But if he tells us to pound sand, we can’t do anything,” Lambkin says. “The problem is, we have no leverage on him.”
“He doesn’t know that,” Marcia says. “That bondage thing with him bothers me. He seems like a sexual predator. He’s a good suspect.”
Marcia strokes his chin. “He’s looking better and better now.”