The Gilded Madonna, Garrick Jones [best fiction novels txt] 📗

on a case that involved a string of prostitutes found dismembered, their body parts deposited in garbage cans all over Glebe. We had no idea who was behind the murders, or when and where he’d strike again.

“In the early hours of this morning, I woke up suddenly, having remembered a particular case in this book. Perhaps it had been lurking around in the back of my mind and something triggered my memory, but I got out of bed and re-read the story of Louisiana Lola.”

“Louisiana Lola?” Mark Dioli asked.

“Yes. That wasn’t her real name of course, but the case goes with the name the police gave her.” I gave them a precis of her story:

Between 1946 and 1948 the bodies of twenty men were found, each a month apart, in cheap motel rooms they’d hired, presumably to spend time with a prostitute. They were the types of establishment that rented by the hour—hence the presumption. All of the men had been stabbed in the back and kidneys multiple times and then shot through the back of the head. The weapon was later revealed to be a Walther PPK fitted with a silencer and fired with a pillow wrapped around it. The room’s television volume also turned up to help muffle the sound.

The case had driven the police crazy because no one had ever seen any of the men enter the motel room with a woman. Nor could they be sure whether the woman herself was the murderer or whether she had an accomplice. The victim was always unaccompanied when he paid for the room. The only reason they’d initially assumed the murderer was a woman was because of the lipstick marks in various places on the victim’s body—mostly on his neck and shoulders.

The choice of the final victim was Lola’s undoing: an ex-marine, down on his luck, who’d picked her up in a bar and had taken her to a motel with the express purpose of beating her up and stealing whatever money she had in her purse, and perhaps taking her keys and robbing her house afterwards. He’d decided he’d wait until after he’d had sex with her. She’d always arranged to lie at the edge of the bed, her open handbag on the floor, so she could quickly reach down at the moment of his orgasm, retrieve her stiletto from her bag, and start stabbing before the man knew what had hit him and while he was in the throes of ejaculation. No one reacted to a man’s yells in a seedy motel room; it was expected all sorts of things went on there.

The ex-marine later explained he never had one of those gut-wrenching, tooth-grinding orgasms—his were always short and sweet and relatively noiseless. He’d been quick enough to grab the woman’s arm. She’d been hesitating, confused about whether he was just letting out another grunt or shooting his load. He beat her senseless before calling the cops. Her confession had been given freely and made for disturbing reading.

From the age of eleven, her father had abused her, almost on a daily basis. Every night he’d encouraged her to fellate him, had given her a dollar and then had slapped her about, telling her she was a whore, destined to go to hell. But once a month, after his regular poker game with his friends, he’d come home drunk, crawl into her bed, make love to her, tell her how wonderful she was, and he’d return her oral favours before having sexual intercourse with her.

As an adult, she turned to prostitution, working out of cheap bars and having sex with men on the back seats of their cars parked in dark streets, or in dark alleyways standing up against the wall. She said she’d be eager to make them feel good, but then vomit and clean herself with disinfectant afterwards, to try to “wash away the bad”.

However, once every four weeks, she’d get dressed up to the nines and drive across the State, go to somewhere known to be frequented by ex-servicemen and white-collar workers, pick up a man and become amorous with him. She admitted she usually ensnared them by saying she was married and couldn’t be seen going to their homes, suggesting a local motel room. More than one bartender had been obliged to ask the couple to leave because of their unabashed kissing and her inappropriate groping. These were the men she chose as her victims and then killed.

When asked why, she reported that it was because of her father and those occasions, once a month, when he’d come home drunk after playing cards with his buddies. After he’d been tender, attentive, and had made love to her, he’d beaten her senseless. Often she’d been dragged around the house by the hair, and once he’d even thrown her down the stairs. One day, at the age of sixteen, desperately fearful of falling pregnant by her own father, and terrified of the mindless violence after copulation, she decided she’d had enough. She hid a meat skewer under her pillow and a kitchen knife under the edge of the mattress. At the moment of his ejaculation, she stabbed him through the eye with the skewer and then plunged the knife into his back until he fell against her, dead. She went to the bathroom and scrubbed herself with bleach, took his wallet and gun, shot him in the head, just to make sure, and then set fire to the house.

When I finished telling the story, I held the book up again, opened at the page titled, “Louisiana Lola”.

“The profile of this killer made a lot of sense to me,” I said, “especially after I managed to interview two local men who gave me information about the Silent Cop killer. Each of them had a different friend, who, by luck, got away from our murderer. And before you ask, one of those very lucky blokes is dead and the other wouldn’t speak to me, but his account, although