“What’s the name say?” Lupe demanded. “Say it out loud

“Virginia Rappe.” He pronounced the name unfamiliarly.

“You know who she was?” prodded Lupe. The breeze fluffed her hair so that it streamed back from her face. “A girl, like me, just a few years older than I am right now. A girl like Cathy Vega, too. She was raped to death. And the guy who did it got off scot-free. But that’s not going to happen here.”

He smirked at her, not believing her. Crouching, he tossed the knife from one hand to the other and laughed at her.

Lupe looked briefly over her shoulder at me and smiled. “You done good, Sherlock, but you can’t take it far enough. I’m not going to lose this cabron in your court system to some guy with a five hundred dollar suit who don’t know what time it is.”

Armando Diaz grinned and raised the knife. “You won’t do it, whore.”

“That’s it, pendejo. Come on. Ven aca.”

A spear of sunlight shimmered off the knife as he raised his arm from out of the darkness of the shadow of the willow.

“Come on, pendejo. Eat my pussy.”

The blade of the knife flashed down. The gun exploded, and the air stung with the smell of it.

Armando Diaz fell, a hole in his gut, blood oozing in spurts across the simple white granite headstone of Virginia Rappe.

I stretched my arm out to Lupe, but she didn’t see me.

The gun dropped from her hand and she turned away and walked to the edge of the lake that looked back at Dogtown. I heard her crying.

THE END

MERCEDES LAMBERT

(Douglas Anne Munson)

1948—2003

Understanding Mercedes Lambert—whose real name was Douglas Anne Munson—is as much a confrontation with mystery as fact.

1989. While awaiting the release of her first book, El Nino, Douglas Anne Munson—an attorney in the Los Angeles Criminal Court system—begins work on a hardboiled mystery called Dogtown. She is writing like there’s no tomorrow, like someone stung by the awareness of how short life can be. Two years earlier, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. When a lumpectomy successfully removed the growth, she turned seriously to writing. She is 39 years old.

1997. On an island in the Pacific Northwest, Douglas Anne Munson struggles to resurrect her third Whitney Logan mystery, Ghosttown, after its rejection by her publisher—the very same publisher who had only a few years earlier urged her to continue the series based on the critical reception of Dogtown (“WE WANT MORE!”). Her mood sinks under the ceaseless rain, the daily ferry rides to a $5 an hour job, the migraines that have her injecting herself with medication. She is convinced that the “trajectory of downward mobility” she had joked about with co-workers before leaving Los Angeles has become her fate.