Kolchak: The Night Stalker: A Black and Evil Truth (4 page)

As we started to file out into the hall, the D.A.’s assistant, a mousy little former city attorney named Koster (whose great secret was that he had the largest collection of pornography in Las Vegas) slithered over to me and said unctuously, “Mr. Paine would like a word with you… out there by the elevators.”

I came upon our great gauleiter rocking to and fro, hands clasped behind his back. When he saw me he said nothing, but waited until the elevator had arrived and he had stepped into it, turning around with the doorway framing his bulky form.

“Kolchak, you’re becoming a real pest. I’ll have to have a word or two with Jake about you. I think maybe Pete Pryor should handle this thing from here on.” Then he smiled his sincerest campaign grimace and added a fatherly, “Keep your nose clean. Stay out of other people’s business, son. It’s healthier that way.”

The doors hissed shut and Paine descended out of reach of any epithet I might have had for him. Pete Prior! One of the most unprincipled muckrakers to ever hoist a quill. He and Jake Herman were like The Goldust Twins. If Jake gave him the word, Pryor would nail my hide to the composing room wall. In fairness, I must say that Pryor has many times exposed graft and corruption in places both high and low. He has even taken on the federal government when he felt it was encroaching on the rights of Las Vegas residents. But he has covered up far more than he ever exposed, has dabbled in character assassinations, and entertains powerful political ambitions. I suppose I just naturally resent anyone who supposedly makes the same salary I do but seems able to take off two weeks out of every six and travel to Greece and Bermuda or Hawaii at the drop of a hat. It might be interesting if I were to reveal the true source of his income. The IRS boys would very likely desire a meeting with him.

I took the next elevator to the street level and Bernie caught my eye as I headed out the Carson Street exit.

“Learn anything, friend?”

“If you mean, to let sleeping dogs lie, “I answered bravely but without conviction, “no.”

“It’s your funeral,” he retorted happily. “Go ahead. Let the local minions of law and order roll you under their steamroller. Goddamit, Carl, you want to snoop? G’head. Snoop! But stop making ‘suggestions.’ Stop interfering with the pros and implying that they don’t know their jobs. You might not like ‘em but you’ve got to admit they’re not dunces. Everything you told me they ought to do… they are doing and were doing before you got your bright ideas. You haven’t got an exclusive on vampires this year.

“And don’t kid yourself. These Vegas boys are not a small town bunch of political hacks. They are as smooth and canny a group of sharpies as ever ran Chicago or New York. And they can play rough if they get pushed too far. Especially when their reputations are at stake. Wise up to yourself, boy, or you’ll find yourself out of a job and ‘eighty-sixed’ all over the state.”

Now I started getting hot. “Does that go for you too, Fain?”

“No, it doesn’t, but… aaah, Jesus! Who can talk to you when you get like this? Look. The bureau isn’t in this officially but I’ll nose around unofficially on anything you bring me. Just between the two of us. But do me a favor. Stay away from me for a few days. Just for friendship’s sake.”

I left Bernie at Third and Bridger and ducked into the courthouse lot to my car while he headed back to Fourth Street and the Federal Building, one of the true architectural mediocrities of this age and, as I turned down Fourth Street, I gave him a loud Bronx cheer. Then I headed for the Plush Horse on Sahara just a block from my apartment.

Once there, I got slowly and pleasantly stewed, grumbling to myself about the cupidity of the D.A. and his two buddies, Lane and Butcher. I was also disgusted with my own performance and realized that within only a month I’d managed to blow whatever working relationship I’d had with the PD and the sheriff’s office, and all because I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut!

As an amateur sleuth I was, it seemed, outclassed in even the simplest mental processes. But I didn’t have the good common sense to let it go. Sherman Reilly Duffy of the pre-World War I Chicago Daily Journal once told a cub reporter, “Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.” Well, socially I fit in just fine between the whore and the bartender. Both are close friends. And I knew the world was round. Yet, as time went by I found myself confronted with the ugly suspicion that the world was, after all, flat and that there were things dark and terrible waiting just over the edge to reach out and snatch life from the unlucky, unwary wanderer.

The frustration continued to grow. I was a journalist. I stood, as Duffy put it, with Galileo. So I ask: what would you do if you could smell a news story like this and couldn’t go anywhere with it?

With me the answer was simple. I knew I was stuck. I knew I was (and am), at best, only a second-rate hack and that my dream of getting back on a big-league daily is just that: a dream.

So–I got drunk.

Drinking is an occupational hazard with many of us scribes. I have always kept an emergency supply of White Horse “miniatures” handy just in case the bars were closed. These little Scotch delights have laced many a cup of city-room coffee over the years. But drinking doesn’t get the job done. I had blown the first murder, that of Cheryl Ann Hughes, and even if I’d been on the ball, the story wouldn’t have rated an “extra” edition. And with the competition down the street hitting the newsstands in early afternoon on their regular schedule, the Daily News got scooped on Murders Two and Three. Now, in a normal town, we would have hit the streets with an “extra” at least by the third killing. But death, as I said earlier, excites little real interest in Las Vegas. The people for the most part are very conservative and insular. They mind their own business. They do not rise up en masse demanding investigations. The Asbill murder case excited much comment in the local bars and the Alsup killing caused a lot of working men to pause and ponder. But no hue and cry went up except for a few editorials. No public demonstrations. No phone calls or letters to the editor demanding action.

Stories peak very quickly and are good for only one or two resuscitations. Columnists fare slightly better and several local scribes have certain pet gripes they use as column fillers when topical issues on a local level are lacking. At the time of the “vampire killings” (the true nature of which was still not made public) the going column items were homosexual rape of first-timers at the state prison; the bungling of the convention board and of County General’s administrators, another perennial favorite; the slapping of wrists belonging to various entertainers who play Vegas regularly but neither love nor was ecstatic over the town and its residents; pot-smoking students; and, of course, that great scourge of morality (in a very moral town), the “adult” book stores which sell “filth and smut” to a great variety of people who anxiously return to buy more even though not one in 50,00 residents would ever admit to such a thing. Still, the number of these stores continues to grow and the business is mostly local trade. They now feel free to advertise openly in the hand-out papers printed for the tourists. No one objects.

Having done so badly with the last attempt at getting the truth made public, I then did what I had sworn to myself I would not do. I called the paper and talked to Vincenzo. I went so far as to suggest we do a takeout for the upcoming Sunday edition (pending, of course, further killings) and restage the murders with pictures of the investigating officers “on the scene,” getting a full share of quotes and speculations and taking an editorial stance of outrage at the cumbersome machinery of the law. The reaction, as expected, was negative. And Vincenzo had a suggestion for me which would have been physically impossible to comply with.

By the time I noticed it was dark outside, I was well removed from reality and so, I tottered out to my car, drove it the hundred feet or so to the little 7-11 Market that borders on the alley behind my apartment building, bought a load of aspirins and coffee, and headed home. There, I soaked for an hour in a very hot tub, swilled down a pot of the brew and prepared to beat my head against the brick wall of police-news media resistance one more time.

My friend Pete Harper, on vacation from the Newark Post, dropped by and fixed up a savory collection of scampi and rice, and by the time I’d finished the meal I felt almost human. Harper is tall, six-six, and looks like a stretched Peter Fonda. He’s a Hemingway bug and a true journalist: game for almost any kind of pursuit that might lead to a by-line. So, after helping stoke the “inner man,” he gladly accepted my invitation to revisit Parkway Hospital and talk to Nurse Staley.

She turned out to be a small, truculent woman who was all business. “I’ll give you one minute. Not a second longer. And I’ll tell you what I told the deputies. Nothing more. He was tall–a couple of inches shorter than your friend here. He was pale, looked like he never saw sunlight. He had dark hair receding at the temples. And he had bad breath. Absolutely foul.”

Her description to the deputies, verbatim.

Then she added, “His breath was really something! I mean it was worse than anything I’ve encountered in… well, never mind how many years of nursing. Worse and different. Not like sick bodies. Not like gangrene. Not like death. It carried halfway down the corridor. Nauseating, and I’ve got a pretty strong stomach; you need one in this work.” She stood there, hands on her hips, a challenging look in her eye. “Anything else?”

“No, that about does it. Thanks very much.”

Outside I lit up a cheap, fat, blunt cigar and looked west toward the lights of the Strip. I told Harper I was stumped. He knew what I thought about the killings, so I asked him, “Do you think I’m nuts?”

“Sure,” he said. “Ever since I’ve known you. Isn’t everybody?” I asked him if he’d care to join me on a night ride with the friend I had from the Sheriff’s Office on patrol of the strip area but he declined, saying, “I’ve got a date with this girl named Marni. Works for the juvenile court services. Out here from Nebraska. Thought I’d do her a big favor and show her the ‘Sin City’ we all just read about.”

“That should be very enlightening,” I countered. It meant, of course, that he was planning to show her nothing more than his own apartment.

So, I dropped him off at my place and called the sheriff’s office and asked for Chuck Hunsaker, a sergeant I know who used to get me passes to the police pistol range. The switchboard girl called the dispatcher who called “Kraut” (my nickname for him) and then I hung up. He got me on the phone about five minutes later. Ten minutes after that he wheeled by my place and picked me up. We tooled around the Strip until 3:00 A.M. with nothing to break the monotony but a couple of “noisy party” complaints and some drag racers on Flamingo Road.

• • •

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 1970

EARLY MORNING

“Kraut,” who’d been around in his forty-two years, couldn’t come up with any alternate theories, but also didn’t, I was relieved to discover, think my “vampire theory” was any worse than others he’d heard. He’d been in on strange cases before.

A couple of years back, he’d taken part in a shootout between two limp-wristed types at the Circle West Apartments off Paradise Road. One little chap, a dancer, had become enraged over the fact that his former lover, a hairdresser, had thrown him over (and out) for a showroom choreographer and taken possession of their three Siamese cats in the bargain. So one night he’d unloaded an Army .45 through his ex-boyfriend’s front door, killing the intended victim and scaring the cats half to death. Subsequently, he shot it out with deputies called on the scene yelling that unrequited love was one thing but the theft of his cats had been “just too much!” It wasn’t the strangest case I ever reported but part for Vegas. And in two days, the residents had forgotten all about it.

When he was ready to call it a night, I had him drop me at the Dunes where I headed for their Persian Room lounge. The big “V Les Girls” revue was just going off and in its place was a singer named Misti Walker, a genuine, long legged, sexy-as-hell saloon singer whose particular brand of vocalizing was just what the doctor ordered for this unrepentant journalist. She’d only been on the Vegas scene about a year and hadn’t yet become a nationwide hit, but at twenty-two, she was already a veteran of nearly ten years as a professional, working her way from dingy bars steadily toward stardom under the firm hand and eagle eye of her performer-manager-husband, Bobby John Henry.

I listened to her renditions of “What Now My Love?” and “But Not For Me” which seemed curiously apt under the present circumstances. I listened and I drank. And drank. And I talked with a succession of cocktail waitresses who were getting very uneasy about the series of killings. They seemed to feel it “in their bones” that the end was not in sight.

When one of their number is hurt, they rally to the cause. Flowers, sympathy. Even money. Because of the odd hours these girls work, and the fact that most of them go home alone, feeling was running high. They didn’t reject my theory, possibly feeling it was the result of the booze. They didn’t particularly care. They just wanted the guy “caught and hung up by his thumbs.”

Misti worked her way into “The Dark Side of the Street,” a haunting underground soul thing–and a very dangerous place for young women these days–and finished up in time with my fifth bourbon with a soulrock number called “Livin’ In Heat,” a genuine foot-stomping item that never fails to please the captains as well as the patrons. The cynical gentlemen in the tuxedos gave her a standing ovation. She deserved it. She had a voice that combined the best of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn.