Kolchak The Night Strangler (10 page)

For a true adept he seems to have led something other than the exemplary life of quiet contemplation and Spartan poverty.

There are some sources that claim he showed up in Philadelphia in the mid-1790’s as a common apothecary and that he moved to New York around the time of the War of 1812. The description is the same, although he seems to have grown a few inches in height. His name this time was Malcrom German.

In one of the books, there is a listing of a Captain Malcrom who was an army doctor with the army that retreated before the advancing troops when the British burned the Capitol in Washington. And there the trail ends.

Chapter Eleven

Thursday, April, 13 1972

Afternoon

I arrived back at the
Daily Chronicle
to find Vincenzo hard at work mutilating a dummy for the front page of the night edition. I tiptoed to his private cabinet and took out his own special amulet, something he’d been saving ever since Pearl Harbor: a large piece of zinc with three letters on it in huge six-inch-high type reading W A R. Evidently he hadn’t heard about 15-minute warnings before the atomic oblivion actually believed he’d get the change to use it if war, as us preatomic oldsters had once known it, ever was legitimately declared.

I tossed it on his desk. He jumped.

“You put that back! Goddamnit! Don’t sneak up on me like that. What the hell do you want now?”

“Got a moment?”

“I’m a busy man. What is it?”

“Nothing much. I just want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About the Elixir of Life.”

He looked genuinely pained. “Go to journalism school, my father said. It’s a good, down-to-earth profession. Clean hands. Decent working con…”

“Do you want to hear what I’ve got?”

“What I want to do is raise tulips for a living, but there’s not enough demand.”
“Let’s talk about life. The Elixir of Life.”

“I’ve got a whole news staff out there that works for a living, Kolchak. Works! And you want to stand here yapping about some fairy-tale formula that…”

“Suppose, just
suppose
an elixir of life could actually be produced. One that could make a man live to be a hundred or more and not age at all. How do you think it would work? One treatment for everlasting youth? Step right up to the bar, boys, plunk your money down, take a shot and live forever?”

“Kolchak…”

“Or do you think it might take a long time? That it might
not
be a one-step process? That it might be necessary for periodic treatments, say…”

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Every twenty-one years?”
“Give the fat man with the moustache
ten
sil-vah dollars!”

“Kolchak, I’m warning you…”

“To continue: Suppose, toward the end of the 21-year period, the person who took the elixir started looking… a little moldy… kind of what he was really like… a man more than one hundred years old. Maybe even older!”

“Suppose he had to make a new batch of the elixir and had to do it in the space of eighteen days? Suppose the
one
ingredient he
didn’t
have was…”

“Blood.”

“Ver-ry
good!
”

Vincenzo started getting red in the face. Lately he had taken to wearing dark glasses but they didn’t help. His beady little eyes burned right through them at me. He whipped them off and brandished them in one hand, waving his ever-handy pica pole, symbol of his authority, in the other.

“Suppose, Kolchak, he had to go out late at night to get that blood. Suppose he got it from the bases of his victims’ skulls with a hypodermic needle. Suppose… his fingertips were starting to decompose so that he left fragments of them on the women’s throats!”

I smiled benignly.

“Suppose, Kolchak, you flap your arms and fly right out that goddamn door!!!”
“I oughta take that goddamn pica pole and ram it right down your throat!”

“And on your way out, Kolchak, suppose you check the dictionary and discover what the word
fact
means. FACT!!”

I threw my arms up in disgust. “
DAY-JA VUUUUUU
!!”

I called Louise and told here I was staying home to get my notes in order and that she should let me know when she was through for the night.

As I rode home via the monorail, I wondered where the killer was and if my theory about him was accurate in its entirety—or only partly so—or, as Vincenzo would have it, inaccurate, incompetent, immaterial; factless, hopeless, and downright useless.

The part about this being the
twentieth
year still gnawed at me, too, but I put it down to impatience for lack of any further information.

And I wondered when and how he’d strike again, because I was certain from the pattern established that he would. The question was,
who
was to be his fifth victim.

I wondered, if the pattern was not to be broken, how he’d pull it off in an area now being so tightly guarded that it was almost necessary to have a police pass just to get to work anywhere in Pioneer Square.

I didn’t have to wonder long.

Chapter Twelve

Friday, April 14, 1972

While I tried to puzzle out such interesting little pieces of information as the content of “orpiment”—some kind of mineral, yellow in color, mainly arsenic trisulphide and
not
, as once had been believed, the actual “prime matter” of the “Great Work”; as I pondered the various methods of achieving the Elixir of Life—ie. the Wet Way or Humid Way, the Dry Way, and the Short Way (
that
had some appeal)…

As I sipped a gift-wrapped bottle of Cutty Sark (that’s right—straight from the bottle like milk), courtesy of my lovely Louise, said lovely Louise was shaking it up at Omar’s Tent for the benefit of the few stout hearts who feared nothing at the hands of the Pioneer Square Strangler, as we were now referring to him.

And as Louise mesmerized her audience, Charisma Beauty was struggling vainly for her life in her tiny dressing room.

A call from the newsroom at 1:25 a.m. informed me of the 420 that had just come over the squawk box. Four-twenty means homicide. I almost had a heart attack when I heard the address.

By the time I fought my way through the police picket line and into Louise’s dressing room, I was almost in a state of shock, which was greatly relieved when I discovered she was only unconscious from fright and not dead. All the way to Omar’s Tent I was praying to a God I have never believed to exist that the victim not be Louise.

Louise was in shock, too. She’d found the body right after coming off stage. She’d gone looking for Charisma when the blonde with the pneumatic body and the baby-doll voice had failed to make her cue.

Charisma Beauty was plain old Gladys Weems again. Dead. Strangled. Blood syringed from the base of her skull. On a chair in a state of collapse was Wilma Krankheimer. Love, I am forced to admit, has many forms. I don’t understand all of them but it was obvious that Wilma had lost more than a playmate.

I gathered up Louise and took her home to the houseboat. We spent the night together and neither of us slept much. I told her she was not to go back to work until the killer was caught, money or no money. And that she was to stay put, with the door locked, and to go nowhere without me. There was no way I was going to let her get knocked off, and it seemed to me the killer was narrowing his radius of action to an uncomfortable degree. Another minute or two and it would, without question, have been Louise’s body I’d have had to do the final story on.

I made up my mind to have a talk with Schuber the next afternoon when he came on duty. He’d been working swing and graveyard shifts combined since the third killing. Maybe he would listen to me when Vincenzo wouldn’t. Faint hope, but worth a try.

So, back to Police Headquarters and the usual runaround about where a reporter can and cannot go, this time from a sweet-faced little blonde secretary named Sheila McCallister, who actually jumped up from her desk and physically blocked Schubert’s door with all the ferociousness her five-foot, one-inch, 95-pound frame could muster.

“Absolutely not! You cannot go in there! I won’t
let
you!”

“Sweetheart, I
am
going in there,” I said with less than gallantry as I picked her up and set her to one side. I rammed open Schubert’s door and found him closeted with two of his minions, looking mighty startled to see me. Schubert channeled his surprise into an angry “Sheila!” and then turned his wrath on me. “What the hell is going on here? Kolchak! Goddamnit…”
“I told him you were busy, sir,” said the girl, almost in tears.

“For Chr… uh… all right, Sheila.”

“You have very pretty legs, Miss McCallister,” I said, turning on the old Kolchak charm. “You should be a model.”

She was thoroughly flustered. She turned to Schubert. “Do you want me to call the police, sir?” He tried to look benevolent, which was a considerable achievement with his stevedore’s rugged features.

“We
are
the police, honey.”

“Oh,” she moaned in a tiny voice, and withdrew, closing the door behind her very, very quietly.

I wasted no time. “You’ve got to put some police women on the waterfront streets and around Pioneer Square at night.”

“Do I, Mr. Kolchak?”

“There are just five days left in which to find the killer. After that, he’s going to disappear.”

“Is he really, Mr. Kolchak?”

“Damn it! Yes! He
is
! Every 21 years since 1889 he’s killed six women over a period of eighteen days precisely. Oh, don’t say it. I’m nuts and it’s only been
twenty
years since the 1952 murders. But that’s the only departure from the pattern. The rest holds.
Six
killings in precisely eighteen days. It is now…”

“Precisely, Mr. Kolchak? No doubt we lack your eagle-eyed perception but we,
somehow
, fail to see the ‘precise’ pattern you keep babbling about. In 1889, there was no evidence that the murders were committed over an eighteen-day period or, for that matter, that they were even related.”

“You …?”

“Yes
we
do a little research too, sometimes. To continue… In 1910, blood loss was reported in only three of the murders…”

“What about the descrip …?”

“The description of the murderer was made by a mental defective in his cups and…”
“What about the 1952 description. Was
that
witness a mental defective too? He sure as hell was not! He was a bank vice-president!”

“In 1952, there were also
eight
killings over a period of eighteen days. What does
that
do to your precious theory?”

“Two of those were by stabbing which invalidates…”

“
And
… after the sixth strangulation, an eye witness described the murderer as being—quote: ‘a bit over medium height, slender and rather handsome… about 45 years of age’—unquote.”

That had me. I had no answer for that at all.

“You mean you missed that little detail, Mr. Kolchak?”

“The… the witness saw somebody else? He
had
to.”

“Did he? Tell me something then. If it’s the same killer… why no signs of rotted flesh on the throat of last night’s victim.”

Goddamn it! I’d been so shook up at the thought it might have been Louise I had missed that too!

“One last question, Mr. Kolchak: Why am I wasting my time on you? Facts obviously mean nothing…”

“Schubert, there’s only one fact left. By next Tuesday, the Pioneer Square Strangler is going to disappear for twenty or twenty-
one
years! And the way you’ve got that area locked up he isn’t even going to show his face before…”
“
Which
face is that? The idiotic horror-show thing your newspaper had the stupidity to print?”

“The rotted face was an eyewitness’ description, and it was rendered by a reliable artist who, I am told, has worked for you people upon occasion.”

“Well, you were told
wrong
! He’s your artist, not ours.”