Kolchak The Night Strangler (2 page)

But now Ethel Parker was frightened. The men who leered at her and drooled as she undulated at Omar’s Tent had tried to pick her up before, and she could remember an ugly incident only three months earlier and found herself thinking she should have spent the money for a cab.

Ethel Parker had begun to run now in panic. From what, she did not know. She darted out into St. James Street and froze in the sudden glare, falling back as she was almost sideswiped by a taxi that screeched to a halt a few yards past her. She ran to the cab and grabbed the handle of the rear door. It was locked.

“Please!” she begged. “Can’t you take me? I only want to go to Shoreline Park. Please!”

The cabbie had other things on his mind. “Off duty,” he growled, and pulled away, leaving her standing alone and shivering in the street.

Ethel Parker. A lady of few words. “Hell!” She spied the bus stop and began to run toward it, but the lights of another cab suddenly brightened St. James Street. She has started
to wave frantically now, dashing down the block. Halfway there she stopped, panting and disgusted, as the can passed by, splashing water on her.

Ethel Parker was standing in front of yet another alley. She glanced at her watch. It was 2:47 a.m. Her hands shaking, she dug into her purse for a pack of Marlboros, extracted one, and lit it with a throw-away butane lighter. Then she turned around to head back to the bus stop.

Ethel Parker took one last drag on that king-size cigarette. One last drag as two icy hands grabbed her neck from behind and jerked her off her feet, cutting off her scream. She grabbed the hands, kicking, but she couldn’t reach the ground. The struggle was silent. The smoke curled slowly from her mouth in a thin string that was pelted to the ground by the rain. Her eyes began to protrude as her tongue swelled in her mouth. Her fingers scraped desperately at the hands around her neck and she was dimly aware of something clammy coming off on them. And that, possibly, was the last thing she was aware of. Seconds later she was dead, lying in a grimy Seattle alley.

And her killer was very busy doing
other
things to her body.

While Ethel Parker, a.k.a. Merissa, was watching the lights of St. James Street flicker out for the last time, I was sitting and chewing the stub of a dead cigar in the Flick Adult Cinema on Pike and watching
Tempting Tales
from the corner of one bloodshot eye, a small bottle of White Horse nestled lovingly between my legs.

In the time since I had left Las Vegas—or, to be truthful, since I was run out of Las Vegas—things had gone pretty much downhill. I had wound up in L.A. and had spent months trying, unsuccessfully, to get work on a paper there. My reputation had not preceded me, but L.A. was suffering one of its periodic slumps. Things in the motion-picture industry were disastrous. Advertising was not much better. The aerospace industry was in complete rout.

I got myself a job on the
Hollywood Citizen
and it folded the next day. I tried the
Herald-Examiner
and was just nosed out of a job by a character from Boston. On my way out of the building I was roughed up by a picket who looked twice my age. At the
Times
, an old Vegas contact, Noel Greenwood, said, “I’d like to help, but right now there’s a hiring freeze on and you couldn’t get a job here sweeping out the composing room.”

I decided to start free-lancing my so-called talents as a press agent for a character actor I knew who was getting ready to make his fourth “comeback” doing voice-overs for commercials. During that time I tried as best I could to get my experiences in Las Vegas down on tape with the hope of getting them to a publisher. Not one I talked to would touch the stuff with a ten-foot pole.

Finally I made contact with Jeff Rice, an L.A.-based ad exec and former Las Vegas newsman who was willing to listen to me. At that point I was so low down I told him to write the goddamn book, which, to my admitted surprise, he proceeded to do. But before I got the chance to see any profits from the project, that venal little runt, Rupert Koster, a henchman of Vegas’ District Attorney
Paine (now out of the office) came snooping around my place, and I decided the time had come for me to blow town.

Things went from bad to worse and a good bit of what happened afterward is pretty fuzzy. Anyhow, I ended up in Seattle in the last week of March, 1972, and there my car died. What money I did get for the old “Blue Bitch,” as I called my Camaro, would have to be used to tide me over in a last-ditch effort to land a job. If I couldn’t do it in Seattle, I figured Canada was my next stop. I could go up there and freeze my butt off with the rest of the drop-outs.

I got myself a pretty decent little place in the Charbern on Belmont for $87.50 a month and prepared to make my stand. Carrying my scrapbook of clippings in one hand, and my semi-written manuscript on the Skorzeny affair in the other, I began to make the rounds. Between visits to nearby taverns. It was very discouraging. I was alone in a strange town. I’d lost most of my friends. My girl had dropped out of sight. And the only action I could afford—and probably was capable of—was sitting and getting stewed in a porno house.

The Seattle
Times
had no opening and neither did the
Post-Intelligencer
, but Marti Braun, a very nice girl at the
P-I’s
front desk, suggested I try the local press club for a contact. It took me a few days to work up the nerve to try.

Finally, one night I walked in with my scrapbook, ordered a double Scotch neat, and ended up in a harangue with some young punk who had the audacity to call himself a reporter. He worked for the
Daily Chronicle
and he told me very kindly that I was drunk or nuts. I can remember screaming at him, “Where the hell have you been living? In a cave? There’s a whole goddamn world outside! A world of facts. Why don’t you stumble out and take a peek at them sometime; get your brain out of hibernation.”

He struggled to be polite and simply withdraw, but I grabbed him by his lapels and forced his nose into my scrapbook, spilling my drink all over it. He looked scared.

“What the hell does that say? Can you read or shall I
tell
you what it says.
‘Vampire,’
that’s what it says. Official Coroner’s Report! You know what that is, sonny? Blood drained from the victim’s body! Body found in…”

He pulled away from me and appeared to be complaining to some guy by the bar, then he looked my way, snickered, and moved on down the bar. The man at the bar was partially hidden from me but he was holding a glass of milk. He came over to my table. The snarl was familiar.

“Hello, Carl.”

I almost fell off my chair.

“Vincenzo! You old sonofabitch! What the hell are you doing in Seattle?”
He was just as warm and responsive as I had remembered him.

“What did I do in Las Vegas?

What he had done was edit the Las Vegas
Daily News
. And spend a great deal of his time butchering my copy. And, about two years ago, he had reluctantly, and very privately, confided to me, “You’re a hell of a reporter.” A few days later I had received my final check along with a nice letter from the publisher’s personal assistant, Bess Melvin, wishing me “good luck.”

I was in no position to rake over old differences.

“Tony, I’ll lay it on the line. I’m just about broke and I’m hurtin’. I need a job.”

“Whatever happed to that big book you were going to write?”

Good old Vincenzo. Still turning the knife.

• • •

But the next day he took me to the Sixth Street offices of the Seattle
Daily Chronicle
. Now here was a paper with tradition. Founded in 1873, it had passed through a series of owners until finally it came into the hands of a young opportunist names Lucius Crossbinder around 1931. Crossbinder had been a copyboy on the
P-I
and had run away to join the army in 1917. He’d been gassed at Ypres and returned to become a full-fledged reporter while dabbling in various less-than-respectable operations on the side. His uncle, Marcus Crossbinder, was a man who had rallied against the “anarchy of the Industrial Workers of the World” and who had chortled with glee when sailors armed with axes and clubs had broken up the Wobblies headquarters in the spring of 1912. Marcus Crossbinder just happened to own the
Daily Chronicle.
And he was a staunch conservative. But by 1931 he was ailing with gout, and his skinny young nephew convinced him that, having no son to leave his paper empire to, he should allow it to pass into Lucius’ own very capable, if grasping, hands. Marcus did and Lucius sank every dime he had made into the
Chronicle
. By April, 1972, the
Daily Chronicle
was not only Seattle’s second oldest paper (and most virulently conservative) but also it’s second largest with a daily circulation of 205,720 and a Sunday circulation of 268,353. (Figures available from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.)

At 73, Lucius Crossbinder was a rail-thin and slightly stooped, his face as seamed as a cigar-store Indian’s and about as forbidding. Crippled by arthritis, he nevertheless retained a full head of black hair, a keen intellect coupled with an iron will, and an acid tongue. He always wore an American Flag pinned to his lapel and when Vincenzo, with unaccustomed charity, introduced me to him in his wood-paneled office, he glowered coldly at me like one of the bronze eagles atop his bookcases and boomed in an incredibly low and rich voice: “Mr. Vincenzo says you are a good reporter who has fallen on sorry days. I do not believe in the bottle, Mr. Kolchack. If you wish to remain in the employ of this paper you will remain sober, sir. What you do on your own time is your business. However, you are required to be mentally alert during working hours. And,” he added, eying me suspiciously, “not to report things that do not occur… or exist.

“No carnival or hoopla tactics on
this
paper, Mr. Kolchak. This isn’t Funtown, USA. This is Seattle. This city celebrated its 120
^th
birthday only a few days ago. We have a long and impressive history here. And so does the
Chronicle
. We are not going to blow away with the first winds of change. But if you are not careful—if you do not mind our standards of conduct and coverage, watch your p’s and q’s, and hew precisely to the mark,” he intoned ominously, “you might.”

“Might what?” I just had to ask.

“You might blow away with the first little breeze and never know why.”

“Yes,
sir
, Mr. Crossbinder. You can count on me. I…”

Vincenzo removed me before I could put my foot in my mouth. It was just as well.

Chapter Two

Tuesday, April 4, 1972

Vincenzo, much against his better judgment, gave me my first assignment: Murder One. A belly dancer named Merissa. Found strangled in an alley. I was back in business at last!

So, out into a threatening overcast and gusty wind I went. Afoot, my trusty tape recorder in hand. First stop: the Seattle Municipal Building at Third and James. Destination: Police Headquarters. Mission: to introduce myself and see if any later information had come in about the killing of Merissa. With my typical charm, I patted shoulders, shook hands, chucked the pretty uniformed maids and maidens under their pretty chins and learned nothing new. There were no useful leads to be had from the victim’s friends, acquaintances, or family. The Medical Examiner’s report was standard. Thus far, the murder was a one-way street to nowhere.

Second stop: Omar’s Tent on First Avenue in Pioneer Square. It was small, with low, beamed ceilings and cheap decorations of gossamer veils and old rope tassels. It was comparatively empty during the daylight hours. Results: negative. No leads. Ethel Parker never mixed with customers, had no known enemies, kept her problems to herself. She was single and all her relatives lived in Massachusetts. Ethel Parker had left the mainstream of life without making a ripple.

Third stop: a modern apartment in the 1000 block on Spring Street, home of Charisma Beauty—given name: Gladys Weems—one of Omar’s Tent’s two remaining belly dancers. Gladys was tall—about five-feet seven or eight inches—thin, with a lovely, supply figure, a tiny waist, and an over-endowed superstructure. She was blonde, had huge blue eyes, a pretty face with a generous mouth, and the highest, squeakiest voice since Betty Boop.

Batting her eyelashes, she told me in her vacuous way that she really didn’t know the late Miss Parker very well and that she wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers.

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant until I got a good look at who was sharing her apartment. Squat and built like a bull, with a pug nose and tiny, pig-like eyes, her “husband,” Wilma Krankheimer, was enough to give anybody the willies. With Wilma keeping a proprietary eye on the proceedings and a beefy hand on Gladys’ arm, the meeting was something less than informative.