Kolchak The Night Strangler (4 page)

I smiled. I was getting my own back. “That’s just what the man said, baby. ‘On the necks of both victims… was a residue of
decomposed flesh
. As if they’d been… strangled by a
dead man.’”

Chapter Four

Friday, April 7, 1972

10:20 p.m.

The smoke inside Omar’s Tent was so thick you could cut it with a knife. I sat nursing a double Scotch and blinking rapidly, partially from the smoke and partially from amazement. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Louise Harper’s hips could move as fast as her mouth.

She was much thinner than I had thought, with legs that seemed to go on forever. But boy, oh boy! Could she move! The motley collection of rummies at the bar kept clapping in an attempt to rhythm while those privileged with seats closer to the tiny, raised platform that served as a stage for both the dancers and the small five-piece band kept waving their arms and trying to get Louise to come closer.

Louise smiled at me, winked, and threw me a grind as one of the musicians put down his clarinet and picked up a microphone.

“Scheherazade, ladies and gentlemen… Princess of the East.”

The drunks belched their approval as Louise did a graceful bow and glided off stage. I got up to follow here and bumped into the sturdy Wilma Krankheimer wearing old army fatigue trousers and a blue silk bowling jacket. She curled her lip at me as I repressed the urge to giggle. Gladys Weems was just coming onstage as the musician, in his best carny-barker voice, was exhorting, “A-a-and now, ladies and gentlemen, the high point of the evening. The lovely—the exotic—the es-o-teric… Cha-
ris
-ma Bee-yooo-tee!”

Gladys began undulating, the muscles rippling seductively across her belly.

“Knock ‘em dead, Charisma,” I cheered as Wilma’s heavy hand found its way to my shoulder.

Charisma Beauty leaned forward and lightly dragged one of her seven veils across my face as her breasts threatened to burst their halter. “Knock ‘em dead?” she whispered in her tiny-tot voice. “Why would I do that?” She spread her legs and began rolling her hips. “I
like
them.” She smiled as the drunks pounded their bottles on their tables and Wilma whirled to glower at them.

Oh, boy. I did giggle, then. And I threw Wilma a circled thumb and finger of approval for Charisma’s obvious talents. Wilma saluted me in Italian as I moved toward the rear of Omar’s Tent.

Two sharp jogs and a short flight of five steps brought me to Louise’s dressing room where she was struggling with an equation in calculus. She looked up at me angrily.

“Who can understand this? I can’t understand it. Nobody understands this stuff. Besides, who needs it? It’s only for the grades. It’s absolute, total insanity.”

“Would this be the tent of the Princess of the East?”

“And Dimwit of the West. I can’t talk to you right now. Unless you’re good at calculus. She turned in silent dismissal and I stared at her as she sat hunched over her problem. There was something about this girl. Ah, nuts! I knew I was just kidding myself. “You’re getting old, Kolchak, old!” I muttered to myself as I made my way back to the bar and ordered another double.

Nearly 50 and no more money in my pocket than I’d had when I’d been a copyboy on the Boston
Globe
. The one girl I’d had who could even halfway tolerate me—a hooker named Sam in Las Vegas—had disappeared from my life after I’d been run out of town and I’d never been able to touch base with her again. Now I was stuck here in Seattle and the only two people I really knew well were Vincenzo and Janie Carlson, both of whom had more than ample reason to keep our relationships on a strict business level. I downed the Scotch and ordered another. By the time Omar’s Tent had closed and Louise came up to me at the bar, the evening had taken on a bit of a glow.

“I’m starved,” she said brightly. “Let’s go get some food.” I stumbled off my stool and began searching my pockets. I came up with something less than two dollars. I looked at her and shrugged. “Whatever it is, it won’t be fancy. I forgot to cash my paycheck.” Hell I’d forgotten to even pick it up.

She looked at me with a curious mixture of sympathy and amusement. “Not to worry. The price will be right. I’m buying.”

We made our way over to First Avenue and Pioneer Square Park. There, at a hot-dog stand across from the Blue Banjo, we shivered in the rain and drizzle and gobbled foot-long dogs with the works on them. It was silly. I was potted. I was wet. I was freezing. And I was enjoying every minute of it. There was just something about Louise Harper that was getting to me.

As we drank steaming coffee from paper containers, I noticed something odd across the street. There was a line of people… about 100 in all, marching double file out of the Blue Banjo Club and moving deliberately into the doorway of a nearby building which looked very old and abandoned. Most of them were wearing raincoats and carrying flashlights. Incongruously enough one of the fellows up front was wearing a red coat and a white plastic imitation straw skimmer. (It
had
to be plastic.
Everything
is plastic nowadays. Well, not everything. I put my arm around Louise’s waist. She was definitely
not
plastic.)

“What’s that? The angry townspeople getting ready to lynch some old wino for the murder of Gail Manning?”

“That, Mr. Reporter, is the Underground Tour.” A baby’s voice.

“Underground?”

Charisma and her bulky “husband” had joined us.

“Yeth. There’s ruins underneath the streets here—what they call Old Seattle. Ithn’t that right, Wilma?”

Wilma grunted and thrust a hot dog at Gladys-Charisma, who accepted it with the docility of a well-trained dog. Louise smiled. Gladys-Charisma was almost too cute for words, bundled up in a fox-collared trench coat, batting foot-long eyelashes and, by God, lisping to boot!

“Oh,
thank
you, Wilma honey. I just
love
hot dogs. You’re tho-o, good to your baby Gladyth.”

It was enough to make me want to vomit.
“Oh, yeth. I wath talking about the Underground, wathn’t I?”

I smiled benignly and nodded. All those Scotches helped put a buffer between me and all forms of inanity.

“There wath a big fire here in eighteen-something-or-other and, for some strange reason I don’t know about, they built it all back… the town, that ith… but much higher than before. Ithn’t that right, Wil…?”

The redoubtable Ms. Krankheimer (or
Mr.
Krankheimer, if you prefer) yanked her away in mid-sentence. “Come
on
, Gladys. It’s almost show time.”

Gladys-Charisma batted her phony lashes, smiled apologetically, and moved off in Wilma’s charge. I turned to Louise who was still smiling that enigmatic little smile of hers.

“Bright girl,” I ventured.

“She’s a nice kid. I noticed you noticing her. She’s got nice boobs.”

“Yes. Three of them. Two in front and one between her shoulders.”

“Now, Kolchak…”

“Carl…”
“Carl, then. Look at you. You’re soaked to the skin. Why don’t we take you home and build a nice little fire and get nice and warm and cozy?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. ”Why
don’t
we?”

Sometime much later, as we lay on a tiny fur rug in front of her tiny fireplace, the waters of Lake Washington causing her houseboat to roll in a most relaxing way, I wondered aloud why she had invited me over.

“Oh, I don’t know. You looked like a wet cocker spaniel. I have been known to take in strays every now and then. With a shave and some decent clothes you might not look half bad.” Her finger traced a line down my cheek and came to rest on the slight scar on the right side of my mouth. Another reminder of one time too many when I’d stuck my neck out and opened that big mouth.

“You and Humphrey Bogart.”

“Yeah. Me and Bogey. Okay, shweetheart. Let’s shtop kidding around. I want to know where you and the fat man put the Maltese Falcon.”

“Huh?”

“Seriously,” I said, nibbling one lovely ear. “About these men who come to see you dance. Did any of their faces ever look…”

“Later, Carl,” she breathed.

Louise Harper was one hell of a belly dancer. But in bed, she was even better. She was many things. She was everything. But most of all, she was loving. Genuinely loving. She knew what few women and fewer men
do. Relax and enjoy. Throw away the manuals and play it as it lies. For the first time in years I felt really good. I felt young again.

And as the sun began to brighten the horizon and I found myself drifting off to sleep, Louise’s head tucked tight against my chest, I got the disturbing but not altogether unpleasant feeling that this might not be just another one-night stand. I tried pushing the thought from my mind. At 50, when you haven’t got two nickels to rub together and most of your friends and associates think you’re crazy (when you’re not) and a bum (which you are), life doesn’t offer too many second chances. All sorts of thoughts rattled around my fuzzy brain. I might even forsake the bottle.

I wrapped my arms more tightly around her. She murmured something and smiled. I hung on like a drowning man.

Chapter Five

Saturday, April 8, 1972

It was a good thing that I’d stayed with Louise. When I woke up she’d ironed my suit as well as it could be ironed, cooked me a very nice breakfast, and laid out the morning edition of the
Daily Chronicle
. What I saw I didn’t like. If my night hadn’t been so damn pleasant, I’d have been ready to kill Vincenzo. I kept scanning the front page.

The skyjacker who’d jumped over Provo, Utah, with $500,000 was still on the loose. Fierce fighting was reported in An Loc, 45 miles northwest of Saigon, where the North Vietnamese 5
^th
Division was battering the defending South Vietnamese Rangers.

On the local scene, Raymond Franklin Harris, 17, had been sentences for up to 25 years in prison for raping a Lynwood woman and assaulting her fiancé with a gun after kidnapping them in February; Dr. Nicholas Kittrie, an attorney, told those at a symposium on “victimless crime” at the Washington Plaza Hotel that “the concern for the secondary effects of ‘victimless crimes,’ such as prostitution, gambling and pornography, is much to speculative.”

Big deal! I had to turn to the “Briefs” column on page two to read a two-column-inch item informing the public that the investigations into the two Pioneer Square murders were “continuing” and that there was “some minor loss of blood in both victims but that no link between the murders has yet been established.”

Great! That was definitely
not
what I had turned in to Vincenzo. He was wielding his big blue pencil just as indiscriminately as ever.

With a kiss that made me wish I didn’t have to go to work, Louise bundled me out the door into a chilly overcast and I made great haste in letting Vincenzo know that I thought of him. He was, as usual, unimpressed and adamant.

“You didn’t really expect me to run that stuff, did you?
No unofficial sources.
Remember?”

“So all we mention is the loss of blood in both girls.”

“Right,” he answered in smug righteousness.

“I just don’t believe this. Vince, do you know how many papers this story can sell, f’Christ’s sake?”

Vincenzo was unmoved. “The old man doesn’t
want
to sell ‘em
that
way.

Jesus! “The old man. That old geezer ought to be stuffed and sent to the Smithsonian Institution.”

Vincenzo started looking ugly. “Kolchak!”
“Oh, don’t give me that ‘Kolchak!’ and the accusing finger routine. I’m going to talk to Gail Manning’s parents.”
“Not today, Kolchak. The old… Crossbinder wants a feature on the historical background of the area where the murders took place.”

“Oh, joy! And he wants little old guess-who to do it?”

“You got it, Kolchak” You’re the new man,” he said smiling broadly. Score one more for A.A. Vincenzo.

“You know something, Vincenzo? You never change.”

“Out! Get out.” He waved me from his office in what had come to be known as the Vincenzo salute and off I trotted through the ancient labyrinth of the
Chronicle
’s corridors until I finally located the “morgue” down to a sub-basement.

Rows upon rows of books, file catalogues, cabinets, and musty, bound volumes of the
Chronicle
surrounded a small island of comparative order in which sat a tiny elfin man with, believe it or not, black cuff guards and a croupier’s visor. He looked like Dickens’ Bob Cratchit.