Kolchak The Night Strangler (5 page)

His name was John Berry and he’d been down here compiling the detritus of the
Chronicle
almost as long as Crossbinder had been putting it out. He was very quiet, with a high, thin voice, but he seemed anxious to help, apparently grateful for a visit of any kind. He kept the back issues coming, thumping each down with an accompanying cloud of dust.

“There we go.”

“Thanks, sport.”

“Most welcome.” He watched me as I worked. He looked like a cocker spaniel that had lost its master. “Mr. Kolchak… I envy you.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Why?”

“Nevertheless, I do. Yes, sir. Research. That’s where the real joy lies.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“And the fascination,” he prattled on. “Let the others scurry about foraging for tidbits of contemporary gossip.” He extended a small white hand toward the volumes I was leafing through. “This is where the meat is found. For instance… no one yet has mentioned the distinct resemblance between these present strangulations and a series of them in the year… mmm… nineteen fifty-one… or was it fifty-two?”

Again my ears pricked up. “Really? How… similar?”

“Oh, extremely,” he said, evidently pleased with my response. He proceeded to fly like a startled bird back and forth amongst his treasures with increasing armloads of old bound volumes and I got a good look at some nice faded clippings. The paper was faded, that is. But not its content.

The old man wasn’t exaggerating. On March 27, 1952, one Myra Johns was discovered strangled in an alley in the Pioneer Square area. On March 30, a second strangulation took place in the same area. On April 2, a third murder. On April 5, yet another strangulation. By April 14, six women had been strangled. All of them died and/or were found in the area of Pioneer Square.

The stories intimated that certain “bizarre details” had been repressed by police officials. This, to my experience, was not at all unusual. I had encountered such tactics before in my travels.

I made some notes and took the elevator back to the newsroom. Vincenzo displayed his usual lack of imagination.

“I hardly think we can say we have the same killer now as in 1952.”

“You hardly think, period! Read on.”

He read on, the smug look of satisfaction fading from under his moustache. “Again?”

“Give the bright man ten silver dollars!”

Vincenzo eyed me with disgust. He read from my notes: “’He had the rotted features of… a corpse’?”

“That’s it,” I told him. “Word for word. By a man who saw him in 1952.”

“Damn it, Kolchak. You know I can’t print this junk.”

“Why not?”

“If you don’t know the answer to that one… ah, Jesus. I come to Seattle for some peace and quite when I could’ve taken a cushy PR job on the Strip, and what do I get?
You
again. And another nutty story.”

“We’ll soon see about how ‘nutty’ it is.”

“How, asked the red-eyed, much-abused editor… knowing that he shouldn’t?”

“Because,” I told him, “if it is the same killer, he hasn’t finished killing. Not just yet.”

Chapter Six

Sunday, April 9, 1972

Joyce Gabriel, a quiet, divorced secretary in her mid-thirties, was on her way home from a late date. She was about to turn down First Avenue from Cherry when she heard a sound. Joyce Gabriel apparently didn’t know that it was a bad idea to be in the Pioneer Square area late at night. It had been a bad idea for many years.

Pioneer Square itself is something of an architectural anomaly, having been built up shortly after the Great Seattle Fire. The buildings were designed and constructed mostly around the turn of the century and many were quite lovely in their Victorian way. For a while, Pioneer Square, with its abandoned underground lurking mysteriously below, was the hub of Seattle’s downtown business district.

But as Seattle began to grow, the growth pattern stretched northward, away from the square, and it began to deteriorate. The buildings were not kept up. Business firms shuttered their offices and moved northward. And in time it became a slum area not unlike Whitechapel or Spitalfields of London in the 1880’s.

With the lost off business and the “carriage trade,” Pioneer Square was gradually taken over by sailors, winos, and the usual run of derelicts who spilled over from the so-called “Gold Rush Strip” a few short blocks away, an area of the central waterfront between piers 50 and 60. By the end of World War I, only the hardiest or most foolhardy men would walk the area at night, and few women other than prostitutes would venture there after dark. And most of the prostitutes would only pass through in pairs.

That the situation has changed at all is due largely to the efforts of people like Ralph Anderson, an architect who saw much that was worth saving in the small remnant of what was once Henry Yesler’s pride and joy. In 1970 the Seattle City Council designated almost the entire area as a historic site in much the same way as Los Angeles has acted toward such landmarks as its Bradbury Building and the homes along Carroll Avenue.

But with all these recent changes, and even Bill Speidel’s “Underground Tour” (of which I was to learn much more, later on), Pioneer Square was still a place to avoid in the small hours of the morning.

But Joyce Gabriel didn’t seem to know that.

A groan coming from a nearby alley caused Joyce to stop and gaze to her right. What she saw made her blood run cold. There were two figures in the alley. One, a woman, was lying, partially hidden by some trash. The other, a man’s figure—or so she thought—was bent across the woman’s and was doing… something.

Joyce took a hesitant step forward, trying to decide what to do.

The man, clad in a dark overcoat and hat with the brim pulled down all the way, straightened suddenly and turned toward her. Joyce Gabriel’s eyes widened. She found herself screaming helplessly as he moved quickly toward her.

And then she fainted.

I got on the scene a very few minutes later. I’d heard the sirens while sitting in Louise’s dressing room in Omar’s Tent and wandered out to see what was up. When I arrived two ambulance attendants were examining the body of the woman who had not yet been identified. She was lying face down in a pile of trash. One of the men in white looked up at me. I flashed my press card.

“Kolchak.
Daily Chronicle
.”

He pointed a penlight at the base of her skull and held the dead woman’s hair away from the nape of her neck. There was that increasingly familiar little puncture mark and a drop of dried blood. The attendant looked up at me again. “Another one.” I shot a few pictures with a strobe-lit Minolta.

Another one indeed. And Vincenzo couldn’t see any “link.”

He and his helper rolled her over onto her back. I stared at her neck and grabbed the little flashlight away from him. There it was, just like the man at the morgue had said: a residue of what looked for all the world like decomposed flesh. God knows I’d seen enough of it on bodies found periodically in the desert around Las Vegas. I shot a few more pictures.

I listened to the chatter among the attendants and cops and went looking for the witness, Joyce Gabriel, who was standing next to none other than Captain Schubert himself. He was questioning her personally. Now, obviously, even if Vincenzo couldn’t see the so-called “link,” things were pretty plain to everyone else if Schubert had been working hours like these and was not only in uniform, but riding with his graveyard shift instead of staying home in a nice, warm bed.

The Gabriel woman, in near hysterics, was attractive, with auburn hair, and was being half supported, by Schubert.

“I… I… just don’t know
why
he didn’t chase me after killing her. I didn’t look behind, though. I turned to run… and… I think I screamed… and… that’s all I remember.”

“Kolchak.
Daily Chronicle
. I know you’re upset Miss… uh…”

“The lady’s name is Gabriel, Mr. Kolchak, and if you don’t mind, I have a few questions of my own I’d like answered. This
is
a police investigation.”

He shouldered me out of his way, taking Joyce by the arm, but not before she said, “Oh God! I hope I never see a face like that again!”

As he took her across the street I heard her voice, growing fainter: “Like a dead man. A
dead
man!” And then she was sobbing and getting into a squad car.

I was shivering, and not just because of the 39 degree temperature. Some of what I’d read in the
Chronicle
’s morgue was coming to life before my eyes. I just knew it! And, of course, I had my Vegas experience to go by, too. This seemed different, though. No wounds in the neck. Bodies hardly tapped for blood at all. Strangulation. Still, there was that disturbing pattern of killings in a series and a tendency by the police to hush it up.

I made tracks back to Omar’s Tent and called in my story to a rewrite man from a pay phone next to the men’s room. I made the mistake of telling rewrite to alert Vincenzo. Then I called for a cab and had the cabbie take my film to the
Chronicle
.

The headlines announced the capture of the “Sky-diving Highjacker” in Salt Lake City as well as the capture of yet another skyjacker in San Diego. It would seem not all the nuts were running around strangling young girls. Former President Johnson was resting “nicely and showing signs of definite improvement” after his most recent heart attack. FDR’s former Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, was dead at 92.

But scant mention of the dead woman, one Claire Bisbee, a waitress at the Seven Seas Restaurant in… you guessed it! Pioneer Square. She had left a husband (who I later learned was in a state of “collapse” and “incommunicado”).

Vincenzo was ready for me and got in his licks early.

“Don’t say it. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything from you. Calling me up at 2 a.m.!”

“What about the deposits of rotted flesh around the necks of all three victims? You should have my photos by now.”

Vincenzo was as receptive as a stone wall. “I
said
I didn’t wanna hear it. I don’t want to hear anything! And… it’s not
official
yet.”

“Who the hell cares if its
official
? You and I both know…”
“Look, goddamnit! I’ll buy the possibility that it’s the same man who strangled six women in 1952.”

How charitable.

“But a
man
, Kolchak. Not a goddamn corpse!”

“That’s the way he’s been described. By an eyewitness! More than
once
!”

“Out!”

I was ready to do a little strangling of my own.

“What the hell is this ‘Out! Out!’ routine you keep pushing? This
is
a newspaper, isn’t it? We
are
supposed to print
news
? Right, Vincenzo?
News!!
Suppression is not the name of the game! Or did you lose your guts in Vegas?”

I thought he was going to slug me.

“Basta! Va! Go! Stronzo! Va!”

I gave
him
the Italian salute and returned to my desk, disgusted. I threw down my copy and lit up a cigar, when Janie, sitting a couple of desks away, bellowed “There!” and dramatically ripped some copy from her typewriter. She looked hopping mad. She came lumbering toward me and sat on the edge of my desk.

“An open invitation to the killer. I intend to walk the streets of Pioneer Square every damn night from now on. Just let that s.o.b. try something cute with me… if he’s got the nerve!”

As I have said in the past, my money would be on Janie. But in dead seriousness, the idea of one of my friends wandering around in the fog and mist didn’t seem like such a good one and I told her so.

I watched her head into Vincenzo’s office and as I turned back to my desk, fumbling amongst my usual rat’s pile of papers for an ashtray, I noticed a note someone had left:

Berry wants to see you down in the morgue.

I found my little pixie holding a bound volume of
Chronicle
clippings like it was one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“I’m giving this to you because you had the thoughtfulness to mention my name in your story about the 1952 strangulations.”

“What is it, John?”

“A burning curiosity impelled me to check back further in our records to see if possibly there might be other strangulations of a similar nature.”

“And…”
Proudly he thrust the book at me and together we walked it to a large table. I read the embossed cover: Feb 15—Apr 15, 1931.

“You gotta be kidding.”