Lady, Go Die! (16 page)

“Was she there with a date?”

“No. Not even a girl friend. Some of her gang from work hung out there, and it was typical of that crowd to show up alone or in pairs or even in groups. She was a little tipsy—the autopsy showed a fairly high alcohol content in her bloodstream—and left about eleven, by herself.”

“This is that roadhouse between here and Sidon?”

“Right. The Hideaway. We questioned everybody there, from Doris’ co-worker friends to every waitress and both bartenders. Even the darn cooks, we talked to, and they never stuck their heads out of the kitchen.”

“Somebody grabbed her in that parking lot.”

“That is our theory. But we checked it. I even borrowed some lab boys from New York to go over that parking lot, and you know what they came up with? Gravel.”

“Anything else in that file?”

“Nothing pertinent.”

“Okay.” I rose and shook his hand again. I nodded toward the framed photos. “That’s the Philippines, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” He gave me an embarrassed grin. “We were on this island, handling supply lines. The Japs were hiding in these caves in the hills, and it got a little hairy. You know, they’d come
out at night, looking for food. Grenade went off and I took some shrapnel. And you know, there were these native girls, but you could catch eight kinds of clap if you weren’t careful. Where were you?”

“In a fox hole,” I said, standing at his door. “Call Chief Chasen and tell him I’m stopping by, would you?”

* * *

Chief Chasen’s office was spare, but then so was the chief, a lanky Ichabod Crane kind of guy in a blue uniform. He was about forty and had an Adam’s apple that bobbed as he spoke and fought with his words for your attention.

“You know, there might be a tie-up at that,” he said, his voice a mellow baritone that might attract the ladies if he wasn’t otherwise a scarecrow. Of course, it had worked for Sinatra.

I said, “With the Wesley killing, you mean?”

“Yeah. Let me make a call.” He got on his phone and asked for “the paper evidence from the March 27 killing.”

Then he returned his attention to me. “The night of their murders, those two girls were seen in a bar in Sidon.”

“Sidon, huh? They were of drinking age?”

“Yeah, they were college girls from the city, but they were both twenty-one. Anyway, they took a booth at this bar. They weren’t with anybody, they were just laughing and talking. We questioned several local guys who went over and talked to them, just flirting, not getting anywhere. The girls said they were meeting some fellas somewhere, and that’s as much as we got.”

“Okay. So how did they wind up in that barn back in Wilcox?”

“Their car was found just outside Sidon. They’d had a flat. We had a witness come forward who was driving by when the two girls were getting into a fancy car.”

“What kind of fancy car?”

He shrugged. “That’s all the witness had to say. He just noticed these good-looking girls piling into a fancy car of some kind, leaving another vehicle along the side of the road with a flat tire.”

“Which way was the ‘fancy car’ headed?”

“Toward Wilcox, all right.”

“You checked thoroughly into the witness?”

“Yes. He had his wife with him and we talked to her, too. Nothing there. Just a good citizen coming forward... Ah, Officer Winch, let’s have that evidence.”

A fresh-faced young cop had come in carrying a clear evidence envelope, which he handed to the chief, who handed it to me as the young cop went out.

“Where did you find this?” I asked, looking at the clear little bag and its contents.

“In that car with the flat tire. It certainly wasn’t on the victims—they were strung up naked as jaybirds in that barn, poor things. We never did find their clothes.”

Her clothes were gone,
Dave Miles had said of the girl left strangled to death, naked and spread-eagled on the beach.
Never found.

Did that detail bind these killings together as surely as the nylon around Doris Wilson’s pale young throat?

I pondered that as I sat there staring at the contents of the clear evidence envelope: a matchbook with a festive New Year’s
motif emblazoned with the words SIDON ARMS COCKTAIL LOUNGE.

* * *

By late morning I was back in Sidon, sitting in a booth across from Velda in the hotel bar where that matchbook had come from.

“I’m starting to think Dave is right,” I said. “Maybe these killings
are
the work of one maniac on the loose.”

A goddess in a yellow blouse, Velda gestured with both hands, palms up. “But how does a maniac fit in with Sharron Wesley’s gambling house? Not to mention all the dirty dealings our friend Dekkert is neck high in.”

“I don’t know,” I said glumly. “And anyway, I’m not convinced the kill-crazy son of a bitch who tortured and killed those college girls is behind the Wesley dame’s exit. But that nylon stocking strangulation? That’s close enough to Godiva to get my attention.”

She shuddered. “Mine, too.”

I threw down what was left of my highball. “It
feels
like I was already on the right track, looking for her silent partner in that casino. When there’s a murder, nine times out of ten, the motive is money.”

“But then there’s that
other
one out of ten, Mike.” She shook her head and the dark hair shimmered. “I admit I’m confused.”

“You’re not alone.”

“Makes me sick to think that nice Wilson girl wound up like that...”

“Dave’s right about one thing. That’s a score worth settling.”

She leaned across. “Listen, I almost forgot to mention—Pat called while you were out. He didn’t leave any real message, of course, after you warned him not to. You want to use the pay-phone booth?”

“No,” I said. “I have to kick this thing into gear. I have a few things for you to do, honey, while I’m gone.”

“Gone? Again?”

“Yeah. Talk to the bartender here about those two college girls, and if he isn’t the one who was on duty, find out who, and track him down.”

I dug in my pocket for my roll of bills and peeled off five tens like a poker hand and passed them across to her.

I went on: “There’s one taxi in this town. Round it up and head out to that roadhouse tonight, the Hideaway—put some nickels in the jukebox, be available for a dance, let a local yokel or two buy you a beer. Talk to the bartenders out there, too. Somebody may have seen something the night Doris Wilson disappeared. It’s not that I don’t trust these Long Island coppers to do their job, but... I don’t trust ’em to do their job.”

She smirked at me. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time on a vacation. Have her dance and drink with other men.”

“Vacation time is over. No more vacation till we’ve wrapped this up. And just in case there
is
a psychopath on the loose, you keep your wits sharp and your .32 ready.”

“Roger. And you?”

“I have to head back into the city. I’ll talk to Pat, and by hook or by crook, I’m going to find out who Sharron Wesley was in business with.”

I called Pat before leaving Sidon, to warn him I was on my way, and he suggested we meet at Mooney’s for mid-afternoon coffee and Danish. He didn’t say so, but maybe I was becoming too much of a fixture around that station house for the reputation of a captain who hoped to be an inspector some day.

I settled for a parking place two blocks from the beanery. The afternoon was sunny but cool, nice enough to make a guy wonder why he bothered going out on the Island for a getaway. Then I heard a cabbie leaning out his window to add some profane lyrics to the song his honking horn was playing, and remembered.

Pat was already in back at our usual table when I strolled in. He saluted me with the oversize mug that was a trademark of the place, in case I hadn’t noticed him. I stopped a waiter and told him to bring me my own coffee and Danish, then plopped down across from Pat. With no preliminaries beyond “Hi,” I began filling him in on my visit to Wilcox, from Dave Miles to the Suffolk County Sheriff to Chief Chasen.

“I have to say I’m of two minds about these killings,” he said, nibbling idly at his pastry throughout our grisly conversation.
“There’s enough criminal activity surrounding Sharron Wesley to make it awfully damn coincidental that some maniac would just happen to single her out.”

“My thinking exactly.”

“On the other hand, you pick up coincidences like blue serge picks up lint. Every time I hear a cop say he doesn’t believe in coincidence, I tell him to hang around with Mike Hammer for a while.”

I stirred sugar into my coffee. “But are there enough similarities to put all four kills at the feet of one fiend? We have the nudity thread, but Sharron Wesley could have lost her clothes in the drink. And as for her being artistically displayed in that park, on that stone horse, well... we don’t know that it was her killer who did that. That could have been some nut with a sick sense of humor.”

“Yeah, the Lady Godiva angle.” He shrugged. “Can’t rule that out. And even where the M.O. is similar, it’s different enough to be a head-scratcher.”

“Be specific.”

“Well, the strangulations, for example. They’re not the same—you have a nylon stocking for the Wilson girl, and powerful hands for Sharron Wesley. Then you have those two coeds in that barn who got slashed up like some demented sacrifice to the Gods.”

He could chow down on that Danish all he liked. I had lost my damn appetite.

“However,” he said, between nibbles, “don’t downplay the nudity aspect.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, I should say, the lack of clothes. The missing clothes.”

“Not following you, buddy.”

The gray-blue eyes narrowed. “There are two breeds of mass murderer, Mike. There’s your quiet everyday good citizen who snaps. Who’s out mowing the lawn one lovely morning, then suddenly goes inside, finds the German Luger he brought home from the war, and saunters around the neighborhood killing everybody he comes in contact with...
Bang
, there goes his next-door neighbor,
pow
, there goes the paper boy,
bing
, the mailman,
wham
, that annoying little old lady who never cuts
her
grass, and then back home and inside,
bang
,
bang
,
bang
, there go the wife and kiddies, and if the cops don’t kill him before he’s done, he turns the weapon on himself. That’s one kind.”

“And the other is the Jack the Ripper breed.”

“Right. What the textbooks called a serial mass murderer. A ruthless psychopath who blends into his surroundings like a chameleon—he may be a scout master or a grocer or even a preacher. But he’s slowly building a body count. The kind of guy whose backyard turns up an interesting crop, if you go digging.”

“Well, I appreciate the lecture, pal, but tell me something I don’t know.”

He pointed at me with the remaining third of his pastry. “How about this, Mike? A serial mass murderer likes to take trophies. The Ripper took female innards.” He raised an eyebrow to make his point, then interrupted himself with another bite of Danish, which he chewed as he said, “The missing clothes may be a trophy this killer collects.”

“A trophy?”

“A souvenir. Something he can take out and look at and re-live a memorable experience.”

“Find the clothes and I find the killer?”

“I don’t guarantee it, but keep that in mind.”

Something was nibbling at my mind the way Pat was at that pastry. “You said a serial mass murderer can be somebody that fits into a community, scout master, preacher. Could it be a woman?”

“Not impossible. But I’ve read book after book on this subject, Mike, and there just aren’t a lot of female mass murderers of either stripe.”

“Okay. But what about a police officer?”

“Well, sure. What better place to hide than behind a badge? It works for bent cops. It could work for a psychopathic one just as well. And a cop is somebody to whom violence is anything but foreign.”

“Maybe that’s how this ties up.”

“What do you mean, Mike?”

“I mean our pal Dekkert. We know he’s a sadistic son of a bitch. He’s got a badge and can go anywhere in or around Sidon with goddamn impunity.”

Pat was squinting at that, shaking his head. “Well, I don’t know. Dekkert’s time on the New York PD was all about money. Graft. And he had a reputation as a big, good-looking mug who never had trouble attracting the ladies.”

“Maybe so, but you remember Billy Ruston’s sister, Marion?”

“Sure. Cute kid.”

“Cuter than that. She’s all grown up and in all the right places. I ran into her at Louie Marone’s last night, and she told me about a couple trips she made out to Sharron Wesley’s gambling den.”

He shrugged his eyebrows. “No kidding. I didn’t know she was old enough to vote.”

“She’s old enough to do a lot of things. Anyway, seems Dekkert put the make on her, and I don’t mean brought her flowers and candy. He dragged her off into the bushes and if she hadn’t kneed him where babies begin, the bastard might well have raped her.”

He gave me a skeptical smirk. “I suppose anything is possible. But trying to force yourself on some dolly you bought drinks for at a casino isn’t the same as stringing up coeds by their ankles in a barn.”

“No. No, it isn’t.”

“And anyway, Mike, there’s no sexual assault in any of the four murders. This particular serial mass murderer may not be capable of normal sexual activity.”

“Not even an abnormal activity like rape?”

“Not even that. He probably gets his sexual charge out of the violence he takes out on these girls. Those trophies he takes, he may use them in pleasuring himself.”

“Sick bastard. This just keeps getting nastier and nastier.” I sighed and slugged down some coffee. “Cripes. Maybe I’m trying too hard.”

“Too hard to what?”

“To connect these murders up. Pat, I don’t know whether I’m getting closer, or if what Dave Miles told me is a distraction—throwing me off.”

Pat leaned forward, so close I could have brushed the crumbs off his mouth. But I didn’t.