The end of the night (13 page)

"What has happened?"

"You heard no shots?"

"I didn't hear anything! What happened?"

"Come with us, please," Ameche said. He gave an order to the uniformed man. I went with White Jacket and Ameche to the master bedroom.

At the doorway, Ameche said, "Kindly do not step into the blood, Mr. Stassen."

I had no intention of so. doing. There was a Fourth of July smell of cordite in the room, and the bland sick smell of blood, and the sharpness of vomit. John Pinelli lay face down on the floor by the foot of the bed where his wife and I had made love. He lay in an ocean of blood. A partial dental bridge lay three feet from his head, a small ship making sail across the sea.

I gagged. I looked for Katby. I did not see her.

Ameche showed me a gun. I had not seen him pick it up. He held it by a yellow pencil he had inserted in the barrel. It was a hell of a big gun, a Colt .45-caliber revolver with walnut grips. He held it so I could read the silver plates set into each grip, first on one side and then on the other.

One side said, "The John P., fastest gun on location."

The other side said, "From Wade, Joan and Sonny—'Action at Box Canyon.' "

I remembered seeing the movie a few years ago, a pretty good Western. I had not known Pinelli was connected with it in any way.

"Are you familiar with this firearm?" Ameche asked me.

"I've never seen it before."

He laid the gun on the bed, retrieved his pencil. "I shall make a reconstruction for you, Mr. Stassen." He walked to the wall, skirting the blood. He pointed out four widely spaced scars in the plaster, each about four feet off the floor.

"He stood about where my associate is standing, and he fired these four shots at the woman. She was dodging back and forth, screaming. One of them caused the wound upon her arm, here." He touched his left arm just below the shoulder. "This spray of blood is from that minor wound. It is beheved

that she then sought refuge under the bed, still screaming. He knelt and crawled after her and placed the muzzle of the gun against her body, here." He pressed his finger down against the top of his shoulder, near his neck. "The large slug ranged downward through her body, killing her. The impact slid her halfway out from under the bed. He stood up, walked around the bed, and turned her over onto her back and fired once again into the center of the stomach. He pulled her out from under the bed all the way to look at her face and be sure she was dead. The gun was then empty. He walked to the bureau there and took one more shell. He walked back and stood where he could see her, and shot himself in the throat and fell where you now see him."

Yes, I could see John Pinelli. But as he had explained how it happened, I had grown more and more conscious of what I couldn't see, what I didn't want to see. I knew where it was. I took four slow steps. And I could see her. There had been much blood in her too. She lay naked on the tile, tiny and gray and shrunken, her hair lifeless, her cheeks sucked in, her eyes turned up out of sight, her small teeth showing. Her breasts had sagged flat. She looked like an old, old woman.

I backed until I could no longer see her. I heard voices in the other part of the house. More officials had arrived. White Jacket hurried out.

"This disturbs you?" Ameche asked. "We will talk on the little terrace."

I was glad to get out of that room, and away from the stink of death. I pulled the outdoor air deep into my lungs.

He perched one tailored hip on a metal table, pulled out a pack of Kents and gave me one. He looked at me shrewdly.

"They employed you?"

"Just to drive them down.'*

"But that was some months ago. Have you been working for them?"

"Just ... the odd errand. A little driving. They haven't been paying me. I've been a house guest, you could say."

"Yes. of course. A guest. And providing ... a very personal service for your hostess, no?"

"Is that illegal here?"

"No, of course not. But stupid carelessness should be made illegal. You were caught with her."

"Yes."

"So we have a murder and a suicide. Now I shall tell you

some facts of life, Mr. Stassen. This is a resort place. We like . . . rumors of intrigue, but not dirty violence and scandal. Mr. Pinelii was in poor health. He was despondent. You are not in any way in this picture."

"I'm not?"

"Your things will be packed. You will be out of this house in ten minutes. You will be out of Acapulco by the first aircraft. I cannot insist, but I would say it would be wise for you to leave Mexico. Go now and dress and leave here."

I looked at him. I shrugged and turned away. After I had gone a dozen feet he said, "Mr. Stassen!" I looked back at him. "She was much too old for you, chico."

Kathy was under a great bed, screaming and screaming, holding her bleeding arm. John Pinelii, crawling, peered under at her, the big, ridiculous gun in his hand.

There was nothing in the world worth arguing about. I left I had a thousand dollars when I arrived in Mexico City. I found a cheap hotel. I got blind, stupid drunk. Four days later I had eleven dollars left, and somebody had stolen my suitcase. I wired home for money. Ernie wired me a hundred dollars. I bought the clothes and toilet articles I needed. I fooled around the city for a while, livmg cheap, trying not to think about Kathy. I drank enough to keep the whole thing a little dulled, a Uttle far back in my mind. When the money was dangerously low, I took a bus to Monterrey. There I ran into a family from Sonora, Texas. A man and wife and two small kids, traveling in a pickup truck.

He had a bad infection in his right hand, and his little Mexican wife couldn't drive a car. So we made a deal.

I came back across the border at Del Rio on Sunday, the nineteenth day of July. He felt he could drive one-handed to Sonora. We parted company there, in Del Rio. I had a little over fifteen dollars left. I didn't give a damn where I went or what I did. It was a blistering afternoon. I decided I might as well hitch-hike east. I walked a way east out of town on Route 90. I had no luck. I kept movmg slowly as I tried. I came to a beer joint. I went in. After the glare outside I couldn't see anything.

A high penetrating voice said, "And here is Joe CoUege, seeing America first, having a great big fat adventure before he poops out and joins Rotary."

That's how I met Sander Golden, Nanette Koslov and Shack Hernandez.

SEVEN

In the fat Wolf Pack file, the first memorandum written by Riker Deems Owen about Nanette Koslov is perhaps the most pretentious one of the lot. As with most men who claim to be unable to understand women, Owen tends to overcomplicate his observations, to see devices and nuances where none exist.

Yet in spite of the somewhat fevered pace of his imagination in his account of this semi-attractive young woman, one cannot say that his obser\'ations would in any way impede the sales of the memoirs he plans to write some day.

Like most small-bore, pretentious men, Riker Owen shows the tendency to strike an emotional attitude and then, using that prejudice as a base, draw vast, unreasoned, philosophical conclusions.

One can see this device in action in the very first paragraph of the first Koslov memorandum:

It would be a most unprofessional attitude for a doctor, a psychiatrist or a defense attorney to believe that any individual is evil in the old-fashioned, Biblical meaning of the word. In my conferences with Nanette Koslov I have had to consciously fight to prevent myself from succumbing to this inaccurate oversimphfication. I have, in fact, delayed my preparation of this memorandum until I could be certain in my own mind that I have established a completely objective attitude toward her, rather than an emotional or even semi-superstitious attitude.

She is but twenty years of age, but it is extraordinarily easy to overlook the fact she is a young girl.

She is five foot six and weighs a little over a hundred and twenty pounds. Her breasts are smaller than average, her hips rather wide and mature. She has a heavy, glossy mop of chest-

nut-brown hair, which she customarily wears completely unfettered. It falls below her shoulders. It is rather raggedly cropped in front, cut off at the level of her heavy eyebrows. She seems to look out from under it at you, hke an animal safe under a hedge, watching you. Her eyes are a slightly muddy green, and very direct. While talking or listening she has a lot of tics and mannerisms that are all involved with the hair. She is forever fingering it, pulling a sheaf of it across her throat like a furry scarf, or pulling a strand of it across her lips, or across one eye.

Her other mannerisms, the way she sits and stands, are, I have been informed, a conscious imitation of that Httle French strumpet with the face like Huckleberry Finn. The French call such conscious imitation bardolatrie, I beheve. Her features are quite plain, the nose snubbed and rather flat, the mouth broad and soft, the skin texture coarse, with the enlarged pores particularly evident on the broad cheekbones. Her only make-up is a dark lipstick, carelessly and lavishly used. On her brows and her strong hands are those small random scars acquired by those whose lives are spent close to the edge of darkness.

I find in reading over these paragraphs of description that I have not done her justice. The description itself is accurate, but in her case she adds up to more than the sum of the parts. There is a savage, sensuous impact to her appearance. Sander Golden has called her an animal. That word captures some of the essence of her. She exudes an automatic sexual challenge, a knowing, skeptical arrogance that makes a man feel there is something he should prove to her. I do not believe this is a conscious thing with her. It is, perhaps, a matter of glands, hormones. Even the slightly unwashed look of her constitutes, in itself, an inexplicable appeal—possibly an appeal to the base desires shared by all men, though acknowledged by very few of us.

I do know that it has been, and will continue to be, difficult to conduct interviews with her. When she has those direct green eyes on you and pulls that shining hair across her lips and slowly shifts her round, solid thighs, it is as if you are exploring two channels of communication simultaneously, only one of them verbal. And at times the subterranean communication becomes so strong as to drown out the words you are saying. And then, for a time, you are lost, and must pause and remember what you were trymg to say.

Her background is drab. Her people are Polish peasants. They fled to West Germany in 1945 and were one of the fortunate families who spent very little time in a resettlement camp before coming to the United States with their three small children and settling near Bassett, Nebraska, in a tenant-farming situation. Nanette was six at that time. Three more children were bom to the Koslovs in Nebraska. Nanette learned English rapidly, attended public school, and worked on the land. Her people were so strict as to border on cruelty. Nanette matured early. At fourteen, after being expelled from junior high school as a result of scandalous behavior involving some senior high school boys, she ran away with a migrant farm laborer who later abandoned her in San Francisco. Her family made no attempt to find her. She looked older than her years. Passing herself off as eighteen, she obtained work as a waitress. When she was sixteen she fell in with a bohemian group in that city. For the next three years she was a fixture in that curious subterranean artistic world of San Francisco which specializes in incomprehensible jazz, foolish painting and hysterical poetry, with their inevitable by-products of mysticism, coffee-house conversation, drug addiction, violence and self-pity. She worked sporadically and was passed back and forth from musician to painter to poet, as a model, an inspiration and a bedmate. During this period she learned the jargon of that milieu without the necessity of having to understand what she was saying—a condition shared, perhaps, by most of her associates.

Last year a painter with whom she was living was killed as a result of a violent argument during an impromptu party. Friends hid Nanette until it became certain the police wanted her for questioning. She fled to Los Angeles and became a member of a smaller group there. It was there she met Sander Golden. When a narcotics raid broke up the group, she left Los Angeles with Golden. Their tentative destination was New Orleans, where Golden had friends. They met Hernandez in Tucson, and the three of them traveled together as far as Del Rio, where Kirby Stassen joined the group.

It is difficult to assess the effect of Nan Koslov on the three men, insofar as their short career of extreme violence is concerned. Each member of the group had, I believe, a catalytic effect on the other three. In one sense perhaps the men felt a necessity to "show off" for the girl, to show her that they were beyond all rules and restrictions. But in order for her to achieve

this effect upon them, it would first have been necessary for her to communicate to them her own taste for recklessness.

From the meager clues she has given me, I can perhaps reconstruct her attitude at Del Rio. Here was a girl who, for several years, had lived only for sensation. For kicks, as Sander Golden would say. Highly spiced foods deaden the palate. So ever-increasing quantities of spice must be used. It is the same with physical sensation. Though she denies it, there is, I believe, a good chance that she was directly involved in the killing of the artist in San Francisco. He was stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen with a long skewer used for fireplace cooking, and in the throat and in the nape of the neck with a table fork. There is such a flavor of primitive violence in this woman, of revolt agamst cruelties inflicted upon her, that she may have found a new and special pleasure in the act of killing. It is, one could say, the ultimate sensation, and she had been increasing the tempo of sensation over her short lifetime.

Also, Sander Golden had put her on his own routine of stimulants, a schedule which he had arrived at through trial and error and which he terms "The biggest thing since the wheel."

It involved a carefully regulated intake of powerful tranquilizers, plus raw dexedrine and barbiturates.