I pushed on. “Maybe I ought to describe it the way the guy at the morgue did. He said the killer must have been ‘plenty strong.’ Their necks weren’t just broken… they were virtually crushed. Cervicals squeezed all out of position, larynges crushed, ruptured in the esophageal tissue. Just check my copy. Read it and weep.”
Vincenzo did and continued to drink the milk. Suddenly he choked and spewed out a mouthful of spray. “Now wait just a goddamn minute!”
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 trace
d 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 5th 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.
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 ki
ller, 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.
Kolchak The Night Strangler Page 3