File on a Missing Redhead

by Lou Cameron

  That was when I saw the blood.

  Roberta Grey’s back was lacerated in a dozen places. A shard of bloody glass stuck out of her neck at a crazy angle and glistened in the sunlight as she leaned out the window.

  I got to my feet and started towards her around the desk. I said, “Take it easy, Roberta.”

  “I’m okay,” she replied, “but you’d better get down to your car on the double.”

  “My car?” I blinked.

  “Yeah,” she said, “somebody just blew it all to hell!”

  • • • The way we reconstructed it afterwards, the bomb had been connected to the ignition wires while Larry Romero was having coffee around the corner. If he hadn’t switched on the ignition in order to run the air-conditioner while he waited for me they’d have gotten me too.

  They’d used dynamite. A lot of dynamite. The nitro fumes were thick in the air as I dashed out the entrance and headed for what was left of my cruiser.

  There wasn’t much. The blast had demolished the police car and the Buick sedan parked in front of it. Windows had been shattered for a block in either direction, and the sidewalks were littered with broken glass and injured pedestrians. One woman who’d been close to the explosion was bleeding to death while a beat cop tried to use the thong of his nightstick as a tourniquet. She was screaming. A meaningless singsong scream that kept repeating like a broken phonograph record.

  She was in better shape than Larry Romero.

  The blast had driven the floorboard up and back into the roof of the cruiser. Romero’s legs had jackknifed until the kneecaps were against his chest and… kept going. The shin bones had been driven through Larry’s chest, pinning him to the seat like a pair of bloody ivory skewers. His shoes, with the feet still in them, were stuck like big obscene thumbtacks to the front of his torn and bloody shirt.

  His head was on the back seat—what was left of it. The interior of the car was spattered with blood, glass, bits of metal, and what looked like raw hamburger. Like I said, they’d used a lot of dynamite.

  A Vegas police car pulled up, its siren wailing, and stopped. I walked over to it, swallowing the sour taste in my mouth, and identified myself. I asked to use their radio to call in. I told our dispatcher what had happened and asked him to send the lab truck and call Doc Evans.

  Then I got out, walked around to the far side of the police car, leaned both hands against it, and threw up.

  After a while, I became aware of one of the Vegas cops standing at my side. I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, smiled weakly, and said, “Sorry about your sidewalls. The man in the car was a friend.”

  “I saw him, Lieutenant,” the uniformed man said quietly.

  “Woman up on the second floor,” I said. “Cut by flying glass.”

  “My partner checked her out,” said the Vegas cop. “She’s okay. Meat Wagon’s on the way. We’ll have a full load for them, too. You know who did it?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’ve a couple of ideas.”

  “We’ll get them,” he said grimly. “We’ll get them and send the cop-killing mothers to the gas chamber!”

  “Not,” I muttered, “if I get them first.”

  • • • Larry Romero left a wife and two kids. They collected his ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, and the state gave him a posthumous promotion to lieutenant and as good a funeral as we could manage with a closed coffin.

  I got a new cruiser.

  It was an unmarked black Oldsmobile interceptor, with an eight-cylinder engine that had delivered 375 horses before they hopped it up. How much power I had under the hood after they’d retooled the big mill was anybody’s guess. But they told me I’d be able to catch anything on the road, if I was nuts enough to drive that fast.

  Just in case I was, the cruiser was equipped with heavy-duty shocks, roll bars, and tight sports-car steering. The blinker light was inside the windshield, as usual, but they’d added the extra disguise of a special antenna for the two-way radio. Too many punks had caught on to the telltale whip sticking up like a fishing rod from the left rear fender of an unmarked car.

  There were an Armalite M-16 automatic rifle and a sawed-off 12-gauge Browning riot gun racked across the backs of the twin bucket seats. Only one seat was occupied as I drove the new cruiser out of the garage. I hadn’t asked for a new driver. I had enough to worry about as it was.

  Hazel Collier’s next letter to her boyfriend at Carson City had been intercepted and, as expected, contained a secret message in lemon juice. I felt a little guilty reading her mail. Especially since it was a love letter. But nice guys finish last in my racket.

  She was still conning herself about what kind of guy Stretch Voss was. She wrote: Darling, I know how you must feel to have me helping the same policeman who arrested you, but I’m doing it for Kathy and for us. Frank said something about you being able to square things with certain parties if you were able to tell them where this MacDonald I told you about is hiding. I know you’re innocent, darling, but so many people—dangerous people—are down on you that I’m worried sick about when you get out of that awful place!

  “Poor bastard’s helpless as a cobra,” I muttered to myself as I read on.

  As soon as I know anything about his whereabouts, I’ll try and get in touch with you so you can do what you think best with the information. Only promise me one thing, darling. Promise me you’ll tell them not to hurt Kathy! She’s no danger to anyone and had nothing to do with stealing all the money on the Strip. I know you well enough, darling, to feel confident you wouldn’t do anything to hurt a friend of mine.

  Bastard would sell his mother, I thought, if it would square things with the Mob.

  Was Hazel really that dumb? I wondered. Even if she couldn’t see what kind of an animal Stretch was, she knew, or should have known, the way a gun operates. Sure, Kathy was just a dumb, innocent bystander. But guns didn’t worry too much about bystanders or witnesses to a hit. If she was with MacDonald when and if they caught up with him, she was dead. That’s if MacDonald didn’t do her in first. Unless I got to her first, and fast, Kathy Gorm would be in big trouble. The biggest.

  It would have been easy as hell to sabotage the romance between Hazel and her larcenous lover. And don’t think I wasn’t tempted. I’d been doing all right with her—or at least she hadn’t been beating me with a big black whip—until Stretch Voss appeared on the scene with his smooth talk and hundred-dollar cuff links. Sure, I’d been only a police sergeant and I’d have never in a million years made the kind of money a guy ought to have if he wants to give a dame half the things I’d wanted to give Hazel. But I might have talked her into being my wife, in time. That was more than Stretch had offered, the bastard.

  I could have had them slip a couple of zingers in when I typed up the letter and secret message for the lab to forge in Voss’s handwriting and send to Hazel with a Carson City postmark. But I didn’t. Sometimes a guy in my business has to be a self-appointed bastard. But I’ve never gone in for being one just for practice.

  Since Stretch had never gotten her letter, I had to work from scratch in answering it. I felt a little strange composing a love letter from another man to a woman I’d once asked to marry me. Sort of like that Cyrano guy Jose Ferrer played in that picture. He’d been a loser who’d written such good love letters for a dumb, good-looking buddy, that the girl he loved had fallen for the clod.

  Well, Stretch Voss was hardly my buddy, and Hazel had already fallen for him. So I laid it on. I had photostats of other letters he’d written her, and copying his flowery style wasn’t too rugged. The tricky part was adding the message for the lab boys to insert, in lemon juice and Stretch’s handwriting, between the cornball lines of ink.

  I wrote: Do anything Talbot wants, honey. My only chance for getting out of here early may depend on having a few fuzz pulling for me. I’ll see what I can do from this end. But meanwhile, I want you to cooperate with him until I tell you different. Frank’s not a bad egg, for a cop.
It might do us a lot of good if you could get him on our side.

  I read what I’d just written and crossed out the part about me not being such a bad egg. There was such a thing as padding my part, and the only real reason I had for all of this involved forgery was Hazel’s help as a skip tracer. Getting her to think I was a nice guy was something I could do on my own time.

  Bert Crawford had detailed a detachment of troopers to canvass people who sold dynamite, as well as all the contractors, mine and quarry operators, and anyone else who might have had a few sticks of the stuff stolen from them recently.

  The Vegas police were working on it too. So most of the logical places to ask questions were double-checked. So far, nobody’d turned up a lead. That could mean the bomb had been placed under my hood by a pro, or that we hadn’t done enough leg work yet.

  It was tempting to blame MacDonald, but he wasn’t the only guy I was supposed to be looking for. A cop makes a lot of enemies, if he’s a good cop. There’d been that screwy warning to stay away from Roberta Grey. I’d been visiting her when the blast meant for me had gone off. It was possible MacDonald knew why I’d been going up there so often. But Roberta had her fat lingers in a lot of pies. It was just possible somebody was getting nervous about me tripping over something—something she knew that I didn’t.

  But cop killing’s not a good idea, if it can be avoided. Why hadn’t they gone after her instead? I pulled Roberta Grey out of the suspicion drawer in the back of my mind and took a closer look at her. She couldn’t operate the way she did without a few shady connections. Could she have wanted me to stay the hell away and stop asking questions?

  It wouldn’t scan. I’d been sitting right across her desk from her when the bomb went off. She’d known I wasn’t in the car, and there was little point in taking all that glass in her hide just to build character!

  Besides, if Roberta Grey knew anything she didn’t want to tell me, all she had to do was keep her mouth shut. She knew I was after Duncan MacDonald, and not anyone else she might have been buddy-buddy with. So… okay. What about her wanting to keep me from finding him and Kathy Gorm?

  Nuts. That wouldn’t scan, either. She and Hazel had been the ones who’d reported Kathy Gorm missing. Of course, that had been before they’d known she was alive and well, but…

  “Paranoid!” I grunted at myself. “Keep looking for wheels within wheels and you’ll wind up thinking the flying saucer people are after you!”

  It was a little after lunchtime when Hazel Collier called. She said she had a lead on where Kathy and MacDonald were. I had an appointment to see the captain, but I left word I was on to something and cut out. The captain would understand. He’d assigned me fulltime to nail the murderer of Larry Romero, and by tying MacDonald in as a possible suspect, I’d been able to hold on to that case too—with carte blanche to look for him anywhere in the state.

  I drove over to the collection agency and parked, not looking at the unmarked Vegas car staked out across the street. I got out and went upstairs. Hazel was in Roberta Grey’s office.

  Roberta looked pretty chipper for a woman who’d had eighty-seven separate slivers of glass dug out of her back a few days before. Her multiple wounds had been superficial, and to her delight, she’d lost nearly five pounds as a result of her experience.

  “I’ll gain it all back,” she said fatalistically. “I can’t look at a potato without gaining a pound. How’re you coming with the case?”

  “Which one, the bomb or our friend MacDonald?”

  “Don’t you think he did it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. Then, turning to Hazel, I asked, “How’d you get a lead on them, Hazel?”

  “He bought another car,” she said, glancing down at some notes clipped to a board in her hand. “It’s a maroon sixty-eight Karmann Ghia. Dealer’s plates. A man calling himself Ian Cunningham made a down payment with a personal check Friday afternoon. Monday, the check bounced. The finance company is very unhappy about it.”

  “Guy likes Kraut cars.” I sighed. “You have any idea how many maroon Karmann Ghias I pass in a day?”

  “Kathy probably knew, too,” Hazel said. “MacDonald’s a bit sporty, left to his own devices. A Karmann Ghia with a factory finish is a rather artistic compromise.”

  “I take it Cunningham’s a Scotch name?”

  “So’s Ian.”

  “Okay, a guy using a Scotch name hung some paper on a finance company. That doesn’t mean it had to be MacDonald, does it?”

  “They used the same credit MO they used when they bought the last car,” Hazel said. “You don’t think any dealer in his right mind’s going to take a six-hundred-dollar check after the banks have closed for the weekend without a credit check, do you?”

  “Sounds reasonable. But how’d they satisfy themselves about the guy’s credit? Doesn’t a person have to have held a steady job for a couple of years before he’s considered a good risk?”

  “Of course,” Hazel answered. “That’s why I’m sure Kathy was helping him. You see, they called the place the man calling himself Cunningham worked. His employer told them Cunningham was a fifteen-thousand-a-year sales executive. Owned his own home out on Spring Mountain Road. It tied in with what he’d said about wanting a light car for his wife to knock around town in. Oh, yes, they also told the dealer he’d been working for them five years. Need I say more?”

  “Yeah. How did they work it?”

  She told me.

  I didn’t believe her.

  “It would never work,” I insisted. “Nobody could be that dumb!”

  “Happens more often than you’d think,” cut in Roberta Grey. “After all, how deep do you think a credit manager can afford to dig? Most people resent the amount of investigating they do do.”

  “But, Jesus,” I said, “what if they’d checked a step further?”

  “It’s not that easy,” Hazel explained. “Don’t forget, the firm the man buying the car works for isn’t applying for credit. You can wind up with a lovely lawsuit sniffing around people who don’t owe you a dime. Besides, if they waited for a Dunn and Bradstreet report on the employer of everyone who wants to buy something on time, installment buying would slow to a crawl!”

  “Let me get the picture straight,” I said as what they’d told me sank in. “As you see it, this guy calling himself Cunningham bought the car on time, giving them a bum check and references they could call. Then, when they dialed the number he’d given them, Kathy Gorm picked up the phone?”

  “And said, ‘Amalgamated Gravel,’ in her secretary voice,” said Hazel. “I told you she was good with telephone voices, didn’t I? Anyway, once they thought they were talking to a business firm, she clicked the receiver and ‘switched’ them to someone she said was Miss Gillchrist, a little old lady who managed that branch office. It was Miss Gillchrist who assured them Ian Cunningham was such a solid citizen.”

  “But it had to be a new number,” I objected. “What if they’d checked the phone book and found no such company listed?”

  “Kathy covered that, too,” said Hazel. “I’ve already checked it out. They rented an empty store on Main Street a little over a week ago. Signed a lease and paid a month’s security. Eighty bucks. Had the telephone company install a phone and list them as Amalgamated Gravel, Inc. If anyone had gotten suspicious and checked with the phone company, they’d have been told there really was a listing for Amalgamated Gravel, Inc.”

  “Wouldn’t the guy from the phone company think something was fishy when he installed a set in an empty store?”

  “Why should he? The linemen are paid to stick the sets where their work order says to stick them. The girl at the phone company who took the order never saw the place. And even if she had, most new businesses install phones and fixtures before the furniture.”

  “With a business phone and time on her hands,” added Roberta Grey, “I imagine Kathy had some furniture in there damned fast! A place of business can order damned near anything, with thirty days
to pay.”

  “No bet,” said Hazel. “I drove by the place on my lunch hour. It’s closed, of course. But they had the windows lettered and a partition put in. A receptionist’s desk and some rather nice casual furniture was all I could see from the sidewalk. I imagine we’ll be hearing—soon—from the people the two of them clipped.”

  “At least,” I said, “we’ve got an idea of what they’re driving, and where they started from. I’ll get a warrant and see what we can turn up in the store.”

  • • • The landlord who owned the building where Kathy and MacDonald had rented the store was puzzled but cooperative.

  “They were fixing the place up so nice,” he mused, opening the front door for Bert Crawford and me. We followed him inside. The air-conditioning units they’d bought on time had been pulled out for a quick, no-questions-asked sale, and the place was like an oven.

  “I thought it was kinda funny business to be in,” the landlord observed, waving a hand at the gilt AMALGAMATED GRAVEL, INC. on the window. “But,” he continued, “I figured maybe somebody wanted to buy sand and gravel out here in the middle of the desert!”

  “They do,” I said, “if they’re building anything out of concrete. But I imagine most of the Vegas contractors already have a local supplier of aggregate. Good name for a phony business if you don’t want too many customers pestering you.”

  “I still think they were taking one hell of a chance!” said Crawford, staring morosely around the empty reception room. He’d voiced the same objections I had, when I explained the MO to him. Even looking at the setup, it was hard for him to believe anyone would have the gall to try it.

  I’d had time to revise my original opinion. The whole thing was so raw the average person would never dream of it.

  “Expensive machine,” Bert noted, pointing with his chin at the IBM electric typewriter sitting on the desk beside a phone and a couple of women’s magazines. I walked over to the desk and looked down at the sheet of yellow foolscap still in the machine. Someone had typed, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” a dozen times. Probably while someone was looking in the window.