“Little while ago. I gave an impromptu press conference for the boys in the lobby, then tried your number but got no answer.”
“I was down the hall taking a shower. Come on over.”
I did, and she answered the door in a white terrycloth robe that came almost to the floor. Her hair was damp and she toweled it as she sat on the edge of the bed and I pulled up a chair so we could talk.
I filled her in on my day, and when I got to the part where I’d got into it at the office with the two intruders, she came over and checked the back of my head. She smelled great. It was just soap, but, man…
“You’ll live,” she said, and sat back down on the edge of her bed. “What then?”
I told her about my visit to Louie’s, and decided the better part of valor would be to omit going to Marion’s crib. Moving the gist of that conversation to Louie’s place wouldn’t hurt anything, and there was no need to get Velda’s nose out of joint. The Ruston girl parading herself for me, and yours truly pretending not to be interested, would not seem the harmless fun it had been. Not to a secretary who gave me hell for two weeks after spotting one lousy lipstick smear on my shirt collar.
“So Sharron’s silent partner,” Velda said, “is some big gambler from the city. It wouldn’t be this Miami Bull character you mentioned, or…?”
“Bill Evans. No-wrong city. They’re Chicago boys.”
“I hear there’s crime in Chicago.”
“Yeah, I heard that rumor, too, but this will be some big boy from New York, and I may try to track down Evans and Miami Bull to lead me to him. They won’t have anything to lose.”
“Our friend Dekkert has ties in the city.”
“That fact is not lost on me, honey. How was your day?”
She put her hands on the terrycloth over her knees and rocked like a little girl. “Quiet. You’d almost think I was on vacation.”
“Ouch.”
“I had a few conversations with locals, but most of the stores weren’t open. Either closed on Sunday or not open for the season yet.”
“No surprise.”
She went back to toweling her hair. “I spoke to several reporters, but I knew more than they did. They got wind of Doc Moody, but I handled that.”
“So that was your fine hand at work? Good job all around. What about Poochie? Did you see him today?”
She smiled tightly. There was frustration in it.
“I did,” she said. “But the doc is mostly keeping him sedated. I finally spoke with the little guy this evening, but you’re not going to like what I found.”
“He didn’t finger Dekkert as the shooter in the window?”
She shook her head. “At first he said he didn’t remember. Then when I pressed, he said he just saw the gun and that a man was holding it. But it was too dark outside for him to see who was aiming the gun.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe you can get more out of him. I pressed as hard and as long as the doctor would allow. Obviously, the poor soul may just be scared, Mike. Dekkert almost killed him the other night. And getting beaten to death is a hard way to go.”
I nodded. “Say, you look tan. Don’t tell me you actually got some sun?”
“I did!” She hopped off the bed. “Want to see?”
“Easy there, kitten…”
“Oh, don’t be a prude. You’re a big boy.”
Getting bigger all the time.
“I have a bra and panties on,” she said, “you coward. My bikini is skimpier, you know.”
She opened the terrycloth robe. It was like curtains parting on a masterpiece of sculpture devoted to the female form. She had a nice tan going, all right, nicely dark against the underthings. And I had seen her in a two-piece suit before, but the psychology of seeing her that way, presenting herself to me with a proud smile, letting me admire the jut of her breasts, the curve of her hips, the hint of dark curls behind the whiteness of panty, the long, long legs, not the pipe cleaner legs of a model but the fully fleshed, muscular legs of a vibrant woman.
“What do you think?” she said, as she closed the robe and cinched the terrycloth belt.
“I think,” I said, managing to get to my feet, “that it’s been a long day, and I could use a shower myself. A cold one.”
She laughed and showed me to the door.
“See you in the morning,” she said.
“See you, kitten.”
You’re here to find a killer, buster, a voice in my head said.
“If these dames don’t kill me first,” I muttered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The two naked bodies were strung by their heels from a rafter in the barn, their fingertips almost brushing the warped planked flooring. Dried blood in frightful trails from countless wounds made vertical stripes down twin flesh in horrible design. The smears of blood beneath had clotted, merging into each other like an obscene Rorschach test ink-blot pattern peppered with blow flies trying to feast there.
The dignity of death was missing. The skillful surgery that had been performed on each, slowly and intricately, had wiped all that out. It was more like taking a look inside a slaughterhouse on a hot day.
Or maybe that was just my opinion because I had seen this kind of horror before and could be almost objective about it now. Not quite, but almost. The one thing that stood out was that, at one time, those two girls had been pretty.
I handed the grisly photograph back to Dave Miles.
“I remember reading about it,” I said. “Early this spring, right? But this doesn’t really resemble the Sharron Wesley killing.”
Dave had called me early at the Sidon Arms-seven o’clock. He had seen the write-ups in both the local and New York papers, saw my name, and called me. He said to come right out to his Quonset hut office at the brick manufacturing works near Wilcox. I pushed a note under Velda’s door, grabbed a napkin-wrapped cruller and paper cup of coffee at Big Steve’s, and took the heap for a thirty-mile spin.
“The common thread,” Dave said, “is beautiful nude women. Dead ones.”
“That’s typical fare on a sex killer’s menu.”
“Mike, my gut tells me it’s the same sick bastard. And there’s another kill, one none of the police authorities have ever connected up.”
One time Dave had been a big man, physically and professionally, an inspector in the New York PD, and Pat’s immediate superior.
But even as an inspector, Dave couldn’t stay off the street and two years ago he had gone in an apartment after a killer and a blast from the punk’s shotgun had taken off his lower leg, and he’d had to retire. He wound up as head of security at the brick-making plant that was Wilcox’s only industry besides tourism.
Now he sat behind his desk, looking slightly shrunken in an old suit, his plastic leg a disembodied thing propped against the windowsill behind him. A frown creased his face into a caricature of weariness and he shook his head.
“Oh, hell, Mike. Maybe you’re right to be skeptical. I just saw the write-ups in the papers this morning, and your name in the middle of it, and…”
I jammed a butt in my face and lit up. “Okay. So what’s this other kill?”
Some life came into his eyes and he leaned forward. “Six months ago a girl was strangled with her own nylon stocking out on a stretch of beach. Her clothes were gone. Never found. She lay there with the stocking that killed her still knotted around her throat.”
“Where was this?”
“Down a side road, about halfway between here and Sidon.”
He had my attention. Two strangulations. Two dead naked females, pretty ones.
“Whose case?” I asked.
“The Suffolk County Sheriff’s department.”
“What do you know about them?”
“They’re closer to real cops than the Sidon crowd, or our bunch here in Wilcox either. But it was months ago, and they weren’t able to run anything down.”
“Months ago when?”
“The strangled girl
was early last fall, right after the season ended. You probably remember from the papers that the girls strung up in the barn were found on the other side of Wilcox. Just outside town but within the city limits.”
“Making it a Wilcox PD matter.”
“Yeah. Why, is that significant?”
I shrugged, blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate. “Maybe. If you have a sex fiend at large, you may just have a smart one. For the sake of argument, say he did kill the Wesley dame, too. That means in a fairly small area, he has managed to spread the killings out among three different jurisdictions-two small-town police forces and the sheriff’s department.”
“Can a maniac be that organized?”
“They never caught Jack the Ripper, did they? Look, what makes you tie it in? You’re not a cop, anymore. This has nothing to do with guarding a brick-making factory on the Island.”
Those hard pale blue eyes stared into my own and a grimace touched his mouth. “Because once you’re a cop, Mike, you never stop. Do I have to tell you? And I can smell it. These murders are connected.”
“Smells don’t hold up in court,” I said.
“But they sure can lead you to the rotten source though, can’t they?”
I chuckled dryly and had another drag on the Lucky. “I came to listen, Dave, and I’m almost interested. Make it fit. I don’t know the details.”
“They were women, they were young, they were pretty, now they’re dead. There’s a sex angle to each of them.”
“Sharron Wesley wasn’t all that young-she was in her late thirties. And she wasn’t molested.” Doc Moody’s autopsy had said as much.
“ None of these victims were molested, and that’s a telling link. Stripping them and killing them, that’s the sex angle.”
Which meant it didn’t have to be a “he”-they made killers in both male and female models.
“There’s one difference,” I reminded him. I thumped the crime-scene photo on his desk. “These kids were tortured to death.”
Dave Miles grinned at me, a hard, nasty grin. “I’m disappointed in you, Mike. Don’t you see the similarity in the crime scenes?”
“Are you kidding? A barn? The beach? A body found draped on a stone horse in a park, a week after the killing? There’s no similarity at all.”
“Sure there is. Maybe you just haven’t rubbed the sleep out of your eyes.”
I had another look at the photo.
And it came to me: the murderer had arranged each crime scene with a dramatic flair designed to turn his victims into a sort of grotesque tableau.
“Those crime scenes,” Dave said, “are staged for effect. For maximum impact. Like they were posed for a shot in a sleazy true-crime magazine.”
I tossed the photo back on the desk. “Okay. You have a point. But this isn’t New York, Dave. Who did the autopsies on the Wilcox barn girls?”
“We have a competent coroner in Wilcox. He says the girls were slowly slashed to death. Death by a thousand cuts. Hung up for slaughter, with their ankles bound above them and the wrists roped, and the fiend took his sweet time. The dirt floor was caked with blood an inch thick.”
He was trying to get me going. Pushing every button he could. Why?
I stayed professional. “The two strangulations make a similar modus operandi, but this torture kill, it’s different. You’re throwing me a curve, buddy. What did the Wilcox police have to say?”
His grin seemed to tighten down. “That’s the kicker, Mike. We don’t really have any. The city force has nine men who are only employees and don’t do much more than tag cars or arrest an occasional drunk. Yes, there’s this factory here, but otherwise we’re as much a tourist town as Sidon.”
“So who makes up this lackluster force?”
“They’re all local men who get hired when there’s an opening, given a briefing, then issued a uniform, badge and gun and assigned a beat. Most of them are military returnees using it as a between-jobs bridge. Out here we have an elected constabulary system with three men patrolling for speeders.”
Could a thrill killer have selected this little part of the world to take advantage of the kind of half-assed policing that Sidon and Wilcox had to offer? If so, that was damn shrewd-here we were, in Manhattan’s backyard, but well away from the jurisdiction of the kind of trained scientific professionals represented by Captain Pat Chambers.
I muttered, “Big fish in a little pond…”
“What, Mike?”
I stabbed out the spent Lucky and got another one going. “How about the Suffolk sheriff’s office?”
“That’s the other kicker. Last November John Harris didn’t run for re-election. He was a damn good man… made Deputy Chief Inspector in New York before he came up here, but he was diabetic and couldn’t take it after two terms in office.”
“Yeah, I know John. You’re right. Good man.”
Dave shrugged. “Maybe he could have taken care of this thing, but he died a month back.”
“Hell. I hadn’t heard.”
“His deputy was the only other trained person around, but when Harris quit, so did the deputy-took a job someplace out west.”
“So who’s in now?”
“Oh, Fred Jackson, a nice enough guy, all right, real nice guy. He was elected by popular acclaim just because he was a real nice guy.”
“Great,” I said. “Just fine.”
“He was born here, went to college upstate, taught six-graders for a year, got drafted and picked up some shrapnel in the Pacific, became something of a local hero and inherited his old man’s dairy farm. Now he’s sheriff.”
“No good, huh?”
“A nice guy, but no cop, Mike. No cop at all.”
“And you smell something.”
“That’s right. The county sheriff’s office is right here in Wilcox. You could talk to Sheriff Jackson, if you think it’ll do any good.”
“So could you. You’re still around.”
“That’s about the extent of it,” he told me. “ Around. Nothing more. Every so often they take off another hunk of my leg to try and stop happening whatever’s happening to it. Pretty soon there won’t be much left to take off. I can make it back and forth to the office, do my job well enough to hold it down, because I can still yell loud enough to scare people. And I have a few guys at the plant here back me up.”
A scowl pulled at my eyes. “What do they need security for in a place that digs up clay and makes bricks out of it?”
“Because our big contract is with the government. There’s a rare element in this ground that makes our bricks ideal for use in government facilities attached to atomic testing.”
“So you’re keeping the Commies away.”
He grinned. “No Ruskies have made it past Staten Island on my watch.”
I laughed at that, but I was getting itchy to get back to Sidon and my real case.
I said, “Listen, Dave, I can see why you think the Sharron Wesley killing might tie in to these others. It strikes me as kind of thin frankly, but… I can see it. What you don’t know is she was likely killed because of that casino she ran outside of Sidon. She appears to have stashed substantial cash on the grounds, just begging for a treasure hunt, and she has ties to big-time gambling in the city. Unless syndicate guys have suddenly started hiring kill-happy lunatics to carry out contract work, I can’t see how this ties in.”
He didn’t reply at once. Then he said, very softly, “You and I have been friends too damn long for you to just shrug me off, Mike. You backed me up in a shoot-out twice and I damn well saved your ass when Gorcey had a gun in your neck and was going to blow your damn head off.”
There was something hanging in the air I couldn’t quite make out.
Finally I said, “Okay. So I owe you. You probably owe me, too, but forget that. I know you have good instincts. Hell, great instincts. But so do I. There’s more to this.”
“There is.”
“Then spit it out.”
Dave nodded slowly,
then pushed his chair around with his good leg and stared out the window at the complex of buildings that sprawled out to the west.
His voice was distant as he said, “Remember that little teenage girl whose family got killed when Thaxton burned down his building to collect the insurance?”
“Sure. She was a sweet kid. Doris something, right? Doris Wilson? You had me enlist Velda to put her up for a month before you found somebody to take her in. Nobody back in those days on the department ever knew how much of a soft-hearted slob you really are.”
His head half-turned, then he looked back out the window. “Nobody else ever took her in, Mike. I gave her a place to stay, saw to it she stuck out school and made sure she had whatever she needed. Helen and I, we never had any kids, you know. We couldn’t.”
I let him talk. My gut told me where this going, though I prayed I was wrong.
“When Doris graduated, she went to business college and wound up with a job right here in Wilcox. Here at the plant.”
“Damn,” I said.
“We stayed close. And if your dirty mind is thinking I was anything more than a father figure to her, then screw you, Mr. Hammer. After Helen died, I never wanted another woman. Maybe I was still doing things for the kid we never had. It wasn’t any trouble. More like a pleasure. Taking this job here was sort of like coming home for Doris and me, you know what I mean?”
I nodded, but he didn’t see me.
“That’s why I called you,” he said.
I still didn’t say anything. Slowly, he swung around in his chair and got another photo from his desk. Something had happened to his face-it looked gaunt and tired now. He handed me the photo.
It was another crime-scene shot, this one of the girl on the beach with the nylon stocking around her neck and her eyes popping and her tongue bulged out and her body arranged in an obscene spread-eagle that made a mockery of her beauty.
I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid, but it was Doris, all right.
I stabbed my Lucky out. “It’s a damn shame,” I said. “But I barely knew this girl. I’m not saying this doesn’t make me sick to my soul, but I’m already on that other Sidon killing.”
“This is another Sidon killing, Mike. And I’m telling you with every fiber of cop instinct left in this fouled-up body of mine, it ties in. And you’re the one to settle the score.”
Lady, go die (mike hammer) Page 11