Kolchak: The Night Stalker: A Black and Evil Truth

by Jeff Rice

  He had to be big. That was obvious. And, as I contended earlier, white. By and large, if Vegas isn’t a segregated community, it certainly isn’t a fully integrated one. Ask the Westside residents if you don’t want to take my word for it. It’s called “de facto segregation” when all the minorities (in this case, blacks) live in one part of town, even after most real-estate barriers are supposedly down.

  Well, anyhow, he had to be white. Police in Vegas are ever vigilant for three things: narcotics; youths; and blacks. Preferably black youths involved with narcotics. Harsh judgement? Ask Municipal Judge Howard “Buzz” Sawyer. He came out of the Vegas ghetto. Ask Police Detective Sergeant Frisbee, also black, why a shooting in a residence near Huntridge is an assault with a deadly weapon while the same thing at a home near D and Monroe streets is a “family disturbance.” The unofficial policy is that “black people just act that way–you know, like animals.” It’s changing, but very slowly.

  So, I believed (without too much brilliance) that this faceless murderer’s invisibility was due in part to the fact he was white. A black man would be much more noticeable in an almost ninety-nine-percent-white neighborhood like the one around Vegas High School, or the area around Ida, Winnick and Albert streets where they intersect Audree Lane (where Carol Hanochek was found).

  But a white man, moving quietly about in the night might well not be considered suspicious in a viewer’s mind. After all, Vegas is a twenty-four-hour town and nearly a fourth of its work force is up at what most people consider “ungodly” hours. It is not at all unusual to see pale, distinguished-looking men in tuxedos carrying around lumpy sacks (that turn out to contain laundry) at 3:00 A.M. They are captains and maitre d’s and baccarat dealers and musicians getting off late shifts. Women in bikinis and thongs doing their weekly marketing just before sunrise are common sights in Vegas.

  No, he had to be white. And probably well-dressed. Possibly with a late-model car. A very middle-class type of character, not a sneaking, second-story type with turtleneck sweater, mask and tennis shoes.

  Having spoken of my theory to Vincenzo and having met with his usual stone wall of resistance, I kicked it on up to the managing editor, Llewellyn Cairncross, who looked at me out of his one good eye and said with his customary tact, “Bullshit! Kolchak, for years I have suspected you were mentally deranged and now I have confirmation of that suspicion. Why don’t you go to Alaska or Florida or anywhere and plague somebody else for a change?”

  So, very patiently, while jamming his office door shut so he couldn’t throw me out, I went over everything I had come up with including the tight-lipped comments from the police department and the sheriff’s office.

  “OK, Lew. What conclusion do you come to?”

  He started to fire off one of his legendary put-downs and it died before it ever rolled off his tongue. He slammed his mount shut and stared at me with that bloodshot eye. Then he called the boss, Jacob E. “Jake” Herman, editor and publisher. Herman the Heinous. Herman the Magnificent. Part crusader. Part charlatan. Once the scourge of crooked politicians; now a political kingmaker. Before Howard Hughes came to our fair city, he was one of the state’s biggest wheeler-dealers. And I suspect he could still teach the “bashful billionaire” a few tricks. And probably will.

  I went to sit with Jake’s assistant, Bess Melvin, a truly lovely person who could smell a news item through two feet of reinforced concrete. The fifteen years she’d devoted to Jake Herman showed in the frustration and tiny crows-feet on her thin, attractive face. I’ve always thought it too bad that she didn’t own and run the Daily News. Too bad for the public. And, as it turned out later, too bad for me.

  The phone rang. Bess picked it up and handed it to me. The receiver growled with electronic venom. “Kolchak, you miserable sonofabitch, if you ever ever go over Vincenzo’s head again…”I let him sputter on. When he paused for breath I got in my two cents’ worth and he surprised me by telling me to write “the goddamned piece” any way I saw fit. He told me to have Lew come into his office. I motioned to our distinguished managing editor and he entered the sanctum sanctorum.

  I returned to my typewriter and explained to the public all the things I have just explained to you, put the words in United Press’ best recommended style and headed for home in the sure and certain belief that on May 12 I would either be well on my way to a Nevada State Press Association award for the best crime story of the year, or out of town on a rail.

  My story ran the next day with all my pet theories deleted. So much for Jake’s much vaunted “word.” It was not a propitious start at all. Later that day the district attorney called to inquire whether I might not be better used by the Daily News in preparing an in-depth study of the treatment of the mentally ill–from personal experience–up in Sparks, Nevada, the Bedlam of the Golden West.

  • • •

  TUESDAY, MAY 12, 1970

  I sulked in my apartment off Karen Court until I got a tip from an informant that Parkway Hospital had just been “knocked over.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Knocked over for what? Cash? Drugs? Equipment?”

  “Blood,” said my informant.

  “Blood?”

  “Blood. Every damn container in the place. Clean sweep. They’ve had the sheriff’s people out here all morning and have sent to the blood bank and to County General for some fill-in stock until they can get stores flown up from California.” I hung up and just sat there, looking out of my living room window at the gaudy, concrete, candy-stripe tent of the Circus a half-mile away on the Strip.

  Man! I thought. You couldn’t be this right! There really is a guy running around who thinks he’s a… I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought. Parkway is less than a mile from my apartment–or where it was when I lived there. (I keep slipping. Can’t help it.) So, I threw on some clothes and hurried on over to talk with the chief resident, Dr. Stoddard Welles. He confirmed what I’d been told on the phone.

  “Everything, Kolchak. Seems blood type and Rh factor didn’t matter. Every ounce we had. Why? I can’t imagine. Stuff won’t keep without refrigeration and even then, not forever. And there’s no black market for the stuff that I know of. So why? Who knows?”

  Dr. Welles’ question was largely rhetorical and it was clear he wanted to be off on his rounds.

  I headed back to my place and my upstairs den. Unlike many of my trade, I am not–or should say -- was not a clannish sort, never a joiner, and was neither a member of the Las Vegas Press Club nor a regular at any of the local bars and lounges (though I soon changed my ways, as you can see). When something takes hold of me I don’t know, and if I can’t think where to go with it (the “something”), then I prefer to hole up in familiar surroundings and brood on it. That could be called laziness by some, and they’d be right. I am physically lazy. I’m about five feet ten, weigh about one hundred and eighty-five pounds going on two hundred, am going bald, and look a great deal like a boozy ex-prizefighter. My idea of exercise–lifting weights for example–is to lift one hundred and eighty five pounds just once a day: when I hoist myself out of bed. I like to do my legwork on the phone as much as possible, at least in the preliminary stages of gathering data on a beat. But I surprise even myself when I’ve got my teeth into something solid because then I can go without sleep for three days and not even notice the meals I’ve missed.

  I lay on my L-shaped couch for the better part of two hours while the sun moved past its zenith and began to dip towards the Charleston Mountain area. Then, as the sun eased below the top edge of my west-facing window and threw a little gleam in my eye, the idea came to me that FBI Special Agent Bernie Fain might be in a good enough humor to listen to me. So I slapped my half-empty Coors can on the coffee table and gave him a ring. He was in, and, for once, not busy, so I invited him up and thirty minutes later, over beer and pretzels, I went over what I had with him.

  His interest was rewarding.

  “You’re nuts!” he opined.

  I pressed o
n. “We have three murders; we have a guy, at least one, maybe more, who goes around grabbing young girls–so far all casino employees–and draining them of their blood.”

  “You’re not supposed to know about that–much less talk about it.”

  “Well, I do. What about your people, Bernie?”

  “This is nothing for the Bureau to mess with at this stage.”

  “True, but you could make some ‘unofficial’ inquiries for me…”

  “Like…?”

  “Like to other police departments in the cities where we get our greatest flow of tourist traffic: LA, Frisco, Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Miami, Boston and New York. Like check the hospitals in those cities, particularly the mental hospitals. Find out if there have been any other corpses like the ones found here–you know, bloodless and all that and not necessarily women. Also find out if there are any guys in these bug houses who think they’re Count Dracula, even if they haven’t done anything to prove it.”

  Bernie just looked at me. “You believe in vampires, little boy?”

  “Very funny,” I said. “Will you do it or are you just going to sit there like a cheap gonif and drink my beer?”

  “I’ll think about it. Repeat: think about it.” He glared at me. Everybody had taken to glaring at me. “Vampires. Jesus H. Christ!”

  I just sat there staring at the painting over my desk: a Transylvanian village street at night with the wind blowing sheets of rain into the face of a bluish, gabled building at a dir-road intersection. I had that painting for years. It brought back the tales of my grandfather’s homeland and it was smuggled into this country with him when he was a lad. After this thing was all over and I had left Vegas, looking at it made me uneasy. I have since burned it.

  I regarded Bernie with a sideways glance as he gnawed on a pretzel. “You know about the blood stolen from Parkway Hospital?” I asked him.

  “Ummhmm.”

  “Know how much?”

  “Ummhmm.”

  “And the three dead girls…”

  “Ummhmm.”

  “How much blood do you figure the average, adult-type girl has in her body?”

  “’Bout ten, maybe twelve pints.”

  “So,” I jumped in, “if we add up what I’ve given you, in the past sixteen days someone, or some thing, has taken thirty to thirty-six pints of blood from three Women. And somehow, just by coincidence of course, thirty pints of blood were stolen last night from Parkway. Don’t you see any possible link?”

  “Hmmm. Couldn’t say. Maybe yes. Maybe no.”

  Bernie Fain. A fund of information. A wealth of suppositions. Brother!

  “Stop drinking my beer and listen to me! Add up the thirty or so pints of blood missing from the three corpses and the thirty pints from the hospital and what do you get?”

  “I get thirty to thirty-six pints missing from three women’s bodies. Also, I get thirty pints missing from Parkway Hospital. I do not see an implicit connection between these things and I sure don’t see any vampire written into any of this.”

  “OK. Fine,” I told him. “Close your eyes and it’ll go away. I’m only working on theory anyhow. But check out what you can for me, please. I want to be on top of this thing when the next one…”

  “What next one? How come you’re so sure there’ll be a next one?”

  “That is part of the old Kolchak ‘vampire theory’. Whoever this character is, he has a lust for blood so powerful that fear of discovery won’t hold him in check for too long. He’s bound to strike again. Sure, I know this is crazy. So was the situation where that kid shot three dozen people from a campus tower at that Texas University. But I’m sure there’s a connection between the disappearance of the hospital’s blood and these murders.”

  Bernie gave me one of his sidelong glances. “Hope it won’t disillusion you to know that the local law enforcement people share your views–somewhat–and are working along those very lines. If you’d stay in your office more you might hear things on the radio. You’re getting too fat and too lazy.”

  “Lay off my gut and proceed with your point.”

  “Well, Kolchak, you’re not the only one who likes to play detective. The police and sheriff’s boys think they’re pretty good at it, too. They think there’s a possible connection between the missing blood and the dead women. Not that they buy that vampire crap…”

  “… even in the face of no other easy explanation,” I broke in.

  “… but even so,” he continued, “they continue to probe and ask questions. Last I heard, they were waiting for a special report from two pathology experts who were flown up from the Los Angels police department together with a small truckload of equipment. If you want to join me at the sheriff’s office, they’ll be meeting at 6:30 with Chief Butcher and the D.A. to present their findings. You may still be able to get into these little sessions if you haven’t worn out your welcome with this stupid vampire theory of yours.”

  “Well, thanks, I’ll…”

  “One other thing, Sherlock. Scuttlebutt is: one of the Parkway nurses saw something. Told the cops she noticed an orderly near the blood storage area last night. Her name’s Amanda Staley. She only noticed him because he was new.”

  “And?”

  “And hospital records show no new orderlies hired in the past three months.”

  “Got a description?”

  “Ummhmm. About six-four and skinny. Pale. Dark hair. And bad breath.”

  “Whoopee! Bad breath. That ought to be a great help in finding him.”

  “If you were a professional detective maybe you could make some sense out of it. Since you are a writer and not a detective, it might be wise for you to stick to reporting and leave the detecting to us poor benighted professionals. To know what I know, all you had to do was ask. See you at 6:30.”

  He left me feeling like a punctured balloon.

  CHAPTER 4

  TUESDAY, MAY 12, 1970

  EVENING

  The 6:30 meeting in Sheriff Reese Lane’s inner office was most interesting. I sat there and was grimly tolerated by the law officers at hand, mostly because they had opened the door voluntarily to me to attend these meetings some months back. There was no real reason they should have let me remain as my presence was strictly a courtesy in return for several years of fair treatment in my reporting and they, in turn, had given me straight answers to my questions. That is, up to now. I was there because they knew that to lock me out would add fuel to my already unpopular theory and get other people talking.

  The report itself was routine, for the most part, dealing with medical facts in ten-dollar words with a lot of Latin terms thrown in for good measure. It was delivered by LAPD pathologist Dr. Mohandas Mokurji, in a soft, reedy voice.

  “At any event, we surmise that death in each case was extremely swift, coming in something less than one minute. Unconsciousness would have come even more quickly. If the victims had had their throats slit with a sharp instrument such as a knife or straightedge razor, and if both the carotid arteries and jugular veins had been severed, the blood loss alone would have resulted in unconsciousness in from fifteen to thirty seconds. Those are approximate figures.

  “However, it is possible by the careful pinching of certain nerves in the neck, near the base of the skull, or by forcefully depressing the windpipe and at the same time those carotid arteries to render a victim unconscious in as little as five to seven seconds. It is our assumption that such was the case with both the Hanochek woman and the Hughes woman. As for Mrs. Reynolds, it is apparent she struggled with her assailant…before she was immobilized.

  “After the initial wounds were inflicted, the blood was drained very quickly and I would definitely say some kind of suction device was used. This would explain why no blood was found anywhere on the victims or in the area where they were discovered.”

  Then Mokurji dropped his little bomb.

  “In our examination of the Hanochek woman we came across something rather interes
ting. As you might surmise we were quite intrigued with the fact that the body had been almost entirely drained of blood. I say ‘almost entirely’ because, of course, there were still some bodily fluids, for example, in the stomach, kidneys, etc. However, there were also, in the minor blood vessels, tiny traces of blood. And almost microscopic traces of blood on the inner edges of the wounds. From these traces we were able to type the woman’s blood.

  “What is so very intriguing is that we found another substance mixed in with this blood. Something we found nowhere else in her body. It was… sputum.”

  Chief Butcher shifted his bulk uncomfortably and turned his florid face to the doctor.

  “Well, man. Don’t keep us waiting. What was this stuff?”

  “Saliva.”

  ”Spit?” asked the chief.

  “So it would seem,” said Dr. Mokurji.

  “You’re telling us the sonofabitch who killed her drooled all over her neck?”

  “No. I am merely…”

  “Well what then?”

  “If you’ll let me continue, please… What I am saying is that we found a minute quantity of saliva on the inside edges of the twin wounds in the woman’s neck. No more. No less. It is enough for us to say the wounds were made by two round, smooth-edged, pointed instruments approximately three-eighths of an inch in length but possibly as long as six-eighths of an inch in length, taking into consideration the ‘give’ of the skin. We assume, from the exact parallel course of the wounds and the saliva found that they were made by teeth such as the incisors of a medium to large-size dog.”

  “Dog! Dog!! What the hell is this?” shouted our intrepid district attorney, Thomas Paine, Jr. “Are you telling us a dog did these… murders?”