by Jeff Rice
As I later discovered, the confrontation took place between the mysterious Mr. Lubin and a Las Vegas show producer, one Henry St. Claire.
CHAPTER 7
THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1970
EVENING
[Note: The following was written by me after reading Kolchak’s complete file and rechecking the incidents and facts on the location, the physical plant and the people involved. JR]
Since there were no conventions or gambling junkets “in residence” at the Dunes Hotel that evening, the casino was only moderately active during the late evening hours. All those who showed up for the Casino de Paris extravaganza, even without reservations, were accommodated without the necessity of resorting to “juice.”
At 10:45 P.M., the coffee shop had only a few scattered customers seated in the tables nearest the entrance, and a few pit bosses taking quick snacks in the blue section. Farther back, at a separate counter section, dealers were coming and going, huddled over coffee and talking quietly. In the Dome of the Sea Restaurant, there were perhaps a dozen diners listening to the strains of “Lara’s Theme” from the motion picture Dr. Zhivago, as played lightly on a golden harp by a lovely young “mermaid” named Kippy Lou as she floated on a motorized seashell around a central pool. Electronically-projected fish swam past the peripheral “windows” and the overhead, multicolored, stained-glass lighting arrangement added to the dream-like, aquatic atmosphere.
Waiters clad in sea-green jackets moved like ghosts through the room, silently tending to their guests as the maitre d’, Frederick Ashton, a personable Cockney, glanced from his watch to the reservation book and shook his head thinking of how he’d have to juggle reservations for the weekend when the Dome would be filled beyond normal capacity by the vacationing hordes that swarm into the Dunes every five days.
Seated at the second booth to the left of the Dome’s inner archway with his latest “protégé” was FrancoAmerican show producer Henry St. Claire. Just back from a scouting trip in Europe, St. Claire had chosen the Dome precisely because Freddie had informed him that it would not be crowded that night. St. Claire wanted to get better acquainted with his new find, and perhaps unwind before the evening’s end, which he intended to make quite soon, by 1:00 A.M., at the latest. He anticipated a busy weekend.
As producer of “Paris Extraordinaire!” at the Deauville, just down the street, as well as two lounge shows at other hotels, St. Claire was rarely fortunate enough to have an evening free from some kind of negotiation or other interruption. He was determined not to allow anything to mar his evening. His eyes were fixed with singular intensity on his lovely companion and, in his mind, he was contemplating how he would “audition” her within the next few hours. She would, no doubt, be in a receptive mood. She wanted to work in Las Vegas. And she had been wined and dined with an excellence rare even for Las Vegas’ best efforts.
They had begun with an aperitif and proceeded through succeeding courses that included escargots de Bourgogne, Green Turtle Amantillo, Hearts of Palm Salad, and Curry of South Seas Lobster Industan. For dessert, naturally, it had been Crepes Suzette. Two varieties of excellent white wines had accompanied the meal which had been personally directed by Ashton as it was each time St. Claire made one of his infrequent visits to the Dome.
St. Claire glanced at the bill which came to about fifty dollars. He smiled when he saw the expected “COMPLIMENTS OF” stamped across the back of the check and the familiar name signed along side. One a line just below it he signed “St. Claire” with a flourish.
His companion murmured something about wishing to “freshen up” and he nodded, rose, and extended his hand to her. As they left the restaurant he handed the maitre d’ a twice-folded twenty-dollar bill. Then the couple walked down the outer aisle of the casino past the Persian Room where “Vive Les Girls” was just beginning its first show of the evening. St. Claire paused to greet Gino, the maitre d’, before continuing his walk past the crap tables and around to his right.
At the poker pit he parted company with his companion as she turned to enter the ladies’ room and he strolled toward the magazine stand. Once there, he waited in line between a young couple, obviously newlyweds, and a tall, thin man in a well-tailored black suit. The couple made their purchases and moved on as the tall man picked up a Daily News and turned to pay the cashier. St. Claire was for some reason arrested by the man’s appearance and paused in his pursuit of a magazine to look at the man who collected his change and disappeared around the tiled corner of a hallway leading to the shop section of the hotel’s tower.
Some unknown thing compelled St. Claire to walk down the hallway in search of the tall man and he spotted him in the Dunes drug and sundry store just paying for a handful of Binaca breath spray tubes and several packages of Chlorettes.
At the door they came face to face and St. Claire, who felt so certain now that he knew, or at least should know the man–he met so many in the course of a day, or a year–that he said, “Good evening, ah, Monsieur…” The man hesitated as if on the verge of a reply and then said in a particularly precise way, in English, “I beg your pardon?”
Feeling uneasy now, as if something were definitely out of tune, St. Claire repeated his greeting, this time in French. “Good evening, Monsieur. Don’t I…”
“Yes,” came the reply in lightly accented French. “It is a… good… evening. The evenings are always most exhilarating,” and with that the tall man turned and headed down the hallway past the men’s shop and around a slight bend in the rough marble wall, disappearing from sight.
St. Claire started to follow him and then remembered his companion and returned to the casino to find her waiting for him by the giant slot machine, “Big Bertha.” They headed for the hotel entrance and by the time his Mark III Continental had been brought around, St. Claire was certain he knew the man he’d just seen but still couldn’t place him. Perhaps from Europe. From before the war? But where? Paris? Vienna? The Sorbonne?
Before he had eschewed the academic training offered at the Sorbonne?… Could it have been one of his old professors? No, they’d all be dead and this man couldn’t have been much more than forty. Maybe it was some theatrical manager he’d met when he had been the male half of an adagio act, something he’d given up in his late thirties to become an entrepreneur.
“Well, no matter,” he told himself as he headed for his Rancho Circle home. He looked at his companion who was leaning back against the heavily padded seat, eyes half-closed and an enigmatic smile on her lips. He thought to himself, “I have more important and pleasant things to attend to.” Yet somehow, for a reason he could not explain, the brief encounter seemed to put a damper on his evening.
While St. Claire was speeding down the freeway, the tall man was walking across the courtyard toward the Dunes’ Olympic Wing. He circled the pool’s high-diving board, paused briefly to look at the pool lights change from red to yellow to blue, and then turned into the nearest entrance. In the hallway he paused, looked both ways, then walked a few paces to a rear exit and found it locked.
Once again he looked around. Then he took the tubes of breath spray and distributed them in his pockets, carefully folding the paper bag and putting it, too, in a pocket. With a single smooth motion, he braced himself against the door and easily forced the lock. Ahead lay a slowly rising footbridge over the rear parking lot. Quickly he padded across the bridge and down to its base in front of the Emerald Green clubhouse, a white and gold circular building nearly three stories high with two kidney-shaped wings on each side. The interior, seen from the tall windows on its east face, was dark.
He started to descend into the parking lot when there came a low growl from his left, and then a sharp bark. The tall man stiffened, hissed sharply and headed straight for the guard dog, a huge German Shepard chained in front of the clubhouse’s south wing, just off the footpath that paralleled the gold course’s east perimeter. The dog snarled viciously once, then fell silent and began to whimper. As the man neared th
e animal it cowered back as far as its chain would allow and then turned to face the man, now barely five feet away. The dog laid back its ears, bared its fangs and snarled again.
The man hissed again and in one incredibly swift movement lunged at the dog and struck it a sharp blow across the snout with the edge of his right hand. The stunned animal fell to its left side and the man grabbed it from behind its neck with his left hand and hoisted it, with no apparent effort, into the air with sufficient force to snap the chain. He wrapped his long, thin arms around the dog and gave a sudden squeeze. The animal gave a compulsive shudder, grunted once, and went limp as blood spurted from its mouth and nostrils. Then the man dropped the dog and stared fixedly at the blood. He knelt beside the dog and buried his face in the fur below the animal’s right ear.
CHAPTER 8
FRIDAY, MAY 15, 1970
MORNING
When I got up the next morning I was feeling very shaky but the headache was gone and the runny nose had dried up. I checked with the PD and the sheriff’s office by phone and was rewarded with the information that a beige ’69 Ford LTD hardtop had been reported stolen from the Dunes parking lot at around 8:00 A.M. There was nothing new about the Katz girl and there had been no incidents of violence during the night. It seemed the “vampire” had gone underground.
The deputy I talked to told me that they had also heard that one of the guard dogs at the Dunes had been found dead on the grass near the Dunes clubhouse. It had been discovered by a patrolling security guard around 6:00 A.M. when he’d come out to put the dog away for the day. The dog was dead, with a small amount of blood on the fur of its neck and it was assumed that some vandal had shot it with a small caliber weapon.
Well, that didn’t seem too terribly interesting so I filed it away under miscellaneous and phoned the office. A few of my associates had been in briefly but there was no one in the newsroom right then, and Vincenzo hadn’t arrived yet. I told the switchboard operator I was feeling a little under the weather and would check in at around noon. Meanwhile, I told her what I’d gotten from the PD and sheriff’s office and asked her to give it to Vincenzo when he came in.
I didn’t really like going to work, but I didn’t feel all that sick after my third cup of coffee. So, while trying to decide whether or not to go to the office, I shaved, showered and dressed.
Then an idea came to me and I called the university asking for the humanities department and then for Dr. Kirsten Helms. She finally answered with a gruff “Yes?” and I told her who I was and asked for an appointment. A short pause followed and then she said, “11:30 sharp!” and hung up. That gave me thirty minutes to kill so I stripped down my bedding, grabbed up my laundry and headed for the car and the nearest cleaners I could afford.
Although I hadn’t seen Dr. Helms in nearly five years, and perhaps spoken on the phone with her all of a half-dozen times since I’d taken some adult education courses from her shortly after my arrival in Las Vegas, I still felt somewhat uneasy and awed in her presence. I wasn’t exactly sure what my reception would be.
The administration had banished the humanities section to an outbuilding Harmon, away from the main campus in lieu of projected plans for a new building. But Dr. Helms, through persuasive oratory and general obstinacy, had managed to keep her old office on the ground floor of the original office building.
[Humanities now has its own high rise on Maryland Parkway. J.R. ]
A placard in crudely drawn Old English script on her door proclaimed: Beware --- Der Troll’s Cave. Some disgruntled student had pinned it there five years before, after reading his code number on the term grade sheet beside the letter “F” for failed.
At the moment of our reunion she said, “You’re two minutes late. You’re losing your hair, you are overweight, you drink too much and sleep too little, and while the scope of your writing has increased an infinitesimal degree your writing style is still sloppy and your grammar atrocious.”
I had been right to be apprehensive. She hadn’t changed. She looked a feisty fifty although she admitted to almost seventy and was probably closer to eighty. Beside being unredeemedly autocratic and, in her own way, unorthodox, she was still possessed of the ability to observe the world around her, add two and two together and come to the right conclusion. She had a mind like the proverbial steel trap and, through voracious reading, a staggering knowledge of odd subjects. She spent a major portion of her small amount of free time railing against the administration’s present tendency toward “new” methods of teaching while they, in turn, tried in vain to force her into retirement. I knew, in the end, that they would have their way because (her fine record notwithstanding) time was simply against her. She knew it, too. And it made her more irascible than ever. The administration might have many reasons for trying to unseat her. She had virtually run her department when it had first been formed even though she’d never held the chairmanship, but they could hardly claim seniority as a legitimate cause for retiring her.
I let her sharpen her verbal claws on me for a few minutes and when she paused to pour some coffee from a thermos I seized the opportunity.
“I came here to ask you for some reference material on folk tales, legends, myths, anything at all, as long as it has information on… vampires.”
“Vampires?”
“Yes. I know you’ll probably think I’ve slipped a cog up here,” I said, pointing to my head, “but I think these murders were caused by a lunatic who thinks he’s a vampire. I want to know exactly how the legendary vampire would act under whatever would be normal circumstances for him.”
Well, she had read the papers. “You have convinced yourself that the murder now loose in Las Vegas is a vampire? Since the papers haven’t said how the victims died I surmised they were drained of blood and that the police want it kept confidential until they can find a way of looking brilliant.”
“Uh-huh,” was all I managed to get out. She immediately began rummaging through the massive stacks of books that surrounded her in the tiny cubicle that UNLV instructors are given in accordance with their rand. Her stout figure bobbing, her wisps of spiky, iron-gray hair cutting the air from time to time just under my nose. She began dumping all kinds of volumes, thin ones, fat ones, huge leather-bounds and paperbacks all into a handy cardboard carton.
“Here!” she rasped, depositing the forty pounds of books in my lap. “Everything you need. If there’s anyone in this town who knows mythology, demonology, witchcraft and the like, it is I. Furthermore, I’ll have you know I am something of an amateur criminologist… strictly in the historical sense. There are several good volumes on famous police cases in there. You’ll find them most useful.”
She paused and squinted at me like I was a lab specimen on a slide. “Do you remember your Homer?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer, she launched into the tale of the Cyclops, one of the few things I did remember from the Odyssey:
The cruel brute made no reply but instead jumped up and seized a couple of my men and dashed their heads against the floor as though they’d been puppies. Their brains ran out and soaked the earth. Limb by limb he shredded them to make his meal never pausing till entrails, flesh, marrow and bones were all consumed, while we could do nothing but weep and lift our hands to Zeus in horror at the ghastly sight, paralyzed by our helplessness.
Again she fixed me with the stare I still remembered from my days in her classroom. “Do you remember?” she intoned threateningly.
“Sure. The Cyclops tale from Homer’s Odyssey.”
“And how did Odysseus resolve the situation?”
“Uh… by… by… by using the Cyclops’ lusts against him… and turning his possessions into weapons. He… he had his men fix up a wooden stake to put out the Cyclops’ eye. Then they got him drunk, blinded him and finally, Ulyss… ahem, Odysseus tied his men under the Cyclops’ sheep and used them as escape vehicles out of the giant’s cave, saving the biggest ram for himself.”
“Very good. You haven’t
forgotten everything you learned. Though, you’ll never be another Odysseus. A Telemachus, perhaps… with a little effort. I can see you are convinced you alone know how to unravel this little mystery of the four deaths. Oh, I’ve been keeping up with the news. Only decent excitement this dust bowl of inequity has seen in years!
“So go… Lock yourself up and read. Get them back here on Monday. Tuesday at the latest. Refresh your memory on the tales your grandfather told you when you were a boy. At least you’ll be… informed. You’ll probably make a fool of yourself and your efforts may well hinder the police. But if I gave you any advice, you’d be sure not to heed it.
“You are a lazy man, Kolchak, but still there is a part of you that longs for adventure. Well, here’s your chance. It may cost you what few friends you have and probably your job. But you have wasted what little talents you have in his town long enough. Follow it through to the end and then go and write a book.”
Then, as an afterthought, “Better make it a work of fiction. People wouldn’t believe what you seem to believe. Oh, yes, yes, I know. I talk too much. Too much, too loud, and too fast. But I’m an old woman and if I don’t get it said and said quickly, I may never have the chance. Now, I go. It’s almost noon and I have classes.”
As I lugged the books out to my car I ran headlong into Alonzo Reynolds. It was like crashing into a wall of dough. The box hit the ground and the books scattered all over the small stone walkway and onto the grass. I looked around quickly to see if Dr. Helms had seen my clumsiness, and then bent to pick them up. Reynolds began to help me.
“Glad to see you again, Mr. uh…”
“Kolchak.”
“Right on! Hey, are you going to come see the show tonight? We have a free ticket for you.”