by John Case
Which is so crowded it’s hard to walk. A barrel-vaulted stained-glass roof sprawls above endless ranks of slot machines. Four women in bright green sequined costumes sing and dance on a stage-lit elevated platform. Lights flash, twinkle, pop. The air is filled with Nintendo tunes, a constant beep and boink of canned melodies interrupted by the occasional grace note – a cascade of coins as a machine pays off. Every pop phenomenon – movie, sitcom, celebrity, popular toy, ethnic emblem, nursery rhyme – boasts a slot machine counterpart. Falsetto choruses burst forth at regular intervals, caroling signature phrases. “Wheel of Fortune!” “Come on Down!”
By the time I fight my way through to the registration desk, I need a sensory deprivation chamber.
“Welcome to the Big Sleazy,” Holly Goldstein says when I get him on the phone. “I pulled the files on the Gabler case. Got some time at three if you’re not tapped out from your flight.”
I tell him I’ll be there.
“Grab a pencil,” he tells me. “Folks expect we’re right near the Strip or in old Vegas, but we’re way out of town. In fact, if you’re on the Strip, technically you’re not even in Las Vegas. You’re in Paradise.”
“What?”
“Yeah. With a capital P. The developers incorporated the Strip as a separate jurisdiction called Paradise.”
“Really.”
“Yeah – in which case, you could say that the Las Vegas P.D. is a long way from Paradise. They stuck us out here in the burbs, like a bunch of dentists. It’s about a thirty-minute drive, depending on traffic.” Goldstein gives directions in the sonorous voice of an anchorman or voiceover specialist. Even his laugh is mellifluous, a liquid chortle. Shoffler told me that Goldstein was in showbiz before he turned to law enforcement. “That’s what the ‘Hollywood’ is about. Holly did a cop show about twenty years back and his true vocation called him.”
At two fifty, after driving through miles and miles of subdivisions and strip malls, I turn into what does, in fact, look like a suburban office park. The complex isn’t even a stand-alone cop shop. The Las Vegas P.D. shares its headquarters with Happy Feet Podiatry, the Bahama Tanning Salon, Nauticale Pool Services. Finally, I spot a clutch of white vans marked CRIME SCENE, and a set of doors identified as CRIMINALISTICS, and I figure I’m in the right area. A man wielding a leaf blower turns it off to speak to me, but shrugs when I ask him where to find Homicide. A colleague, mulching a shrub, points over his shoulder. “Por aquí.”
In the reception area, two women tap away on computers. The wall behind them displays a large super-realistic photo of woodlands, a country-style wreath with fake birds and eggs, and some children’s drawings. One woman asks my business, then buzzes Goldstein and tells me to wait, gesturing toward a tiny alcove just big enough to hold two chairs. I sit, facing a framed engraving of a wooded path. The gilded inscription reads: YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE.
Goldstein is a tall, handsome man in his early fifties, with silver hair and jet black eyebrows. We shake hands, and he delivers what amounts to a testimonial to Ray Shoffler. “Ray’s ears must be burning,” Goldstein concludes, “but I kid you not, the guy is really something. Old school. We get all hung up now in technology and it’s great, okay? Our case files are ten times as thick as they were even ten years ago – we get that much data. And it can help, especially in court. But to solve a crime? Nah. Sometimes you get lost in all that crap; it works against you. Take 9/11. The information was there, but it got lost in the data stream. Ray cracked a case for me one time strictly on a hunch.”
“I’m here on one of his hunches.”
“There you go,” he says, with a dip of the head. “Hey, Cindy,” he calls out. “Open Sesame.”
I follow him through a metal gate that swings open with an electronic growl. We make our way through a warren of tiny offices, edging past a crew working with a huge camera and boom mike. They seem to be in the process of photographing a piece of paper. “Cold case,” Goldstein says, with a nod toward the cameraman. “They’re assembling documents. You can’t afford to slap these things in a scanner. You gotta preserve the original – so they have to be photographed. The deal is we just elected a new sheriff. One of his campaign promises was to go after the cold cases.”
“Like the Gablers?”
He shrugs. “All of them, supposedly. But with the Gablers, I don’t know. Thing is, they’re kind of an orphan case.”
“What do you mean?”
We arrive at a conference room. Goldstein gestures toward one of the dozen chairs arrayed around a wooden table. “Let me explain how we work here. First of all, we got a huge area to police. Clark County and the city of Las Vegas – it’s more territory than the state of Massachusetts. Eight thousand square miles.” He nods toward the huge satellite photo of Las Vegas and environs that occupies one wall. “And growing. Fastest growing city in the U.S. The workload can be a bitch. We’re supposed to work these cold cases in our down periods – which is a joke around here.”
“You have a lot of murders?”
“Less than you’d think. We average maybe a hundred fifty homicides a year. And hardly any of our work comes from the Strip. The big casinos have a huge stake in safety – and there’s lots of surveillance. Tourists don’t get popped – that’s quite rare. And they don’t come to Vegas to pop each other, either. Most of our business is the same as anywhere else. Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. Meth labs, drug deals gone sour.”
“So the Gablers… what do you mean they’re orphans?”
He slaps his hands down, one at a time, on the two binders on the table in front of him. “Clara and Carla. Carla and Clara. They’re orphans two times over – or would that be four? For openers, they’re actually orphans – their folks got killed in a car crash down around Searchlight. The girls were seventeen.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Cars kill way more people than guns. It’s not even close! I mean, forty thou a year get killed in cars, just here, in the U.S. That’s like a coupla jumbo jets crashing every single week. Anyway, the Gabler girls – not only are they orphans, but their case is orphaned, too. See, the way it works is every detective owns his cases. The investigating detective – once it’s his case, it’s always his case. The guy who ran the Gabler investigation was Jerry Olmstead. He had the desk next to mine, which is why I know as much about the case as I do. Anyway, Jerry had his thirty-five in, high blood pressure, the wife was antsy. So he retired, moved to Lake Havasu. A month later, to the day – his ticker goes off.”
“Jeez.”
“So that’s how the Gablers became orphans the second time around. And it’s not good when a victim loses his or her investigating detective. You get attached, you know what I’m saying? Right from the get-go. It’s your case; it’s your baby.” He leans toward me, his face earnest. “It sounds like bullshit, but we really feel – I mean we detectives – we really feel like we’re working for the victims. Soooo-” He shrugs. “With Jerry gone, the Gabler case has no built-in advocate. It’s a pretty high-profile deal, so maybe the guy who inherited the case will take it on, now that the sheriff’s got a hard-on for cold cases. But I doubt it, I really do.”
I don’t say anything. I’m thinking about Shoffler’s move to the task force.
“So why didn’t you inherit the Gabler case?”
“Didn’t want it. Tough case. And I was slammed, anyway. On account of the Mongols.”
“The what?”
“The Mongols. Motorcycle gang. Them and the Angels had a war down in Laughlin. Lotta people killed. Lotta witnesses to interview. I was in court for months.
“But look,” he says, shifting gears. “I checked to see who has the case, and it’s Moreno’s. Pablo Moreno. He’s a pretty good guy. He’s in court this week, but you can give him a call on his cell.” He tells me the number, and I log it in my notebook.
“So this Moreno – he’s working the Gabler case?”
Goldstein shakes his head. “No. Like I said,
maybe he’ll pick it up now that there’s this push, but I wouldn’t put money on it. Like all of us, he’s got dozens of cold cases to choose from. And the Gabler case has a strike against it.”
“What’s that?”
“No one’s beating the drums. Sometimes you have a murder and ten years later, Mom or Dad is still making it their business to call and follow up with us. And I mean every single day. But the Gabler girls? Uh-uh. No one making noise at all. Sort of the opposite.”
“What do you mean?”
“The murder was so… grotesque, you know? And these girls, they worked on the Strip. Well, two blocks off, but close enough, y’know? And the Strip – that’s our bread and butter. Horrific unsolved crimes are not the publicity you want. Not exactly.” Goldstein frowns. “My way of thinking – the sensational aspect of the murders actually works against the case being pursued. It’s bad for business. Too… visceral, you know what I’m saying?”
“I guess.”
“Let me put it this way. Here in Vegas, we got guys with man-eating tigers, we got disappearing cars and people, we got roller coasters will scare the living shit out of you. We got showgirls up the kazoo. Heck, every two-bit casino – even some restaurants – has beautiful waitresses with their asses and tits hanging out all over the place. But it’s all… packaged, you know. The death-defying magic shows, the rides and all – it’s thrills and no spills. And as for the showgirls, that’s sanitized, too. Sex without fluids, as someone put it. Not that we don’t have call girls and prostitutes – Jesus, it’s frickin legal here. You’ve seen the booty boxes?”
“Yeah.” He’s referring to metal boxes that stand on many streets amidst the boxes vending USA Today or the like, but inside are the details and photos of many of the town’s prostitutes.
He shakes his head. “Most towns have real estate sheets in those things, you know? Homes for sale. We got hos for rent. Anyway, the Gabler case – showgirls massacred! – considering all it had going for it, the story actually moved to the back pages pretty damn fast.”
“Hunh.”
“No family – that really hurt, I think. So anyway, the case just kinda faded away.”
“So it’s okay if I look at the files? Moreno won’t mind?”
He holds out his hands and rolls them open in the direction of the binders. “All yours. Not that there’s a lot in there. I mean – no one reported these girls missing for more than two weeks.”
“Jesus.”
“Well, you know, it’s Vegas. New people pouring in all the time. Other people pouring out.” He thumps the notebooks again. “Clara and Carla,” he says, with a rueful shake of his head. “Even after their roommate gets around to wondering if something happened to them, it’s another week before there’s any evidence of foul play. Up to then, nobody’s even looking for these girls. That’s what you’d figure, you know? They took off for L.A. or Maui or just went back home. Whatever. I mean, apart from each other, they had no family, no one really paying attention that they’re missing. In the meantime, the trail’s gettin’ way cold. I mean – two weeks is a lifetime.”
“This evidence-” I say. “You’re talking about… when the hiker found them?”
“Right. That poor sonofabitch. He had to be hospitalized! They had to helicopter him outta there. But he didn’t find them.”
“No?”
“Not exactly. Not them. He just found half of Clara, right? The bottom half.”
CHAPTER 22
Goldstein is right. After an hour and a half with the files, I don’t know much more about the murders than I did from the news stories.
The last time anyone saw them, the Gablers were working the topless show at the Blue Parrot. The personnel director at the Parrot, one Clay Riggins, left three messages on the twins’ voice mail, ascending in irritation level – and then gave up. The messages provided the police with a probable date for the girls’ disappearance. And no, Riggins didn’t call the police, figuring the girls just blew town or got a better gig somewhere else. From Jerry Olmstead’s interview with Riggins: They were identical twins, you know? Not that hot, but they were learning a few makeup tricks and getting better at dancing. There were angles you could work with them, you know?
Tammy Yagoda, a twenty-three-year-old showgirl at the Sands, had been the Gablers’ roommate. She was the one who reported them missing. She hadn’t seen them for two weeks – and that time frame meshed in nicely with the date of their first no-show at the Parrot. Tammy told the police that the last time she saw them, the twins were fine. They were working at the Parrot, they were taking dance and speech lessons. The thing was, Tammy had more or less just moved in with a new boyfriend, Jaime, so it wasn’t until she went back to the apartment to get some clothes that she realized something was wrong. The stench from the litter box hit her as soon as she opened the door. Romulus and Remus, the two Burmese cats who belonged to the Gablers, were ravenous. Yagoda reported that the twins adored the felines; they never would have left the cats like that. So she knew something was wrong.
She was right about that.
Red Rock Canyon is a popular tourist site about twenty miles from Vegas. A well-marked thirteen-mile scenic drive leads the visitor through the Mojave Desert landscape. Dramatic rock formations form a backdrop for native fauna (bighorn sheep, desert tortoise, wild burro) and flora (cholla and barrel cactus, manzanita, Joshua tree). The rocks bear pictographs and petroglyphs, the work of Paiute Indians, dating back at least a thousand years. It isn’t just tourists who love the place – the locals do, too. It’s a haven for the hordes of native Vegas hikers, mountain bikers, and rock climbers. The brochures and maps encourage everyone to “Leave No Trace.”
Josh Gromelski, solo hiking in an isolated area behind Icebox Canyon, stumbled upon more than a trace. He’d scaled the walls of Icebox and had entered an area behind it, which led to a much smaller canyon known as Conjure Canyon. Free climbing, he nearly tumbled to his death after setting a handhold that, when he pulled himself up, brought his face about four feet from the torso and legs of what turned out to be Clara Gabler. Gromelski had a GPS system and a cell phone in his backpack. He lasted long enough to call in his gruesome discovery before tossing his Clif Bars and going into shock.
I can see why. The crime-scene photos are stomach-turning. I force myself to take a second look, although I don’t know why. Like other photos I’ve seen – the piles of naked Jewish corpses being tipped into mass graves, the gas-bloated bodies at Jonestown, the fallen Taliban fighter on the road outside Tora Bora, his pants pulled down and a crowbar jammed up his ass – the first glance is indelible. Like other sights I’ve seen in person – the carnage in Kosovo, where I beheld a pregnant woman with no head – some things don’t require a second look.
The photo of Clara Gabler’s lower half joins what has become, over the years, a gallery of horror in my head, a place where such images – the ones you wish you’d never seen – are imprinted forever. The trunk is severed at about the waist, the legs splayed apart, one of them slightly bent. The upper cavity is like some obscene bowl, the edge of skin and subcutaneous fat at the cut comprising the container that holds a gnawed mash of red pulp.
Despite the damage done by predators, the lower half of Clara Gabler did not deteriorate much in the dry Mojave air. Except for the tattered flesh still visible where the body was severed (wildlife, the crime scene report noted, removed the organs), the torso and legs look like the lower half of a doll. The shapely legs are encased in fishnet stockings, the feet – slightly turned in – are still shod in patent leather sandals with four-inch heels. A scrap of gold-sequined fabric – like the bottom half of a bathing suit, but shredded and twisted at the waistline – covers Clara’s lower trunk.
The identity of the legs and torso was not established until later, although it didn’t take long to find the other half of Clara Gabler once the police went looking. It was only twenty yards away, wedged into a rock crevice, apparently dragged there by coyotes. This i
s the half with a face, a face with nibbled sockets for eyes. Looking at it is difficult: the freakish way her body suddenly stops, just below the rib cage…
Carla was found about fifty yards away, facedown in a little gully. According to the reports, animals and birds had been feeding on the bodies for approximately two weeks before the hiker found them.
Carla Gabler met death in a more conventional way than her sister. She was shot, execution style, behind the right ear. It’s almost a relief to sift through the photographs in her file, and I have to remind myself that she, too, was murdered in cold blood. The crime-scene photograph shows Carla in her costume: fishnet stockings, high-heeled sandals, gold-sequined panties, jewel-encrusted bra. She was facedown on a rock when shot. Between livor mortis, predator damage, and the exit wound made by a.38 caliber bullet, her face is unrecognizable.
If the photos are brutal, the text offers no refuge. The dry prose of the autopsy report notes that Clara was cut in half by a saw powerful enough to slice through her spinal column. The incision passes straight through the soft tissue of the abdomen, slightly above the umbilicus, severing the intestine at the duodenum… continuing through the intervertebral disk between the second and third lumbar vertebrae.
But it’s even worse than that. According to the medical examiner, injury to subject’s trunk occurred premortem. The cause of death was exsanguination.
The language of the report fails to blunt its meaning. Clara Gabler was alive when she was cut in half, alive when her murderer sent her soul howling into the next dimension.
In other words, I tell myself, the butchery wasn’t carried out in an effort to make the body more compact for disposal. It was an act of sadism.
But not, apparently, the result of a sex crime. Neither woman had been molested. In fact, according to the medical examiner, there was no evidence of recent sexual activity on the part of either one. Various documents in the files – Q and A’s with Yagoda, Riggins, with other residents of the Palomar Apartments, where the Gabler girls lived, and with fellow employees at the Parrot – explored the notion that maybe the twins did a little hooking on the side. “Hey,” Goldstein said, “they’re identical twins, it’s Vegas, they’re showgirls, fah Chrissake. A few three-ways, to help make ends meet? It wouldn’t exactly surprise anyone.” But according to Yagoda, Carla and Clara – while not virgins – were not “like that.” “Not at all,” Goldstein says. “Didn’t even go out that much. In fact, Yagoda said the Gabler girls worried about just that kind of thing. The twin thing. They hated it when people joked about three-ways – which happened, you know. They didn’t even like to double-date.”