Mortal Wounds

by Max Allan Collins

  “Class,” she said, only half-sarcastic. “What did you do in the back? And when?”

  “Fresh paint, new carpet.” He rubbed a palm over his forehead, then back over his balding scalp, distributing the sweat. “Maybe a month ago, two, no more’n that.”

  “I should thank you. You’re making our job a little easier.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  Now she shrugged. “Normally, a place like this—we’d be sifting through DNA until we all retired.”

  A defensive frown formed on his Greek Lou Grant face. “I told ya, Cath, this is no hooker haven. With these lap dances, guy makes a mess, it’s in his pants.”

  “Even so—there’d be some of that on the floor, and hairs and sweat and…well, the general residue that follows a good time being had by all.”

  “That wicked sense of humor.” His smile was feeble but sincere. “Almost wish you was still here, kid.”

  “That makes one of us, Ty.”

  “Seriously. You still got the looks, and Lord knows you got style.”

  Interrogation was Conroy’s job, but the detective was busy, and Catherine knew her familiarity with Kapelos might make him more open with her. “Any idea who would do this to her, Ty?”

  He sucked in a breath. “Probably that son of a bitch Ray Lipton…. I guess I shoulda thought to tell that female detective about that prick. Nice looking woman, that detective.” He glanced back toward the hallway. “And you know that kid you come in with, what’s her name? Siddon?”

  “Sidle.”

  “She could make a few bucks here, too. What’s the PD policy on a little innocent moonlighting?”

  Catherine ignored that. “Who is this Ray Lipton?”

  “Jenna’s boyfriend. He hated her workin’ here.” He shrugged. “Old story.”

  Very old story, Catherine knew. Half the guys dating dancers hated what their women did for a living; the other half only dated the women because they danced. Sometimes the first group had started out in the second. “Ray and Jenna, they fight?”

  Kapelos snorted a laugh. “Cats and dogs. It got so bad I had to get a damn restraining order against the guy.”

  Catherine frowned. “Did he hit her?”

  “Well…not exactly—he would kinda manhandle her, sometimes. Anyway, he kept coming in here, making scenes, causin’ trouble. Hell, Lipton practically choked one of my regulars here, once.”

  The image of the strangled woman leapt into Catherine’s mind. “You call the police on him?”

  “Naw. You remember how it is, Cath—like I said, the guy Lipton got into it with, he was a regular. Didn’t want no trouble, either. After that, I got the restraining order to keep Lipton out.”

  “Could we talk to this regular?”

  Kapelos found a glass to dry with a dirty towel and considered that. “You ain’t gonna make no trouble for him, Cath, right? I mean, he’s a right guy.”

  In other words, married.

  “No trouble, Ty,” Catherine said. “The detectives’ll just want to ask a couple questions.”

  Kapelos shrugged again and said, “Guy’s name is Marty Fleming.”

  “Know where we can find him?”

  The bar owner thought about that and dried two more glasses. “He ain’t been in for a while. Last I heard, he was dealing over at Circus Circus.”

  “When did this run-in with Jenna’s boyfriend happen?”

  “Oh, three…maybe four months ago.”

  She patted the man’s hand, where it rested on the counter. “Thanks, Ty. By the way, restraining order or not—you didn’t happen to see Lipton in here tonight?”

  Kapelos shook his head. “Nope; but I was in the back, in the office, most of the time. Ask the girls, or maybe Worm.”

  “The DJ?”

  “Yeah. He knows Lipton. Anyway, I’ve seen ’em sit and chew the fat, before.”

  “Thanks for the coffee,” Catherine said, and had a final sip.

  The CSI was starting away when Kapelos said, “She was a nice girl, Cath—like you. Mighta got outa the business one day…. Do me a favor?”

  “Try to.”

  “Catch the son of a bitch?”

  She grinned at him. “That’s why they pay me the medium-sized bucks.”

  Catherine crossed the room to the opposite corner where the DJ was just pulling on his jacket. “You speak to a detective yet?”

  He shook his head. Worm was maybe twenty-five, his black satin jacket bearing a Gibson guitar logo on the left breast. He wore black jeans, Reeboks, and a black T-shirt with a MUSIC Go ROUND logo stenciled across the front. “That lady cop, she told me to wait around for her.”

  Catherine nodded. “Detective Conroy. Shouldn’t be long. As soon as she’s done in the dressing room, she’ll be out here.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, with a good-natured shrug. “I’ve got nothin’ better to do anyway. Still on the clock.”

  “So they call you Worm?”

  He flashed an easy smile. “Name’s Chris Ermey. Why they call me Worm’s a long story—let’s just say it involves a tequila bottle.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Catherine said, with a little smile. “Ty mentioned you know a guy named Ray Lipton.”

  “Yeah, sure, I know Ray.”

  “See him in here tonight?”

  Worm thought about that for a long moment. “I might have.”

  Catherine cocked an eyebrow. “Might have?”

  “Gets pretty smoky in here, but I thought I saw him, across the room—see, Ray usually wears that one jacket of his.”

  She nodded, letting him tell it in his own way, his own time.

  “It’s kinda like a letter jacket, ’cept it’s denim with, like, tan cotton sleeves. Has the name of his company—Lipton Construction? On the back.”

  “And you saw him tonight.”

  “I saw a jacket like that, across the bar tonight—near the private dancer rooms? Guy had a cap on and dark glasses, coulda been Ray—only I think he had a beard.”

  “Does Ray have a beard?”

  “When I first met him he did. Then he didn’t. And I haven’t seen him for a while, so he coulda grown it back. Hell, come to think of it, it probably was Ray. He hated Jenna working here, y’know.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Ermey,” Catherine said.

  “Am I done now?”

  “No—I was just getting a little background. The detective will be with you soon, and go over all of this again.”

  The DJ nodded, said, “Fine with me, still on the clock,” plopped on a chair, fished a pack of cigarettes out of somewhere and lit up.

  Catherine went back down the hall, where she found Sara packing up the last of their gear. Conroy, moving briskly, came down the hall from the dressing room end.

  “Get anything?” Catherine asked.

  “Her boyfriend seems prime.” She glanced at her notepad. “One Ray Lipton—lot of the girls mentioned him. Said he had an attitude about Jenna dancing here.”

  “Yeah, I heard that story too,” Catherine said, and quickly filled the detective in on what Ty had told her.

  “Doin’ my job again, Catherine?” Conroy asked, kidding.

  “I figured Ty might open up to me,” Catherine said, lifting her shoulders and putting them down again. “For old time’s sake.”

  “Well, evidently the Patrick woman lived with another dancer, a…” Conroy checked her notes. “…Tera Jameson. They say Jameson used to work here, too, but took a job at another club, Showgirl World, about three months ago.”

  “Movin’ on up,” Catherine said.

  “I’m going to talk to the DJ,” Conroy said, “then follow up with Kapelos—half an hour, I’ll be done here.”

  “We’re wrapping up now,” Sara said.

  “If I can find Ray Lipton tonight,” Conroy said, moving off, “I’ll be bringing him in for questioning—you two want a piece?”

  Sara and Catherine traded looks, then both gave Conroy nods.

  Catheri
ne said, “Let us know when you get back to HQ. In the meantime, we’ll run our findings over to the lab and get the DNA tests started.”

  The two CSIs had the SUV loaded up when Sara remembered the videotapes; Catherine went back inside to talk to Ty Kapelos one last time.

  “Ty,” Catherine said, “we’re going to need tonight’s security tapes.”

  Kapelos was seated on a bar stool now, on the customer side of the counter; he was smoking the stubby remains of a foul cigar. “No problem, Cath. Got ’em in back.”

  Five minutes later he handed her a grocery bag brimming with videotapes.

  Her eyebrows rose. “These are all from tonight?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Ty said, as he swept his hand around the bar, a king gesturing to his kingdom. “Eight cameras—can’t be too careful, in this business. One over the door, one on each corner of the stage, two behind the bar, and that one at the end of the hallway. Seems like every other asshole who walks in the place is lookin’ to sue me over some goddamn thing or another. Tapes don’t lie.”

  “Thanks, Ty,” Catherine said, arms filled with the bag, the heft of it reassuring. “We’ll get these back to you.”

  “Keep ’em till ten years from Christmas,” he said, “if it’ll help get that son of a bitch.”

  Catherine glanced around, to make sure no one was looking, and gave the bar owner a kiss on the stubbly cheek.

  Then—once again—she was out of there.

  4

  Arthur and Millie Blair lived in an anonymous, cookie-cutter white-frame two-story with a well-tended barely sloping lawn on a quiet street in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood not far from the UNLV campus, where Mr. Blair worked. The effect of the Lynn Pierce disappearance on the Blairs was at once apparent, when Brass and Grissom rolled up in the unmarked car: every light in the house was on, lighting the grounds like a prison yard.

  To Brass, the Blairs seemed like nice people, salt-of-the-earth church-goers who kept to themselves mostly, worked hard, saved money, raised their only son the best way they knew how. Then, one day, their lives had changed forever—just because of who they were acquainted with.

  Happened every day. Somebody had to live next door to JonBenet and her parents; someone had to take the apartment next to Jeffrey Dahmer; John Wayne Gacy had nextdoor neighbors on his quiet street; O.J.’s wife Nicole had girl friends close to her.

  Lynn Pierce was Millie’s friend, Arthur’s too, and had trusted them with the tape that might now be the only link to what Brass still hoped was just a missing persons case, and not a murder. Even though the disappearance was in no way the fault of this nice couple, Brass could see the guilt there on their faces.

  He could tell they felt they should know where she’d gone, even though they couldn’t possibly have that information. Like most people caught up in a tragedy, the Blairs battled the feeling that somehow, some way, they should have done something, anything, to prevent this terrible situation…and they hadn’t.

  Yes, they could have come to the authorities with the tape right after Lynn brought it to them; but the Pierce woman had asked them to hold onto it for her. They couldn’t have realized she might have anticipated her own murder, and was leaving a smoking gun behind, to identify her killer.

  Only right now Brass did not have a murder—just a missing person. Nonetheless, he had brought Gil Grissom along, since at present the criminalist and his people were the only ones really, truly looking for Lynn Pierce.

  The couple sat on their tasteful beige couch across from Brass and Grissom. Mr. Blair was in the white shirt, striped tie, and gray slacks he’d probably worn to work that day. Nervously, the man pushed his dark-rimmed glasses back up his nose, so thick-lensed they exaggerated his eyes—to comic effect in other circumstances. Next to him, his wife Millie had on black slacks and a black-and-white striped silk blouse—dignified attire, vaguely suggesting mourning. She kept her arms crossed in front of her, clutched to herself, as if they could somehow keep out the problems that now faced them.

  Grissom, like a priest in black but without the collar, perched on the edge of a tan La-Z-Boy, as if afraid to sit lest the thing might swallow him whole. Grissom, it seemed to Brass, seemed uncomfortable with comfort. On the other hand, Grissom surely knew as well as Brass that this was not going to be a pleasant interview.

  After clearing his throat, Brass asked, “So, Mrs. Blair, you don’t believe that Mrs. Pierce would abandon her husband and daughter?”

  “No, I don’t.” She looked at him curiously. “Do you?”

  Brass smiled meaninglessly. “It’s not important what I believe, ma’am. What’s important is that we find Mrs. Pierce.”

  Mrs. Blair unfolded herself a little, revealed the tissue in her right hand, and dabbed at her eyes. “Lynn would never run off like that, and not tell anyone where she’s going. That’s just not her. Not at all.”

  “Help me get to know her, then.”

  “She’s…” Mrs. Blair searched for the word. “…sounds corny but…she’s sweet.” The woman glanced toward her husband, who took her hand in his. “We met a year or so ago, when she joined our church…then our women’s Bible study group.”

  “You didn’t know the Pierces before that?”

  “No.” She smiled—it was half melancholy, half nervous. “I think Lynn had a change of heart, a change of…spirit…direction.”

  “I see,” Brass said, not seeing at all. Grissom was looking at the woman as if she were something on a lab slide.

  “Before she met the Lord, Lynn had a different set of values, a different social circle…but since she joined our group, she and I became good friends—best friends.”

  “Would you say Lynn is reliable? Could she ever be…flighty?”

  Mrs. Blair smiled at the absurdity of the thought. “Oh, Detective Brass, you can always count on Lynn. If she says she’s going to do something, she does it.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s why I was so surprised last night when she phoned to tell me she was on her way over—right over—and then never showed up.”

  “Tell us about that phone call,” Brass said. “How did she sound?”

  She glanced at her husband; they were holding hands like sweethearts. “I feel so bad about that…”

  “Darling,” Mr. Blair said, “it’s all right.”

  His wife went on: “I’ve thought and thought about it since last night. I knew at the time she was upset, but I should have heard it then—she sounded distraught. Even terrified, but trying to…you know…hide it a little.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Brass asked.

  She shook her head, sighed. “I’m not sure about anything, anymore. I’ve replayed it so many times in my mind, I don’t know if she really sounded distraught or if I’m putting my own feelings into it…. I won’t lie to you, Detective Brass, I have…nervous problems. Sometimes I take medication.”

  Brass glanced at Grissom, but the criminalist’s eyes were fixed upon the woman. The detective said, “Is that right?”

  “Yes—Prozac.”

  Her husband added, “A small dosage.”

  “Well,” she said. “Prozac or no Prozac…I think Lynn was distraught. Really and truly.”

  “Any idea what was troubling her?”

  With a tiny edge of impatience, Arthur Blair said, “Maybe it was her husband threatening to cut her up in little pieces.”

  Brass nodded. “I don’t mean to downplay the tape. But remember, some husbands and wives make those kind of idle threats all the time—”

  “We don’t,” Mr. Blair said.

  Brass continued: “And, at any rate, that was an argument from the day before. Did you get a sense of what specifically was troubling her the afternoon she called?”

  Glumly, Mrs. Blair shook her head. “No. She didn’t tell me what it was, exactly…and I’d have no way of guessing.”

  “Was she upset with her husband? I mean, this is a woman who went to the trouble of capturing her husba
nd’s verbal abuse on tape, after all.”

  “That was my assumption, but when I asked her, directly, if it was another argument with Owen, she kind of…dodged the issue.”

  Mr. Blair sat forward. “It must have been about Owen. Lynn calls Millie all the time when Owen becomes…uh…overbearing.”

  “That’s happened a lot?”

  “I don’t know if it’s fair to say ‘a lot,’ ” Mrs. Blair said, thoughtfully. “She does call other times, though.”

  “Has she ever called upset about something other than her husband’s abusive behavior?”

  “Lori,” Mr. Blair blurted, before his wife could answer. “Their daughter—she aggravates Lynn almost as much as Owen.”

  “That’s true,” Mrs. Blair admitted, shrugging one shoulder, raising one eyebrow. “Lori gave Lynn fits…although—and I don’t like to brag—they seem to’ve had a lot less trouble with her, since Lori started dating our Gary.”

  Brass smiled. “Then Gary’s a positive influence on the Pierce girl?”

  Mr. Blair smiled and nodded. “He’s a good boy—follows the Lord’s teachings and studies hard in school.”

  Brass wondered what planet this was, but said, “That’s great. You’re very lucky.”

  “No question,” Mr. Blair said. “Gary’s helped settle Lori down. She was a little…wild, before.”

  “Wild?” asked Brass. “How so?”

  Mr. Blair was searching for the words, so Mrs. Blair answered for him: “Impetuous, I would say. She made some mistakes with boys…drugs. It’s an evil world out there, Detective Brass.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  Mrs. Blair went on, in a pleased rush: “But between Gary’s good influence, and Lynn’s good parenting, they got her straightened out.”

  “Despite her father,” Mr. Blair grumbled.

  “Anyway,” Mrs. Blair said, “I would say the girl’s doing fine now. Better grades, active in church, doesn’t try to dress like those…slatternly singers that are so popular now—like Lori used to.”

  “Even so,” Brass said, “it would seem Lynn’s had more than her share of stress in her life—would you agree?”

  The Blairs exchanged searching looks.