by James Swain
Banko grimaced.
“I deserve a chance.”
Banko pointed at the open doorway.
“Sir,” he added.
“Jesus Christ,” Banko said under his breath. “Say it.”
Valentine produced a sheet of paper from his pocket, and unfolded it. Uncle Al had given him the names of twelve magicians who lived in the Atlantic City area who’d been performing for over twenty years. He handed the list to his superior.
“The Dresser is one of the guys on this list,” he said.
Banko snatched the sheet out of his hand, his eyes racing down the page.
“You’re absolutely positive about this?”
“He’s a magician. I called Lois, and she confirmed it.”
The rage melted from Banko’s face. He grabbed Valentine by the sleeve, and pulled him over to the desk where the others were huddled.
“You guys need to hear this,” Banko said.
Chapter 55
All twelve magicians on Uncle Al’s list were listed in the Yellow Pages. The list was copied down and Xeroxed, then divided into three groups, which were split between Fuller and Romero, and the other two pairs of detectives. The men left, and Banko gave Valentine a fatherly slap on the shoulder.
“This is a nice piece of detective work. Good going.”
“Guess I haven’t lost my street smarts,” Valentine said.
Banko gave him the slow burn. “Giving you the casino job still stings, doesn’t it?”
“Did I say that?”
“I was born late, but not late last night.”
“Yes, it still stings,” Valentine admitted.
“Do you know why I put you in the casino?”
“Because I got shot, and you didn’t think I was fit for the street.”
“You’ve always been fit for the street.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t be corrupted by all that money,” Banko said. “I needed the squarest guy in Atlantic City to run that place, and you were the best choice.”
Sabina popped her head in. “Still got a job?” she asked.
“Looks like it,” Valentine said.
Sabina looked to her boss for assurance.
“Yes,” Banko said.
She said goodnight and left. Banko picked up one of the Xeroxed lists, and handed it to Valentine. “Make yourself useful, and run a background check on these suspects.”
“Does that mean I’m now working the case?”
“Don’t be a wise ass,” Banko said.
Valentine then went downstairs to the records room, and began looking through the files of men who’d been arrested in Atlantic City over the past twenty years. There were several thousand names, with many not in proper alphabetical order. He had heard that one day, all of the department’s records would be computerized, whatever the hell that meant. In the meantime, every search had to be painstakingly done by hand.
It took an hour and a half to see if any of the twelve suspects had ever been arrested. Of the group, three of the men had criminal records.
The first was Lester Clay, aka The Amazing Foodini. Lester had been arrested for carping checks, and done hard time in Rahway State Penitentiary. Valentine found his parole officer’s name on the sheet, and called him at home. From the officer he learned that Lester lived alone, and had few friends. The parole officer had called Lester a social misanthrope. Valentine hated labels, and said, “What does that mean?”
“He’s a real prick,” the parole officer said.
The second suspect was Martin Hollis — stage name Farky —who’d been arrested for sticking a frozen pepperoni pizza down his pants in the A&P supermarket. Farky had been in his magic costume — top hat, tails, and a walking cane — and acted like he didn’t know where the stolen food had come from when the arresting officer had pulled it from his pants. The arresting officer had not been amused. Hollis’s crime was not considered serious, and he’d been released with a warning.
Johnny Martin — Martin the Magic Man — was the third suspect to run afoul of the law. Johnny had pulled his car up to a street corner one night, and solicited a policewoman posing as a prostitute. The Magic Man had also been wearing his magic costume —a pink bunny outfit with a Styrofoam tail and floppy ears —and had been legally drunk. Martin had wisely thrown himself upon the mercy of the court, and was currently on parole. Valentine called his parole officer as well, and got no answer.
Going upstairs to Banko’s office, he handed his superior the three men’s files, and told him what he’d learned.
“Think it’s one of them?” Banko asked.
“I do.”
“Tell me why.”
“Most killers run afoul of the law at least once. You ought to haul them in.”
Picking up his phone, Banko called Marlene the dispatcher, who sat in a room on the first floor, and instructed her to contact the men in the field, and have them call in. Hanging up, he said, “I’m feeling good about this. How about you?”
“I just hope we’re not too late.”
“You mean to save Mona.”
Valentine nodded. He had not forgotten about Mona, even though he knew it was probably too late to save her. He imagined sharing a cup of coffee with her again, and hearing her rasp over a cigarette while trading one-liners.
“Keep the faith,” Banko said.
The office suddenly went dark. Valentine instinctively reached into his jacket, and drew his .snub-nosed 38 from his shoulder harness. He heard Banko get up and cross the room. The sergeant turned the lights on, then stared at his gun.
“You still using that old thing?” Banko asked.
“I like my .38,” Valentine said.
“You and Jack Webb on Dragnet. You know he upgraded to a .45.”
“You’re kidding. When?”
“Start of the fall season. Someone on the LAPD told him the department was changing, so he did to.”
“What’s with the lights?”
“President Carter’s orders,” Banko explained. “Buildings go dark every night. Don’t want to be too dependant on foreign oil.”
Valentine put his gun back into its harness They didn’t turn the lights off at the casino, he thought. A line on Banko’s phone lit up, and the sergeant snatched up the receiver, then put the caller on speaker phone. It was Romero, calling from a noisy bar. Banko told him about the three magicians with police records.
“We need to haul them in,” Banko said.
“We’ve already spoken to Hollis,” Romero said. “He’s definitely not the one.”
Of the three magician’s with records, Hollis was the only one who’d tried to talk his way out of it. That was what criminals always did.
“Why do you say that?” Valentine said to the box.
“Hollis invited us inside his house, and let us look around,” Romero replied. “He’s a little nutty, but harmless.”
“He let you look around?” Valentine said to the box.
“That’s right. Why?”
“That’s not normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s not a normal reaction from a person who’s been arrested before. He’s challenging you.”
“Look. We talked with him. The guy’s harmless.”
Valentine didn’t think so. Their killer knew how to appear harmless; that was why hookers felt so comfortable around him. That was his power. He grabbed Hollis’s record off the desk, and found his address in Chelsea Heights. To Banko, he said, “Hollis is the one.”
“You’re sure about this,” his superior said.
“One hundred percent.”
“We’re leaving right now,” Banko said to the box. “Meet us at Hollis’s house.”
Chapter 56
Banko drove with the siren screaming on the dashboard, then killed the siren two blocks from Hollis’s address, and crept up the street. It was a quiet neighborhood, and as they parked several houses away from Hollis’s, a
dog started to bark.
They found Romero and Fuller standing on the sidewalk, shivering from the cold. Both men looked annoyed; Hollis had done a good job convincing them he wasn’t a killer. “You’re making a mistake,” Fuller said. “Hollis isn’t the Dresser.”
“Yes, he is,” Valentine said.
“How can you know? You haven’t even spoken to him.”
Valentine didn’t need to talk to Hollis to know he was right. His gut was telling him that Hollis was the Dresser, and his gut was never wrong. He was not about to back down.
“Bet you a hundred bucks,” Valentine said.
“You’re on,” Fuller said.
The four men started up the path toward Hollis’s residence. The house was a two-story square box that looked like a piece from a Monopoly game, with blinds drawn tightly on the windows, and old newspapers lying on the stoop. Fuller knocked on the screen door with his fist. The porch light came on, and they heard footsteps.
“Be careful. He’s got a grudge against Valentine,” Banko warned.
The front door swung in, and Hollis stood on the other side of the screen. In his late thirties, he was balding, with a pug face and deep, sunken eyes. Dressed in running shorts and a gray sweatshirt, he appeared to have been working out. Valentine stared at him through the FBI agents’ shoulders.
“Sorry to bother you again, Mister Hollis, but we forgot to ask you a couple of things,” Fuller said. “May we come in?”
“Can’t this wait until tomorrow? I’m going to bed,” Hollis said.
“Afraid not.”
“Who are those men standing behind you?”
“Two officers with the Atlantic City Police Department.”
“Do they have names?”
“Why is that important?”
“I just like to know who I’m letting into my home.”
Hollis was stalling. Inside the house, Iron Butterfly’s psychedelic rock song In-a-gadda-da-vida was playing loudly on a stereo, and sweet incense was burning. Every serial killer had a ritual, and Valentine guessed that Hollis’s ritual was to recreate The Summer of Love.
“Mona’s in the house,” he blurted out.
Hollis’s eyes grew wide. Fuller jerked the screen door open, and he and Romero rushed in. They pinned Hollis to a wall in the foyer, and ordered him not to move.
“You’re under arrest,” Fuller told him.
Fuller read Hollis his rights, while Romero cuffed their suspect. Valentine and Banko followed them inside. Seeing Valentine, Hollis suddenly looked afraid.
“Valentine,” he muttered.
“Where is she?” Valentine said.
Hollis said nothing. The interior of the house was chilly, yet Hollis was sweating. Most old houses on the island had faulty heating, and he guessed Mona was either in the basement, or the attic. He decided to give Hollis a chance to come clean.
“You left a thumb tip in the glove compartment of your car,” Valentine said. “A hooker you picked up last week saw it. The game’s over. We know who you are.”
Hollis looked baffled. Then, his shoulders sagged.
“Fuck me,” he muttered.
“Is Mona still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Take us to her.”
“Okay.”
Hollis stepped down into the living room with the two FBI agents behind him. Their suspect dropped his arms, and there was a harsh popping sound as he dislocated his wrists. The handcuffs slid free and hit the floor. Reaching into his shorts, he extracted a can of pepper spray, and spun around.
“Fuckers!”
The pepper spray hit Fuller first, then Romero and Banko. It gave Valentine enough time to raise his forearm, and partially protect his face. His eyes filled with tears, and he watched helplessly as Hollis kicked Banko viciously in the groin, then shoved the FBI agents into each other, and sent them to the floor.
Then, Hollis turned on Valentine.
“Ready to rumble, Tony?” he screamed.
Hollis had turned into a raving psychopath in the blink of an eye. He grabbed a metal lamp off a table and smacked Valentine in the side of the head, then hit him in the shoulders and arms. He was laughing now, and seemed to be enjoying himself.
Valentine hadn’t come here to die. He threw a lazy punch at his attacker’s face. Hollis ducked the blow, but not the elbow that came with it. Boxers called it throwing a chicken wing, and it was the dirtiest trick Valentine knew.
Hollis’s head snapped back, and he hit the floor. Valentine got on top of him, and started throwing punches of his own. He would have continued had Banko not stepped in. “Jesus, Tony, you’ll kill him.”
“Is that so bad?”
“How did he slip the cuffs?”
“It’s a magic trick.”
Valentine grabbed Hollis by the collar and lifted his head. With his other hand, he pulled back one of his eyelids. Hollis was out cold.
“Damn it,” Valentine said.
It took Fuller and Romero a few moments to pull themselves together. When they had, and Hollis was under their control, Valentine and Banko ran through the house, checking the rooms as well as the basement and attic. There was no sign of Mona.
“The garage,” Valentine said.
The garage was a separate structure that stood behind the house. Banko opened the sliding door, and Valentine found a light and turned it on. A florescent bulb lit up the interior, revealing a white AT&T van with a ladder perched on the roof. Valentine grabbed the handle on the van’s rear door and jerked it open. Empty.
“Jesus,” Banko swore. “Look at this.”
Banko faced a wall lined with dozens of apothecary jars. From each jar stared out a pair of helpless eyes. Squirrels and rabbits and cats were swimming lifelessly in formaldehyde. Some people collected stamps. Hollis collected dead animals.
They returned to the house. Every room had been ice cold. So why was Hollis sweating? Valentine took another walk through the downstairs. The rooms were laid out in a circular design. If it was a circle, then where was its center?
He checked the closets, and banged on the interior wall. The closet in the den sounded hollow, and appeared to be made of particle board.
“In here,” he shouted.
Banko joined him. With their combined weight, they took down the wall. If fell inward, and they entered a small, dimly lit space that was twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Mona hung by her wrists from a meat hook in the ceiling, her mouth covered in duct tape, her face a deathly blue.
“Help me get her down,” Valentine said.
He gave her mouth to mouth until an ambulance arrived, and a pair of medics went to work on her. She’d always joked about them getting together one day. Not like this, he thought. He leaned against the wall and watched the medics try to jolt her heart back to life. It wasn’t working.
He shuddered. It was what passed for tears after he’d been a cop for a while. He realized he needed to sit down. There was a chair against the wall, and as he sat in it, he noticed a plate of hot dog and beans lying on the floor beside it. Had Hollis been eating his dinner as Mona had starved to death? He couldn’t think of anything more cruel.
A small desk sat in the room’s corner, on it an open shoe box. He thumbed through snapshots of Mary Ann Crawford, Melissa Edwards, Connie Howard and Maria Sanchez that showed them gradually starving to death. The last envelope contained snapshots of a naked man lying atop a naked woman tied to a bed. The woman did not look thrilled with the situation. The man in the photos was Special Agent Fuller. Now he knew why Fuller had run out of town; Hollis had the goods on him.
Valentine glanced at the medics. They were still working on Mona, and paying no attention to him. He shoved the incriminating photographs of Fuller into his pocket, then walked out of Hollis’s lair. In the living room he found Banko talking to a couple of uniforms. His superior took him aside and said, “How’s she doing?”
“Not good,” Valentine said.
“I’m sor
ry. I know you cared about her.”
“Thanks.”
Through the living room window appeared the blinking lights of several police cruisers, as well as the shadows of uniformed cops standing on the front lawn. Valentine went outside, and found Hollis sitting in the back of a cruiser, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his face stained by his own blood. Their eyes met, and Hollis gnashed his teeth, trying to make himself frightening. Only he wasn’t; he was just a pathetic little man. Valentine put his face to the window. “Will you tell me something?”
