Copp In Shock, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series)

by Don Pendleton

  This is of no particular moment to the inveterate gambler, since one casino seems much like another once you get inside, but it does offer a contrast to the usual atmosphere of Las Vegas, Reno, or Atlantic City. For myself, I prefer the less strident atmosphere of the High Sierra since I am no great shakes at gambling and usually regard it as an exercise in frustration.

  Highway 395 takes you briefly out of California through the western tip of Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe, on to Reno before reentering California, then through the northern part of the state and into Oregon. I jogged over to U.S. 50 just outside of Carson City, Nevada, and rolled on into Stateline at about four o'clock.

  The first item of business for me was to find the wedding chapel where Martha and I were married. It was an unpretentious place near the lake. An elderly man let me in and immediately asked, "Where's the bride?"

  I explained that the bride had not come with me this time and showed him the marriage certificate. "Is this one of yours?" I asked him.

  He had a crackling sense of humor, showed me a droll smile as he jibed, "Did you lose her already?"

  I did not want to spoil his day so I told him, "No, I'm just wondering if you remember performing the ceremony."

  He studied the document with that same droll smile then replied, "Oh, it's legal, okay. Were you hoping it was not?"

  "Would you believe it if I told you I'm suffering from amnesia? That's my signature, okay, but I have no memory of it. I was hoping maybe you would."

  "You are serious about this?"

  "Yes, sir, I am dead serious."

  "What happened to your head?"

  "I forgot to duck. That's why the memory loss."

  The justice of the peace became entirely serious. He said, "Just a minute, please. I'll get my wife. She has a better memory for these things."

  He was back within a minute, his wife in tow. She

  was showing me a sympathetic smile so I knew that she was aware of the problem.

  I asked her, "Do you remember me?"

  She said, "Oh, yes. And such a beautiful girl."

  I said, "Could I see the chapel, please?"

  They took me into a small chapel in the back. Nothing elaborate, but very pretty, and I remembered this place. The scene was traumatic. I had to get out of there. I thanked the old couple and quickly let myself out. Going into that chapel had been a mistake.

  I drove on into South Lake Tahoe and found the sheriff's substation. A woman on duty there recognized my name and said, "Oh, yes, Chief Terry called about you. Just a minute, please."

  The guy in charge was a Sgt. Webster. He ushered me into his office and said, "I hear things have been a little hot in Mammoth."

  I replied, "Too hot. L.A. is calm by comparison. How are things in Tahoe?"

  He was an easy guy. "We're holding our own. Hope you're not heating things up around here the way you did in Mammoth."

  I said, "Hey, I had nothing to do with it."

  "You were just driving through," he said with a smile.

  "The folks from your area have been behind most of the trouble down there. I was hoping that you could give me a line on some of your badasses."

  "If you're talking about the guys who shot up the hospital, I don't know them. Apparently they blew through here and stole a car, but they didn't check with me first."

  I chuckled and said, "I'm sure they didn't. Did you get anything on their movements here?"

  "Yeah, we made them at the airport. Apparently they had come in from back East by way of San Francisco. These guys were connected. It was a contract job, I'm sure of that."

  "Who, would you think, was sponsoring them?"

  "At this stage, it's anybody's guess."

  I said, "How about the guys who ripped off the military Jeep in Nevada? Any score on those two?"

  He showed me a sober smile. "The Nevada authorities are putting together a package on them. At first glance, they were for sale to anybody with a few bucks. Why Mammoth?"

  I said, "Looks like it's all somehow involved with Harley Sanford's problems. John Terry told you that Sanford was found dead in Mammoth this morning?"

  "Yeah. Sanford is a big man around here but he's strictly a small fish in a large pond. Hell, he wouldn't be worth much cut down to his own size. I suspect that's exactly what's been behind all this. He just got too big for his pants."

  I said, "Maybe so. What can you tell me about a couple of small-time hoods who've been playing games for Sanford? According to the rap sheets that Terry gave me, Sammy and Clifford spend a lot of time up here. What do you know about these guys?"

  "Yeah, they're small-time, go-fer jobs for Sanford. For some reason, he seemed to enjoy having punks like these on his payroll, but I don't know how involved they may have been."

  "Were they involved with his casino?"

  "Like I said, go-fers; they hung around a lot but I never found them with anything dirty on this side of the border." Webster pulled a sheath of paper from his drawer and said, "I thought you'd never ask." He passed the file on to me. "This turned up just a few hours ago."

  Sammy and Clifford were dead, victims of a mysterious "boating accident."

  I said, "How convenient."

  "Freak accident. It says that they fell from the boat and it went on without them. Apparently neither man could swim. The boat was run ashore on the west side."

  I said, "If you can believe that..."

  Webster snickered. "One way is as good as another, I guess."

  "Death by drowning?"

  "That's the tentative finding. There were bruises on both bodies."

  "No witnesses?"

  "Oh, yeah, some fishermen saw the boat running wild and the two men thrashing around in the water. Took some hours for the divers to find the bodies. This is a very deep lake, you know."

  I said, "Well, those guys had been trying to buy into something like that for a long time, I guess. I don't care what it might look like, those guys were snuffed."

  Webster snorted. "Takes no genius to figure that out."

  I stood up and grasped his hand. "Thanks for the briefing. I know you're a busy man. I want to take a look at the casino."

  He walked me outside and told me, "Don't be a stranger. Stop by anytime."

  That was pleasant enough.

  Except that the dark shadow of death seemed to be following me around, even into the depths of Lake Tahoe.

  I was getting a bellyful of this stuff. And it was not done yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  i f it sounds as though I were merely stumbling around in the dark here, let me remind you that is exactly what I had been doing for days, but I cannot blame all of my difficulties on my head trauma. The events of the past couple of days would have been bewildering enough even had I been fully in control of my head. It did seem, however, that the deeper I got into this case the better my memory became. The visit at the wedding chapel, though painful, had furthered to some extent my sense of reality concerning the entire experience. So I was really looking forward to a bit more "shock treatment" as I moved closer toward the truth about Martha.

  I drove past her father's casino and wanted an inside look at that place, but that could wait. Terry had given me a line on the Sanford home, which was nearby, and I wanted to check that out first.

  It turned out to be a rather modest lakeside home, by Sanford's standards, with the yard a bit neglected and the house exterior suffering from inattention.

  I did not have any trouble getting inside. French doors on the lakeside appeared to have been broken into recently and hastily patched with duct tape. I removed the tape and the glass, reached through, easily found the lock, and just walked right in.

  It was a nice-enough house, sure, but nothing to write up in House and Garden.

  Especially not this particular house.

  There was a horrible odor, one I had experienced many times in the past.

  I discovered a dead woman in the bedroom.

  She had bee
n there long enough for the body to have begun decomposing—and the odor in there was overpowering.

  She was naked, face-up on the bed, dead of apparent gunshot wounds.

  Her clothing was folded neatly atop the dresser. A purse contained ten crisp twenty-dollar bills, an unopened package of cigarettes, various other odds and ends, a small cosmetic bag, and a wallet with a Nevada driver's license. The photo on the license was close enough and her date of birth indicated that she was twenty-five years old, residence Carson City, Nevada. The name was given as Vicki Lynn Douglas!

  It is not that uncommon a name, but I almost twitched when I read it; there had to be a connection here to Arthur Douglas. It had been a large group of the "Douglas clan" in the waiting room at the hospital in Mammoth—and Carson City is not far removed.

  I had to get out of there for some fresh air. I took the driver's license with me to the van and snapped a close-up shot of it with my Polaroid. Then I returned the document to the dead girl's wallet.

  I poked around briefly inside the house but found no

  further interest there. This house had none of the charm or grace of the Sanford home at Mammoth; there was no family warmth here. Obviously it had been used primarily as a vacation residence and not even that to any extent during recent years.

  A boat slip on the water was also showing signs of disuse and neglect. I wondered if this place had figured during happier times when Martha, George Kaufman, Arthur Douglas, and Cindy Morgan had posed for the photo I had earlier found in the wreckage of Douglas's apartment in Mammoth.

  I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. I called the Nevada Sheriff's Department and went outside to wait for their arrival. I had done all I could do. Now it was a job for the coroner.

  Two officers from the Nevada Sheriff's Department were on the scene within minutes after my call. These guys were sharp and knew exactly how to handle this kind of investigation, so I did not accompany them inside the house. That was no worry, because they were not anxious to dally around in there any more than I had been. My name meant nothing to them and they were even less impressed with my P.I. badge, but they were courteous and friendly.

  They did know of Harley Sanford, and it would have disappointed me if they had not. These Nevada cops have some kind of radar concerning known casino operators. They'd even had this home on some sort of check list and one of them made a reference to the APB out of Mammoth. Of course they asked me repeatedly about my knowledge of the victim and her relationship with Sanford.

  I saw no need at this time to mention my suspicion that this dead girl could be a relative of the cop who had been shot in Mammoth, Arthur Douglas, but I did consider it prudent to mention the recent string of violence; I did have to explain why I was in the area and why I had entered the house.

  I recited the facts as I knew them, but only the facts without embellishment. They asked me about the two victims who had been found in the lake earlier that day. I explained that I had learned of that just a few minutes earlier from the California authorities and they did not question me further about that incident. I could tell that they were interested, however.

  One of the cops was on his radio even as I spoke. I suspected that the Nevada authorities were checking out my story because the guy kept glancing my way the whole time he was on the radio.

  It took me an hour to get clear of there. The cops offered me nothing about the dead girl except to hint that she had been known in the area and I overheard one of them suggest to the other that the victim was "an unlucky hooker."

  I was still mulling that possibility and trying to get on my way when another Nevada cop rolled in and stepped out of his vehicle to show me interested attention. He looked vaguely familiar. The name on his chest was Miller and I divined from his identification that he was a watch commander or its equal in this neck of the woods. He greeted me in a familiar way and asked, "What are you into this time, Joe?"

  It can be annoying as hell to be constantly in one identity crisis after another, unable to focus in on events that should be strongly in the mind, especially at a time like this. But I did not get a chance to even try to focus on this guy. His radio began squawking and he had to make a dash for his car. "Sorry," he yelled at me over his shoulder. "Gotta run!" From the gist of what I heard on his radio, an ambulance was responding to an auto accident uplake somewhere. He showed me an amiable smile as he peeled out of there.

  That was okay with me. I was not feeling exactly sociable at the moment, anyway. I was still struggling with the riddle of Vicki Douglas.

  If Tom Lancer had given me the straight on Harley Sanford, then it was not exactly a surprising revelation that this latest victim had spent time in the Sanford house. But had he killed her there?—and if so, why in God's name had he simply walked away and left the body in his own bed?

  If Sanford had not killed her, who had?—and why? This victim had been dead since sometime before the recent events in Mammoth. From the condition of the body, it was even conceivable that she could have died at about the same time that Martha died—or even earlier.

  It was going to be interesting to see the coroner's report on this one.

  It would be even more interesting if Vicki Douglas had a definite family connection with the wounded officer in Mammoth and if "an unlucky hooker" in Tahoe was somehow involved in the wave of intrigue stretching from Los Angeles to Mammoth and beyond.

  I was betting that she was.

  Something deep inside of me was crying out that she was.

  But how?

  i drove a short distance back to "Sanford's Tahoe," the casino that bore his name although he was only one of several owners. This was no "Caesar's Palace" by any stretch of the imagination, but it was nice enough, large enough, and no doubt lucrative in any way that really counts for a casino operator.

  According to Nevada law, only a small percentage of casino gambling profits may be retained by the casinos. Theoretically, at least, the lion's share of gambling earnings must be returned as winnings, so the margin of profit for the operator should be better when nongambling expenses are minimized. Since the glitzy casinos in Las Vegas and elsewhere ordinarily operate at practically giveaway prices for rooms, food, and beverages, the profit margins for the small-time casino operators are no doubt considerably higher than those who feel obliged to encourage the gambling public with expensive perks.

  This one had a small lounge and only a "snack bar" to divert attention from the main business at hand, gambling—no rooms, no entertainment, no "perks" that I could discern—plenty of slot machines, several crap tables, a number of blackjack tables, poker tables, even a baccarat room and the ever-present keno action.

  Business was good, for early evening. The tables were active and the slots were getting heavy play if the noise in there could be a good indication—bells ringing and lights flashing to keep the players excited and hopeful.

  I made my way up a wide flight of stairs to the casino office and had to run a gauntlet of wary security officers who where manning the ramparts above the casino floor. The casino boss was a studious-looking guy of about fifty with wire-framed glasses and a harried expression. He came forward to greet me in the outer office after I flashed my badge at a young woman inside who had leapt to the conclusion that I was a police detective.

  I did not even have to show the badge a second time. The casino boss showed me interested attention and ushered me into his office. He was a busy man, so I got right to the point. "Harley Sanford was killed this morning," I told him.

  "My God!" he cried.

  I said, "Shocking, yeah. He was shot."

  "I can't believe this!"

  "Believe it," I suggested. "I am investigating his death. Can you think of anyone who may have wanted him dead?"

  The guy was still bowled over by the information. "Not Mr. Sanford, no, my God! Wonderful man, I can't believe it!"

  I told him, "I've never heard him described as a wonderful man. From what I've heard,
people have been standing in line for years to put him away."

  "Oh, no, I don't think that's true. He was a hard business man, sure, but not..."

  "There's a theory that he might have killed himself. What would you think of that?"

  "I can't believe that, either. This is just..."

  "Do you know Mrs. Sanford?"

  "I haven't seen her for a couple of years, uh... "

  "Since Kaufman died?"

  "Come to think of it, I guess not since then."

  "Did you know Kaufman?"

  "Sure. He was the controller here."

  "Did you know Martha?"

  "Sure, I know Martha."

  I told him, "No, you have that in the wrong tense. Martha was murdered more than a week ago in Los Angeles."

  The guy's eyes were popping through the wire rims. He was overloading on this information. He stood up and walked around the office before again taking his chair, and the eyes were moist as he said, "God, I can't believe this. Martha was a wonderful girl. Why would anyone... ?"

  He was one of those people who seldom complete a statement. I told him, "Another girl was found dead a short while ago here in Tahoe." I showed him the Polaroid of the Douglas girl's driver's license. "Do you know this victim?"

  He inspected the snapshot closely and lingered for a moment on the DMV photo. "Yes, I know this woman. She comes in here a lot."

  I asked, "Have you ever seen her in the presence of Harley Sanford?"

  The casino boss was beginning to get his wits about him. He gave me a wary look and replied, "I couldn't swear that I have. A lot of women come in here."

  "In Sanford's company?"

  "I really couldn't say."

  "Sure you could. Don't get delicate with me, pal. This is important. The man is dead, the girl is dead. Did Sanford know her?"

  The casino boss's gaze swerved aside as he replied in a barely audible voice, "Yes, he knew her."