by Earl Emerson
“What about the biker?”
“I guess he took her to the ocean on his Harley once. He took her down to Illwaco and she was thinking they were going to camp out and do a joint or two, you know. Well, this toad met a bunch of his biker buddies, Skeletons, and in order to impress them all, he sorta passed her around.”
“What do you mean?”
“Meliss told me the story maybe three times, and each time it got a bit hazier. But I had the impression that they had a good old-fashioned gangbang, you know. It haunted her. It really did. But ya know what, man? After we broke up, I saw her with this guy again. At least, he was some sort of biker. It must have been him. He was a toad. In Tacoma, down on Pacific Avenue. I was in a car with some other people comin’ home from a Dead concert.”
“What’d the guy look like?”
“He was fairly short, and looked Oriental, maybe South American, ya know. Only he wasn’t. He just looked that way like some dudes do. And he was old. They were going to a movie down there, Bonnie and Clyde. But the thing was, I had the feeling they had just come from this rundown old hotel right next door. And you know, she said something about this guy bein’ from Tacoma. I remember now, cause I’m from Tacoma, and I wondered if I’d ever met him.”
“Had you?”
“What, man?”
“Had you ever met him?”
“You know those bikers. That hair and those mirror sunglasses. You coulda dressed him up in a suit and a tie ten minutes after I saw him and I wouldn’t’a recognized the guy. But it was kind of a weird experience. When I knew Meliss, she was real free and easy. She slept with quite a few guys, but she never took any of it seriously. And she had this little punk who wanted to marry her, this poet.”
“They got married.”
“Did they? Wow!”
“Did Melissa ever tell you anything about her father?”
“Man, talk about rolling in it. We went down there to their house once when her folks were out of town. We all got stoned and jumped in their pool naked. Some of the neighbors called the cops and they came down and hassled us.”
“You had a lot of good times, didn’t you?” I said, a touch of irony in my voice that he didn’t quite catch.
“Yeah, man. But everybody’s doing something else now. You know? Meliss got married. Jon and Paul are both dead. Jon got it in Nam, and Paul fell asleep on some railroad tracks somewhere and got cut in half. All the others are straight now, you know, working at Boeing or back in school. Fred got his law degree. Believe that? He’s working for the city. There’s nobody left, ya know. Just me and Judy and my dog Booger.”
Before I left, I had Waterman give me a better description of the movie theater and the hotel in Tacoma. He wasn’t positive Melissa and the biker had been coming out of the hotel, but it was the only lead I had. As Waterman escorted me to the main entrance of the building, glancing nervously around for his boss, I measured his height against mine. Our burglar had been taller than me, tall enough to thunk his head on the top of the door frame. Hank towered a good five inches over me.
Outside, it was coming down in large drops the size of penny gum balls. I drove four blocks through the muddy side streets of South Park before remembered Taltro’s headquarters was nearby, directly across the river in Georgetown. What the hell? Maybe the old man knew where his daughter was by now. Maybe he would listen to reason. Maybe he wouldn’t fly off the handle this time. Maybe they sold Nutty Buddies in Hades, too. ?
Chapter Sixteen
TALTRO WAS LOCATED IN A MODERN COMPLEX OF BUILDINGS, the barnlike offices in front, and several tin-walled warehouses and manufacturing buildings spaced out behind.
The receptionist at the main door was in her forties and wore enough lipstick for three pairs of lips. When I asked for Angus Crowell, her face grew dark, and I realized she must have been the woman I had spoken to yesterday about Crowell’s dead sister.
“It’s personal,” I said. “Angus Crowell?”
She must have recognized my voice from the telephone. “Is it about his family problem?”
“You bet.”
I passed a lot of people wearing important looks on their faces, in important clothes, doing important jobs before I found Crowell. Surprisingly, his secretary didn’t look too important, said I was expected and told me to go right in. She closed his door behind me as if it were a trap. His office was empty.
Water sloshed in a sink. “Be right with you,” Crowell said in a booming voice.
He was bent over in a washroom behind a door, scrubbing, his shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows, a lather of soap creeping up his forearms. I could see a slice of him through a crack at the hinge. His hands made squeaky sounds against the suds.
I sat down
He washed for a long while. Some people almost made a religious ,experience out of being clean. When he came out, he walked around behind his desk, unrolling his shirt sleeves, fastening one cuff button before reaching across to shake my hand. It wasn’t what I had been expecting.
“Sorry about the last time we met,” said Crowell, making an uncharacteristic face. “Things like that don’t happen to me much anymore.”
He plunked down into his swivel chair, cocked it around and glanced out the window at the steel-gray skies. “Not since the girl - left home for college.” He cocked back around to face me, tilting the chair backwards and rocking it. “I suppose this family is beginning to look pretty bad to you?”
“The thought had occurred to me,” I said, watching him carefully. He was so different from the last time we had met, I had to marvel at it.
“I’ve been under a lot of pressure. And I understand you tried to get hold of me yesterday about my sister?”
“I did.”
“My wife and my sister have been feuding for years. I don’t even recall what initiated it. If I had known about Mary yesterday, I would have driven up and taken care of the arrangements.”
“Do you know where your daughter is?”
He squinted at me like a gunfighter about to draw, then relaxed. “No, I don’t. Do you?”
“No, but I’ll find her. That’s what I’ve been hired to do and that’s what I’ll do.”
“May I ask who hired you?” I had the feeling his Curiosity was much more intense and all-inclusive than he wanted to let on.
I ignored his query. He already knew who hired me. Kathy had told him last Friday when she spoke to him. I said, “I have reason to believe you want her found also.”
“I placed the ad in the paper. Sure I did. Two thousand dollars is not much when your daughter has vanished.”
“Funny. I thought you had different feelings toward Melissa.”
“She’s my daughter, damn it. Nothing can change that fact. And I…I love her. No matter what she does…I love her.”
The scene was almost touching. It wasn’t every day you saw a gruff old guy on the verge of tears, talking about love.
“Why is she so frightened of you?”
“I wasn’t aware that she was.” “She is.” Angus looked up, waiting for me to divulge the family secrets I had unearthed. As he played his thick hands about the desk top, I watched the scars on the back of one hand, the scars Mary Dawn had told me about Sunday. She claimed a dog had done it. A dog will do a lot of things if you corner it.
Look, Mr. Black. I wish you would forget everything I said the other night. I’m not especially proud of my performance. I guess I was…I guess I was out of my head. We only have the one girl and she turned out so bad. She’s…well, she’s had psychological problems since she was a pre-teen.”
“And now?”
“We’re not pure. She’s stunned us so many times. From time to time, Melissa makes…weird allegations. If you get to her before I do, I hope you’ll take her mental state into consideration.”
“I try to take everyone’s mental state into consideration.”
“Good.” He watched me carefully, trying to see whether I was mocking him. Finally he
decided I wasn’t.
“You have a man following me, don’t you, Mr. Crowell?”
His brown eyes suddenly turned hard. I was glad I didn’t have regular business dealings with him. I’d lose my pants.
He was striving to be mellow and relaxed when he replied, “We have security problems in this industry. It looks like small potatoes, but we’ve got almost five thousand people working for us in five plants on the West Coast. Now we’re trying to expand to the Midwest.We’ve had industrial espionage problems. Unexplained fires. Mangled machinery. The lead supervisor in this particular plant was almost killed in a freak auto accident last month.
“You see, Mr. Black, when my daughter disappeared, everything I knew warranted that it had something to do with my business interests. That’s why it was so important that we had Angel in our custody. But you could never explain a thing like that to the scatterbrain.” We both knew which scatterbrain he was referring to.
“Are you saying Melissa’s disappearance was caused by some of your business rivals?”
“That’s the hypothesis we’ve been working under.”
“And your sister’s murder? Was that related also?”
“Burton did that. The Bellingham police have him in custody.”
“So you do have a man following me?”
“That’s not what I said.” He was irked, but he remained civil. “I said I have every reason to believe Melissa’s present problems, whatever they are, are related in some way to this business I’m trying to run. We’ve hired a security firm to look into it. It was only this morning that I discovered that, among other things, the security people had been following you. I want you to know right now that I had nothing to do with it, and the moment I found out I had it stopped. Sometimes these security outfits get a little overeager.”
“Then we’re both after the same thing? We both want to find Melissa?”
He nodded. “My reward stands. If you bring her to me before my security people do, the two thousand is yours.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
“I don’t know how much you’re being paid or who’s paying you, but I can up that reward. Five thousand? How does that sound?”
“That sounds higher.”
“You want more?”
“I don’t want anything from you, Mr. Crowell, except to know why your daughter is afraid of you. From what I’ve uncovered so far, a lot of the reason she left had to do with avoiding a confrontation with you.”
Angus Crowell’s eyes narrowed and the caterpillar eyebrows knit together. “What sort of confrontation?”
“Nobody seems to know that except your daughter.”
“Well, bring her here, boy, and we’ll work things out together.”
I got up to leave.
“You don’t trust me,” he stated flatly. “Is it because of the way I handled Burton last Sunday? Look at what he did! My judgment of that boy has been vindicated! He’s everything I said he was and worse!”
“Good day, Mr. Crowell.”
“Black?” He got up and limped around his desk like an old grizzly. An affectation. He hadn’t limped earlier. He dropped a heavy arm around ray shoulders and said, “When you find her, be gentle. She’s a troubled girl. She needs more understanding than anybody can know about. Be gentle and try not to judge her.”
Outside in the parking lot, I knelt and ran my fingers under the sidewalls and bumpers of the truck. My palms were black by the time I discovered the transmitter under the rear bumper. It was no larger than a crab apple. That was why! hadn’t spotted anybody tailing me. Using a transmitter, a tail could afford to lose visual contact almost whenever he wished, knowing that he could be reasonably assured of picking me up again on the signal., I placed the electronic device back where I found it.
It was turning into a long day. On a hunch, I bucked the first trickles of rush-hour traffic and drove back to Helen Gunther’s apartment.
Four blue-and-whites and two unmarked city cars were parked in the street. I should have known while I was still outside. I walked around the apartment complex, through the wet grass to her basement unit. A uniformed policeman in her doorway grabbed me by the arm and held me.
Before he could grill me, I peeked over his shoulder and saw a part of her body sprawled on the bed, the rest of her obscured by dark blue uniforms.
“Is she dead?”
“What’s your name, Bub?”
“No, that’s not it. I’ll give you two more guesses. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Cut the wisecracks and give me your name.” “What is it, Hal?” A plainclothesman drifted to the door. He recognized me, but I could see by the puzzlement on his face that he could not recall exactly where he knew me from.
I volunteered the information. “I used to shoot on the team. I worked the north end.”
The plainclothesman had been in uniform the last time I’d seen him. He’d obviously risen in rank and responsibility. It didn’t seem to weigh heavily on him. He went about his job with a casual, confident air. It was the sort of personality you liked to see in a cop. It was the way I hoped I had been.
“You retired a few years back?”
“Thomas Black. It was a bum knee.” The uniformed cop stopped scowling and let go of me.
“You know her?” he asked, nodding toward the woman on the bed.
“Not really. I spoke to her this morning. She dead?”
“They don’t come any deader.” ?
Chapter Seventeen
TWO MURDERS IN TWO DAYS.
Sprawled on the bed, she had been bludgeoned and probably violated. It looked like a man’s crime. Her skull was dented and bloody. Her jumper had been ripped off. The skin of her chest was pale and bloodless. Her chalky white brassiere had been twisted and knotted around her neck. Her face was a purplish black. In death, her large head appeared even larger, much too big for her sleek torso.
The place was packed with uniforms. One could hardly move. The air was fetid. I found an empty chair and sat heavily, balancing my head in my hands. From the moment I confirmed that she was dead, I knew I was going to have to make a decision. Would I tell them about the murder in Bellingham, or would I keep my trap shut? Coming here had been a mistake. I would have much rather read about it in the tabloids.
I had Hank Waterman’s insistence that he’d once seen Melissa and her biker friend in Tacoma on Pacific Avenue near a hotel. A week ago, Melissa had phoned her aunt from a pay phone on Pacific Avenue. I had the phone number and address of the booth.
With a little footwork, I was reasonably assured of finding her. If nothing else, I could stake out the phone booth. She had used it once. She would probably use it again.
I was sure the cops storming about Helen Gunther’s tiny apartment had heard of the killing in Bellingham, but I was just as sure that it would take them weeks to link Mary Dawn Crowell’s murder to Helen Gunther’s. On the other hand, blurting out a few well-chosen words, I could connect the two murders and become the center of attention, the bull’s-eye on a municipal dart board.
The plainclothesman who had let me in was named Gayden. After a few minutes on the phone, he came over, knelt in front of my chair and said, “You just met her, you say?”
“Twice. I saw her the other day for a few minutes and then this morning.”
“You date her, or what?”
“She was a friend of a friend.”
“You trying to be coy?”
I looked at him. “Am I a suspect?”
“At this point, everybody’s a suspect. When it comes to killing a woman; everybody’s a suspect.”
“I’m a private detective now. She’s a psychologist. One of her clients is missing. Ran away from her husband. That’s how I met her. I thought she might be able to point me in the right direction.”
“Did she?”
“Not a peep. I was going to give her one last try before I tracked down some other leads.”
Gayden nodded, then held up a plastic ev
idence bag, a pair of crushed tortoiseshell glasses suspended inside. “You ever see these before?”
“She was wearing them this morning.”
“We found them outside the door. It looks like she had quite a struggle. She’s a pretty big girl. He must have been a bruiser.”
“Or somebody with a lot of practice,” I said.
Gayden stared at me. “You ever miss the job?”
“I feel bad about it. I don’t miss it. But I feel bad about it. This stuff Im doing now… it has its moments.”
“Why do you do it?”
“It’s what I know.” Gayden snorted. “Yeah, that’s how I feel a lot of the time. It’s what I know. Can you guess how we found out about this?” He gestured toward the dead woman on the bed.
“A neighbor upstairs heard a commotion about an hour and a half ago. He didn’t want to get involved in it, so he turned his stereo up. He heard screaming and doors slamming. He could have come down here and saved her.”
“So he called you?”
“After it was quiet for fifteen minutes he got curious. He found these outside.” Gayden displayed the bag with the glasses. “The door was partially open. He could see the body from where he stood. You can see where he tossed his cookies in the garden.”
“That’s your only lead?” I asked, debating whether or not to tell them about Mary Dawn.
“So far.”
I could always plead ignorance. After all, the Bellingham police had a suspect in custody. A reasonable man had no cause to assume the two murders were connected. No cause at all. Except that both women were going to hand over information on Melissa Nadisky. Both women lived alone. Both women had been brutally murdered, probably by the same person. Not Burton. Not likely. I had never figured him for the Bellingham killing and it would have been impossible for him to have done this from a jail cell eighty miles away.
“Want to tell me the name of this woman you’re looking for?”
Suddenly I was overflowing with information and good will. “A blonde. Name is Melissa Nadisky. Mid-twenties. Slender. Pretty.”
It did not mean beans to Gayden. He stood up and straightened his trousers. “You know who might have done this?”
