by Lou Cameron
Lou Cameron
File On A Missing Redhead
• • • The woman’s body was discovered late Thursday morning. I got the call at 10:55 A.M. and arrived on the scene a little after 11:20. The place was an automobile cemetery and wrecking yard out on U.S. Highway 91, just past the Indian reservation north of Vegas.
Sergeant Romero, my driver, switched off the siren and made a left turn against the oncoming traffic to park our unmarked cruiser on the gravel shoulder of the southbound lane. I told Romero to radio our position and stand by. Then I opened the door on my side and got out of the air-conditioned cruiser.
It felt like God had opened a furnace door in the sky. A big one.
I unbuttoned my jacket and pulled the brim of my straw hat down as I crunched across the sunbaked gravel towards the wrecking yard. It was a fair-sized operation. Must have been about four hundred cars, or what was left of them, sprawled like broken and discarded toys around the feet of the evil-looking wrecking crane dominating the yard. It was nearly five stories high, painted a rusty locomotive-black, and had a huge eagle’s claw of metal-rending talons poised above the huddled clunks like some one-armed prehistoric monster about to pounce. I traced a mental line from the huge claw in the cobalt-blue desert sky to the mouse-gray Volkswagen huddled like a frightened rabbit directly beneath it. If that was the stolen car the report had been about, it had been a near thing.
There was a larger car parked just this side of the gray Volkswagen. I squinted against the wavering heat waves and made out the lettering: “CLARK COUNTY CORONER’S OFFICE.”
Doc Evans had beaten me to the scene again. I walked over to the Volkswagen gingerly. The dusty gravel was rutted and littered with bits and pieces of metal and shards of headlight glass. I found Evans on the far side of the stolen car, talking to a worried-looking Mexican in grease-stained chinos. They were looking at something in the open trunk compartment of the Volkswagen. The cobweb-dry breeze shifted slightly, and I knew what it was.
Doc Evans looked up and smiled at me across the open lid of the beetle’s forward trunk compartment. He called, “Your troopers asked me to tell you they were checking out the guy who reported this heap stolen, Frank.”
“I know,” I replied. “We picked up the call on our way out. Any idea who she is, Doc?”
“Not yet.” Evans shrugged. “Somebody tried to get cute as hell with us, Frank. Wanna come around on this side and take a peek?”
I didn’t. The whiff of decay I’d just smelled told me it was going to be pretty messy. But I had a job to do. So I swallowed the green taste in my mouth and walked around the stolen car.
“This is Lieutenant Talbot, Mister Verdugo,” Doc said to the Mexican. I held out my hand as he added, “Mister Verdugo’s the one who found the body, Frank.”
“It was them white sidewalls,” Verdugo said, shaking hands. “I never would’ve noticed nothing if it hadn’t been for them spanking-new white sidewalls.”
“Most of these cars have been stripped by the time you’re ready to scrap them, eh?” I asked, taking my first look inside the trunk compartment. After you’ve worked for the Highway Patrol as long as I have, you get so you don’t vomit. You may want to, but you don’t.
The dead woman was naked except for a pair of nylons that had burst open like the skins of overcooked sausages as her thighs had swollen to blotchy purple monstrosities. Her legs were doubled up until the knees pressed against her breasts, and her wrists were tied to her ankles with cheap brown twine so that the mottled, bloated arms were hugging her thighs. You could only see part of her face. It was jammed in one corner of the trunk compartment and cradled on a mat of obscenely beautiful red hair. The hair was a break. The face was so badly decomposed her own mother wouldn’t have been able to identify her. But the hair narrowed the field a bit. A redheaded woman attracts a certain amount of attention, even around Las Vegas. People would remember she’d had red hair when and if they reported her missing. Now, if only she’d had some dental work done locally…
“I bet the Mafia done it,” Verdugo was saying from a vast distance. “I read someplace about how the Mafia gets rid of stiffs by stuffing them inside a car and then baling the car for scrap, see? I mean, Jesus, if I hadn’t wondered about them white sidewalls before I dropped her in the press over there…”
I followed his gaze and stared thoughtfully at the pile of bathtub-sized metal cubes stacked neatly on the other side of the gaping maw of the hydraulic press near the crane’s feet. You wouldn’t think anything as big as an automobile could be pressed into such a small package. But it could, once the steel jaws crunched together on it. I wondered how hard it would be to uncrumple a car body enough to identify its make and model once it had been wadded up like tinfoil. Or how anyone could ever identify anyone who’d been inside its trunk when the press squeezed every bit of empty space out of it. Doc Evans was pretty good, but even he would have one hell of a time performing an autopsy on a paper-thin sheet of bone meal and hamburger.
“We like to strip out all the rubber and upholstery before we bale them, Lieutenant,” Verdugo explained. “The steel mills raise hell if there ain’t a ton of metal in every ton they pay for, see? ’Course, we don’t make such a hot profit we can go over them with no fine-tooth comb. Lots of them go into the press with seat cushions and floor mats and all. But we don’t hardly never leave the goddamn tires on them!”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “So you wondered if this heap was one your boss had paid for and decided to check?”
Verdugo snorted. “What paid for? Nine out of ten of them we pick up by the side of the road. Used-car dealers give us lots of trade-ins for five or ten bucks a throw, stripped.”
“You mean you don’t bother with pink slips?”
“Hell, no. We don’t know who the hell the owner is half the time.” Verdugo grinned. “Some guys that wanna get rid of a heap drive out here at night and just leave it. Don’t even ask for nothing. Just to get rid of them without they gotta fill out a lot of papers and stuff. When I seen them white sidewalls I figured that somebody’s palmed off a burned-out clunk on us, and that was okay by me. Only I thought I’d better yank the wheels so they wouldn’t screw up the baler. Soon as I got downwind, though, I knew there was somebody dead inside. I was over in Vietnam a couple of years ago and you get so’s you can tell.”
“Notice the hands?” asked Doc Evans in a professionally disinterested tone.
I managed to sound almost as casual as I nodded and said, “Somebody’s been just cute as hell, all right. How do you suppose they took the fingers off, Doc?”
“Garden shears, maybe,” Evans grunted. “Took her teeth, too.”
“Her teeth?” I frowned. “You mean they yanked them?”
“Didn’t have to,” Evans replied. “She wore an upper plate and a partial on the lower jaw. Looks like she had a classic case of gum-line erosion. The remaining molars don’t look like they’ve been worked on. But it’s hard to tell. Jaw’s broken and the tongue’s swollen all to hell. Once we get her down to the lab, I’ll check for porcelain fillings. But without the dentures we’re going to play hell finding the dentist who took care of this particular young lady’s addiction to soft candy and cola drinks.”
“No clothes. No fingerprints. No dental records,” I mused, “and stashed in a car stolen two weeks ago by person or persons unknown. Oh, this is going to be a lovely one, Doc. You have any idea of how long she’s been dead, or how she got that way?”
“No,” Evans answered bleakly. “Not until we’ve opened her up and run some cell tissue through the lab.”
“You said her jaw’d been broken.”
“Jaw, septum, and both cheekbones.” Evans nodded. “Looks like who
ever stripped her down… cut off her fingertips… and swiped her teeth, did a job on her face with a jackhandle while they were at it. We weren’t supposed to find her, Frank. And if we did, we weren’t supposed to identify her.”
“Like I said, it was the Mafia,” cut in Verdugo.
He had a point. But not a very good one. The killer had done a pretty professional job on our mystery redhead. But the Mob has its own ways of getting rid of a stiff. I’d run a check on the Strip, of course, to see if any of our local shady ladies were conspicuously absent. But I wasn’t banking on the killer being tied in with the Mob. This thing smelled like a cold-blooded job by a clever amateur who’d had time to think it out for some time. I’d run into that type before. There’s one particular type of guy who plans well enough ahead to steal a car and has the cool to dispassionately work on a nude female corpse—the guy who should have reported her missing by now, if he didn’t know something he didn’t want us to find out about.
The woman’s husband. Or her lover.
“Will you be able to tell us anything about her sex life?” I asked. “When you’ve had a chance to examine her, I mean.”
“You think this is a sex crime?” Evans frowned.
“Other way around,” I explained. “I think whoever did the job was no longer interested in her fair white body, Doc. How many rapists know a woman well enough to know she’s wearing dentures or give a good goddamn about us checking her prints?”
“I see what you mean.” Evans smiled grimly. “Whoever left her here was afraid that if we identified her we’d tie him in with her.”
“Roger,” I said. “So all we have to do now is find out who in the hell she was.”
• • • The man who’d reported the stolen Volkswagen was named Harris. He managed a motel near the Desert Inn and had a good local reputation. He also had a wife named Thelma, and she was very much alive. But I wanted to check his story out myself.
“Let me get this straight, Mr. Harris,” I said as we sat under a beach umbrella near the motel pool. “You say you weren’t the actual owner of that sixty-three Volkswagen?”
“Belonged to a guest,” Harris said defensively. “Guy named Duncan MacDonald. He checked out nearly a month ago owing me two weeks’ rent.”
“But he left his car?”
“For security,” Harris explained. “Dropped a bundle on the Strip and tried to skip. One of them kooks with a system, you know?” Harris sipped at his Coke highball and snorted. “Some system! Thought he could double up betting the red and black. Told me all about it, sitting right where you’re sitting, Lieutenant. You ever hear of such a nut?”
“Every day,” I sighed. “So after this MacDonald lost his bankroll bucking the house…?”
“He said something about having a job promised him up in Elko,” said Harris, “only I said something about it being a criminal charge in this state to skip out on a motel bill. He left me the keys to his car as security. I figured what the hell, a second-hand beetle’s better than hot air. So I let him go. I mean, how was I to know the goddamn kids would swipe the car on me?”
“Kids?” I asked. That hadn’t been in the report.
“Teen-agers,” Harris explained. “Chuck Parsons at the Esso station down the Strip seen the bug pull out of my drive about two or three in the morning. Said the girl driving it looked like one of them teeny-boppers that hang out around the bowling alley on Paradise Road. Ginger, I think they call her.”
“Ginger?” I muttered, making a note in my log. “Know anything else about her, Mr. Harris?”
“Naw. Never seen her myself. And Chuck could be wrong, you know. I mean, I don’t want no trouble with the kid’s parents, and it was pretty dark and all.”
“But you say this Chuck Parsons recognized her.”
“I didn’t say no such thing!” objected Harris. “I said Chuck thought it might be this kid they call Ginger, see? I mean, it was dark and she was wearing sunglasses and a bandanna over her head. I mean, you can’t go accusing some neighborhood kid of swiping your car unless you’re sure, Lieutenant!”
“I understand that,” I answered patiently, “but if your friend caught just a glimpse of her as she drove past in the Volkswagen, what made him think it was her at all?”
“The hair,” said Harris.
“The hair?”
“Yeah. That’s why they called her Ginger,” said Harris. “It was fire-engine red.”
• • • “There’s a lady waiting to see you, Lieutenant,” said the desk sergeant as I checked in that evening. “I told her you were going off duty and she asked if she could wait in your office.”
“She give a name?” I asked, straightening my tie and glancing regretfully at my watch. It had been a long, hot day and I was already on my own time. Ginger had turned out to be a skinny fourteen-year-old brat with an overindulgent mother, a seemingly limitless supply of bubble gum and henna rinse, and an ironclad alibi for the night the gray Volkswagen had been stolen.
The desk sergeant glanced at the blotter and said, “Name’s Collier. Miss Hazel Collier.”
I died a couple of inches.
“She asked for me?” I asked.
“Yeah, said she knows you, Lieutenant.”
I died a few more inches.
How long had it been? Two years? More like three this fall. I heard myself mumbling something inane as I left the desk to go out the side entrance and down the narrow corridor to the office I shared with Bert Crawford and a couple of the others on Homicide. Stretch Voss was doing ten-at-hard up in Carson City. It was a little early for Hazel to be twisting my arm to say nice things about him to the parole board. On the other hand, I couldn’t think of anything else she might want to talk to me about. She’d said something about never speaking to me again the night I collared the punk.
I paused outside the frosted glass door, took a deep breath, and opened it.
She was sitting near my desk, talking to Bert. She was still as beautiful as she’d been the night I’d asked her to marry me. But her eyes were cold as the muzzles of a brace of .357 Magnums as she glanced up to see me standing there with a sick, stupid grin on my face.
“It’s been a long time, Hazel,” I managed, walking over to her.
She stared up at me like I was something she’d just found under a wet rock and said, “Let’s not be so formal, Lieutenant Talbot. You may call me Miss Collier.”
“If that’s the way you want it.” I shrugged, dropping the hand I’d held out to her and going around to seat myself on the far side of the desk.
“Miss Collier’s here to report a missing person, Frank,” explained Bert Crawford in an embarrassed-for-both-of-us tone.
I stared thoughtfully at her and said, “This is Homicide—ah—Miss Collier. Are you sure you want this department?”
“I’ve already been to Missing Persons, Lieutenant,” Hazel replied. “They told me you’d found the body of a woman this afternoon.”
“We found a body this morning,” I corrected her. “I’ve been running around all afternoon trying to find out who she might have been.”
“She might have been a girl who works with me,” said Hazel. “If she had red hair.”
“Name’s Kathleen Gorm,” cut in Bert. “I’ve already taken a few notes, Frank. According to Miss Collier here, the Gorm girl’s been missing from work about two weeks. Fits the description we have so far. Female Caucasian. Scotch-Irish ancestry. Born June twentieth, 1941.”
“She wear false teeth?” I asked.
Hazel frowned and replied, “I don’t think so, but I don’t know her that well.” Then she looked away and asked, “Would it be all right with you—ah—Frank, if Lieutenant Crawford handled this thing for me?”
“It would not,” I snapped brutally. “And let’s not be so formal, Miss Collier, I’d just as soon you called me Lieutenant.”
She nodded. “I noticed you’d been promoted. But then, I imagine you think you’ve earned it, with your record of arrests.”
<
br /> “I do my job,” I said, thin-lipped, “and the body we found this morning’s my case. Now suppose we quit futzing around and talk about this Kathleen Gorm you can’t seem to find!”
A million years went by.
I could see she wanted to get up and storm out. Hazel was good at storming out. I’d tried to explain the night we arrested Stretch Voss. I’d tried to tell her I hadn’t collared him because she’d said she was going to marry him instead of me. I’d tried to tell her I’d done it because he was a hoodlum and a thief. Because he stole money, and not because he’d stolen my girl. But she hadn’t listened. She hadn’t wanted to listen. It had been easier to say she’d never speak to me again and slam a door in my face as she walked out of my life.
For a moment, I thought history was about to repeat itself as Hazel stared at me with hate-filled eyes that told me only too well she was still carrying a king-sized torch for the man I’d sent to state prison. Then she sighed wearily and brushed away a wisp of ash-blond hair that had fallen down over her forehead. Not looking at me, she said, “We thought Kathy had run off with a man. That’s why we didn’t report her missing right away.”
“Who’s we?” I asked, taking out a pack of cigarettes and offering her one.
She shook her head and explained, “Kathy worked with me at the Grey collection agency. It was she who broke me in as a skip tracer, as a matter of fact.”
“Skip tracer?” I asked, lighting up and taking out my ball-point pen.
“For the collection agency,” she explained. “Vegas is a transient town, and you’ve no idea how many people skip out on unpaid bills. My job at the agency is to find out where they’ve moved to so—”
“I know what a skip tracer is,” I cut in. “But you were a hatcheck girl the last I heard.”
“A blackballed hatcheck girl,” Hazel corrected me bitterly. “You know damned well why I can’t work on the Strip anymore, Frank Talbot!”
“You had no part in that crooked layout Stretch was running until we nailed him,” I protested.
“You checked, of course?”
I nodded. “To clear you. And because it was part of my job. You were never even called as a witness, remember?”
