by Lou Cameron
“No,” she murmured. “But I was tarred with the same brush you used on Stretch. Girls who’ve been sleeping with known members of the Mafia, or people who are supposed to be members of the Mafia, have a hell of a time getting a cabaret license in this state. Or hadn’t you heard?”
“I’ve heard. So let’s get back to this Kathy Gorm. You said something about her running away with some guy?”
“I think there was somebody. Somebody real, I mean. You see, Kathy was sort of… well, weird. About men, I mean.”
“Fooled around a lot?”
“Didn’t fool around at all. She was a very strange girl. Very shy in person, and full of all sorts of romantic notions. I’m almost certain she was a virgin, and she had this crazy crush on Tab Hunter.”
“Wait a minute,” I objected. “We’re talking about a girl born in forty-one? A girl twenty-seven years old?”
“I know it sounds silly. She was such a mousy little thing. Not really unattractive, except for a weight problem and this awful shyness. In person, that is. On the telephone, Kathy was something else! I think that was one of the reasons she was such a good skip tracer. Meeting people face-to-face seemed to frighten her to death. But she had this streak of ham in her when she was safely hidden at the other end of a telephone line. Lots of people in the business seem to be that way. You have to be a little kooky to think up some of the tricks we use to locate deadbeats. Kathy specialized in voice impersonations. She could sound like anything from a hysterical housewife to a lost child. The rest of us used to crack up, listening to some of her put-ons.”
I stared at Bert Crawford, who stared back, and then I shook my head and said, “Maybe I missed something. We are talking about bill collectors, aren’t we?”
“We’re talking about skip tracers,” corrected Hazel.
“They’re not the same thing?”
“Not the same thing at all. Bill collectors are the people who pester you after we skip tracers find you. If we do our job right, you don’t even know you’ve talked to us.”
“Yeah.” I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about. “So we’ve got this overage adolescent who calls herself Kathy Gorm, loves Tab Hunter, and makes a living playing telephone jokes on people who owe money to other people. Now, let’s go back to why you thought she’d run away with a man and what makes you suddenly think she might not have.”
“She blossomed,” explained Hazel.
“She what?”
“Blossomed. You know, bought some mod clothes, dyed her hair, started going out at night on her own instead of bowling with the rest of the gang. That sort of thing.”
“So you figure she was dating somebody?”
“Yes. And when she suddenly dropped out of sight, we assumed she’d gotten married or something.”
“How do you know she didn’t?”
“We don’t. But Roberta owes Kathy a week’s pay. She’s never written to any of us, or even to her family back in Nebraska, and there’s that nutty thing about the slave bracelet.”
“What slave bracelet?”
“You’re going to think this is awfully silly. But I told you Kathy had this mad crush on Tab Hunter, didn’t I? I mean, she had dozens of photographs of him and even wore a slave bracelet, with their names on it, on her ankle.”
“She got something like that from a Tab Hunter fan club?”
“Of course not. She had it engraved herself at a jewelry shop over on Freemont. I was with her the day she bought it. Honestly, I felt so embarrassed for her I could have died!”
I started to ask a dumb question before it hit me. I looked thoughtfully at Hazel and said, “Kind of odd for a girl with a real live beau to give a damn about Tab Hunter, isn’t it?”
“That’s what Roberta thought. She ran a quick check across the country, and Kathy’s name doesn’t appear in any county clerk’s office. On a marriage license, I mean.”
I shot Bert a look and frowned. “This Roberta of yours can check a thing like that?”
“Roberta Grey,” explained Hazel. “She runs the agency, and she’s quite a remarkable woman. You’d be surprised at what Roberta can find out with a few phone calls.”
“I’ll bet I would,” I muttered. “We can’t seem to get your friend Roberta’s sudden information. You have any idea how long it would take us to run a check on every county clerk in the country?”
“That’s because you’re stuck with legal processes.” Hazel smiled a trifle smugly.
A sudden thought hit me and I asked, “How’d you know about our finding a redheaded DOA so soon, Hazel?”
“Missing Persons?” she tried.
“They might have referred you to Homicide,” I said, “but they wouldn’t have told you as much as you knew when you came in here. Not without checking with me first.”
Hazel looked innocent. Too innocent. I stared at her for a long, hard moment. Then I said, “You’ve been making funny-funny on the policeman’s phone.”
It was a statement, not a question.
I picked up my desk phone and got Missing Persons on the horn. They said they’d never heard of any Hazel Collier.
It figured.
I said, “Have you talked to any woman today about that case out on Route Ninety-one? Think, now. It’s important.”
“Nobody’s called in except the county sheriff, Lieutenant. They wanted to know something about jurisdiction.”
“Jurisdiction?” I said thoughtfully. Then I asked, “Did you talk to the sheriff himself?”
“I didn’t talk to nobody, Lieutenant. The call came in on the day watch. Wait a minute, I’ll check the log. Here it is. Three forty-five. Sheriff’s secretary called for him.”
“Secretary, huh?” I muttered, looking at Hazel.
“You don’t have to call the sheriff’s office,” she said, tossing her head. “It was me. Not that you’d ever in a million years be able to prove it. But you may as well know how we operate.”
“You little… bitch!” I marveled. “You’ve been calling in on the police lines, impersonating state and county officials for… how long?”
“Since I started to worry about Kathy,” she replied simply. “About a week or so.”
“You have any other tricks like that up your sleeve?”
“A few,” she replied. “Like I said, we can sometimes find things out the police have trouble finding out for themselves.”
I knew better. But I had to know. I said, “Did you ever use your—ah—peculiar talents to find out anything about… me?”
“Quite a bit,” she answered calmly. “So far I haven’t been able to uncover anything I can use.”
“Use? For what?” I asked.
“To get you fired,” she replied in a cold, deadly voice.
• • • It was cold in the county morgue. I’d driven over after dinner on the odd chance that Doc Evans might be the same kind of nut I was. A nut who worked a hot case on his own time.
He was—looking happy as a clam in his laboratory smock and reeking of Formalin and rotten flesh. I shook hands, gingerly, in the hall outside the autopsy theater, hoping against hope he’d seen fit to wash up before coming out to greet me.
“Just shoved her back in the cooler, Frank.” He smiled. “But we can have her wheeled back in if you want.”
“Never mind,” I muttered. “I already saw the lady, remember?”
“Not opened up properly,” he objected, deadpan. I didn’t know whether he was putting me on or not.
I said, “Find anything I ought to know about?”
“Cause of death.” He smiled smugly. “She was poisoned. Strychnine. Nasty way to go. Stuff’s odorless and tasteless, of course, but the convulsions are something else. There was quite a bit of alcohol in her system. So I imagine somebody got her bombed and slipped her a slug of coyote killer. You can get the stuff at any general store over in the Charlestons.”
“Aren’t they supposed to record the sale?”
“Sure. You imagine our murderer u
sed his right name when he came in with his story about coyotes getting into his sheep?”
“Okay, we’ve got the cause of death. How about the date?”
“Hard to tell. Don’t have many cases of a corpse left in an enclosed environment under a desert sun. The heat in that trunk brewed up some interesting bacteria, I kid you not!”
“Not even an educated guess?”
“If I guessed it wouldn’t be educated. Pick a date within the last month, and if it fits your case, I’ll swear to it.”
“What about the sex angle? Had she been molested?”
“Not enough to bother her. She’d been fitted with one of those plastic intra-uterine loops. Couldn’t have gotten in trouble if she tried.”
“Can that be checked, Doc? I mean, a woman’s got to be fitted with one of those things by a gynecologist, right?”
“Wrong.” Evans snorted. “Got birth-control clinics all over the place where a woman can walk in off the street. Not a bad way to have a perfectly legal abortion, by the way. If she’s not more than a couple of months along, fitting the loop in her uterus will cause her to miscarry, and nobody can do a goddamn thing to her or the doctor. Only costs twenty bucks, too. You can’t beat progress, Frank.”
“Okay. But if we can’t trace it, we can be pretty certain she was having fairly regular sexual intercourse.”
“I can’t think of any other reason she’d have had for an intra-uterine loop,” replied Doc Evans dryly. “Oh, we found something else when we were getting her out of that trunk, Frank. It was under the body.”
He fumbled around under his smock and then frowned and said, “Must have left it inside. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He turned around and pushed through the swinging doors. I took a deep breath and followed Doc into the brightly lit autopsy theater. Two assistants were hosing down the white enameled steel table in the center of the room. The floor was wet and some of the puddles were an evil shade of gravy brown.
“Left the damn thing right over here someplace,” Doc was saying, looking around absently.
I wasn’t listening. The highly sophisticated birth-control device had shot the case to hell worse than the false teeth. It was possible for a twenty-seven-year-old girl with a sweet tooth to need dentures, and the hair had looked like a dye job. But if Hazel was right about the missing girl being an overage virgin…
“Here it is,” Doc said, holding up something that glittered golden in the harsh light. It was a fragile-looking bracelet. The kind romantic young ladies sometimes wear around their ankles. I took it from Doc Evans and read the inscription. It was in italic letters. It said, “Kathy and Tab, forever.”
• • • The place where Hazel and the missing girl worked was on Freemont, between Union Station and the old county courthouse. She’d said something about them starting pretty early, so I got there a little before 8:35 A.M. I’d sent Larry Romero across town to check a few things I might have skimmed over the day before. So I was alone in the cruiser as I used the blinker to buck the westbound lane and swing into a loading zone across the street.
It was going to be another scorcher. I walked east along the block, squinting against the glare for some sort of sign. There didn’t seem to be any. I checked the address I’d written in my log and it turned out to be that of a hole-in-the-wall doorway between a pawnshop and a bar.
I stepped in off the sidewalk, waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the sudden shade, and peered at the cards on the mailboxes. One of them read GREY CREDIT CLAIMS, INC.
I walked up one flight and found the same thing printed in slightly larger letters on a grimy frosted-glass door. I rapped three times and went inside.
I found myself in a nondescript reception room with a nondescript dishwater blonde. I flashed my buzzer at her. She seemed impressed.
The receptionist asked me to take a seat and whipped out of sight. I didn’t want to take a seat. I wasn’t tired. The hard wooden bench she’d pointed out to me looked grimy, and my legs were perspiring.
I lit a cigarette and leaned against the frame of the frosted-glass partition separating the reception room from the rest of the layout. A woman on the other side of the glass was saying something about calling a cop. Since I happened to be a cop, I pricked up my ears.
“Don’t give me that crap, dearie!” the woman was saying. “It was your husband who sold me the damned vacuum cleaner! And it’s your husband who’s gonna make good on it, by God, or I’m gonna have him thrown in jail!”
There was an interval of silence, and I gathered the angry lady had been talking on the phone to someone I couldn’t hear. When she spoke again her voice seemed a little less angry and a bit more worried. She said, “Of course I’m sure he said his name was Joseph Henderson. How’d you think I got your name from the operator if he didn’t say his name was Joseph Henderson? I seen his card, too. He had it printed right on his card. And it’s on the order blank I filled out for the damned useless vacuum cleaner, too!”
There was another pause, and then, suspiciously, the voice asked, “Come on, lady! If your husband doesn’t work for the Little Gem Vacuum Cleaner Company, where does he work?”
I caught on about then. But the woman at the other end of the line didn’t have my advantage. She didn’t know the hysterical call from what appeared to be an irate housewife was coming from a collection agency.
She fell for it.
The voice on the other end of the partition asked, “Are you sure, Mrs. Henderson? I mean, are you sure that’s the only job he has? This man who sold me the vacuum said he was Joseph Henderson, and your husband’s the only one I’ve been able to find. Tell me something, honey, does your husband wear a moustache and—What? You’re sure? Yeah, I know it looks like some crook’s been using your husband’s name. But how am I gonna explain that to my husband when he comes home from work?”
There was another pause and then, in a voice dull with resignation, the skip tracer in the next room muttered, “Boy, it sure looks that way, Mrs. Henderson. I’m sorry I blew up at you like that. But how was I to know there were two Joseph Hendersons?”
She apologized again and hung up. Then, in a crisp businesslike tone, the same voice said, “That’s a verification on Henderson, Lena. His wife says he’s working in the baggage department out at McCarran. We’ll let the call cool a day and get an attachment on his salary first thing Monday morning.”
There was the sound of a telephone being dialed, a pause, and the same voice suddenly shrilled, “Mrs. Wilson? My name’s Bertha Hanks. I’m one of the suckers your goddamn husband stuck with one of his worthless vacuum cleaners!”
“Mrs. Grey will see you now, Lieutenant,” said a voice from the open doorway. I smiled up at the receptionist, nodded my head at the invisible speaker on the other side of the frosted glass, and said, “She’s pretty good.”
“That’s Tina,” the receptionist said. “She’s okay. But you ought to hear some of our real operators con a skip. Walk this way, please.”
I couldn’t have walked that way in a million years, but I followed the blonde back through the maze of glass-enclosed cubicles. There was a mumble of voices and the clatter of typewriters and addressographs coming from all sides as we threaded our way through the maze. But apparently each skip tracer worked alone in a private partition to insure privacy as they telephoned their assorted victims.
“Roberta’s on the phone,” explained the blonde, turning to shush me as I was about to say the place reminded me of the three-ways-for-three-dollars cribs they used to have outside Reno before they cleaned the town up a bit.
We stood in the narrow corridor, just outside another cubicle dignified with its very own door, while a sultry voice, just dripping sex, purred at someone with a velvet glove. I frowned at the blonde and she whispered, “Roberta.”
I said, “Oh,” and read the name, ROBERTA GREY, on the frosted glass. If Roberta Grey looked anything like she sounded, I was going to enjoy interrogating her very much.
“Ordinarily,” the sultry voice was purring, “I don’t go in for this sort of thing. But you do sound like a swinger! Blanche didn’t say what you looked like, but she said you were a lot of fun and—What? Six foot one? Mmmmm, I like big men. I mean, men who are big where it counts, if you know what I mean. Well… like I said. I don’t ordinarily go in for blind dates, but I guess we could at least have a drink or something.”
There was a pause, and then, with a throaty laugh, the woman on the phone said, “I’m not promising any such thing, Charley. Not until I see you! How about the Dunes Lounge, around sevenish this evening? I’ll be wearing a lavender turtleneck and a miniskirt. Never mind the carnation, lover. If you look as good as you sound, you won’t have any trouble finding me.”
She murmured something soft and purry and hung up. Then there was a metallic click and the same voice, an octave higher and fifty degrees cooler snapped, “Roger, you know that sixty-seven T-bird we’ve been trying to repossess? It’ll be parked tonight at the Dunes Hotel. Get there around six thirty and wait for that deadbeat Webber to show up. Let him park it and go inside before you grab it. The way I’ve set him up, you should have a good twenty minutes before the penny drops for the jerk.”
The receptionist rapped softly on the door and the same voice said, “Come in.”
I did. The dishwater blonde muttered something about my being Lieutenant Talbot and vanished into limbo as I stared down at a fat, dark woman with a butch haircut and a shape like a sack of potatoes. Roberta Grey peered up at me from beneath thick brows that met in the middle and growled, “You have some identification, friend?”
I took out my wallet and handed it to her. She stared at it for a time before handing it back with, “You get a little paranoid in my business, Lieutenant. How come you’re a state cop? Doesn’t Vegas care about my girls any more?”
I started to explain about the body being reported to the Highway Patrol outside the city limits, but she cut me off with, “A fuzz is a fuzz is a fuzz, I guess. You really think Kathy’s been murdered?”
