File on a Missing Redhead

by Lou Cameron

  “You know that, and I know that.” Roberta Grey smiled wanly. “But you’d be surprised how goosey the average skip is when it comes to messing around with Uncle. He’d changed his name from Williams to Wilson but kept his initials. Soon as they called him to the phone, she recognized his voice.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t recognize hers by now.”

  “I told you she didn’t use the same voice each time she called. Anyhow, as soon as she had him on the horn, she dropped into a snotty secretary voice and told him she was working in the bookkeeping department.”

  “You mean the bookkeeping department where he worked?”

  “What other bookkeeping department would you have said you were from? I mean, if you wanted to get a skip’s home address?”

  “You mean he gave it to you?” I marveled.

  “He gave it to this girl we’re talking about,” she corrected. “She told him she was going over the payroll and couldn’t make out the home address on his application form. He gave it to her, never suspecting a thing, and then she verified him by reading off his Social Security number and asking him if she had it right.”

  “Is that SOP?” I frowned. “Seems to me it’s skating on thin legal ice to impersonate a guy’s employer like that.”

  “So who’s going to press the charge?” She shrugged. “If you make your call the right way, nobody will ever know what you’ve done. You’d be surprised how many odd phone calls the average person gets that he never bothers to check up on.”

  “Not any more.” I grinned. “I’m beginning to wonder about wrong numbers.”

  “Wrong numbers are useful,” Roberta Grey agreed. “You’d be surprised how much information you can pump out of somebody before they figure you’ve got the wrong number and forget they ever talked to you. And we nearly always make a dumb phone call before sending a process server to your house. Saves a trip if nobody’s home.”

  “Yeah,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette and taking out another. “So what did this girl we’re talking about do after she located this guy again?”

  “She did a very dumb thing,” said Roberta Grey. “She took a personal interest in a skip.”

  “This is bad?”

  “The baddest. Bill collecting is like undertaking. You make your money off of people who’ve had bad luck. Sometimes it’s their own fault. Sometimes it isn’t. You can’t play little tin god, trying to decide who deserves a break and who should be stepped on before they multiply. This girl we’re talking about knew this. But she’d started feeling sorry for her victim. Or maybe fantasizing about him. He was a charming son of a bitch. Most bad credit risks are. That’s how they get the credit in the first place, I guess.”

  “It figures.” I nodded, urging her on. Roberta Grey was taking a hell of a long time getting to the point, if there was one. I couldn’t see what all this ancient history had to do with the redheaded corpse we’d found the day before. But I had a pretty good idea who the girl she was talking about had been, and I knew better than to push her.

  “She met him,” Roberta said. “She told herself it was just curiosity, and maybe it was, at first. But she dolled herself up and went to a neighborhood bar she knew he hung out in. She was shy, and not the most attractive thing that ever came down the pike, even in those days. But she managed to strike up a conversation. Next thing she knew, she was head over heels in love with the creep!”

  “You think Kathy Gorm did something like that?” I asked. “You think she might have met this Duncan MacDonald and fallen for him?”

  “Doesn’t it figure?” Roberta Grey replied. “Look at the way she doctored his credit report, Lieutenant. Look how she changed his description, gave him a different job, and even threw in a red herring about his being a Canadian! You know what the Central Credit Bureau would have done with that file, if it hadn’t been for his being wanted by the state police? They’d have filed it in the wastebasket, that’s what. They’d have written him off as an uncollectable bad debt and chalked him up to experience. Duncan MacDonald would have been free and clear as far as we were concerned. Believe me, I know.”

  “That’s what happened to the guy you—your friend fell for that time?” I asked.

  “All but the last part.” Roberta Grey sighed. “This girl we’re talking about—and don’t get any personal ideas, dammit—this girl from Baltimore leveled with the skip she’d been after. She told him who she was and how she’d found him. And after they’d been in the feathers a couple of hours, she told him how to skip and stay skipped.”

  “That doesn’t sound easy.” I smiled.

  “Easy enough.” She shrugged. “If you’ve got somebody inside the credit organization working for you on the QT. The first thing she did was file a report locating him in New York. New York’s a hell of a hard place to find anybody. Especially if he’s on his way to California.”

  “That’s where he went?”

  “That’s where they went. The poor stupid little dame quit her job and took off across country with the good-looking bastard. She knew all the tricks of checking on credit. So they had no trouble buying a car on time and borrowing eating money along the way. She taught him every deadbeat trick in the book, and how to cover his trail while he was at it. I’ll bet they’re still looking for that son of a bitch in half the states in the Union.”

  She stared for a time at the green blotter in front of her and then she smiled wryly and added, “He taught her a few things, too. Left her stranded in a second-rate motel just outside San Pedro. Left her pregnant and broke.”

  “Rough,” I said. “Must have been rough as hell.”

  “Could have been worse. She had the stars knocked out of her eyes; and it’s tough as hell to find an abortionist in a strange town. But she was still alive when the bastard decided he couldn’t use her anymore.” She looked up at me bleakly and said, “That’s a better break than Kathy got, anyhow.”

  • • • Unlike detectives in the movies, working cops have more than one case at a time to worry about. Working the day watch out of Homicide in the Vegas area keeps a guy pretty busy. I had three more killings to check out less than two weeks after finding the redheaded stiff in the Volkswagen. None of them, however, was as rugged as the Kathy Gorm case. Compared to the murdered redhead and the vanished Mr. MacDonald, they were light work.

  A disgruntled loser decided the cards were stacked against him at a second-rate joint on the strip and put a couple of bullets in a slow-moving blackjack dealer. There were a dozen witnesses, and the Charleston division spotted his car a mile outside of Rhyolite a few minutes after the APB went out. He thought he could outrun a Highway Patrol cruiser on a mountain road. It took us half the night to haul him and his car up out of the canyon. By that time, he was as dead as the dealer he’d pumped full of lead.

  A divorcée from Chicago caught the dude ranch cowpoke she’d been playing footsie with playing footsie with a divorcée from Dallas. She stabbed them both with a steak knife. The cowpoke died on the way to the hospital. The lady from Big D lived, and pressed charges. Picking up the hot-tempered lady from Chi was routine. She’d gone home to her apartment and polished off a fifth of Cutty while waiting for us.

  The third killing was some leftover business from the Bugsy Siegel era. A gun from Detroit arrived at McCarran on the noonday jet and was found floating face down in a swimming pool the next morning. We didn’t catch the guys who’d done him in. But we knew who they were. They’d left for L.A. shortly before midnight and we’d wired the Coast for them. It was only a question of time before they turned up, one way or the other. If the L.A. cops didn’t get them, the Mob would. The guy they’d killed had been a captain, and on his vacation. Killing him had been very bad form.

  While all this had been going on, I’d kept gnawing away at the Kathy Gorm case, like a dog working on a dry but still smelly bone.

  The green T-bird hadn’t turned up anywhere in the state. Neither had anybody named MacDonald who answered the new descriptio
n we had of our suspect.

  I’d gotten to know Duncan MacDonald a bit better as I kept plugging away. We went back over the same ground, talking to the same witnesses, and a picture began to emerge from the mists. Not a very pretty one.

  MacDonald came from Ohio. Born in Cleveland on August 19, 1932. He’d been a trouble kid. Had a JD record a mile long. Mostly small stuff. The FBI had his prints. But the only mug shots anyone had on him were taken when he was still a teen-ager. He’d been a good-looking, clean-cut WASP type who might have grown up to look like anybody.

  The U.S. Air Force had a record on him, too. Not a good one. MacDonald had been given a bad conduct discharge in fifty-five. He’d also been under thirty days’ psychiatric observation. According to the Air Force head shrinkers, he was a pathological liar and something they called a psychopathic personality.

  I looked that one up. Psychopathic personality is a catchall term for what used to be called a plain, no-good son of a bitch.

  Apparently, MacDonald’s psychiatrists had decided he was a moral moron. He had a normal IQ but couldn’t seem to tell right from wrong, or truth from falsehood. He was reported to be clean, neat, and agreeable. He’d been popular with his squadron mates, but given to blowing his pay on cards, craps, or anything else he could bet on. He’d begged, borrowed, and stolen to feed his built-in losing streak. In the end he’d stolen one time too many and been kicked out of the Air Force.

  Somewhere along the line, MacDonald had picked up the trade of lead burning. I didn’t know what a lead burner was either. So I looked it up.

  A lead burner’s a guy who welds lead. He uses an oxy-acetylene torch to run bead-welds on lead sheeting. It’s a highly skilled technique, and there aren’t many lead burners around. That was the first break we’d had with the elusive bastard.

  I noted lead burners were employed a lot around dentist’s offices, putting in X-ray screening. That meant we had someplace to start looking and that MacDonald probably knew more about dental techniques than the average layman. He’d know, for example, that a body can be identified by its bridgework.

  Something else I found out about lead burners interested hell out of me. I put through a call to Doc Evans and asked him about lead poisoning.

  “According to the literature,” I explained, “lead workers have to watch out for the stuff they handle getting into their systems. You know anything about lead poisoning, Doc?”

  “Symptoms or treatment, Frank?” asked Doc.

  “Both. It’s occurred to me that we might get a lead on the guy if we knew what sort of prescription drugs he was liable to be buying in heavy quantities.”

  Doc Evans thought a moment and then he said, “Best antidote for lead poisoning is BAL. That stands for British anti-lewisite. For flushing metallic poisons out of the system, they generally use a diuretic called EDTA. Don’t ask me what in the hell it stands for. I’ve forgotten. And in any case, you couldn’t get either in a drugstore. Time you’ve got that much lead in your system, you belong in a hospital.”

  “Nuts,” I muttered. “Thought I had something.”

  “You still may,” said Doc. “Your lead burner may be taking magnesium sulfate in king-sized doses. Or look for a guy practically living on Rolaids and Alka-Seltzer.”

  “They’re good for lead poisoning?”

  “No, but they’re good for upset stomachs. Lead poisoning starts out as a king-sized bellyache. Painter’s colic, they used to call it. Dyspepsia, chronic constipation, and abdominal cramps. That’s if he’s lucky.”

  “You call that luck?”

  “When you’re dealing with lead poisoning? You bet your bird it’s luck! You have any idea what that stuff can do to your brain if it attacks the nervous system?”

  “Kill you?”

  “In time. But first it gives you the galloping jitters. Palsy, limpness of the joints, or hallucinations, mania, convulsions, and coma, in that order. Takes a lot of lead in your system to get to that stage. But the stuff’s an accumulative poison, Frank. Has the guy got a blue line at the base of his fingernails, or where his teeth join his gums?”

  “How the hell should I know?” I replied. “I’ve never seen MacDonald. What was that business about mania, Doc?”

  “Depends on the patient,” he explained. “If the poison settles in the cerebrum, his computer goes out of whack. He starts hearing and seeing things that just aren’t there and attaches undue importance to trifles. He may start collecting belly-button floss or decide cutting off a whisker at a time is more important than getting to work on time.”

  “What if he was a little unbalanced to start with, Doc? I’ve a service record on MacDonald that shows he had some sort of psycho problems.”

  “Before he started working with lead or after, Frank?”

  “Before.”

  “Then let’s just hope he’s been careful on the job,” said Doc Evans, “because if he’s been absorbing the stuff into his nervous system, you’re liable to have a class A, dingaling nut on your hands!”

  • • • The bottle-green T-bird was found just this side of Beatty, a half-dead mining town sunbathing in the Amargosa River Valley. It had been run off onto a seldom used dirt road leading to an abandoned mine shaft and left to rust. A couple of hunters from Beatty had found it, wondered about a brand new T-bird sitting in the middle of nowhere, and notified the Highway Patrol. I was out to lunch when the call came in, but Crawford told them to keep everyone clear until we could dust it for prints. The report was on my desk when I came back to the office.

  That wasn’t all that was on my desk. There was a plain white envelope… postmarked Vegas… addressed to me, with PERSONAL stamped twice across the front and once across the back. There was no return address.

  Larry Romero hadn’t come back yet, so I told Bert where I was going and headed downstairs to the cruiser, stuffing the envelope in a side pocket until I had time to read what was so damned personal.

  I headed northwest on Route 95 with the siren on and the blinker going. Had a chance to nail what looked like a drunk driver as I tore through Charleston Park. But I had other things on my mind and radioed the marked cruiser patrolling the section to pull him over. It was a tan Buick station wagon with California plates, and they caught up with him before he managed to kill himself or anyone else. By this time I was coming into Beatty, and I spotted a uniformed trooper waving at me from the shoulder of the highway. It was a good thing they’d thought to flag me down. The dirt road cut off through high desert scrub and I’d have missed it completely, even looking for it.

  The T-bird was about a quarter of a mile from the main highway. The cruiser that had reported the find was parked just this side of it on the narrow road. I parked my own cruiser third in line—there wasn’t room to pull up beside the others—and got out. The road was sunbaked to ankle-deep dust, and I cursed the fact that I’d forgotten to stop for my desert boots. I also cursed the dust for another good reason. I’d hoped to get a moulage on any footprints around the abandoned car. There wasn’t a chance.

  The trooper I’d picked up at the crossroads was named Jennings. His partner at the car was Sergeant Phillips. The hunters who’d found the T-bird had gone on home after reporting their find. Phillips had their names in case I wanted to question them. I took them. You just never know in this business.

  “How far up the road is this abandoned mine shaft?” I asked Phillips. He didn’t know, but Jennings did. It was a little over eight miles.

  “Way I figure it,” said Jennings, “whoever left this car here had another car waiting for him back down on the highway. Quarter of a mile’s about as far as most people like to walk.”

  That was the way I figured it too. But there was still that mine shaft up the road. First things being first, I dusted the car for prints.

  There weren’t any.

  “Even wiped inside the glove compartment,” marveled Trooper Jennings as he watched me with professional interest.

  I nodded. “Used a greasy
rag. Like a pro. Let’s try the trunk.”

  “It’s locked.”

  “So let’s unlock it,” I grunted, taking out a set of small metal tools that can get you in big trouble if you’re found carrying them without a badge to go with them.

  It didn’t take long to unlock the T-bird’s trunk compartment. But remembering what I’d found the last time I opened the trunk of a car once owned by one Duncan MacDonald, I braced myself as I heaved the heavy lid up.

  The trunk was empty this time. There wasn’t even a spare tire or a jack handle.

  “We’ll see what the lab boys can find in the cracks,” I said, slamming the lid back down. “Let’s take a look in the mine shaft.”

  “You think he parked here and walked eight miles?” Sergeant Phillips frowned. “The guy’d have to be nuts.”

  “Maybe he was,” I suggested, “or maybe he drove up to the mine shaft, dropped some goodies down it, and drove back almost to the highway before ditching the car.”

  “I never thought of that,” Phillips muttered grudgingly.

  I knew he hadn’t. That was why I was a lieutenant and he wasn’t. But I didn’t say so as I got back in my cruiser.

  I threw my car in low gear, turned off into the greasewood, and ploughed around the other cars until I was back on the dirt road again. Jennings said he knew the way, so I had him ride with me. These desert roads are treacherous as hell, even without a mine shaft at one end.

  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about the abandoned mine. The road fanned out into an area half the size of a football field gouged out of the side of a low hill. The sun-bleached bones of a timber hoist stood at a drunken angle amid gullied piles of spoil and what was left of a tin-roofed cabin. The mine shaft ran into the slope at a forty-five-degree angle. A gaping black hole at the end of some prospector’s rainbow.

  We parked near the cabin and got out. A quick check of the long-deserted cabin produced nothing of interest except for an empty liniment bottle the desert sunlight had slowly turned to lavender “sun quartz.” Jennings pocketed it with the observation that you didn’t find much sun quartz intact.