File on a Missing Redhead

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File on a Missing Redhead Page 8

by Lou Cameron


  “Thanks,” I said, getting to my feet. “I appreciate the tip, Tex.”

  “’Sokay.” He shrugged. “It’s bad for business when a cop gets hit.”

  “Lieutenant, honey?” asked Phoebe LeRoy as I started to leave.

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering, later on tonight, if you’re not doing anything…”

  “I appreciate that, too.” I smiled, hoping she didn’t catch the lewd wink Tex shot me from one side. “But like the man said, I’ve got to move fast. Afraid I’ll be busy for the next few days.”

  “I can wait.” She smiled, licking her lips.

  • • • I got to Roberta Grey’s collection agency around four thirty. I told Larry to stand by and opened the door on my side. He said, “Have I got time for a cup of joe, Lieutenant?”

  I told him it was okay, and we agreed to meet at the diner around the corner if I came down before he’d finished polishing off his coffee and cheesecake.

  I went upstairs and asked to see both Roberta and Hazel Collier. Roberta was glad to see me. But Hazel was still packing that same chip on her shoulder.

  I told them what I’d found out so far and added, “I’ve been checking around town. Been to the radiation lab and a couple of other places. Hazel, you’ve got to help me find Kathy Gorm before it’s too late.”

  “I’ve already told you—” she began.

  “Nuts to what you’ve already told me!” I cut in. “We’ve got a better line on MacDonald now, and he’s a real gone kook!”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” said Hazel stubbornly.

  “I do,” said Roberta. “Where do you think you’re going, Hazel?”

  “Back to my office.”

  “Like hell you are!” the heavy woman snapped. “Sit down, dammit. That’s an order!” She sounded like she meant it.

  Hazel bit back an angry retort, flounced over to a nearby chair, and sat down. She crossed her legs, took out a cigarette, and studiously ignored me as she lit it and I continued with what I’d found out so far about Duncan MacDonald.

  “He came out here six months ago to work for a subcontractor who installs dental equipment,” I said. “But, as you know, he started blowing all his pay on the Strip and wound up broke, in hock, and with a couple of attachments slapped on his pay. The place he worked for figured it was easier to get a steadier worker than to fritz around with the extra bookkeeping the courts had stuck them with. So they fired him.”

  “I tell clients never to slap more than one garnish on the same debtor,” said Roberta. “They’ll either get fired or skip, every time.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “so that left MacDonald stranded and broke. He changed his name and took a job building a cobalt safe for the radiation lab out by the university. But it didn’t pay that well and he blew what little he made the same way. I imagine it was while he was working there that Kathy caught up with him. He seemed to like the trick of reversing his Social Security number when applying for a job. Should have been one of the things an experienced skip tracer like Kathy would have looked for.”

  “Along with the Scotch name.” Roberta Grey nodded. “Some ethnic groups think it’s clever to switch nationalities along with their aliases. Scotch, Irish, and Welsh almost never do.”

  “So he changed his name in order to work at an honest job,” said Hazel. “What’s so terrible about that?”

  “Nothing much,” I said, “but the next job he took wasn’t quite so honest. He took a job as a shill on the Strip.”

  “Gambling’s legal in this state.”

  “Sure, and so’s shilling, as long as nobody gets cheated,” I said. “But along in here somewhere, MacDonald met a thrill-crazy divorcée named Sandra Dipple. We can’t pin it down to the day. But we’ve found the beauty shop where she had her hair dyed. MacDonald seems to like redheads. That would mean he’d met both Sandra and Kathy and was stringing the two of them along at the same time. Maybe with a little overlap. Not much. He was quite athletic in bed and seems to have pleased both of them well enough for them to throw in with him. Kathy started messing up his credit records and giving him motherly advice on how to cheat on installment payments about the same time Sandra Dipple was helping him bilk a couple of houses on the Strip out of seven thousand dollars.”

  “Then Sandra’s the one they found in his car!” gasped Roberta Grey.

  I nodded and explained. “He clipped his boss first, then helped Sandra clean the place where she was working out of an even bigger bundle of chips. The houses keep tabs on employees, and you can only work the gimmick they pulled once. So there was Duncan MacDonald with two redheads, and he only needed one.”

  “Kathy,” put in Roberta. “To help him get away.”

  I nodded. “Right. Sandra was a trouble dame. And there was the matter of splitting all that nice green lettuce between them. So he knocked her off. She was a wild broad, and a heavy drinker. Strychnine has very little taste and it’s easy to come by around here. He might have known what a horrible death it was, and he might not have. Once he’d dosed her with enough to kill a pack of coyotes, it probably didn’t matter too much. He must have been a cold-blooded son of a bitch to smash her face in after prying open her clenched jaws to remove her dentures the way he did. Most men would have had to have hated a woman pretty bad to snip her fingers off, one at a time, after watching her die an agonizing death.”

  “Jesus!” marveled Roberta, “I was wondering why you were having so much trouble identifying the body! But, wasn’t it dumb of him to have used his own car like that?”

  “Dumb like a fox,” I said. “He never expected us to find the car. He drove it out to a wrecking yard and left it in line to be baled for scrap. If he hadn’t made one little mistake about the tires, it would have worked.”

  “But it didn’t,” Roberta objected, “and the car was registered in his name.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “That made it the only car in Las Vegas he could steal with impunity. The pink slip was in his name, even though he’d left it as security on a bad debt. If he’d been caught with it, before killing the Dipple woman and driving her out to the dump, he’d have been guilty of running out on a bill, not grand larceny. He probably had a set of duplicate keys and knew right where it would be at three in the morning. Since the only witness to the theft reported the car being driven out of the motel by a redheaded woman, the odds are he had Sandra Dipple swipe it herself.”

  “Or Kathy.”

  “Doubtful,” I said. “Remember, he and Sandra had financial matters to transact. He might have been holding out on her. Or he might have already split their take and intended to get it back the easy way. In either case, they’d have been keeping an eye on one another. Besides, Sandra was a thrill seeker. It sounds like the nutty kind of caper that would appeal to her jaded mind. According to both of you, Kathy Gorm is a shy type. Hard to see her swiping cars at three in the morning.”

  “She might have stolen a car for him,” said Roberta, “but I can’t see her helping him with a murder. Especially the murder of a fellow member of his harem. Kathy may be a romantic little fool, but she’s hardly sophisticated enough for a ménage à trois.”

  “Another point to remember,” I said, “is that this MacDonald’s cagey and very, very concerned about his own neck. He didn’t chance stealing the car himself. My guess is that he wouldn’t have the guts to drive it very far with a dead body in the trunk. He probably waited until Sandra Dipple swiped it, drove out to the junkyard with her, and finished her off at leisure in the wee small hours. She might have been half juiced to begin with, and the coroner’s office says one extra swig spiked with strychnine would have done the job. Probably drove her out for some desert fun and games, poisoned her, and tidied up after himself by stripping her of all identification and jamming her in the trunk.”

  “But the slave bracelet!” said Hazel abruptly. “Why was she wearing Kathy’s slave bracelet?”

  “She wasn’t,” I said. “They found it unde
r the body, not on it. There are a dozen ways he might have gotten hold of it if he was dating Kathy at the same time. Probably fell off in the car, or his room. He didn’t expect us to find the body,” I continued, “but he was too cagey to leave everything to chance. After disfiguring the corpse, he planted his other girl’s identification bracelet on it, figuring to give us a red herring to chew on. That almost worked, too. We’ve been so busy chasing phony leads that he’s had a hell of a head start. Only break we’ve had is his reluctance to leave the state.”

  “Why doesn’t he?” asked Roberta. “There are other places you can gamble, you know.”

  “Not as easily,” I said. “MacDonald’s a psycho when it comes to gambling. It’s the only thing that means more to him than women. He’s sick, Hazel. He can’t leave the only part of the country he can gamble day and night in. And he can’t stop gambling. Not even if he has to steal or kill to keep going. Kathy’s in danger, Hazel. Real danger. You know what he’s done to one girl after he couldn’t use her anymore and—”

  “I know what you say he’s done,” Hazel replied loftily.

  “Say, my balls!” I snapped. “You think I’m dreaming this whole thing up? I want to show you something.”

  I took out a full-length photograph of Sandra Dipple posing in her white bikini, and one other. I shoved the first shot under Hazel’s nose and snapped, “Look at this, damn you! This is Sandra Dipple. She was a bitch on wheels. But she was gorgeous. She made your friend Kathy look like a pig.”

  “So?” Hazel shrugged, glancing disdainfully at the print in my hand.

  “So here’s a full color shot of her taken on the autopsy table,” I continued brutally. “Look at it, damn your high and lofty mind! Take a good look at what a pretty girl looks like after she’s been murdered, mutilated, and left to rot by your romantic chum’s lover-boy.”

  “I—I saw it!” She gagged, turning away and covering her mouth with a handkerchief.

  “Lieutenant?” asked Roberta Grey, holding out her hand.

  “You sure?” I asked. “It’s pretty bad.”

  “I want to see it,” she insisted.

  I handed her the photograph. She stared down at it impassively. Then she nodded and muttered, “You’re right. It’s pretty bad. And you think Kathy’s liable to wind up the same way?”

  I could have kissed her.

  I shot a sidelong glance at Hazel. She looked like she was thinking. I didn’t know what, but at least her wheels were going. That was something. Hazel had a good brain, when she wanted to use it. Trouble was, she’d stopped thinking—around me at least—the night I’d arrested Stretch Voss.

  I caught myself about to say something about the Mob being after MacDonald too. I bit my tongue just in time. It was true that her friend Kathy was in double jeopardy now that certain gangsters were looking for MacDonald too. But I didn’t think this was the time to bring it up. Hazel liked gangsters. One gangster, anyway.

  I wondered if saying something about her cooperating with the police helping Stretch when he came up for parole would do any good. It was pure, unadulterated crap. But Hazel had swallowed the line he’d handed her. Maybe, if I laid it on thick enough…

  But what about when it came time to deliver? Stretch had been a bad boy. Bad enough for a lot of people, on both sides of the law, to want him out of circulation for a long, long time. He’d run a crooked layout, which was bad enough, then pocketed a big chunk of the take, which was even worse, from his employer’s point of view. If he hadn’t followed up by intimidating a few witnesses and attempting to fix a juror, he’d have been in the same bind as MacDonald about now. I wondered if Hazel knew how much safer Stretch was up in Carson City than he’d be if he ever showed his face on the Strip again.

  I let that thought slide too. The whole thing was too close to home. I’d have to lean heavy on the danger Kathy was in from the guy she was running around with and hope that would be enough to convince Hazel she should help.

  “If it was anyone else,” Hazel said, “I’d be willing to give it a try.”

  She looked at me and added, almost wistfully, “Don’t you see what Stretch would think if he heard I was working with the man who helped put him away?”

  “You could explain it to him, honey,” said Roberta.

  “No,” I cut in, “she couldn’t.”

  Both women looked at me. I shook my head and explained, “If word got around up in Carson City that we were looking for this MacDonald character—”

  “Stretch doesn’t know either of them,” said Hazel. “Why in the world would he tip MacDonald off?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “We’re not the only people looking for MacDonald. He’s got a couple of guns on his trail, too.”

  Hazel shot me a thoughtful look and asked, “Why would Stretch tell anything to anybody in the Mob? Even if he did the things you say he did, he’s hardly on friendly terms with them now.”

  “He would be,” I said, “if he were to pass on some information they could use. Certain people might take the position he’d paid his debt to—ah—society, if he helped them nail a guy who hadn’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, batting her eyelashes as she conned me. I started to ask her who the hell she thought she was kidding. But what did I care what she thought, if she was willing to play ball?

  “I’ll have to think about it,” she said, getting to her feet.

  Roberta started to say something, but I shot her a warning look, and the fat woman nodded as Hazel said something about having to get back to work and walked out. As soon as we were alone, Roberta Grey shook her head in a disgusted way and muttered, “I thought you were a smart hairpin, Lieutenant. But I think you just blew it.”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “Can I use your phone?”

  “Go ahead,” she said, “but don’t you see what you’ve just done? You’ve just made certain that Hazel’s going to tip Stretch off to what you’re up to.”

  “Of course,” I said, dialing headquarters, “but can you think of a better way to get her to help us catch MacDonald?”

  “Oh, she’ll do it,” Roberta said. “She knows as well as you do that Stretch is in trouble with the Mob. She’ll cooperate the hell out of you—while she’s feeding a blow-by-blow progress report to her boyfriend in the can.”

  “Yeah.” I grinned. Then I had Bert Crawford on the horn and shushed Roberta Grey as I said, “Bert, I want Stretch Voss moved to the maximum security block. Think we can swing it with a minimum amount of fuss?”

  “If I give the warden a good enough reason,” Bert replied cautiously.

  “Tell him it’s in connection with a homicide case and a couple of guns,” I said, “and see what he can do about intercepting the guy’s mail as usual. I want his incoming mail forwarded to our office. He’s to have no mailing privileges until we say so.”

  “They’ll have to think up some disciplinary charge,” Bert objected, “or we’ll have the goddamn Civil Liberties people on us. He’s been a model prisoner, the way I hear it.”

  “Been getting mail with secret messages,” I said. “That’s a violation of prison regulations. If the warden can’t clamp down on him for that, we’ll have to think of something better.”

  I gave Bert a few more instructions and hung up. Roberta Grey was staring at me openmouthed. I grinned at her and said, “The old invisible ink gimmick. Hazel’s been using lemon juice to scribble between the lines. Stretch must have told her how before he went up.”

  “And you’ve known all along?”

  “Sure. Half the guys up there are getting secret messages from their girls. Sending them, too. Ultraviolet picks it up as they censor the mail.”

  “And nobody does anything about it?”

  “Not unless they have to. It’s a harmless outlet for the cons, and we pick up a lot of information we might not if we made things too difficult.”

  “So when Hazel tips Stretch off, your friends at Carson City will intercept her message? Stretc
h will never get her letter?”

  “Oh, he’ll get it,” I said. “At least, he’ll get a copy produced by our lab, with a slightly different message in lemon juice between the lines.”

  “I see.” Roberta Grey frowned. “And the same laboratory forgers will send her an answer that satisfies her.”

  It was a statement, not a question. I shot the fat woman a look of respect. Damn, she was quick! I was already regretting the amount of information I’d just given her. But I had to let her in on some of what I planned. Roberta Grey was as anxious as I to capture MacDonald before something happened to Kathy Gorm. If she thought I was as stupid as I wanted Hazel to think, she was liable to swing into action herself, and we already had enough people making waves. Working on my side, contented that I knew what I was doing, Roberta Grey could be a big help. Bucking us, she could be a formidable complication.

  As if she’d read my mind, Roberta said, “Hazel’s my friend, Lieutenant. You know she’s my friend. Are we playing wheels within wheels?”

  “Come again?”

  “Are you banking on my telling Hazel what you just told me? Because if you want me to, I will. But I can’t see what the weenie is. You don’t want Stretch Voss to know what’s up, do you?”

  “Slow down!” I laughed. “You’re getting as Machiavellian as a game of three-dimensional Byzantine chess!”

  “Paranoid,” she corrected. “I told you a girl gets paranoid in this business. Trouble is, sometimes you wind up playing chess when the name of the game is checkers.”

  “Happens to cops, too. Sometimes the solution to a caper seems too simple to be true. We start looking for angles that just aren’t there and—”

  That’s when it happened.

  There was a sudden flash of light, an ear-splitting explosion, and a shower of broken glass as the window behind Roberta Grey’s desk came in just ahead of the shock wave.

  I went over backwards, chair and all, and rolled to my hands and knees. I looked up. Roberta Grey was getting to her feet with a dazed expression. From the shattered window behind her came a babble of shouts, screams, and the hysterical trilling of a police whistle. The fat woman muttered, “What the hell…?” and turned to stare down into the street.

 

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