File on a Missing Redhead

by Lou Cameron

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “I’m stalling whilst I figure out if what I got is worth what you said. I mean, if I could give you an educated guess…”

  “Try me,” I said.

  “Well, the way I heard it,” said Weeping Willie, “the bomb got the wrong cop, see?”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Well, there was this guy just got out of Carson City prison. He says there’s this con up there. A racket guy. He says the guy’s been offering a big bundle to just about anybody due to get out. I mean, like the guy’s out of his skull!”

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s he been trying to get these cons to do when they get out?”

  “Knock off a cop,” said Weeping Willie.

  “Come again? You say there’s a guy in Carson City—a con—who’s offering a standing reward for knocking off a cop?”

  “Not just any cop,” explained Weeping Willie Wagner. “This dingaling con’s out of his skull because the same cop who sent him up is dating his girl.”

  Weeping Willie chuckled and added, “Ain’t that a bitch? Women are all whores, anyway. You’d think a knockaround racket guy’d have figured this for hisself by now. But they say he’s really chewing up the walls about it. Anyhow, that’s all I know about it, Lieutenant. I figure there’s a chance some con who just got out might have done the job for this jerk. But I couldn’t prove it, and I don’t even know the racket guy’s name.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I do.”

  • • • The FBI man in charge of the Boulder City branch looked like a younger edition of J. Edgar Hoover. Come to think of it, just about all the FBI men I’ve ever met look like they’re at least related to old J. Edgar. I’ve never figured out if it was nepotism or the sincerest form of flattery.

  I told him about the tentative deal I’d made with Weeping Willie Wagner. He started to lecture me on my responsibilities as a peace officer.

  I said, “You can have the goddamn silencer if you can’t nail him with the murder rap. But unless you’ve got a weak case—”

  “Weak my ass!” snapped the FBI man. “He’s going to burn, Lieutenant. Wise-ass sonovabitch thought he was being cute when he knocked off the state’s two star witnesses. Only he carried one of them across a state line to do it. That gave us jurisdiction, and we’ve worked with the Georgia authorities to build an airtight box for Weeping Willie. He couldn’t beat the rap with six Philadelphia lawyers, an uncle in Congress, and a certificate of virginity!”

  “Then do me a favor,” I coaxed, “let me forget about the silencer.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “He’ll burn,” I explained, “but he’ll talk to a lot of cons before they strap him down. It might make our job easier in the future if some ex-con had heard the Nevada Highway Patrol shoots straight.”

  “You’ve got a point,” mused the FBI man. He thought a moment and then he said, “Tell you what, Lieutenant. We’ll forget about the silencer unless we need it, okay?”

  “Deal.” I smiled. “But I don’t see how you’ll ever need it. Why tack on a federal arms violation when you’ve got him on three murders?”

  “You just never know, in this business.”

  “But you said—”

  “Yeah, I know what I said. But for all we know, Weeping Willie Wagner’s got six Philadelphia lawyers, an uncle in Congress, and a certificate of virginity!”

  • • • I spent a day and a half at Lake Mead. I had help from the Boulder Beach and Vegas Bay forces, the Park Rangers got into the act, and, just to cover all bets, I asked the Temple Bar force, on the Arizona side, to check from Hoover Dam to Overton.

  We bombed out.

  Oh, there were oodles and oodles of young couples in maroon Karmann Ghias. I hadn’t known there were that many maroon Karmann Ghias outside the Black Forest. But none of them turned out to be the one we were after. Wherever MacDonald and Kathy Gorm had intended to use those water skis, it hadn’t been Lake Mead.

  I’d phoned in the tip Weeping Willie Wagner had given me about Stretch Voss. Bert Crawford had been checking out the recent releases from Carson City. Only a dozen or so had returned to the Las Vegas area within the past few weeks. Most had been easy to find. Two of them verified the rumor about Stretch Voss having offered a reward for my sudden demise.

  I’d had time to think about that as I drove back from Lake Mead. I called Carson City and asked them to restore mailing privileges to Voss. Then I sat down and wrote him a nice long letter from Hazel. I told the lab boys to insert another secret message to Stretch. It read, “Frank Talbot knows who put the bomb in his car. He doesn’t suspect me yet, darling, but he’s sure you had something to do with it. He says he’s only waiting for proof that you ordered that man to do it before he closes in on him.”

  It would be interesting to see what Stretch wrote in reply.

  Meanwhile, I dropped by the Grey collection agency to see if Hazel had turned anything up on the fugitive couple. She hadn’t had much luck.

  “I’ve called everyone I could think of in Lake Tahoe,” she said. “I’m working on Pyramid Lake now.”

  “Check the dental labs around Reno?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she replied, “but he’s probably too busy spending the take from around here to think of lead burning. We’ve been getting a rash of calls from stores and finance companies the two of them clipped with that phony gravel business.”

  “I dunno,” I mused. “The way MacDonald gambles, he’ll be needing money soon. Tahoe’s on the California line, which makes it good strategically for a guy on the lam. But I’ve sort of been wondering about Ruby Lake.”

  “Where’s that?” She frowned. “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know anyone who’s ever been there.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I’ve been wondering about it,” I said. “Unless those water skis were purchased as a deliberate red herring, and don’t think that dismal thought hasn’t crossed my mind, he’s looking for a place to water ski, gamble, and hide out. You can gamble anywhere in the state. So that leaves us with a lake, and an area not many Vegas people are liable to visit. Yeah, the more I think of it, the more I like Ruby Lake.”

  “Where is it?” she repeated.

  “Up near Elko,” I said. “It’s in the hilly cattle country up in the northeast corner of the state. The area’s lousy with hidey holes. Woods, lava beds, and dozens of ghost towns. More important, it’s got Bing Crosby.”

  “It’s got what?” Hazel asked.

  “Bing Crosby. He’s been playing Howard Hughes up in the Elko neighborhood. Has a big cattle ranch and a couple of business holdings. More important, he’s attracted other people with money to the area. West Coast money.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning things are starting to move up around Elko. But the moving’s legit. Very little Mob activity up that way. Just filthy-rich movie stars and even richer cattle kings. Not a bad place for a gambler who likes action but doesn’t want to meet too many guns while he’s blowing Mob money. Good place for a lead burner, too.”

  “How do you figure that?” she asked.

  “Dentists,” I replied. “Elko’s been a pretty sleepy place until recently. Now, with all these new people with money buying five-acre ranches all over the Ruby Mountains—”

  “They’ll have more toothaches than the established dentists could shake a stick at!” Hazel cut in. “High-priced bridgework and capping, too. Elko would be a hell of a place to start a new practice, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, and you need a lead burner to install your X-ray shielding,” I answered.

  Hazel got up from her desk and walked to a nearby bookcase. She took down a large volume bound in a clip-on cover of fake morocco leather and brought it back to her desk.

  “Elko Yellow Pages,” she explained. “I’m going to be busy for a while, Frank.”

  “I’m going to drop in on Roberta before I go,” I said. “After that, I’ll be checking out a few leads in my cruiser. If you find anyth
ing, they’ll be able to reach me by radio. You know the number?”

  “By heart,” she said, opening the Yellow Pages.

  I stood there a moment, wondering how to take that. There’d been a time when she’d called the number a lot. When we’d been going together. But she didn’t explain further. So I said, “See you,” and split.

  I went down the passageway and stopped outside Roberta Grey’s door. I started to knock. Then I realized she was on the phone and waited for her to finish her act.

  It was a pretty good one. I knew her voice now. But even I had a hard time remembering I was listening to a two-hundred-pound woman who’d never see fifty again, instead of the lost little girl she was pretending to be.

  “Golly, mister!” she was saying in what sounded like a ten-year-old’s verge-of-tears tremolo, “my Uncle Ellison was supposed to meet me at the airport and take me to my mom’s apartment! Are you sure there’s nobody there named Ellison Purvis?”

  I waited until she’d burst into tears and gotten the information that her Uncle Ellison was at work, and where he worked, before I tapped softly on the door and tiptoed in. Roberta was just hanging up the phone. She looked up at me and grinned.

  “Always works with a motel manager,” she explained, “no matter what they’ve told him about not giving out information to people who call.”

  “I may have to borrow Hazel for a few days,” I said.

  “You’ve located them?”

  “No. Just a hunch they might be up around Elko.”

  “Didn’t he tell the people at that motel he was going to Elko?” she asked.

  “Might have been a Freudian slip,” I said, “or even the truth. Sometimes pathological liars throw you that kind of a curve, you know. One thing seems odd, for a guy who wasn’t raised in Nevada.”

  “What’s that, Lieutenant?”

  “He knew there was such a place as Elko,” I said. “Most out-of-staters know about Reno or Tahoe. But Elko’s either a very artistic lie or the truth.”

  “He’s been up to Reno and back since he left that place without paying his bill,” she mused. “Could be you’re on to something. Want me to get on the horn?”

  “Hazel’s checking,” I said. “By the way, who’s going to get the phone bill I’ve got her running up on you?”

  “Not to worry,” she said. “I get a special rate.”

  She hesitated a moment before adding, “Besides, I want him caught before he hurts Kathy. I don’t want any of my girls hurt, Lieutenant.” She shot me a meaningful look and said, “That includes Hazel.”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t oh me, you Machiavellian bastard!” She smiled. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “You’re worried about me making a pass at her?”

  “Screw the pass!” She snorted. “Screw her, as far as that goes! It might do her some good! I’m not worried about anyone ravaging her fair white body, dammit! I’m worried about that kooky son of a bitch, Stretch Voss!”

  “He’s in the can,” I said. “Maximum security.”

  “His friends aren’t,” she objected. “Word’s gotten around the Strip about a certain cop being marked for a hit.”

  “Talk.” I shrugged. “How could he pay off? He’s in the can, remember?”

  “And the money he salted away before you caught up with him?”

  “It was never recovered… But he’s doing heavy time—” I started to say. Then I nodded thoughtfully and said, “I see what you mean. Stretch is in the can, but his money isn’t. And money talks.”

  “Dozens of ways he could arrange a payoff,” Roberta Gray agreed. “Dozens of ways to double-cross the gun who hit you, too. But anyone dumb enough to kill a cop might not figure that out in time to do you much good.”

  “I wasn’t expecting anything when they bombed my cruiser,” I said. “Now that I’m on guard, it might not be so easy.”

  “So who’s going to guard Hazel?”

  “I see what you mean.” I frowned. “Maybe I won’t borrow Hazel, after all. I thought she’d come in handy when I drove up to Elko. But she’d be a lot safer here.”

  “Safe as my ass! I thought you said you knew about the talk that’s going around.”

  “I do,” I protested. “Stretch Voss is mad at me. So mad he’s been plotting a bit of remote-control murder.”

  “For both of you,” Roberta said. “He’s not a very nice guy, Lieutenant, even when he’s feeling good. They say he’s not feeling good at all about you and Hazel being seen together.”

  “There’s nothing going on,” I said. “You know damned well that Hazel’s down on me.”

  “Sure.” Roberta nodded. “I know that, and you know that, and Hazel knows that. But Stretch doesn’t know that. You intercepted her letter to him, remember?”

  “Then he thinks,” I said, “that Hazel’s double-crossed him.”

  “That’s why she’ll be safer with you than alone,” said Roberta Grey. “I’ve talked to a couple of fellows who just got out of state prison. Stretch Voss has passed the word he wants both of you killed!”

  • • • It was two in the afternoon when I intercepted the call on my car radio. I was cruising west along Flamingo Road when it came in. Two troopers had a suspect holed up in a motel cabin just outside the city line. The motel was on Route 95. Flamingo and Route 95 join up a few miles east of the Strip. I turned on my siren and blinker, made a U-turn, and went to give them a hand.

  A couple of Vegas prowl cars and a cruiser from the Clark County Sheriff’s Department had gotten there ahead of me. When people start shooting at policemen, we tend to forget jurisdictional details.

  The trooper who’d called for help was named Gurney. He said the suspect was holed up in the last cabin of the second-rate motel court that ran its gravel finger out into the gray desert scrub north of U.S. Route 95. He told me all this in the shade of a cottonwood tree between the clustered police cars and the nearest ramshackle wooden cabin. I asked where the other people from the motel were.

  “We herded them into that diner down there,” he said, motioning in the direction of a nearby greasy spoon. I noticed faces at the windows. They were within range of the cabin occupied by the suspect. I said, “Move them out of there. I want everybody we don’t need at least five hundred yards from here.”

  “He couldn’t hit nobody at that range if he tried, Lieutenant,” the trooper protested, “and it’s hotter than hell out in the sun.”

  “You ever see a woman, or a kid, take a bullet in the guts, Trooper?” I snapped. “It’s dead flat out here. A rimfire twenty-two will carry a mile, and the tin walls of that diner won’t stop anything going faster than a snowball. Move, Trooper!”

  He moved, muttering something under his breath I preferred not to hear. I walked over to a man in a Vegas police uniform. He said he was Sergeant Dalton. I asked him to fill me in.

  “One of your Highway Patrol cars pulled into the drive,” Dalton said. “Somebody opened fire on them. That’s as much as any of us know.”

  “Just like that?” I frowned, looking around. I spotted another man in Highway Patrol uniform and called him over. He was Gurney’s partner. His name was Massie. He didn’t have the foggiest notion of why they’d been fired upon.

  “We pulled in to turn around, Lieutenant,” Massie explained. “We were about to head back down our beat and the traffic was heavy. So we drove into the court, like we’ve done a hundred times before, and all hell broke loose.”

  I shot a look at the triangle of bullet holes in the rear door of their cruiser and observed, “Lucky for you he didn’t know enough to lead a moving car. Anybody covering the back?”

  “My partner,” cut in Sergeant Dalton, “and a couple of deputy sheriffs. They’ve circled around through the greasewood. You can’t get too close to the rear of that cabin without leaving cover. But he isn’t going anywheres either.”

  “Got a name for this bird?” I asked Massie.

  “Manager says he registered
as Joe Webster,” said Massie. “No car. No luggage. Payment in advance. Manager says he’s a seedy-looking little guy with a drinker’s nose and thin gray hair. About fifty. Wears a black silk suit and a dirty white shirt with no tie. Looks like a bum.”

  “You call his name in?”

  “Yeah. Nobody wanted by the name of Webster. Doesn’t fit the description of anyone we’re hot for either.”

  “Psycho?” offered Sergeant Dalton.

  “Let’s find out,” I said. “Anybody got a bullhorn?”

  “Right here,” said Dalton, picking up a powered megaphone he’d placed just out of my sight at the base of the cottonwood. He handed it to me and said, “We’ve been trying to call him out, Lieutenant. He hasn’t answered. Hasn’t even fired at us again.”

  I pointed the bullhorn at the cabin, pressed the button, and called, “What’s the trouble, Joe? This is Lieutenant Talbot of the state police. You’ve made some kind of mistake, fella. Nobody’s trying to hurt you.”

  Nothing.

  “Think he’s still in there?” asked Dalton.

  “He couldn’t have gotten out,” objected Massie.

  “How long did he have before you surrounded the place?”

  “Couple of minutes, maybe. But where the hell could he go? Look at that desert out there, Lieutenant. It’s dead flat for miles.”

  “Covered with knee-high scrub,” I corrected. “If we can crawl through the stuff, I don’t see why he couldn’t.”

  “He could be playing possum,” objected Dalton. “Or he could have killed himself, for all we know. No telling what a psycho will do.”

  He was right. That was the hell of it. We could be playing cops and robbers with an empty cabin, a dead man, or a kook with a gun trained on us right this minute.

  “Got any gas?” I asked both of them.

  “In the car,” said Massie. “You going to smoke him out?”

  “No.” I smiled. “You are. I want you to try the bullhorn a few more times. Then if he doesn’t come out peaceful, put some gas in there and see what happens. But, for Chrissake, be careful! If he’s in there, you’ve got him without any need to take chances.”

  “What if he’s not in there?” asked Massie as I turned away.