File on a Missing Redhead

by Lou Cameron

  “You’re going to get Kathy killed!” objected Hazel.

  “Not if we’re lucky,” I snapped, dialing another number. “And unless we move fast, the next body we find in a Volkswagen trunk really will be Kathy Gorm. Now calm down to a roar, everyone. I’m calling the FBI.”

  “Think he’ll run for the Utah line?” asked Cooper. “Lots of salt flats the other side of Wendover. If we spot him out on that dead-straight stretch running for Salt Lake, he’s finished.”

  “The FBI comes in on kidnapping,” I said. “Technically, since the girl’s asked for help, I’m considering her kidnapped. Now shut up, dammit. I’ve got the FBI.”

  I laid the cards on the table with the agent in charge of the Elko office. He got on another phone and dispatched a team in our direction. Then he said, “You the same Lieutenant Talbot who caught Weeping Willie Wagner?”

  I said I was, and he said Weeping Willie was blowing the whistle on everybody he’d known since he’d been toilet trained.

  “Don’t know how much of it we can prove,” said the agent I was talking to, “but we’re sure tying up a lot of loose ends.”

  “He say who hired him, and who he came to Vegas to hit?”

  “Yeah, he was working for Tough Tony Rocco. Rocco owns a place fronted by Phoebe LeRoy, among others.”

  “Then he was sent to scrag MacDonald,” I said.

  “MacDonald?” said the agent. “Nothing in this letter about anyone named MacDonald. He was set to hit a hood named Voss. Howard K. Voss, alias Stretch Voss. Ring any bells?”

  “Sure does,” I said, shooting a cautious look at Hazel. She was sitting with her profile to me, running a lock of her blond hair back and forth between her fingers. I said, “You’re sure about the name? No chance Wagner’s being cute?”

  “What cute?” the agent replied. “Weeping Willie’s so scared of that chair they’ve got waiting for him that he’s pissing in his pants. He knows he’s going to burn, but he keeps hoping against hope that if he’s a real good boy, somebody might kiss it and make it well.”

  I couldn’t tell him about Stretch being in maximum at the time we arrested Weeping Willie. Not with Hazel in the same room. I asked him to call my office and fill Bert Crawford in. Bert would fill him in about Stretch, and maybe together they could figure something out. I had other things to worry about right now.

  I hung up and told the others we might as well go back to the cars. Cooper picked up the phone to put a stakeout inside the store in the unlikely event the fugitive doubled back, and I followed Hazel out the door.

  I don’t know what made me glance up. Maybe a blur of movement at the edge of my vision. Maybe a friend in the angel department. Anyway, I did glance up. And it saved our lives.

  “Down!” I shouted at Hazel as I went for my gun.

  She froze. I stiff-armed her to the sidewalk and dove on top of her, shielding her with my body as I fired six shots in rapid succession at a figure perched atop the glue factory across the street.

  I missed, but I threw his aim off, too. He fired one shot from the high-powered rifle in his hands, shattering the glass behind us, and dropped below the edge of the roof parapet.

  “What the hell…?” yelled Cooper from the doorway. I didn’t answer. I had Hazel by the hair and was dragging her, caveman style, out of the line of fire. She was screaming blue murder.

  “Sniper!” I shouted, hoping every cop within a quarter mile would hear me. “On the roof of the glue factory!”

  “Cover me!” yelled Cooper, running across the street in a cautious crouch. I wondered what the dumb bastard thought I was going to cover him with. My Cobra was empty. Then I saw Sergeant Rose. He was behind a parked car a couple of doors down on our side of the street. He was staring up at the roof with his revolver in his hand.

  By this time, Hazel had stopped screaming and was starting to realize what had happened. “Somebody tried to kill us!” she gasped. I wondered what else was new.

  I finished reloading my gun and followed Cooper across the street at a dead run. Ahead of me, I heard a couple of shots from what sounded like ground level.

  “He’s in the glue factory!” a voice called.

  I ran for an open doorway. It was dark and evil-smelling inside. There were steam pipes and bubbling vats of glue all over the place. A rattled-looking man in crusty overalls asked me if I was looking for the guy with the rifle. I said I was. He pointed up and said, “Catwalk. Your partner winged him and he ducked back inside and climbed them stairs over there.”

  I stared up through the rising fumes. A dark figure was up above us on a narrow catwalk running along under a skylight. He didn’t seem to have the rifle.

  I called, “Hold it right there, Stretch.”

  “Don’t shoot!” the man on the catwalk pleaded, “I’m hit bad and I ain’t got no gun! Please don’t shoot, Officer!”

  “Come on down,” I shouted back, keeping my gun trained on him. I could see he was gripping one of the pipe railings of the catwalk with both hands. He was either afraid of heights, or hurt.

  “I can’t come down!” he called in a desperate whine. “I can’t move. I told you I was hit, dammit!”

  “You’re going to be hit again,” I said, “if you don’t quit stalling!”

  “Who’s stalling?” he whimpered. “I’m bleedin’ like a stuck pig an’ ever’thing’s going around! I can’t hardly see!”

  “Hang on,” I said. “I’ll come up and give you a hand.”

  “Hurry!” he pleaded. “I can’t hang on much longer!”

  I ran over to a nearby ladder and started up, holding my gun in one hand. He didn’t sound like he was faking, but I’ve been to more than one funeral of a cop who gave a punk an even break.

  He wasn’t faking. I was halfway up the ladder when he let go of the rail and fell forward, off the catwalk, without a sound.

  He did a one-and-a-half somersault into the swimming-pool-sized vat directly below him. If he’d taken a dive like that at the Desert Inn pool, he’d have gotten a big hand. Since he took it, instead, into a bubbling vat of boiling glue, all he got was dead.

  Sergeant Cooper and Sergeant Rose had both come in by the time I reached the floor again. Cooper had another cop with him he introduced as Trooper Gonzales, Elko troop. Gonzales had fired the shot that hit the sniper. He’d found the rifle, a Weatherby Magnum, where the sniper’d dropped it outside the rear entrance.

  “Who was he?” asked Rose.

  “Beats the shit out of me,” I said. “I thought it was a guy named Voss, but I got a glimpse of him as he passed by. Nobody I ever saw before.”

  “Can you turn that thing off?” Rose asked the bewildered-looking man in the crusty overalls. The glue man said he’d already shut off the steam valves, but that the glue would boil for a couple of hours anyway.

  “We’ve got to get him out,” I said. “If we wait for that stuff to cool, there’ll be nothing but bones.”

  “Bones my ass!” interrupted the glue man. “We melt bones in that vat.”

  He went over to the wall and got a long-handled tool that looked something like a monster garden rake. He climbed up on the walkway running along the edge of the vat and started dragging the bottom.

  I had a sudden thought and muttered, “Jesus!”

  “What’s the matter, Lieutenant?” asked Rose.

  “I was just thinking,” I said, “how lucky it was for Kathy Gorm that MacDonald didn’t know what was right across the street from them.”

  • • • By the time they fished what was left of the man out of the boiling glue, Rose, Cooper, Hazel, and myself were en route to the ghost town. They called me on the car radio and told me he’d been identified as Scars Masulli, the hood who’d broken out of Carson City with Stretch Voss.

  Hazel, riding beside me, heard it. She gasped and said, “Stretch broke out of prison?”

  “They didn’t give him the keys,” I grunted. I filled her in with as much as I wanted her to know until I figured out
who’d fingered us, or me, at any rate, for the sniping.

  “Surely you don’t think Stretch had anything to do with trying to kill you?” she protested.

  I didn’t answer. When a girl’s in love, she takes dumb pills regularly.

  “I can’t believe it!” she insisted. “Even if Stretch didn’t get my message—even if he’s got some crazy idea about us—he couldn’t kill anyone!”

  I shrugged. “Maybe you’re right, but he sure talks a good killing. That’s one of the reasons they sent him up, remember? Stretch offered to knock off a few witnesses if they didn’t keep their mouths shut!”

  “But… a woman?” she pleaded. “A woman he loved?”

  “Said he loved,” I corrected. “You can’t have it both ways, kid. If he lies about killing people, he could lie about loving them.”

  “I won’t listen!” She sobbed, turning off her brain and running on glands again. “You’re just down on him because of what he means to me. You’ve always been down on Stretch!”

  “Sure,” I said, “I framed him. I went up to Carson City, dug a tunnel, and sprung him and Masulli, just to make him look bad.”

  She chewed on that for a while as we drove in silence. I was chewing too. Some pictures were beginning to emerge from the mists. A lot of people had been playing very cute tricks on me lately. But the trouble with a really complicated crime is that you have to be very, very tidy. Nothing ever goes exactly the way you plan, and the more pieces there are to a puzzle, the more you’re liable to drop.

  You know the toughest case for a cop to solve? A simple case of spontaneous thuggery with a blunt object. Meet some drunk in an alley, pick up anything that’s handy, and clobber him with it. Unless you’re caught within the next five blocks, you’ll drive us out of our skulls. It’s the cutie pies who think they’re Fu Manchu who get caught.

  “There’s something very funny about all this,” Hazel suddenly said in a calmer tone. She nodded to herself, and added, “Stretch told me to cooperate with you, Frank.”

  “He did?” I asked innocently.

  “I guess there’s no harm in telling you now,” she confided. “Stretch and I were writing secret messages in invisible ink.”

  “You’re putting me on!” I said incredulously.

  “It’s true,” she insisted. “I told him I was working with you, and why. He wrote back that he wanted me to. He said it would help with his parole.”

  “Sounds reasonable.” I nodded, trying not to smile.

  “But it’s not reasonable,” she said. “Why would he be after you with a gun if he knew there was nothing between us?”

  “Like you said, maybe he didn’t have anything to do with that sniping back in Elko.”

  “But the man with the rifle broke out of prison with him.”

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, damn you, Frank Talbot! You… you’re impossible!”

  I smiled. “Not impossible. Just highly improbable.”

  We both laughed. Then Hazel looked away. It was an old gag. A gag we’d shared together once, a million dreams ago, when neither of us had ever heard of Stretch Voss.

  There was a crackle from the car radio, and I heard a distant voice asking for me. I answered, and the same voice said, “FBI agent Benson here, Talbot. I’m calling from Rochester. We think we’ve got MacDonald pinned down. The sixty-six Volkswagen’s parked near an abandoned mine shaft on the edge of town.”

  “You check the trunk?” I asked soberly.

  “Yeah,” replied Benson. “It’s empty. The girl must be with him, in the mine.”

  “In the mine?” I frowned, picturing a long-abandoned tunnel shored up by rotting timbers. Then I asked, “You sure they’re in there?”

  “Somebody’s in there,” agent Benson answered. “Took a shot at me when I tried to shine a light down the shaft!”

  • • • It took us the better part of three hours to reach Rochester, but nobody’d made a move in the meantime. There were six or seven cars parked near the abandoned blue Volkswagen. FBI, county, and state troopers had repopulated the little ghost town. One end of it, anyway. Benson turned out to be a heavyset nephew of J. Edgar Hoover. He was wearing desert scuffs, chinos, and a Thompson submachine gun. He waved the nuzzle of the Thompson in the direction of a tall, rickety structure of sun-gray timber and said, “He’s over there.”

  I’d left Hazel in the car with orders to stay, so I didn’t have to look smart. I frowned and said, “Thought you said he was in a mine shaft.”

  “He is.” Benson blinked. Then he caught the direction of my gaze and added, “Oh, that’s a stamping mill. The mine opening’s just beyond. You can’t see it from here. He can’t see us, either. That’s why we’ve got the cars over here. Two of our guys and three of yours are covering the opening from the stamping mill. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you how to move in without exposing yourself in his line of fire.”

  I could have figured it out for myself. But I followed Benson without comment as the FBI man led me in a circuitous route through the knee-high scrub covering the slope up to the stamping mill.

  I asked what had been going on while we’d been getting there.

  Nothing much had.

  “It’s been quiet since he took that one shot,” said Benson. “We’ve tried to talk him out with the bullhorn, but he’s been lying doggo. Not a peep out of either one of them.”

  “Three hours is a long time.” I frowned. “Any chance of there being another way out of there?”

  “Negative,” said the FBI man. “We’ve made a radio check with the company in Elko who used to run this mine. It’s a maze of galleries inside, but there’s only one entrance. He can’t get out and we can’t get in. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Could have done the Dutch act,” I mused.

  “Only one shot,” objected Benson. “If he shot himself, the girl would have come out by now.” Then he muttered. “Of course, he might have killed the girl…”

  I didn’t answer. It would simplify things if we knew Kathy was dead. We could use gas, or just block the entrance and wait for him to get hungry, if the girl was dead. But it seemed so futile to have come this far only to find he’d done what we’d figured all the time he was going to do.

  Benson was wrong about my “three guys.” Two of them were troopers, and the other was from the county. The deputy’s name was Wayne and he was eager. He had a gas gun, a clear shot at the entrance from behind the machinery of the stamping mill, and a desire to use them both.

  One of the FBI agents was arguing with him about it as Benson and I joined them.

  “He’s got a hostage in there with him, dammit,” the FBI man was explaining as I eased myself into position beside them.

  “The gas won’t hurt her,” insisted the deputy. “Oh, it’ll make her sick, maybe. But it’ll drive them both out into the open.”

  “Or deeper into the mine,” I corrected. “The ventilation’s not liable to be too good in there as it is, Deputy. We’d be likely to suffocate them with gas, even if it didn’t run them into a vertical shaft, blind, or into some rotten timbers that could have us digging a month to recover the bodies.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” admitted the deputy defensively, “but we gotta do something, for Chrissake. That goddamn MacDonald’s a nut. I mean, a real sex-maniac nut.”

  “We looked over the luggage in the Volkswagen,” explained Benson. “He had the damnedest collection of sex paraphernalia this side of the fun-and-games room of the Marquis de Sade.”

  I grimaced and asked to use the bullhorn. One of the FBI men handed it to me, and I aimed the speaker at the mine shaft entrance and pulled the trigger. There was a hiss of white noise, and then my voice echoed off the mountain as I called, “MacDonald, this is Lieutenant Talbot. I’m a friend of Kathy’s, Duncan. Why don’t we talk this over? You can’t get out of there, buddy. Why not give yourself a break? Send the girl out, MacDonald. She’s no good to you in there, and you’ll b
e doing yourself a favor with the judge if we can say you didn’t hold her against her will.”

  Nothing.

  I looked at the others and shrugged. The deputy said, “If you’d lemme use a little gas…”

  It was worth a try. I flicked the bullhorn on again and called, “We’ve got gas guns, MacDonald. We don’t want to use them if we don’t have to. Can’t we at least talk this over?”

  Still nothing. The black hole in the mountain yawned at us like an idiot’s gaping mouth. MacDonald could be just inside, with his gun trained on the stamping mill while he waited for one of us to get brave, or he could be a mile down the shaft and not even hearing the bullhorn. That was something to think about.

  He might have dragged the girl deep into the earth, looking for another entrance to the mine. He’d have had no way of knowing there wasn’t any. The mine was a tangle of side galleries leading to nowhere. He could be frantically searching for a way out of this one mess he couldn’t run from, like a rat in a laboratory maze. He’d hardly be likely to know the layout, or that he was trapped. It would take hours to explore completely the abandoned mine. It would take us even longer to find him in there, if any of us were dumb enough to try.

  I pictured myself inching into that black maze under the mountain, gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, while I waited for a shot from a desperate cornered rat I’d finally run into a blind alley. It wasn’t a nice picture, but it was something somebody was going to have to do, sooner or later. And Rochester was in my jurisdiction.

  “Kathy!” a feminine voice called from my right. I peered out and spotted Hazel down the slope. She was waving at the mine entrance from the dubious cover of the abandoned Volkswagen. I yelled, “Get back, you little fool!”