I backed until I could no longer see her. I heard voices in the other part of the house. More officials had arrived. White Jacket hurried out.
“This disturbs you?” Ameche asked. “We will talk on the little terrace.”
I was glad to get out of that room, and away from the stink of death. I pulled the outdoor air deep into my lungs.
He perched one tailored hip on a metal table, pulled out a pack of Kents and gave me one. He looked at me shrewdly.
“They employed you?”
“Just to drive them down.”
“But that was some months ago. Have you been working for them?”
“Just … the odd errand. A little driving. They haven’t been paying me. I’ve been a house guest, you could say.”
“Yes, of course. A guest. And providing … a very personal service for your hostess, no?”
“Is that illegal here?”
“No, of course not. But stupid carelessness should be made illegal. You were caught with her.”
“Yes.”
“So we have a murder and a suicide. Now I shall tell you some facts of life, Mr. Stassen. This is a resort place. We like … rumors of intrigue, but not dirty violence and scandal. Mr. Pinelli was in poor health. He was despondent. You are not in any way in this picture.”
“I’m not?”
“Your things will be packed. You will be out of this house in ten minutes. You will be out of Acapulco by the first aircraft. I cannot insist, but I would say it would be wise for you to leave Mexico. Go now and dress and leave here.”
I looked at him. I shrugged and turned away. After I had gone a dozen feet he said, “Mr. Stassen!” I looked back at him. “She was much too old for you, chico.”
Kathy was under a great bed, screaming and screaming, holding her bleeding arm. John Pinelli, crawling, peered under at her, the big, ridiculous gun in his hand.
There was nothing in the world worth arguing about. I left. I had a thousand dollars when I arrived in Mexico City. I found a cheap hotel. I got blind, stupid drunk. Four days later I had eleven dollars left, and somebody had stolen my suitcase. I wired home for money. Ernie wired me a hundred dollars. I bought the clothes and toilet articles I needed. I fooled around the city for a while, living cheap, trying not to think about Kathy. I drank enough to keep the whole thing a little dulled, a little far back in my mind. When the money was dangerously low, I took a bus to Monterrey. There I ran into a family from Sonora, Texas. A man and wife and two small kids, traveling in a pickup truck.
He had a bad infection in his right hand, and his little Mexican wife couldn’t drive a car. So we made a deal.
I came back across the border at Del Rio on Sunday, the nineteenth day of July. He felt he could drive one-handed to Sonora. We parted company there, in Del Rio. I had a little over fifteen dollars left. I didn’t give a damn where I went or what I did. It was a blistering afternoon. I decided I might as well hitch-hike east. I walked a way east out of town on Route 90. I had no luck. I kept moving slowly as I tried. I came to a beer joint. I went in. After the glare outside I couldn’t see anything.
A high penetrating voice said, “And here is Joe College, seeing America first, having a great big fat adventure before he poops out and joins Rotary.”
That’s how I met Sander Golden, Nanette Koslov and Shack Hernandez.
SEVEN
In the fat Wolf Pack file, the first memorandum written by Riker Deems Owen about Nanette Koslov is perhaps the most pretentious one of the lot. As with most men who claim to be unable to understand women, Owen tends to overcomplicate his observations, to see devices and nuances where none exist.
Yet in spite of the somewhat fevered pace of his imagination in his account of this semi-attractive young woman, one cannot say that his observations would in any way impede the sales of the memoirs he plans to write some day.
Like most small-bore, pretentious men, Riker Owen shows the tendency to strike an emotional attitude and then, using that prejudice as a base, draw vast, unreasoned, philosophical conclusions.
One can see this device in action in the very first paragraph of the first Koslov memorandum:
* * *
It would be a most unprofessional attitude for a doctor, a psychiatrist or a defense attorney to believe that any individual is evil in the old-fashioned, Biblical meaning of the word. In my conferences with Nanette Koslov I have had to consciously fight to prevent myself from succumbing to this inaccurate oversimplification. I have, in fact, delayed my preparation of this memorandum until I could be certain in my own mind that I have established a completely objective attitude toward her, rather than an emotional or even semi-superstitious attitude.
She is but twenty years of age, but it is extraordinarily easy to overlook the fact she is a young girl.
She is five foot six and weighs a little over a hundred and twenty pounds. Her breasts are smaller than average, her hips rather wide and mature. She has a heavy, glossy mop of chestnut-brown hair, which she customarily wears completely unfettered. It falls below her shoulders. It is rather raggedly cropped in front, cut off at the level of her heavy eyebrows. She seems to look out from under it at you, like an animal safe under a hedge, watching you. Her eyes are a slightly muddy green, and very direct. While talking or listening she has a lot of tics and mannerisms that are all involved with the hair. She is forever fingering it, pulling a sheaf of it across her throat like a furry scarf, or pulling a strand of it across her lips, or across one eye.
Her other mannerisms, the way she sits and stands, are, I have been informed, a conscious imitation of that little French strumpet with the face like Huckleberry Finn. The French call such conscious imitation bardolatrie, I believe. Her features are quite plain, the nose snubbed and rather flat, the mouth broad and soft, the skin texture coarse, with the enlarged pores particularly evident on the broad cheekbones. Her only make-up is a dark lipstick, carelessly and lavishly used. On her brows and her strong hands are those small random scars acquired by those whose lives are spent close to the edge of darkness.
I find in reading over these paragraphs of description that I have not done her justice. The description itself is accurate, but in her case she adds up to more than the sum of the parts. There is a savage, sensuous impact to her appearance. Sander Golden has called her an animal. That word captures some of the essence of her. She exudes an automatic sexual challenge, a knowing, skeptical arrogance that makes a man feel there is something he should prove to her. I do not believe this is a conscious thing with her. It is, perhaps, a matter of glands, hormones. Even the slightly unwashed look of her constitutes, in itself, an inexplicable appeal—possibly an appeal to the base desires shared by all men, though acknowledged by very few of us.
I do know that it has been, and will continue to be, difficult to conduct interviews with her. When she has those direct green eyes on you and pulls that shining hair across her lips and slowly shifts her round, solid thighs, it is as if you are exploring two channels of communication simultaneously, only one of them verbal. And at times the subterranean communication becomes so strong as to drown out the words you are saying. And then, for a time, you are lost, and must pause and remember what you were trying to say.
Her background is drab. Her people are Polish peasants. They fled to West Germany in 1945 and were one of the fortunate families who spent very little time in a resettlement camp before coming to the United States with their three small children and settling near Bassett, Nebraska, in a tenant-farming situation. Nanette was six at that time. Three more children were born to the Koslovs in Nebraska. Nanette learned English rapidly, attended public school, and worked on the land. Her people were so strict as to border on cruelty. Nanette matured early. At fourteen, after being expelled from junior high school as a result of scandalous behavior involving some senior high school boys, she ran away with a migrant farm laborer who later abandoned her in San Francisco. Her family made no attempt to find her. She looked older than her years. Pas
sing herself off as eighteen, she obtained work as a waitress. When she was sixteen she fell in with a bohemian group in that city. For the next three years she was a fixture in that curious subterranean artistic world of San Francisco which specializes in incomprehensible jazz, foolish painting and hysterical poetry, with their inevitable by-products of mysticism, coffee-house conversation, drug addiction, violence and self-pity. She worked sporadically and was passed back and forth from musician to painter to poet, as a model, an inspiration and a bedmate. During this period she learned the jargon of that milieu without the necessity of having to understand what she was saying—a condition shared, perhaps, by most of her associates.
Last year a painter with whom she was living was killed as a result of a violent argument during an impromptu party. Friends hid Nanette until it became certain the police wanted her for questioning. She fled to Los Angeles and became a member of a smaller group there. It was there she met Sander Golden. When a narcotics raid broke up the group, she left Los Angeles with Golden. Their tentative destination was New Orleans, where Golden had friends. They met Hernandez in Tucson, and the three of them traveled together as far as Del Rio, where Kirby Stassen joined the group.
It is difficult to assess the effect of Nan Koslov on the three men, insofar as their short career of extreme violence is concerned. Each member of the group had, I believe, a catalytic effect on the other three. In one sense perhaps the men felt a necessity to “show off” for the girl, to show her that they were beyond all rules and restrictions. But in order for her to achieve this effect upon them, it would first have been necessary for her to communicate to them her own taste for recklessness.
From the meager clues she has given me, I can perhaps reconstruct her attitude at Del Rio. Here was a girl who, for several years, had lived only for sensation. For kicks, as Sander Golden would say. Highly spiced foods deaden the palate. So ever-increasing quantities of spice must be used. It is the same with physical sensation. Though she denies it, there is, I believe, a good chance that she was directly involved in the killing of the artist in San Francisco. He was stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen with a long skewer used for fireplace cooking, and in the throat and in the nape of the neck with a table fork. There is such a flavor of primitive violence in this woman, of revolt against cruelties inflicted upon her, that she may have found a new and special pleasure in the act of killing. It is, one could say, the ultimate sensation, and she had been increasing the tempo of sensation over her short lifetime.
Also, Sander Golden had put her on his own routine of stimulants, a schedule which he had arrived at through trial and error and which he terms “The biggest thing since the wheel.”
It involved a carefully regulated intake of powerful tranquilizers, plus raw dexedrine and barbiturates.
As Nanette described it, “It was the most I’d seen. It kept you out there. Everything, every little thing, like a stone or a bottle, looked bright and important in a funny way, and you could laugh and understand things the squares couldn’t. He changed it a little for me, different from the way he took it, and kept asking me, and changing it, until he had it just right for me, and I could float all day and all night. But he couldn’t give much to Shack, because Shack went crazy. Sandy said he was going to patent it. You couldn’t get hooked on it. But sometimes my heart thumping would scare me a little. And anything you did—it didn’t seem to really count. Do you know what I mean? You could step off a building and laugh all the way down. We put Stass on it, and we both kept asking him, and Sandy kept changing it, but we never got it to him just right. We’d have him either all shaky and hopped, or falling asleep.”
So the regimen of the stimulants and depressants was another catalytic agent. It was a queasy rapture.
I must make one further point about Nanette Koslov which involves a reappraisal of my own thinking. It is a truism that men do not understand women. But until I met Nan Koslov, I had been content with one generalization which I felt fitted all women, from whore to princess. I had felt that women had a strong drive for stability and security. I believed it was a primitive heritage. They, I thought, were the undiluted conservatives in this world, the apostles of “things as they are.” They play safe. They do not gamble. They each want a safe nest somewhere in the world, and when they do not have it, they work and yearn for it.
But Nan Koslov falls completely outside this pattern, thus voiding my comfortable generalization. She is disconcertingly complete within herself. I can detect in her no yen for any kind of security or stability. She was content to wander, to stake no claim on any man, to take what she was given and make do with it.
It is only logical to relate this to her sexual attitude. I realize that every culture has its own violent superstitions about sex. The incestuous practices of the ancient Egyptians appall us. We are sickened when we learn that the dynastic line was maintained through the offspring of father-daughter copulation. We feel utterly superior to primitive races, and call their sex play “dirty habits.” Even in our own times, we cannot comprehend the frank, uncomplicated, casual attitude of the Scandinavian countries toward unregulated sexual promiscuity. Even as we condemn their young people, they condemn us for what they term our “obsession” with sex. They think we are the twisted ones. They smile and say it just does not have the importance we give it.
Perhaps we are twisted, but I personally find it a suitable way to live. I respect continence. The sexual act in its purest sense should be a sacred act, an act of devotion, a ceremony of love. A coin passed too often from hand to hand loses its mint-sharpness. The inscription can no longer be read. If it is agreed that life should contain acts or symbols of value, is not the sexual act a suitable thing to be so acclaimed? If nothing in life has great meaning, then life itself is denigrated.
To Nanette Koslov, the act of sex has no emotional significance. It is, to her, a way of achieving a mild, unselective pleasure. For several years she has been, to the men around her, an uncomplicated convenience—like a free lunch in the old-time saloons. If the man who was housing and feeding her preferred that she reserve herself for him, either through some emotional quirk, or through that same fastidiousness that prevents the sharing of a toothbrush, she was agreeable. Should he wish to share her, she was co-operative. Love talk bored her. Jealousy was an emotion she could not comprehend. She wanted men to want her. It was the only sort of reassurance she seemed to need. She could have followed the legions of the Romans on remote campaigns. The life would have suited her.
Thus, to me, she is an uncomplicated evil, and a new thing in the world—a denial of most of what we mean when we say Woman. From what she has told me, I now believe that she is one of a multitude. This is a terrifying thing to contemplate. It is more than a revolt against the puritan aspects of our culture. She does not feel that she is in revolt. She feels that she is honest and natural. If she is legion, what is happening to us all? What is happening to a familiar world? She has reduced the magic of life to a low and dirty denominator, made of herself an idle receptacle, and feels neither shame nor regret. She is, to use a word she could not comprehend, godless.
It is unprofessional of me to feel satisfaction in knowing that she is now very afraid. She is afraid of death, the way an animal is afraid. She does not have the imagination to fear life imprisonment.
She asks me many questions. She bites her thick lip, and then asks if you feel anything when you are electrocuted. I tell her it is very sudden. She asks if I can get them off. I tell her I will try. And she asks me again if it will hurt. She asks the way a child might ask about a whipping.
The four of them, during their brief career, were a strange, interrelated group. She was Sander Golden’s from the beginning. I have learned that his use of her was as unimportant to him as to her, and it was infrequent, as might be expected in a man whose vital energies have been depleted by years of abuse. Though she was of no importance to him, he would not let Hernandez have her. This was a game Golden was playing, a cruel
and rather dangerous game. Hernandez wanted her badly. Golden apparently wanted to prove to himself that he could control Hernandez even with this additional strain upon their relationship. He flaunted his possession of the Koslov girl, and blocked every effort Hernandez made to possess her. The girl was aware of the game, and idly amused by it, and increased the tension by flirting with Hernandez, teasing him the way one might tease a caged bear. Hernandez was caged by his great regard for Sander Golden. Sander had to learn how stout the bars were.
After Kirby Stassen joined them, Sander Golden was able to increase the pressure on Hernandez by sharing the girl with Stassen. This had the effect of directing all Hernandez’ sullen rage at Stassen, rather than Golden. I feel that Hernandez would have murdered Kirby Stassen sooner or later, had not the tension been broken by the acquisition of Helen Wister.
Of course, the first I knew of the invasion of our county by this foursome was when, on Sunday morning, I read the front-page account of the murder of Arnold Crown and the abduction of Paul Wister’s daughter. As a matter of professional interest, I had been following the news stories of their track of violence. Until the murder of Crown the authorities were not certain whether it was two men or three men or four men and a girl involved. It was a stroke of luck that the Crown murder had occurred in front of unseen witnesses. As yet no positive identification of any of them had been made. I had expected to read that Sunday morning of their having been trapped and captured. Their luck was incredibly good. Their crimes had the mark of the amateur, plus that curious frenzy of the unbalanced mind. Individuals have run amuck in every society the world has known, and will continue so to do. It is unusual for four crazed ones to join forces.
Back on that twenty-sixth day of July, on that hot still Sunday morning, I had no idea that I would find myself defending them. The authorities were tackling the problem with great energy.…
The End of the Night Page 12
