Sin City

by Max Allan Collins

  The city wore the blue patina of dusk, the sky streaked a faded orange along a horizon made irregular by the lumpy spine of the slumbering beast of the dark blue mountain range; dark gray clouds, like factory smoke, encouraged the night.

  In her stylish black leather jacket, a turquoise top and new black jeans and black pointed-toe boots, Catherine Willows walked briskly across the parking lot, feeling fresh, well-rested, and ready to get back to solving Jenna Patrick’s murder. She had not yet admitted to herself that this case was special, that her emotions had been touched by the thought of a young woman, about to leave that life, having hers ended prematurely.

  She collected Sara in the break room, where the brunette criminalist was giving the day shift’s coffee a down-the-drain mercy killing.

  “Hey,” Sara said.

  “Hey,” Catherine said. “Let’s see what the elves have come up with.”

  “Greg first?”

  Catherine nodded. “Greg first.”

  Greg Sanders was hovering over one of his state-of-the-art machines. God, he was young, Catherine thought; with his spiky hair and mischievous smile, he looked more like a kid than a gifted scientist—still, there was no doubting his ability.

  Catherine stood across from the slender blue-smocked figure, Sara leaning on the counter, not yet awake. This was morning to them, after all.

  “What do you have for us?” Catherine asked.

  Sanders shuffled some papers, and smiled—a smile that might mean disaster or triumph, one never knew. “Last things first, I guess. The fake beard and mustache you found in Lipton’s house? Human hair.”

  “Human scalp hair,” Catherine said.

  Sara was frowning, not quite following.

  Sanders picked up on Catherine’s thought. “Human scalp hair’s what they use to make really high-quality wigs.” He brought out two plastic bags with the beard in one and the mustache in the other.

  “Okay,” Catherine said, with Sanders and yet not with him. “So what does that tell us?”

  He turned his palms up. “Well, the hair in the beard and mustache, that you took from Lipton’s closet, doesn’t match any hairs you collected in Dream Dolls.”

  “No?”

  He held up a tiny bag with a single straight brown hair in it. “No—for example, this is from the club, and I identified it as wig hair, but the cheap variety…not human hair: rayon.”

  “Okay,” Sara said, not ready to process this information just yet, “what else?”

  Sanders showed them two more evidence bags. “The spirit gum bottle, and the shoebox you got all this stuff from? The only fingerprints belong to the victim, Jenna Patrick.”

  Sara shrugged. “So Ray Lipton wore gloves, or wiped off the bottle and box.”

  Sanders was already shaking his head. “Not likely.”

  “Why?” Catherine asked.

  “No wipe marks, but plenty of clear prints—the Patrick woman’s prints would’ve been smeared, if the box’d been wiped. Near as I can tell, only Jenna Patrick ever touched this stuff.”

  “Okay,” Catherine said, “so Ray Lipton didn’t touch any of it. Maybe this is some other fake mustache and beard, hard as that might be to buy…. What about the back room at the strip club?”

  “Yeah,” Sara said, eager, “any sign of our man back there?”

  Sanders sighed, took a swig of coffee, shook his head. “You brought in a ton of stuff; I’ll still be going through this evidence when I reach retirement. Y’know, I never knew female pubic hair could be such a bore.”

  Sara made a face. “Thanks for sharing, Greg.”

  “Anyway, none of the fingerprints belong to Ray Lipton. His hair wasn’t back there, either.”

  Sara suddenly seemed animated—finally awake. “Wait, Greg—what are you telling us…Lipton didn’t do it?”

  “I’m not saying that. Anyway, you’ve still got the videotape, don’t you?”

  Catherine said, “That’s starting to look a little iffy, its own self.”

  After another sip of coffee, Sanders raised his eyebrows, shrugged and said, “It’s not that Lipton couldn’t have done the deed—it’s just that there’s no real evidence from the strip club that he did, other than the security videotape. And if you think that’s not him on the video…well…where does that leave you?”

  Sara turned to Catherine. “Where does that leave us?”

  “Where else?” Catherine said. “Back to square one: find evidence that Lipton did it…or evidence that exonerates him.”

  “And, hopefully, points to someone else,” Sara said. “Greg, you got anything else for us?”

  “Fingerprints, lots of them. Hair, fibers, and DNA. We just don’t know who they go with. I need samples from the dancers and the customers.”

  Catherine shook her head. “We’ve got the customers who were there when the murder was discovered—O’Riley and Vega have been interviewing them, collecting fingerprints; maybe day shift can help us out and gather those samples for you.”

  “That’ll help,” Sanders said.

  “As for customers who might’ve been there earlier that day or night,” she went on, “or more crucially, any who slipped out before Jenna’s body was found…there’s no way to track them down.”

  “Unless they were regulars,” Sara said, “and that Kapa-what’s-it guy’ll give us their names.”

  “Kapelos,” Catherine said. “He might help.” She used her cell phone and caught Detective Erin Conroy, telling her, “We need another visit to Dream Dolls.”

  “Got a lead?”

  “We may have, after you’ve done some questioning…. Meet Sara and me there, and I’ll fill you in when I see you.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they met the detective in the mostly empty parking lot of the strip club, the fancy DREAM DOLLS sign doing its neon dance for no one in particular.

  “Why so dead?” Sara wondered aloud.

  Catherine surveyed the vacant spaces. “Early evening…weeknight.”

  Still, strip clubs in Vegas rarely had empty parking lots, no matter what hour it was.

  “You mind telling me,” Conroy said, her mouth a tight line, “why we’ve returned to this delightful scene of the crime?”

  “Ray Lipton,” Catherine said quietly, “may not be our guy.”

  A convertible Mustang rolled by, a male passenger cat calling at the three women standing in the parking lot, possibly mistaking them for strippers on their way into the club. A low-rider BMW drove by, its bass speaker rattling windows in the surrounding older buildings.

  “Lipton not our man?” Conroy asked, numbly.

  Catherine shook her head.

  Conroy was frowning. “What the hell? We have him cold, on videotape.”

  “That might not be him,” Sara admitted. “If it was, he somehow managed not to leave any prints.”

  “You CSIs ever hear about gloves?” Conroy asked.

  “It’s not that easy,” Catherine said.

  She filled Conroy in on Greg’s reading of the evidence, and Helpingstine’s preliminary enhancement of the video, which seemed to bring out a figure that didn’t entirely resemble Lipton’s build.

  Rather glumly, Conroy asked, “Suggestions?”

  Catherine said, “Sara and I’ll get hair and blood from the dancers, and I thought you might want to re-interview.”

  “Yeah,” Conroy said, “probably a good idea. But maybe you should chat with the owner some more.”

  The two CSIs gathered their equipment from the Tahoe, Conroy giving them a hand, and headed into the club. While Sara and Conroy kept a respectful distance, Catherine approached Ty Kapelos, who ruled the roost from behind the bar, wearing what appeared to be the same white long-sleeved shirt as the other evening.

  “Hey, Ty,” she said.

  “Hey, Cath…knew you couldn’t stay away—missed me, didn’t ya?”

  “That’s it, Ty,” Catherine said. “You’re irresistible.”

  The club was quiet, only a handful o
f college-age guys, hanging out near the stage, and a few white-collar types at tables, whether conventioneers or local businessman “working late,” Catherine couldn’t hazard a guess. The music was thankfully silent—Worm in his booth, going through CDs looking for tunes, reminding her of Greg Sanders examining clues—and no women were currently on the stage.

  “Jeez, Ty,” Catherine said. “I’d like to have the tumbleweed concession in this place, about now.”

  Kapelos shrugged. “Changeover time, Cath. You know how that is. Girls are in the back.”

  “That the whole story, Ty?”

  His good humor evaporated, and he answered her, but in a hushed tone. “Nothing like a murdered dancer to chase business away.”

  “Sure—your patrons like things discreet. Murder happens, you never know when the cops are going to show back up.”

  “You said it, Cath, I didn’t—at least, the sheriff had the decency to send around pretty cops.”

  “You’re still a charmer, Ty,” she said, and explained what they needed.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Kapelos said.

  Catherine turned to Conroy, who gave her a look. The CSI nodded just a little, getting it, and said, “You two go ahead…. I’ll catch up.”

  Conroy smiled a little as she and Sara moved toward the hallway in back.

  Returning her attention to Kapelos, Catherine asked, “Which of your dancers makes the most money?”

  He shrugged as he polished a glass.

  “Come on, Ty—I’m not the IRS. I don’t want to bust anybody’s chops, particularly not yours—I just want to know if Jenna was the object of jealousy.”

  Another, more cooperative shrug. “Yeah, some—she was really cute, y’know, had this girl-next-door kinda thing goin’. She did pretty well even before her boob job, which came out great, and made her even more popular…. Some of the girls didn’t like that. You know how it goes.”

  Catherine was aware that Jenna’s life at Dream Dolls wouldn’t have been easy. Under the added pressure of her jealous boyfriend, Jenna couldn’t have been very happy; no wonder she’d wanted out. “Had Jenna ever talked about quitting?”

  Kapelos waved off the question. “Yeah, sure. They all do.”

  “So, you didn’t take her talk of quitting seriously?”

  “Question is, did she take it serious. I mean, hell, I knew this boyfriend, Lipton, wanted her to quit…even though he met her here…and she usually talked about it, right after they argued. ‘Maybe Ray’s right, maybe I am prostituting myself.’ I learned a long time ago not to put too much stock in that kind of talk. These are messed-up kids—you know, Cath…low self-esteem, high drug abuse, and more incest victims than a week of Springer.”

  “Was Jenna a drug user?”

  “I don’t know about her private life. I don’t have to tell you, I don’t allow none of that shit in here, not in my business…but what they do on their own time, how they spend all this money they make, that’s their business.”

  “Jenna ever mention anything about her and Lipton getting married?”

  “Yeah, but I figured she was just talkin’ about that to keep Lipton on the hook. Sure he’s a hot-headed prick, but he’s also a good-looking fella with a successful small business.”

  “So you figure she did want to marry him?”

  “I think so, but my take is, she wanted to work a few years, and put a little money away, of her own, before she walked away from show biz to be a baby-making machine.”

  “Did she say that? Indicated Lipton wanted a big family?”

  “Yeah. She’d be a normal housewife, those were the words she used. Look, I don’t have to tell you Dream Dolls and even the glitzier clubs, like Showgirl World and Olympic Gardens, ain’t exactly Broadway or Hollywood…but it’s still show business, and Jenna was a star, in her little universe…and it’s hard to walk away from that kind of attention.”

  “But Jenna did want to marry Ray,” Catherine said, pressing Ty, “if not now, eventually?”

  Kapelos turned up his palms. “Who can say? You ever know anybody talkin’ about marriage didn’t have their head up their ass?”

  Suddenly her ex-husband Eddie’s face popped up in her memory, like a jack-in-the-box, and she shook her head to dismiss the image.

  “Damn straight,” Kapelos said, misreading that as a gesture of agreement with him.

  Catherine didn’t bother to correct him. “Which of these dancers would you say disliked Jenna the most?”

  Kapelos harumphed. “Hell, take your pick. It ain’t like the old days when you girls watched out for each other. These days, these girls just as soon spit at each other as say hello. This is a more lucrative business than when you left, Cath. Some of these girls are makin’ a good six figures.”

  Catherine squinted—had she heard right? “You serious?”

  “As a heart attack…and Jenna was one of those girls. She did the circuit, made some serious green, but this was home for her…. Y’know, when she did L.A., she had the porn producers hounding her, all the time.”

  “She interested?”

  A groove of thought settled between his thick eyebrows. “Frankly, I think she mighta been considering it. She told me that some of the top girls in the adult industry work a few years, and retire millionaires.”

  “Did Lipton know she was considering a porn career?”

  “If he did, well…”

  “Well what, Ty?”

  “I was gonna say…he’d kill her.”

  Their gazes held for several long seconds, then Catherine twitched a smile and said, “Thanks, Ty. I’m going to the back, to help out. I know Detective Conroy’s going to have some more questions, possibly about regulars. I’d appreciate if you’d be as open with her as you have been with me.”

  Kapelos grinned. “Not a chance, Cath…not a chance.”

  She chuckled, as Kapelos turned his attention to one of college kids, who’d ambled up to the bar.

  Pushing through the curtains at the corridor’s end, Catherine entered a different facet of the world of Dream Dolls.

  The dressing room was much brighter than the dark bar and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. Once the tiny stars dissipated, she found herself in a room deeper than she remembered, going back a good thirty feet and leaving space for nine tiny dressing tables along each side wall. Globe lights on four ceiling fans ran down the center of the ceiling. At least, Catherine thought, Ty had finally got rid of those fluorescents that painted the dancers a ghostly white. Walls a pastel green, the room felt soft and inviting compared to the overbearing blackness beyond the heavy curtains.

  Conroy was in the far left hand corner interviewing a lithe, chocolate-skinned dancer wearing a red sequined g-string and nothing else. About halfway back on the right side, Sara was taking a blood sample from a blonde woman in red bikini lingerie, a voluptuous girl of maybe twenty.

  Seven or eight other women stood around in various stages of undress, none of them the least bit modest or seemingly even aware of the three fully clothed women in their midst. The unforgiving illumination revealed cellulite, stretch marks, scars and other imperfections that the low, blue-tinged lighting out front would conceal; a couple of them wore a shiny patina of perspiration that told Catherine they had been dancing recently.

  A redhead with breasts as fraudulent as her hair color strode forward on spike heels that lifted her to a height of six feet. Probably pushing thirty or even thirty-five…ancient in this trade, Catherine knew…the busty dancer had the cold eyes of a veteran and a narrow severe face framing a small round mouth that looked perpetually angry. She used a large white beach towel to dry herself as she walked over, saying, “You with them?” The woman tilted her head toward the back of the room.

  Nodding, Catherine introduced herself, adding, “Crime scene investigator—and you are?”

  “Pissed off…Thanks for a skin’.” She saronged the towel around herself, plucked a package of cigarettes from the nearby dressing table and lit he
rself up. She blew smoke and said, “I was just wonderin’ when you people are gonna be done with this place so we can go back to makin’ money.”

  Ignoring the stripper’s belligerent attitude, Catherine asked, “You have my name—yours is…?”

  Chin high, proud of herself, the dancer said, “Belinda Bountiful.”

  Catherine laughed out loud. “That wouldn’t be a stage name, by any chance?”

  The redhead glanced around, making sure no one was listening, and whispered, “Pat Hensley.”

  “Don’t the other girls know your real name?”

  “We’re not that close. I like to keep my private life private, that’s all…. I got a husband and two kids to feed.”

  Catherine sat on the edge of a dressing table. “So, the money’s dried up around here?”

  With a shake of her ersatz-auburn mane, the dancer said, “It was hard enough to make money here when Jenna was alive—this ain’t exactly the Flamingo, you know. But now…”

  “What about now?”

  “Whose fantasy is it, to go into the club where there’s been a murder, anyway? Jeffrey Dahmer’s maybe? Ted Bundy’s? And those two ain’t been hittin’ the club scene much, lately. Plus which, we’ve had cops in and out of here, almost nonstop since Jenna bought it.”

  That was touching. “You have a few customers out there. It’s early, yet.”

  “Probably as big a crowd as we’ll see all night.”

  Trying to catch the dancer with her guard down, Catherine asked, “Bother you at all, how much money Jenna was pulling down?”

  The Hensley woman scoffed at that. “Hell, no. You’re kidding, right?”

  “You were making your fair share then?”

  Moving a well-manicured hand to her cleavage, the dancer asked, “You know anything about this life, then you know that as long as I have these, I’m going to make my fair share.”

  “You happen to know if Jenna Patrick was using her real name?”

  The belligerence was gone, now. “That was her real name—had the right sound, y’know? Lots of ‘Jennas’ around the strip circuit, right now. Hot porn star name.”

  “You knew that was Jenna’s real name, but she didn’t know yours?”

  “Hey, just ’cause I’m belly-achin’ about business, don’t think I’m glad Jenna’s gone. Truth is, we were friends. I get along with her roommate, too.”