by Jeff Rice
“I was at the hospital yesterday.” I looked directly at Butcher. “Your own people fired maybe fifty or sixty rounds at him, some at point-blank range. How come this man never even slowed down? How come a man seventy years old can outrun police cars for more than fifteen blocks? How come when he gets clubbed on the head he doesn’t bleed like other people? Look at these photos! There’s a gash on his forehead… and whatever is trickling down from the cut is clear… it isn’t blood.
“How come three great, big, burly hospital orderlies weighing an estimated total of nearly 750 pounds couldn’t bring one, skinny 160 pound man to his knees? How come an ex-boxer, a light-heavyweight not long out of the ring, couldn’t even faze him with his best punch, a right hook that should have broken his jaw?
“Face it. Whether its science, witchcraft or black magic, this character has got something going for him you don’t know anything about. He doesn’t seem to feel pain. Or get winded. And he doesn’t seem to be very frightened by guns, or discouraged by your efforts to trap him.
“Look at these photos! Look at that face! That isn’t fear there. It’s hate. Pure hate! This man is evil incarnate. He is insane and he may be something even worse although you’d laugh at me because I have no scientific documentation to back me up. Hell, even Regenhaus and Mokurji have all but confirmed that he sucks blood.
“Whatever he is, he’s been around a long time and this seems to be the closest any police force has come to putting the finger on him. If you want to go on operating the way you’ve been doing by treating him like an ordinary man, go ahead. But, I’ll bet you any amount of money you come up empty handed again. If you try to catch him at night he’ll get away just like he did last night. He’ll…”
“Jesus Christ!” bellowed Butcher. “This son of a bitch has diarrhea of the mouth. Can’t one of you people shut him up? Bernie! For Chri…”
Paine cut him off. “No, I think we should let him talk. Let him hang himself with his own words. Then we’ll finally be rid of him.”
“I agree,” added Sheriff Lane. Then he turned to me.
“Kolchak, for most of your time here in Las Vegas you’ve been a pretty regular guy. You’ve reported things straight, and even when you found things that made us look a little silly, you’ve never pulled any cute moves. How come all of a sudden you’ve got this bug up your tail about this one particular guy? Why is it that you think you’re the only one who knows how to handle this thing?”
“Maybe it’s because I’m not afraid to consider the possibilities beyond the normal range of police experience. My God. Think of the things that have been believed impossible that proved otherwise. Man couldn’t fly. Couldn’t leave the earth. Couldn’t be revived after death. Hell, in the field of organ transplants alone doctors are doing what Mary Shelley wrote about a hundred and fifty years ago in Frankenstein, they’re giving people new kidneys, new eyes, new hearts. There are lower animals that regenerate broken and lost pieces of their bodies. Scientists don’t know how.
“On a large scale we’ve harnessed the power of the sun… and created an almost limitless source of energy. A few decades ago, that was thought impossible. On a man to man basis… uh… well, take unarmed combat for instance. Any fool knows a brick is harder than a man’s hand. Well, practitioners of Karate have proved that wrong. Your parents never heard of Judo. When you were young, if someone’d told you you could bust bricks with your hands you’d have through he was nuts. Today, any ten-year-old kid knows this is true.
“So how come you don’t admit you’re up against something that doesn’t conform to all your precious rules and concepts? Or is it that you’re already beginning to believe I’m right? That maybe there is such a thing as a vampire? Is that why you’re all so scared that the public might find out about how those people died? Are you so afraid of looking stupid that you’d ignore a possible way of nailing this guy?
“You guys muffed it yesterday and the whole story is in the papers today. Your time is running out and you’d better get this Skorzeny fella pretty soon or someone’s going to start screaming for a grand jury investigation. You can’t stop the rumors. They’re all over the place.
“I wasn’t even in on the first killing but one little guy at County General talked about the lack of blood. That led me to the Willows and the fang marks. Dr. Mokurji’s report made the rumor a fact.
“This guy drinks human blood!”
D.A. Paine finally held up his hand in a “stop” motion and I ran out of breath long enough for him to cut me off.
“We have kept this thing from the public because we want to avoid a panic.”
“Bull,” I muttered.
“And, because we don’t want to look any more ineffectual than we already do.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” I told him.
“What’s more, we like to handle our own affairs. Where crime syndicates are involved we are very happy to cooperate with the federal authorities as Bernie here can testify. Everyone here knows where I stand on crime.”
I was sure he was about to launch into another campaign speech, but he surprised me.
“But,” he went on, “if the public ever thinks we can’t handle our own local problems… commonplace stuff like murder and robbery…”
I could see he had ignored everything that had been said.
“Commonplace!” I was becoming slightly hysterical now. “Commonplace! You call these murders commonplace? You call a bulletproof man who can outrun an automobile at low speeds commonplace? You call what you’ve been doing handling the situation?”
He let me rant until I finally ran down and fell silent. I knew they were all sure I was crazy, now. Paine opened his big mouth, sucked in air loudly, and jumped right in.
“I repeat, if the public, which is already divided on whether or not police are the ‘good guys’ or club-wielding ‘pigs,’ if they ever lose confidence in our ability to handle this thing… and their finding out how these girls died might just supply the final ingredient for that… There’d be so goddamn many of them running around half-cocked and packing all kinds of weapons for ‘self-defense’ that our job of tracking this man down would be impossible, let alone attempting to prosecute him, they’d… they’d panic for sure. We might even get into such a fix we’d have to call for federal troops.”
And I thought I was hysterical. Federal troops, yet!
“And,” he droned on, “in all this confusion, this guy could give us the slip with no trouble at all.”
“Sure,” I told him. “That’s what Hitler said back in Munich in ’32. Law and order. Tell the people what’s good for them. So tell me, Mr. Paine, what lever are you using on my boss to get this story killed?”
Paine glowered at me.
“No, I don’t think I will explain that, as it is irrelevant. All you have to know is that we have and if we could have killed those stories altogether, we would have done so. Especially after we had those coroner’s reports. But, then, this is a free country [he didn’t sound exactly overjoyed that that prospect] and you can’t entirely muzzle the press.”
“You’ve done pretty well so far,” I told him.
“And we will continue to do so with voluntary cooperation from all parties until we get this man behind bars or until he is dead. After we get him you can write anything your little heart desires, Kolchak. But until then, the blackout stands. Now, if you have nothing further to offer, I will repeat for the final time: Keep your mouth shut, take notes and do your job or you will be thrown out permanently and replaced with some other representative of the Daily News.
“By God, Kolchak, if I have to, I will have your police press pass pulled and get Jake Herman to reassign you to covering the meetings of the Citizens for Decent Literature and the Humane Society. Do you read me?”
“Five by five, mein fuhrer. You have my word. I’ll be a good little boy. Just remember who’s got the answers when you blow it again. Oh…” and I gave him the V-sign, “peace.”
/> Lane stretched his legs and sighed. “Bernie, what are the 1969 averages for violent crimes in America?”
Bernie ticked them off by rote: “One violent crime every forty-eight seconds. One aggravated assault every two minutes. One theft every two minutes. One rape every fourteen minutes. And one murder every thirty-six minutes.”
“And the FBI contends that in many of the categories Las Vegas is significantly higher?”
“Correct.”
“For years,” Lane went on, “the federal government has been itching to close this town up, maintaining that the gambling causes a greater influx of criminal types into this area and implying we can’t handle our jobs. No disrespect intended, Bernie, or any lack of appreciation for what your people are now doing, but surely you can see how vital it is to this town and to each of us here personally to get this job done with a minimum of fuss and public interference.”
“Well, I can see,” answered Bernie, “that this Janos Skorzeny is creating his own set of statistics and that they’re staggering. He’s committed at least ten aggravated assaults, five murders, two thefts, and God knows what else in the past twenty-six days.”
“Ah, yes. Thank you, Bernie.” Lane looked around the room. “I don’t have to remind all of you that it is nearing election time. Tom Paine here and I are both up for re-election. If we botch this thing we could end up on the street. And,” he looked at Butcher, “so could you, Paul. Yours is an appointed office. You could be canned overnight. So let’s get on with business and turn this session over to Captain Masterson who is the operational head of the combined force. Let’s see what we’ve got so far and what changes have to be made.”
Masterson lugged a bunch of charts and maps to an easel being set up by a deputy in the front of the room. “Our two departments have a combined total of six hundred and fifty men and thirty-seven reservists on full-time duty plus another twenty-six trainees who could, in a pinch, man the desks to free that many more for field work. We’ve got the helicopter going from dusk to dawn, as many men as possible in patrol cars and we’ve beefed up our beat patrolmen on foot. All leaves have been cancelled, all personnel including the women field operators are on twelve-hour call. Most of the top people in both departments are putting in nearly sixteen hours a day.
“Today, we took the chopper to Nellis Air Force Base and it was fitted out with a Homans infrared multispex camera and a special, experimental radar unit they’re testing which can focus on an object one square foot in size up to a distance of almost ten miles. With this equipment, and continued night patrols, we can spot our suspect and if he tries to run, locate and lock onto him. If he takes to hiding in a building or goes underground we simply log the location and move in with ground units.
“We’ve taken this precaution because from his MO he is a night crawler and we’re going to need this stuff to spot him. So far, there have been no reports of any activity by him during the daytime.
“We’ve got his car, the white Chevy, but that’s no guarantee he hasn’t stolen another one. There have been several thefts in the past 48 hours. God knows if he’s responsible for any of them. We’ve got to assume the worst and that he’s got wheels and is still highly mobile.
“We’ve marked off certain areas, mostly around Casino Center and along the Strip and these are being patrolled at night by plainclothesmen in unmarked cars.”
“What about the roadblocks?” asked Lane.
“Well, we’ve asked for help from the highway patrol but, as you know, they’re desperately understaffed. The most they can muster on twelve-hour shifts is about twenty men for the whole county.”
“All right,” said Lane. “Have them block off all the main arteries–Interstate 15, the Tonopah Highway and the Boulder Highway. I’ll activate the jeep posse and get as many as possible armed and out on some of the bigger main roads in a radius of, say, three to three and a half miles from the center of town.” He got up and pointed to one of the maps.
“We can have them cover points on Craig and Sunset roads to the north and south, and on Rainbow and Nellis boulevards to the east and west. They have radios and can be used to close the net if this guy is spotted and gets through our primary police lines. And they’re good over rough terrain, even at night. They can follow tracks and go places in those jeeps he could only go on foot if he makes a break and runs off the regular roads somewhere along the line.
“I think that’s about as close as we can get, what with checking all incoming and outgoing travelers–as close as we can get to sealing off this town. I’d hate to resort to a general curfew but let’s start cracking down on the kids under eighteen. If necessary, we can cut the midnight curfew on Friday and Saturday back to ten o’clock.”
“Good,” said Butcher. “Let’s do it and give that news out to the media people now. Best the ranks of kids are thinned out after dark as much as possible. We’ve had two girls disappear in the past few days and both are under twenty-one. I’d hate to see any more drop from sight.”
Bernie spoke up. “Has anything turned up on those girls that our people missed?”
“Nothing,” came the answer. And there’d been no calls from anyone who’d reported seeing Carolyn Riegel since she’d disappeared. But the PD and the sheriff’s office were busy checking out all sorts of false reports as to the sightings of Skorzeny in every part of town from Charleston Heights to College Park.
They also knew by now, Lorna Frontiere, of the UP wire service, had produced nearly a month’s worth of stories on the “Mystery Murderer of Las Vegas” which went out to all parts of the country, and someone at the meeting, I forget exactly who, mentioned that the publicity was doing the town no good.
“Memorial Day weekend is just six days off,” Butcher observed, “counting Friday as the day they should really start rolling in here. All those tourists are just going to make this thing that much harder.”
“I would hope to hell that we’ll have him long before that!” Lane shot back. “We’ve already had one hell of a local recession since the stocks took that nosedive and if this goes on much longer, people are going to start staying away from here in droves. I haven’t heard too much about cancellations from the hotel people, but the big boys on the Strip are getting anxious and my phone has been ringing for three days. They want action and they want it now!
“The situation is bad enough, but if we can grab this nut before the big weekend and let the world know we’ve got him in custody–nailed to the jailhouse wall, so to speak–I think we’ll come out of this thing all right. But we’ve got to work fast, now that we’ve got all this stuff from Bernie to go on. Officially, to all outsiders, this guy’s still classified as an ordinary maniac,” he chuckled ruefully, “if any homicidal killer can be classified as ordinary.”
Then came out one of those slips of the tongue that every newsman worth his salt dreams about.
“What’s been done about the victims down at the morgue?” asked Butcher. (It was a euphemistic reference to The Willows because, as I pointed out earlier, Las Vegas doesn’t really have a morgue.)
Paine looked inordinately pleased with himself and by now everyone had shifted and paced about so much that I was off to one side and just out of sight.
“Everything’s been handled very nicely. The Hughes girl had no other relatives other than the ex-husband in Desplaines, so we had her cremated. The same goes for the Hanochek woman. As for Mrs. Reynolds, her husband flew out here two days ago. We had a little talk with him and persuaded him to hold a closed-casket funeral at The Willows and it went off quietly. Then she was cremated at our suggestion. No one’s turned up to claim Hemphill, so I think we can get rid of him tomorrow. We had some plastic work done on the Branden girl’s neck to make the punctures look like a bad slash that was sewed up by a doctor. We shipped her body to her old man in Florida.”
Well, there it was. All neat and tidy. Now, I thought, if only the two girls were found alive, everything would be just fine. The distraught parents
could be “persuaded” not to ask too many questions and it would be certain that some believable explanation would be found if they were discovered dead in the same way as the first five; some explanation that would be readily accepted by the survivors, none of whom, I was certain, would be thinking about demanding a copy of the coroner’s report. (Not that it would have done them much good, since I later found out the reports had been altered.)
The county commissioners, whose function was, in part, to supervise these “dedicated lawmen,” would prove no problem. They were all pretty much of the same persuasion, punched out of the same cookie cutter. The D.A. had a brother on the commission, and the sheriff, a cousin. The same applied to the city commissioners. One of them was related by marriage to both the D.A. and the sheriff, and also a top-ranking state senator. Between Laine and Paine (Inc.) they had one relative and two other solid connections on County General’s board of trustees and they could be effective in silencing any comment from the pathology department should anyone down there decide to start blabbing. They had already quietly removed McManus and Netski and both had left town.
All in the name of what? Suppressing a panic? Saving the tourist industry of Las Vegas? Or just a little election time insurance and the sheer pleasure of exercising power?
It’s a well-known fact that periodically some columnist in a newspaper or some magazine writes a new expose on “Sin City USA: Las Vegas,” dredging up all the old Mafia stories and mixing in a little prostitution for spice–as if there weren’t Mafiosi and prostitutes operating everywhere else in the country. And every time this happens the hotel-casino operators get burned a little bit more. New scars over old, even though a number of them are as straight as doctors and as sober as judges. But through it all, they remain for the most part private citizens. What these exposes really do (when they’re done right) is hurt the local politicos. They can make them look very foolish, when, as Paine put it, they seem unable to “handle” their jobs.
Now, Paine, more than all the rest, knows the value of good publicity. He never misses and opportunity to be quoted on almost any issue that is in any way newsworthy, no matter how trivial, from the “intended vulgarity” at the end of the first act of “Hair” to the “drug-oriented advocacy of certain popular rock songs.” In fact, he manages to get quoted on something almost daily in the local press and almost four times a week on the air. And every time some well-known entertainer gets drunk and flies off the handle in public in Las Vegas, D.A. Paine is right on hand through the auspices of network television to express the desire to look into said entertainer’s connections with the “underworld.” And not that his malapropisms stop him from getting all this publicity. Oh, he gets his “tang tungled” in excess verbiage, but the media all over the country laps it up and it feeds his ever-expanding ego.
