Binding Ties

by Max Allan Collins

  The skinny dude stepped out onto the walkway and Nick maneuvered himself so he was between the guy and Catherine.

  The dude slowly pulled the door to 2D closed, probably hoping he could do so without them noticing.

  “We’re looking for Phillip Carlson,” Catherine said over Nick’s shoulder.

  The guy reared back a little. “You found him. How can I help Vegas Five-oh? You protect, I serve.”

  “By answering a few questions,” Catherine said.

  Carlson turned his attention to her, appraising her with a kind of amused confusion, as if he couldn’t make out why a good-looking woman like this would be a cop. “I got nothin’ to hide, Sweetcheeks. Ask away.”

  “It’s Willows. Could we talk somewhere more private?”

  Eyes flicking uncomfortably toward his closed apartment door, he said, “We could do that.”

  When Carlson took no further action, Nick nodded toward 2D and said, “Private, as in there?”

  Carlson shook his head so rapidly he might have been trying to clear the cobwebs. “That’s not my place, man.”

  Nick gave him the friendly smile that wasn’t really friendly. “Whose is it?”

  “My lady friend. She’s, uh … not decent.”

  That Nick could believe.

  Carlson pointed a knobby finger. “You were at the right door, before. Let’s go down to my crib.”

  They slid nearer the rusty metal rail, to allow Carlson room to edge by and lead the way, as an amused Nick raised an eyebrow at Catherine, whose eyes were large with skepticism.

  “Sorry,” Carlson said, as he unlocked the door and swung it open. “Maid’s day off.”

  He entered the dark apartment, followed by Catherine and Nick.

  The curtains were pulled tight and very little light seeped in other than through the open door. Carlson flipped a wall switch, and a two-bulb overhead fixture that apparently housed Carlson’s dead-bug collection bathed the minuscule living room in odd gray-tinged illumination.

  Looking around at this world-class mess, Nick figured the “crib” hadn’t been cleaned since the Rat Pack had ruled the Strip. The CSI had entered the dwellings of obsessive-compulsives before, but taking in this prime example of the form, he fought the urge to pull on his latex gloves.

  The only furnishings were a ratty sofa, two TV trays, and a twenty-five-inch television. The walls were bare, but everything else looked like the aftermath of an explosion at a landfill. Fast-food bags and cups littered the TV trays, the top of the television, and most of the pathways through the apartment. Beyond the living room, Nick could see a small dining table with a mountain of fast-food detritus and two chairs inside a tiny alcove that had once served as a dining room.

  To Nick’s left ran a short hallway that led to one or two bedrooms. The most striking feature of the dump, however, was the thigh-high piles of newspapers that lined the walls and took up much of the floor space.

  Please God, Nick thought, don’t let this ever be a crime scene….

  “Sit anywhere” Carlson said, plopping onto the sofa on top of various fast-food sacks.

  Nick and Catherine chose to stand—not as if there really were any seating options….

  The apartment smelled of urine, dope, and puke. Nick had had less trouble keeping his eyes from watering at dead-body decomposition sites.

  Forcing himself to focus, he asked, “Mr. Carlson, do you know a man named Marvin Sandred?”

  Carlson’s eyes narrowed as he riffled through the Rolodex of his alleged mind, his face otherwise as blank as the walls of his apartment. “Nope. Don’t think so. That all? That was easy!”

  “How about Enrique Diaz?” Catherine asked.

  Something that might have been thought glimmered in Carlson’s eyes. “Listen, uh … cooperating with the Five-oh, that was my New Year’s resolution back in ’99. So I’m trying to be … helpful.”

  Nick said, “We appreciate that.”

  “But before I say anything else, I thought it’s, you know, fair for me to ask you what this is all about, anyway….”

  “It’s part of an ongoing investigation,” Nick said meaninglessly. “It’s not a trick question, Mr. Carlson—do you or don’t you know someone named Enrique Diaz?”

  “Greek to me—even if it is Spanish.” Carlson smiled to himself, savoring his wit probably in much the way he had savored the former contents of the scattered fast-food bags. “Hey—what kind of investigation?”

  Catherine said, “Murder.”

  “Whoa!” Holding up his hands, Carlson shook his head. “I didn’t kill nobody.”

  “That’s not what you’ve told the police over the years,” Nick said. “You’ve confessed to what, twenty-one murders?”

  “Hey, I was messed up when I was a kid, but I got help. I got medication.”

  Catherine’s smile seemed cheerful. “Like the ‘medication’ we smelled next door?”

  Carlson’s hands went to his eyes, covering them, then slid slowly down his face, pulling the flesh in a melting effect; it did not go well with what he said: “I’m straight, I tell you. That was incense, not weed.”

  One look at the man’s dilated pupils told Nick another story.

  Nick said, “My guess is the last time you were straight, the Beatles were still together.”

  Carlson came up off the couch, his hands reaching up like claws, his eyes wide and wild.

  Nick and Catherine both drew back in surprise at the sudden outburst. But only for a second—Nick gave Carlson a not-so-gentle push.

  “Sit back down, Charlie Manson,” Nick said, “and chill out.”

  The hands lowered, the shoulders slumped, the eyelids slipped to half-mast; he looked like a puppet hanging by a string or two. “You just … you got to me, man…. Hurts my feelings.”

  Nick said, “You have my sincerest apologies. Now, sit … back … down.”

  Carlson swallowed and nodded and did as Nick said. Slumping, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, their host said, “I … was … was just trying to tell you, I’m not that guy anymore. It … bums me out when people, you know … think that. I worked hard to straighten my ass out!”

  Catherine said, “Well, since you’re not ’that guy’ anymore, you won’t mind if we have a look around.”

  Shooting a quick look to the hallway, Carlson said, “Uh … I still got some rights, don’t I? Or is this more of that Patriot Act b.s.?”

  “I’ll stay with him, Cath,” Nick said. “You call for the search warrant.”

  Carlson looked stricken; he raised his hands. “You guys … come on … it’s not what it looks like.”

  Catherine frowned. “What’s not what it looks like?”

  “Nothing …” Again, Carlson glanced toward the corridor, then grinned up at the CSIs, nervously. “I just got diarrhea of the mouth, is all…. There’s no cure for that.”

  Nick gave Catherine a look and she nodded.

  While Catherine stayed in the living room with Carlson, Nick—gun drawn in his right hand, Mini Maglite in his left—moved down the dark hallway, sweeping the flash back and forth.

  Three doors.

  Open ones on the left and right, and one closed one on the left side at the end.

  Nick quickly checked the two open ones—bathroom on the left, a bedroom on the right, both filthy, both empty, of people anyway; Nick had a hunch Grissom could find plenty of bugs in both to make friends with. The last door, however, was locked.

  “You got a key you want to give us, Mr. Carlson?” Nick called. “Hate to have to kick this in.”

  Seconds later, Catherine’s voice pinged off the plaster walls: “He’s got the key. And he’s sharing it!”

  Nick went back for the thing and glared at Carlson. “Why didn’t you just give it to me? You don’t get points for making this harder.”

  Staring at the floor, mouth hanging open, Carlson said nothing.

  At the bedroom door, unsure what awaited behind it, Nick palmed his flashlight, t
he light extending between his index and middle fingers as he used his thumb and index finger to hold the key in his left hand and unlock the door. In his right hand, the gun came up as he swung the door in and stepped into the darkened bedroom.

  Heavy drapes covered a window on the left wall, shadows dancing as Nick’s Mini Mag swept over the room.

  But for the beam of light, nothing moved.

  He flipped the switch on the wall and another overhead dead-bug repository/light came on. The pistol slipped to his side and dangled there as Nick’s amazed gaze arced around the room.

  Newspaper articles, magazine articles, photos, and drawings covered the walls and even the ceiling, all sharing a common theme, in the way a teenage girl might devote her entire bedroom to some pop star. Only there was no bed, and this wasn’t a shrine to a singing star or film actor …

  … this was the Church of CASt.

  A small dark wood table in the center served as an altar for the holy book—CASt Fear, the Perry Bell and David Paquette paperback about CASt; several scrapbooks were stacked on the table, as well. Ropes tied into reverse-eight nooses hung from the ceiling in varying heights.

  When Nick came back into the living room, Catherine was standing near the hallway, eager for a report. Nick’s wide eyes spoke volumes.

  Carlson sat on the sofa, with the dejected expression of a thirteen-year-old whose parents had just found his porn stash.

  “So, Mr. Carlson,” Nick said cheerfully. “This effort you made to straighten yourself out—was that before or after you opened up the serial killer museum?”

  Carlson sprang up, bolted toward the door.

  Catherine whirled and Nick reacted right away, but still it was too late: Carlson had made it outside.

  Nick took the lead, Catherine right behind him, as they chased the shirtless eternal hippie along the concrete walkway. The skinny figure took the stairs two at a time but by the time he made ground level, Nick was closing the distance. Carlson perhaps took speed, but he didn’t have it: What the suspect had was the wind of an inveterate dope smoker, and with each step, Nick drew nearer.

  Carlson had just made it across the parking lot when Nick hit him with a solid tackle.

  Nick pulled down his prey, the two of them rolling across the sidewalk and into Baltimore Avenue, the pavement biting into the flesh of Nick’s hands and elbows, but he hung on.

  Catherine was right there, ready to deal with traffic, but the pair had wound up, fittingly enough for the suspect, in the gutter.

  “Aw, maaan,” Carlson moaned, under Nick, the suspect’s stubbly face dripping blood where it had connected with the concrete. “Not cool! Not cool!”

  “Resisting arrest,” Nick said, “is not so hot, either, dude.”

  “I’m not under arrest! Am I…?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Nick heard a siren wail and he realized his partner had a cell phone in hand; she’d already called in backup, and a patrol car, luckily, had been nearby. The officers showed up moments later and loaded a hang-dog Carlson into the back.

  “That’s what I get for praying,” Nick said gloomily.

  Catherine frowned in amusement. “How so?”

  “I asked the Supreme Being to spare us from that apartment turning out to be a crime scene. Now, while Carlson spends the afternoon cooling his jets in an air-conditioned cell, we’ll be combing every square inch of his hellhole apartment.”

  “Maybe God has a sense of humor,” Catherine said, laughing a little.

  They were walking back toward the building.

  “Oh God has a sense of humor, all right,” Nick said. “Trouble is, seems about the same as Grissom’s….”

  And they returned to the apartment, to photograph, process, and dismantle the shrine to CASt; as they did so, they would try to figure out if Carlson had actually constructed a temple to himself….

  Sara Sidle knocked on the frame of Gil Grissom’s open office door.

  The CSI supervisor sat behind his desk, glasses perched on his nose as he slowly scanned a page in a file. He looked up and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  She strolled in, dropped an evidence bag containing the Las Vegas Banner magnetic key onto his desk and flopped into the chair across from him.

  “Prints?” he asked.

  “Couple of partials, but nothing that pops up on AFIS.”

  The Automated Fingerprint Identification System had been helpful to them on numerous cases, but the system contained only prints of bad guys that had been caught.

  “So it’s not easy,” he said. “Are we surprised?”

  She shook her head. “What’s next?”

  “I’ll call Brass. Maybe we can identify the key through the newspaper.”

  “Really think the Banner big boys will make every employee who has one show it to us?”

  Grissom considered that for a moment. “If it wasn’t the Banner or some other media outlet, maybe. My guess is they won’t do anything until they talk to their lawyers.”

  “And the lawyers will say?”

  “That it’s a Fourth Amendment issue,” Grissom answered, “even though it really isn’t.”

  “Kill all the lawyers.”

  Grissom said, “Actually, that quote’s always taken out of context. In Henry VI, Shakespeare was in reality implying that lawyers are valuable to—”

  “Fine, right. But the Banner’s lawyers won’t cooperate.”

  “No.”

  “And we’ll try anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  An hour later, sitting in the office of Banner publisher James Holowell, with Grissom and Brass, Sara heard Holowell make the same argument, minus the typically Grissom-esque interpretation of the Bard of Avon.

  A big window in the publisher’s office overlooked a bustling warren of reporters’ desks. Holowell’s office was leanly furnished, a large mahogany desk taking up more than its fair share of space, the top neat but not bare, a computer monitor sitting at an angle on one corner. The evidence bag containing the magnetic key sat in the middle of the blotter like a three-dimensional ink stain.

  Grissom, Brass, and Sara sat in three chairs fanned around the desk, opposite Holowell, a barrel-chested African-American with a bald (or possibly shaved) head and tortoise-shell glasses. He wore a gray dress shirt, the cuffs rolled up one turn and a blue-and-silver Frank Lloyd Wright-patterned tie.

  Thus far he had been pleasant, professional, and not very helpful.

  “How many employees have these?” Brass asked, pointing to the bagged key on the publisher’s desk.

  Holowell shrugged. “I wouldn’t really know.”

  “Who would?” Grissom asked.

  “I don’t really know that, either.”

  “Could you find out?”

  “I suppose I could.”

  Brass asked, “Will you?”

  “Not this second, but of course I’ll look into it. I have every intention of helping you, within the parameters of my responsibility to this paper.”

  In other words, Sara thought, no.

  Grissom, who’d been studying the publisher, asked, “Approximately how many magnetic Banner keys are out there?”

  “Maybe twenty,” Holowell said. “Perhaps thirty.”

  That sounded low to Sara. Even at that, the Banner—the city’s third largest daily paper—had a couple hundred employees, and now at least ten percent of them were possible suspects.

  “Only twenty to thirty?” Brass asked. “Best guesstimate, who would they likely be dispersed to?”

  “Myself, of course, all the editors and reporters,” Holowell said with a shrug. “And a couple of supervisors in the press room.”

  They thanked Holowell for his time and rose; handshakes had already been passed around on entry, and no one bothered to repeat the ritual.

  Grissom picked up and pocketed the evidence bag off the publisher’s desk, then the two CSIs and the detective stepped out into the reporters’ bullpen. The bustle and m
ild roar of the newsroom gave them a peculiar privacy.

  Sara turned to Grissom and Brass. “How about, ’Kill all the reporters?”’

  “Shakespeare was silent on that subject,” Grissom said.

  Sara said to the detective, “Are we in a better place than we were before that interview?”

  Brass said, “Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Of course we are,” Grissom said. “Two steps forward, one step back, is still one step forward. When we arrived we had a pool of two hundred suspects who might have a card. Now, if the publisher can be taken at his word, we’re down to thirty or less. And we may be able to get a list of names.”

  Sara made a face. “But the card could have been stolen. …”

  Grissom nodded. “If in that case we can determine from whom it was stolen, we’re at an advantage—we have a starting point.”

  “Okay,” Sara said, seeing it.

  “What we do know,” Brass said, getting on board, “is … again, taking Holowell at his word … that about eighty-five to ninety percent of the employees don’t have keys.”

  Grissom smiled. “Exactly, Jim … Sara, information is our currency, you know that. The account grows little by little, one tiny piece at a time. But it grows.”

  With a sucking-lemon expression, Brass said, “Sounds like my savings account.”

  The trio had moved only a short distance when David Paquette popped out of a side office that bordered the bullpen. He wore a blue shirt and blue-and-gold striped tie, sleeves rolled more than once; he seemed both more harried and less pristine than his publisher, the fluorescent lighting bouncing off his own balding pate.

  “What brings the LVPD to the enemy camp?” he asked, kidding on the square.

  “Appointment with Mr. Holowell,” Grissom said.

  Paquette waved for them to follow him back into his office, a third the size of Holowell’s, barely bigger than a cubicle, his desk was a boxy metal job with a much smaller monitor and piles of papers.

  After shutting the door, their host did not get behind the desk, nor did he invite his guests to sit down; they stood in a loose huddle.

  “What did you see James about?” Paquette asked. His tone had a sense of betrayal in it.