He shrugged. “That’s all the witness had to say. He just noticed these good-looking girls piling into a fancy car of some kind, leaving another vehicle along the side of the road with a flat tire.”
“Which way was the ‘fancy car’ headed?”
“Toward Wilcox, all right.”
“You checked thoroughly into the witness?”
“Yes. He had his wife with him and we talked to her, too. Nothing there. Just a good citizen coming forward… Ah, Officer Winch, let’s have that evidence.”
A fresh-faced young cop had come in carrying a clear evidence envelope, which he handed to the chief, who handed it to me as the young cop went out.
“Where did you find this?” I asked, looking at the clear little bag and its contents.
“In that car with the flat tire. It certainly wasn’t on the victims-they were strung up naked as jaybirds in that barn, poor things. We never did find their clothes.”
Her clothes were gone, Dave Miles had said of the girl left strangled to death, naked and spread-eagled on the beach. Never found.
Did that detail bind these killings together as surely as the nylon around Doris Wilson’s pale young throat?
I pondered that as I sat there staring at the contents of the clear evidence envelope: a matchbook with a festive New Year’s motif emblazoned with the words SIDON ARMS COCKTAIL LOUNGE.
By late morning I was back in Sidon, sitting in a booth across from Velda in the hotel bar where that matchbook had come from.
“I’m starting to think Dave is right,” I said. “Maybe these killings are the work of one maniac on the loose.”
A goddess in a yellow blouse, Velda gestured with both hands, palms up. “But how does a maniac fit in with Sharron Wesley’s gambling house? Not to mention all the dirty dealings our friend Dekkert is neck high in.”
“I don’t know,” I said glumly. “And anyway, I’m not convinced the kill-crazy son of a bitch who tortured and killed those college girls is behind the Wesley dame’s exit. But that nylon stocking strangulation? That’s close enough to Godiva to get my attention.”
She shuddered. “Mine, too.”
I threw down what was left of my highball. “It feels like I was already on the right track, looking for her silent partner in that casino. When there’s a murder, nine times out of ten, the motive is money.”
“But then there’s that other one out of ten, Mike.” She shook her head and the dark hair shimmered. “I admit I’m confused.”
“You’re not alone.”
“Makes me sick to think that nice Wilson girl wound up like that…”
“Dave’s right about one thing. That’s a score worth settling.”
She leaned across. “Listen, I almost forgot to mention-Pat called while you were out. He didn’t leave any real message, of course, after you warned him not to. You want to use the pay-phone booth?”
“No,” I said. “I have to kick this thing into gear. I have a few things for you to do, honey, while I’m gone.”
“Gone? Again?”
“Yeah. Talk to the bartender here about those two college girls, and if he isn’t the one who was on duty, find out who, and track him down.”
I dug in my pocket for my roll of bills and peeled off five tens like a poker hand and passed them across to her.
I went on: “There’s one taxi in this town. Round it up and head out to that roadhouse tonight, the Hideaway-put some nickels in the jukebox, be available for a dance, let a local yokel or two buy you a beer. Talk to the bartenders out there, too. Somebody may have seen something the night Doris Wilson disappeared. It’s not that I don’t trust these Long Island coppers to do their job, but… I don’t trust ’em to do their job.”
She smirked at me. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time on a vacation. Have her dance and drink with other men.”
“Vacation time is over. No more vacation till we’ve wrapped this up. And just in case there is a psychopath on the loose, you keep your wits sharp and your. 32 ready.”
“Roger. And you?”
“I have to head back into the city. I’ll talk to Pat, and by hook or by crook, I’m going to find out who Sharron Wesley was in business with.”
CHAPTER NINE
I called Pat before leaving Sidon, to warn him I was on my way, and he suggested we meet at Mooney’s for mid-afternoon coffee and Danish. He didn’t say so, but maybe I was becoming too much of a fixture around that station house for the reputation of a captain who hoped to be an inspector some day.
I settled for a parking place two blocks from the beanery. The afternoon was sunny but cool, nice enough to make a guy wonder why he bothered going out on the Island for a getaway. Then I heard a cabbie leaning out his window to add some profane lyrics to the song his honking horn was playing, and remembered.
Pat was already in back at our usual table when I strolled in. He saluted me with the oversize mug that was a trademark of the place, in case I hadn’t noticed him. I stopped a waiter and told him to bring me my own coffee and Danish, then plopped down across from Pat. With no preliminaries beyond “Hi,” I began filling him in on my visit to Wilcox, from Dave Miles to the Suffolk County Sheriff to Chief Chasen.
“I have to say I’m of two minds about these killings,” he said, nibbling idly at his pastry throughout our grisly conversation. “There’s enough criminal activity surrounding Sharron Wesley to make it awfully damn coincidental that some maniac would just happen to single her out.”
“My thinking exactly.”
“On the other hand, you pick up coincidences like blue serge picks up lint. Every time I hear a cop say he doesn’t believe in coincidence, I tell him to hang around with Mike Hammer for a while.”
I stirred sugar into my coffee. “But are there enough similarities to put all four kills at the feet of one fiend? We have the nudity thread, but Sharron Wesley could have lost her clothes in the drink. And as for her being artistically displayed in that park, on that stone horse, well… we don’t know that it was her killer who did that. That could have been some nut with a sick sense of humor.”
“Yeah, the Lady Godiva angle.” He shrugged. “Can’t rule that out. And even where the M.O. is similar, it’s different enough to be a head-scratcher.”
“Be specific.”
“Well, the strangulations, for example. They’re not the same-you have a nylon stocking for the Wilson girl, and powerful hands for Sharron Wesley. Then you have those two coeds in that barn who got slashed up like some demented sacrifice to the Gods.”
He could chow down on that Danish all he liked. I had lost my damn appetite.
“However,” he said, between nibbles, “don’t downplay the nudity aspect.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, I should say, the lack of clothes. The missing clothes.”
“Not following you, buddy.”
The gray-blue eyes narrowed. “There are two breeds of mass murderer, Mike. There’s your quiet everyday good citizen who snaps. Who’s out mowing the lawn one lovely morning, then suddenly goes inside, finds the German Luger he brought home from the war, and saunters around the neighborhood killing everybody he comes in contact with… Bang, there goes his next-door neighbor, pow, there goes the paper boy, bing, the mailman, wham, that annoying little old lady who never cuts her grass, and then back home and inside, bang, bang, bang, there go the wife and kiddies, and if the cops don’t kill him before he’s done, he turns the weapon on himself. That’s one kind.”
