Kolchak The Night Strangler (8 page)

“My bottle!” said the bulky wino, who was sliding down the pipe to the ground.

“Who the hell are
you
?”

“Ah damn. What’s it to ya? What’re you? A cop?

“You broke my bottle! Hell! Oh… my back. Lumbago. No damn privacy anywhere anymore.”

“You could get killed down here. Do you know there’s a strangler loose somewhere in this damn ghost town?”

He got up and began to totter off into the gloom.

“Hey!” I shouted after him.

Louise came up behind me. “Carl, are you all right?”

I fingered my jaw. It seemed to be intact, although I was having trouble breathing and there was blood trickling from my nose.

“Never laid a glove on me, Maw.”

She ran a hand through my hair and handed me my hat.

“You look awful… as usual. Let mama kiss and make it all better.”

“Now, cut that out!”
”What’s the matter, you no like zee way zee Princess of the East kisses?”

“I like just fine. But this is not the place.”

“Agreed! Home, Mr. Kolchack!

Had true romance come to this aging reporter? Had his withered heart begun to bloom again? Uh huh!

“Now, how the hell do we get out of here?”

There is something peculiarly inviting about a hot toddy and a warm, soapy girl in a steamy tub. Especially when the tub is aboard a houseboat rocking gently with the various swells set up by gentle winds.

Louise was 32, had been raised in El Cajon, California, and had done just a little bit of everything. She had been a salesgirl, a secretary, a dance teacher, and even once, briefly, an assistant women’s editor for some small daily in San Francisco. A few unfortunate love affairs (but no marriages) had not dampened her basic optimism or enthusiasm for life. She moved about as her whims instructed her and wherever she settled down she pursued a college degree, although her major kept changing as often as her residences. She’d been in Seattle over a year and was seriously thinking of staying long enough to finish her studies.

“Why me, Lou? What is there about this battered visage that attracts you?”

“I think it’s your Bogart impressions.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.” She started soaping my back. “You came on all businesslike and didn’t even try to make a pass. Not a pinch. But I could see you were interested. At your age…”

“Watch it, shweetheart. You might get a fat lip.”

Her hands moved lower and around my chest, soaping, soaping. “At your age, most men are pretty blunt about what they want. The successful ones are smoother, but they all come on with that funny-pathetic mixture of desperation and bravado that just turns me off. In case you haven’t heard about women’s lib, let me set you straight. Sometimes the girl likes to decide who she wants to bed down with. More often than you think. And when a girl gets hold of a good thing…”

“Hey, watch it! Gently. It’s the only one I have.”

“And a very serviceable one it is, too.”

“Shall we, Miss H?”

“We shall, Mr. K. But first, I think a rinse is in order. Suds on sheets don’t make it. Anyhow, when one gets hold of a good thing… raise your arms… then one is inclined to see if it has any lasting qualities.”

“And
I
am the most promising specimen to date? Come on. I’ve never amounted to a hill of beans in my whole life. I’m two steps away from being a confirmed alcoholic…”

“Frustration.”

“… and I’m nearly 18 years older than you are…”

“Not mentally. And emotionally I don’t think you’ve ever gotten out of your teens.”

“… and I’m almost flat broke. I’m not a very good prospect as a husband.”

She stood up and lifted one lovely leg from the tub. I kissed whatever areas were available until she almost slipped back in.

“So who…” she pulled me up from the water “… who said anything about marriage? That’s
your
generation talking, Carl. Contracts. Plights of troth and all that nonsense. I’ve been through the roll-in-the-hay bit and it’s not for me. But I’m not at all sure that marriage is either. I’m not planning to have any kids because I haven’t got any maternal instincts whatsoever.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said as I gently toweled her. “You’ve done very nicely by me so far.”

“That, lover, is something else altogether.” She began to towel me. “You exhibit all the over-40 signs. Uptight about marriage. Afraid of it, yet feeling it’s only right that you go through with all of society’s stupid little shopworn conventions because of what you probably think of as morality.”

“Hey. I’ve been knocking around quite a few years and I’ve managed to avoid matrimony very nicely up to now… without going in for abstinence. I’ve gotten by.”

“But I’ll bet you’ve had guilty twinges all along the way.”

She was right. But that’s another story.

“And you’ve picked up and run away every time you thought you were falling in love, or done some outrageous thing to drive away the girl, right?”

“What are you? My head shrinker?”
”Answer the lady? Am I right or am I right?”

The question was rhetorical. She already knew the answer. She looked down at her handiwork. “I should say, “she began in a mock-aristocratic British Horse Guards accent, “that Mr. Kolchak is ready for action.”

She was right again. And I had no ideas about driving her away.

“Just a sec…” She reached for a bottle of Shalimar.

“Uh, uh. I like you with just you. Come, woman, your master awaits.” I picked her up and bumped my way clumsily into the bedroom. We fell together on her bed in a tangle of arms and legs. She tasted as sweet as she smelled. I don’t think life had ever been so good. And I told her so.

“You know, Carl, there’s someone out at the university I think you should talk to. You may not be too crazy about her, but she’s just the one to see. She’s an expert on every crazy subject in the world. Ghosts, demons, vampires, ghouls …

“After lunch today I got to thinking about what you told me about Las Vegas. Prepare yourself for a little shock.”

“Go ahead. Shock me. I am impervious to surprise.”

“Her name is Dr. Kirsten Helms. Your mouth is open, Carl. Carl!”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” was all I could say.

“No doubt you will. But many years from now, I hope.”

There are clichés for this kind of situation. “Life is just full of little coincidences” and “Here we go again” come to mind. A good editor will tell you that in writing fiction (have never mentioned it, but I once tried my hand at the short story form for men’s magazines and failed) one must not lay on the “convenient coincidence” too heavily or too often. But the facts are that—here comes another cliché—truth
is
often stranger than fiction.

Two years away from Las Vegas. In a town as different as a place could be by virtue of weather, industry, and people. And thus far two souls who were intimately acquainted with my disastrous adventure in Las Vegas had turned up in my life once again. Vincenzo and Janie Carlson. Now there was Kirsten Helms, the very same Kirsten Helms who had given me the necessary research materials in Las Vegas to convince me I was
not
insane and very definitely on the right track.

However, consider the following: In Las Vegas (and probably many other places) it is not unheard of for an editor to leave his paper more than once and return. Vincenzo had left twice to take public-relations jobs on the Strip only to give up in frustration—he could never smile enough or say the right, phony things—and had once or twice tried Los Angeles. And, as much as he disliked Janie Carlson, I noticed he never stinted on giving her assignments when he wanted them done in a professional manner. His taking her along with him to Seattle was not altogether out of his character.

Which brings me to Dr. Helms. It is hardly unusual for a university-level instructor with tenure and several years beyond honorable retirement age to move from school to school in the pursuit of knowledge or some esoteric fact. I had taken a few classes from her myself at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. She was somewhere near eighty years old, though she admitted to “around 70” and looked, when I had last seen her, to be in her mid-50’s. She was feisty, acid-tongued, and very sharp of mind. It had taken heaven and earth to move her out of UNLV’s humanities department where she had held sway as the “unofficial chairman.” It was she who had told me to gather my facts about what I have supposed (correctly) to be a vampire and write a book—fiction, of course. For my health, I believe she had said.

The feeling of
déjà vu
began to creep over me again.

And so did Louise.

“You know something? It must be love.”

Louise nibbled my ear. I think I
would
follow her anywhere.

Chapter Nine

Thursday, April 13, 1972

I left Louise sleeping and crept out to the kitchen where I made some coffee, then got the
Chronicle
from her front doormat. Half of An Loc had fallen to the North Vietnamese. “Justifiable homicide” was the ruling of an inquest jury on the fatal shooting of John Augustus, Jr., who had shot six Seattle cops from his Bush Hotel room window on March 18. Governor Dan Evans would up his statewide tour “positively convinced” of “widespread dissatisfaction with our state’s tax structure.” And the Seattle School Board had decided to go ahead with its bussing plan for the Hamilton, Eckstein, Wilson and Meany-Madrona schools.

And where was my story? In the middle of page three with a notation on same under “Local Briefs” at the bottom of the front page. More of Vincenzo’s handiwork, no doubt.

I dressed, called a cab, and headed for the University of Washington, my trusty tape recorder in hand.

The University of Washington is situated on nearly 700 acres of greenery on the shores of Lake Washington with NE 45
^th
Street bordering it on its northern most side, and 23
^rd
Avenue cutting right through the center of it.

As the cab moved up Memorial Way, I could see the Washington State Museum to my right. It’s an old campus with a good-sized student body of more than 33,000. Louise told me Dr. Helms’s quarters were in Denny Hall, a great gray stone structure build in 1895 and named for the pioneer who had given a generous endowment to help get the university it’s “territorial” status. Arthur Denny’s great-grandson is the present Dean of the Graduate School of Public Affairs.

Denny Hall itself is crowned by a greenish-tinged copper cupola which houses an amplifier system from which the university chimes peal forth their call to study. For the most part, it is taken up by language classes, psychology offices, and a few labs on its upper-most floors. It used to have a wooden sash decorating its exterior but this was replaced by steel about ten years ago. Inside, as expected, it’s a bit musty with a bit of the old lab smell about.

Dr. Helms’s “temporary quarters” were the remains of an old board room with eighteen-foot-high ceilings, and paneled in dark-stained oak throughout. The walls were lined with books and the two tables—one large round one and a smaller oblong affair, leather-topped—were littered with tomes, notes, and the assembled skeletons of small animals. Seated behind a huge, incredibly ugly desk, likewise littered, was Dr. Helms. She was visibly older, a bit heavier, and her spiky hair was almost snow white. But she was still the same Dr. Helms.

“Late as usual, I see, and still drinking too much. Typical of your breed, Kolchak. Sloppy student. Sloppy in personal habits as well. You’re still undernourished, under-exercised, and no doubt your mind is slowly dissolving in alcohol. I’d love to have it, “she said with great relish, “to study when you finally wind up in some alleyway. It won’t even need to be put in formaldehyde.”

“Welcome home, said the chastised reporter glumly.”

“Forget the wisecracks, Kolchak. I’m a busy woman. Your friend, Miss Harper, who by the way has an excellent mind—although I’m not sure now, seeing who she’s been associating with of late—told me what you’ve been up to. It does an old woman’s heart good to know that someone, even someone like you, Kolchak, still has enough independence of mind to
not
turn up his nose at things most people call ‘the stuff of fairy tales.’ Well, don’t just sit there on your bad record. Tell me what you’ve got, and I’ll tell you where to go.”

I just bet she would, too. “I’m still recovering from your welcome.” I turned on my tape recorder. She scowled.

“Well …?”

“Well, this time I don’t think it’s a vampire. It would seem that every 21 years since 1889…”

I gave her every piece of information I had been able to find, plus my own speculation, and related my encounter with the man in the alley, of whom I still had my doubts as a suspect.