The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 21

Vegas. I’ve never been to Vegas before. It just never happened. But like everyone, I guess, I had a full-blown notion of the place – equal parts glitz and sleaze. As it turns out, my mental Las Vegas pales before the real thing.

The initial mile out of the Avis lot from McCarran Airport is sleazy, as torn-up and funky as any disreputable stretch of Route 1. Tired motels and seedy casinos vie for space with down-at-the-heels wedding chapels and fringe commercial enterprises. The Hearing Palace. Leonard’s Wide Shoes. The Laughing Jackalope. This last is a motel-casino right out of a B movie. In fact, you wouldn’t get away with inventing The Laughing Jackalope. It’s too seedy. The sign features a sinister rabbit decked out in a green tuxedo lounging against a fan of cards.

I pass a giant billboard advertising MICROSURGICAL VASECTOMY REVERSAL. (Is there a big market for this? The sign lists four locations.) Then I hit the first big hotel-casino, the sheathed-in-gold Mandalay Bay.

It’s unbelievably huge, bigger than any structure in the D.C. area except maybe the Pentagon. And it’s the first of many of these monsters. I’m reduced to gawking as I drive up the Strip in my rented Ford. Each hotel is like a separate theme park, a huge and lavish stage set. Mandalay Bay, Luxor, New York New York, Paris, the Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace. A tidbit from the flight magazine said that the light from the Luxor’s obsidian pyramid can be seen from outer space. The gigantic faces of Vegas-centric celebrities loom everywhere on massive billboards. David Copperfield, Lance Burton, Penn and Teller, Wayne Newton, Cirque du Soleil, Céline Dion.

Lights, billboards, crowds. It’s Times Square on steroids.

But I’m not staying in one of these nouveau palaces. Priceline found me a bargain at the Tropicana. It’s still huge, but compared to the new places, it seems almost petite. I drive around to the self-park lot and go into the hotel through the casino.

Which is so crowded it’s hard to walk. A barrel-vaulted stained-glass roof sprawls above endless ranks of slot machines. Four women in bright green sequined costumes sing and dance on a stage-lit elevated platform. Lights flash, twinkle, pop. The air is filled with Nintendo tunes, a constant beep and boink of canned melodies interrupted by the occasional grace note – a cascade of coins as a machine pays off. Every pop phenomenon – movie, sitcom, celebrity, popular toy, ethnic emblem, nursery rhyme – boasts a slot machine counterpart. Falsetto choruses burst forth at regular intervals, caroling signature phrases. “Wheel of Fortune!” “Come on Down!”

By the time I fight my way through to the registration desk, I need a sensory deprivation chamber.

“Welcome to the Big Sleazy,” Holly Goldstein says when I get him on the phone. “I pulled the files on the Gabler case. Got some time at three if you’re not tapped out from your flight.”

I tell him I’ll be there.

“Grab a pencil,” he tells me. “Folks expect we’re right near the Strip or in old Vegas, but we’re way out of town. In fact, if you’re on the Strip, technically you’re not even in Las Vegas. You’re in Paradise.”

“What?”

“Yeah. With a capital P. The developers incorporated the Strip as a separate jurisdiction called Paradise.”

“Really.”

“Yeah – in which case, you could say that the Las Vegas P.D. is a long way from Paradise. They stuck us out here in the burbs, like a bunch of dentists. It’s about a thirty-minute drive, depending on traffic.” Goldstein gives directions in the sonorous voice of an anchorman or voiceover specialist. Even his laugh is mellifluous, a liquid chortle. Shoffler told me that Goldstein was in showbiz before he turned to law enforcement. “That’s what the ‘Hollywood’ is about. Holly did a cop show about twenty years back and his true vocation called him.”

At two fifty, after driving through miles and miles of subdivisions and strip malls, I turn into what does, in fact, look like a suburban office park. The complex isn’t even a stand-alone cop shop. The Las Vegas P.D. shares its headquarters with Happy Feet Podiatry, the Bahama Tanning Salon, Nauticale Pool Services. Finally, I spot a clutch of white vans marked CRIME SCENE, and a set of doors identified as CRIMINALISTICS, and I figure I’m in the right area. A man wielding a leaf blower turns it off to speak to me, but shrugs when I ask him where to find Homicide. A colleague, mulching a shrub, points over his shoulder. “Por aquí.”

In the reception area, two women tap away on computers. The wall behind them displays a large super-realistic photo of woodlands, a country-style wreath with fake birds and eggs, and some children’s drawings. One woman asks my business, then buzzes Goldstein and tells me to wait, gesturing toward a tiny alcove just big enough to hold two chairs. I sit, facing a framed engraving of a wooded path. The gilded inscription reads: YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE.

Goldstein is a tall, handsome man in his early fifties, with silver hair and jet black eyebrows. We shake hands, and he delivers what amounts to a testimonial to Ray Shoffler. “Ray’s ears must be burning,” Goldstein concludes, “but I kid you not, the guy is really something. Old school. We get all hung up now in technology and it’s great, okay? Our case files are ten times as thick as they were even ten years ago – we get that much data. And it can help, especially in court. But to solve a crime? Nah. Sometimes you get lost in all that crap; it works against you. Take 9/11. The information was there, but it got lost in the data stream. Ray cracked a case for me one time strictly on a hunch.”

“I’m here on one of his hunches.”

“There you go,” he says, with a dip of the head. “Hey, Cindy,” he calls out. “Open Sesame.”

I follow him through a metal gate that swings open with an electronic growl. We make our way through a warren of tiny offices, edging past a crew working with a huge camera and boom mike. They seem to be in the process of photographing a piece of paper. “Cold case,” Goldstein says, with a nod toward the cameraman. “They’re assembling documents. You can’t afford to slap these things in a scanner. You gotta preserve the original – so they have to be photographed. The deal is we just elected a new sheriff. One of his campaign promises was to go after the cold cases.”

“Like the Gablers?”

He shrugs. “All of them, supposedly. But with the Gablers, I don’t know. Thing is, they’re kind of an orphan case.”

“What do you mean?”

We arrive at a conference room. Goldstein gestures toward one of the dozen chairs arrayed around a wooden table. “Let me explain how we work here. First of all, we got a huge area to police. Clark County and the city of Las Vegas – it’s more territory than the state of Massachusetts. Eight thousand square miles.” He nods toward the huge satellite photo of Las Vegas and environs that occupies one wall. “And growing. Fastest growing city in the U.S. The workload can be a bitch. We’re supposed to work these cold cases in our down periods – which is a joke around here.”

“You have a lot of murders?”

“Less than you’d think. We average maybe a hundred fifty homicides a year. And hardly any of our work comes from the Strip. The big casinos have a huge stake in safety – and there’s lots of surveillance. Tourists don’t get popped – that’s quite rare. And they don’t come to Vegas to pop each other, either. Most of our business is the same as anywhere else. Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. Meth labs, drug deals gone sour.”

“So the Gablers… what do you mean they’re orphans?”

He slaps his hands down, one at a time, on the two binders on the table in front of him. “Clara and Carla. Carla and Clara. They’re orphans two times over – or would that be four? For openers, they’re actually orphans – their folks got killed in a car crash down around Searchlight. The girls were seventeen.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Cars kill way more people than guns. It’s not even close! I mean, forty thou a year get killed in cars, just here, in the U.S. That’s like a coupla jumbo jets crashing every single week. Anyway, the Gabler girls – not only are they orphans, but their case is orphaned, too. See, the way it works is every detective owns his cases. The investigating detective – once it’s his case, it’s always his case. The guy who ran the Gabler investigation was Jerry Olmstead. He had the desk next to mine, which is why I know as much about the case as I do. Anyway, Jerry had his thirty-five in, high blood pressure, the wife was antsy. So he retired, moved to Lake Havasu. A month later, to the day – his ticker goes off.”

“Jeez.”

“So that’s how the Gablers became orphans the second time around. And it’s not good when a victim loses his or her investigating detective. You get attached, you know what I’m saying? Right from the get-go. It’s your case; it’s your baby.” He leans toward me, his face earnest. “It sounds like bullshit, but we really feel – I mean we detectives – we really feel like we’re working for the victims. Soooo-” He shrugs. “With Jerry gone, the Gabler case has no built-in advocate. It’s a pretty high-profile deal, so maybe the guy who inherited the case will take it on, now that the sheriff’s got a hard-on for cold cases. But I doubt it, I really do.”

I don’t say anything. I’m thinking about Shoffler’s move to the task force.

“So why didn’t you inherit the Gabler case?”

“Didn’t want it. Tough case. And I was slammed, anyway. On account of the Mongols.”

“The what?”

“The Mongols. Motorcycle gang. Them and the Angels had a war down in Laughlin. Lotta people killed. Lotta witnesses to interview. I was in court for months.

“But look,” he says, shifting gears. “I checked to see who has the case, and it’s Moreno’s. Pablo Moreno. He’s a pretty good guy. He’s in court this week, but you can give him a call on his cell.” He tells me the number, and I log it in my notebook.

“So this Moreno – he’s working the Gabler case?”

Goldstein shakes his head. “No. Like I said, maybe he’ll pick it up now that there’s this push, but I wouldn’t put money on it. Like all of us, he’s got dozens of cold cases to choose from. And the Gabler case has a strike against it.”

“What’s that?”

“No one’s beating the drums. Sometimes you have a murder and ten years later, Mom or Dad is still making it their business to call and follow up with us. And I mean every single day. But the Gabler girls? Uh-uh. No one making noise at all. Sort of the opposite.”

“What do you mean?”

“The murder was so… grotesque, you know? And these girls, they worked on the Strip. Well, two blocks off, but close enough, y’know? And the Strip – that’s our bread and butter. Horrific unsolved crimes are not the publicity you want. Not exactly.” Goldstein frowns. “My way of thinking – the sensational aspect of the murders actually works against the case being pursued. It’s bad for business. Too… visceral, you know what I’m saying?”

“I guess.”

“Let me put it this way. Here in Vegas, we got guys with man-eating tigers, we got disappearing cars and people, we got roller coasters will scare the living shit out of you. We got showgirls up the kazoo. Heck, every two-bit casino – even some restaurants – has beautiful waitresses with their asses and tits hanging out all over the place. But it’s all… packaged, you know. The death-defying magic shows, the rides and all – it’s thrills and no spills. And as for the showgirls, that’s sanitized, too. Sex without fluids, as someone put it. Not that we don’t have call girls and prostitutes – Jesus, it’s frickin legal here. You’ve seen the booty boxes?”

“Yeah.” He’s referring to metal boxes that stand on many streets amidst the boxes vending USA Today or the like, but inside are the details and photos of many of the town’s prostitutes.

He shakes his head. “Most towns have real estate sheets in those things, you know? Homes for sale. We got hos for rent. Anyway, the Gabler case – showgirls massacred! – considering all it had going for it, the story actually moved to the back pages pretty damn fast.”

“Hunh.”

“No family – that really hurt, I think. So anyway, the case just kinda faded away.”

“So it’s okay if I look at the files? Moreno won’t mind?”

He holds out his hands and rolls them open in the direction of the binders. “All yours. Not that there’s a lot in there. I mean – no one reported these girls missing for more than two weeks.”

“Jesus.”

“Well, you know, it’s Vegas. New people pouring in all the time. Other people pouring out.” He thumps the notebooks again. “Clara and Carla,” he says, with a rueful shake of his head. “Even after their roommate gets around to wondering if something happened to them, it’s another week before there’s any evidence of foul play. Up to then, nobody’s even looking for these girls. That’s what you’d figure, you know? They took off for L.A. or Maui or just went back home. Whatever. I mean, apart from each other, they had no family, no one really paying attention that they’re missing. In the meantime, the trail’s gettin’ way cold. I mean – two weeks is a lifetime.”

“This evidence-” I say. “You’re talking about… when the hiker found them?”

“Right. That poor sonofabitch. He had to be hospitalized! They had to helicopter him outta there. But he didn’t find them.”

“No?”

“Not exactly. Not them. He just found half of Clara, right? The bottom half.”