The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 23

The Blue Parrot is only a couple of blocks off the Strip, but it’s several steps down from the splendor of the big casinos. Even from the exterior, the down-at-heels look hits me: A few nonfunctioning tubes in the gigantic sign give the neon parrot a disheveled look, as if it’s molting.

I pop for valet parking, handing my keys to a distinguished-looking man in his sixties. He gives me an austere nod along with a bright blue claim ticket. It occurs to me that Vegas is the ultimate service economy, so there are lots of men like this – dapper retirees who look as if they ought to be sitting in boardrooms.

At six P.M., the place seems tired and dingy, only a couple of its tables going, stage curtains drawn, the place mostly empty. A few hardy types slam away at the slots, but at this hour most of the patrons are there for the $3.99 Early Parrot Dinner.

A fatigued woman in a cheetah-print micro-dress sighs and shows me into the boss’s office. This is a ten-foot box, paneled in fake wood, with a scrofulous magenta carpet and a particleboard desk from which the veneer is beginning to separate and curl. Clay Riggins, fifty, bald, with the permanent squint of a smoker, has seen better days himself – although a big diamond stud in one ear speaks of a certain bravado. He’s on the phone, a Diet Dr Pepper in his hand. He raises it by way of hello and continues his conversation. Which concerns pool maintenance.

I stand there for more than five minutes, counting the number of empty Dr Pepper cans in the room (fourteen) and wondering what I can possibly learn from Riggins. What do I even hope to learn? Something, Shoffler says in the back of my head. Or maybe not. The detective would tell me that the process can be circuitous. This guy, maybe he says something and later you put it together with something else.

Riggins finally hangs up. “Sorry ’bout that,” he says, with a little grimace. “These days, you gotta ride herd on every single thing, know what I mean?” He shakes his head. “So you’re here about the Gabler sisters.”

“Right.”

“Well, I don’t mind talkin’ to you, but I hardly knew these girls, know what I’m saying?”

“They worked for you for eight months,” I point out.

“Yeah yeah yeah, but plenty of people work for me. I didn’t really know the two of them – didn’t even know where they lived.”

I’m not sure what to ask him. “Were they… good at their job? What did they do, anyway?”

“We gotta stage show – bird theme. They more or less came out in their costumes, took their tops off, and shook their tits along with a dozen other girls, while one of the dancers or singers did her thing in the middle. And no – they weren’t very good at it. They had the twin thing going for them, and that was about it.”

“Hunh.”

“Truth is, they weren’t that pretty,” Clay Riggins tells me. “I kept telling them, they needed a little work, a little less nose, a little more boob.” He barks a laugh. “Then” – he seesaws his hands in the air – “maybe I showcase them a little more. As it was…” He expels a dismissive puff of air and taps his hands on the desk.

“So what did you think when they didn’t show up for work?”

“Now, that,” he says, as if this never occurred to him before, “was not like them. Dependable – yeah, I give ’ em that. Never missed a single day of work.”

“So – weren’t you surprised when they didn’t show up? Didn’t you think something might be wrong?”

He frowns, pushes the air with his hands, as if shunting this notion right back to me. “Nah – this is Vegas, son.”

“So what did you think?”

“Truth?” He fingers his earring. “I thought they went home. Took jobs in Wal-Mart or the Dairy Queen or whatever. I thought they were like a lot of girls come here – hoping to meet Prince Charming or catch the eye of some Hollywood director or whatever damn thing these girls think. I thought maybe they figured out it wasn’t going to happen and decided to bag it. They were on the shy side – maybe didn’t want to come and tell me in person. That’s what I thought.” He shrugs and drains his Dr Pepper. “But maybe not.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tammy? Their roommate – she’s the one brought them to me. A good kid, Tammy. Works at the Sands now. Anyway, the twins told her they had an audition, thought they had a line on a new job.”

I sit up straight. This is new. “What audition? Where?”

Riggins shrugs. “I don’t think Tammy said.”

Tammy Yagoda lives with her fiancé, Jaime, in a new condo five miles out of town toward the Hoover Dam. The living room contains a huge television and an overstuffed couch. “We just moved in,” Tammy apologizes. “It’s going to be soooo great! Good thing we’re minimalists – right, honey?” She gives Jaime a megawatt smile and asks him to get me a chair.

Jaime brings in a beat-up straight-backed chair from the dining alcove. The two of them twine together on the couch as we talk, trying to keep their hands off each other. But failing.

“Tammy’s been through all this a million times,” Jaime warns me. “She can’t think of anything she has to add.”

Tammy looks up at him adoringly – her champion. “I still can’t believe it,” she tells me, her features clouding. “They were such sweetie pies, really nice girls.” She twists her pretty face into a grimace. “It was so horrible.”

Jaime gives her a buck-up hug and a peck on the cheek.

“How were they nice?”

“In just about every way,” Tammy says. “Do anything for you. Plus” – she looks at Jaime – “they were, you know, a little naive.”

“What she means,” Jaime puts in, “is they were sexually inexperienced.”

“Jaime!” She gives his thigh a little girly slap.

“Hey, he asked,” Jaime says. “Why not say what you mean? Now, I didn’t know these girls, but from what Tammy told me, they were like… off the truck.”

“He’s right,” Tammy says, with a sigh and a sad little shake of her head. “They were soooo naive. Like they believed guys when guys said they weren’t married.”

“You told me they didn’t even know what a blow job was. Thought it involved blowing air on someone’s dick. You had to explain it to them.”

“Jaime!” Another slap.

“I mean, what planet were they living on, you know?”

“So they didn’t date much.”

“Oh, no,” Tammy says. “I lived with them for almost a year and maybe they each had a couple of dates. Don’t get me wrong: they weren’t virgins, but they were like – they had to be in love to have sex with someone, you know? That kind of cuts down on your social life here. They hated doing the topless thing. They couldn’t wait to get out of that.”

“No old boyfriends, no stalkers they were worried about, no admirers, no one… uh… romancing either one of them?”

“I met Jaime a couple of weeks before they went missing and it was” – she looks at her fiancé – “it was love at first sight. So maybe they met someone in that two weeks, ’cause I was busy.” A chuckle from Jaime. “But far as I know, there was no one.”

Jaime rubs her thigh and kisses her neck. I feel like a voyeur.

“Guys came on to them, of course, all the time,” Tammy says, “but they never brought anyone home. They weren’t like that. And I taught them to be careful. Coming home from the Parrot, there’s a guy escorts you to your car; they’re real good about that. But even so, I told them – don’t ever get into your car without looking in the backseat. Always check behind you.”

“How about a guy with a dog – a whippet? You ever see anyone like that?”

“No. Clara was afraid of dogs. They were cat people.”

I ask if the twins were into medieval festivals or Renaissance fairs.

“What’s that?” Tammy asks.

“You know, Tammy,” Jaime answers, “one of those things with knights and shit. Like Excalibur. My cousin Wilson dragged me to one of them a couple years ago. I thought it was dorky, but Wilson – he loved that shit.” He rubs Tammy’s thigh. “It might be the kind of thing those girls’d be into.”

“I don’t think so,” Tammy says. “They weren’t like… historical.” She brightens. “They did go to see Harry Potter…”

I ask Tammy’s opinion: What does she think happened to them?

Tammy shivers and looks at Jaime. “I don’t know. Some psycho. I mean, what else? It has to be. Someone who followed them from the Parrot. Found out where they lived. Stalked them.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “Gives me the creeps.”

Jaime agrees. “I wouldn’t let Tammy go near her apartment – not after she found the cats abandoned like that. Even before the cops discovered the bodies, Tammy knew something terrible happened. She just knew.”

“That was sad, too,” Tammy says, turning her woeful gaze toward Jaime, “about the cats. I tried to find a home for them, but they had to go to the shelter.”

“Clay Riggins mentioned some kind of audition,” I tell her. “You know anything about that?”

“Yeah! And that’s soooo sad, too, you know? They were so stoked about that. They worked their butts off – speech classes, dance, Pilates, got their teeth whitened. And it looked like it was all about to pay off. And then…”

“What kind of audition was it? I mean, what was it for?”

Tammy shrugs. “Some kind of magic show.”

“A magic show? Hunh. You know anything else about it?”

Tammy shakes her head. “This is just like… like two days after I met Jaime. Clara told me about it when I called to tell her where I was – because I knew they’d worry, you know? She said she thought they really had a shot. She was excited, but… I was on my cell, at work. I didn’t get any details.”

Ezme (“with a z”) Brewster, the owner and resident manager of the Palomar Apartments, greets me with a “Howdy.” She’s sixty, or maybe even seventy. Reading glasses suspended from a rhinestone chain rest on her chest. In one hand, she holds a TV remote; in the other, a lit cigarette. She gestures with the cigarette toward the color TV in the corner. “Come on in, honey, but hold your fire for a minute. I’m watching something.”

From the television, Maury Povich says: “Let’s find out right now!” The camera flips to a black teenager, head hanging to reveal intricate cornrows, then to a shot of a smiling toddler.

“In the case of two-year-old Devon,” Maury says, opening an envelope, “Donnell – you are the father.”

An overweight woman jumps up and does a kind of victory dance, then shakes her fist, cursing out the kid with the cornrows – who now wears a kind of shit-eating grin. Little bursts of pixilated fog cover the woman’s mouth as she shouts expletives.

Ezme hits the power button. “Rotting my damn brain,” she says, stubbing out her cigarette. “But what the hell. I’m not gonna solve the conflict in the Middle East at my age. So you’re here about the Gabler girls?” She makes a sad face, shakes her head. “How can I help?”

“I’m not sure.” I explain to her who I am and that I’m checking out murders involving twins.

“Oh, my God, of course. You poor man. Those little boys. I saw you on TV. Terrible thing. And you think there’s some connection with Clara and Carla? Good Lord… Well, they were some of the best damn tenants I ever had. A real damned shame. Paid on time, kept the place neat as a pin, no male visitors. I was in the hospital when they disappeared. Electrolytes out of balance or some damned thing. If I’d been here, I damn sure would have reported them missing a lot sooner than happened.”

“So you saw them regularly.”

“Every single day. They were homebodies, those two. Rare in this town.”

I ask her the usual set of questions about tall men, skinny dogs, medieval fancies. She shakes her head: no, no, and no, not so far as she knew.

“Did you know anything about an audition for a magic show?”

She nods. “That was another damned shame. They worked like dogs improving themselves, spending all their hard-earned money on this kind of lesson and that kind of lesson. They finally get a shot, and then-” She heaves a sigh, which turns into a prolonged coughing fit.

“Who was the audition for?”

She taps her head. “It was a new act, just getting started. There was to be some weeks of rehearsal. Clara did tell me the name of it.” She sighs, looks at the ceiling. “But I don’t really remember. The Meressa Show? Marassa? Malessa? Some kind of name like that – reminded me of molasses. The audition was at the Luxor, I think – or maybe it was the Mandalay Bay.”

I ask for her take on what happened.

She lights a cigarette. “Some wacko lured ’em out to Red Rock, killed ’em for fun. That’s what I think.”

“I guess that’s the theory.”

“What else could it be? The police dug back into their high school days and their hometown and all, and they didn’t find a thing. It didn’t seem to be personal, either, know what I mean?”

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t. Nobody claimed it. No sexual motive. What I think is they were killed more or less for fun.”

“Maybe.”

“Watching television as much as I do,” Ezme says, “you get a good idea what people can get themselves up to. Between the reality shows and the news, I’d say we’re closing in on the Romans. Except – when we get to the gladiator stage, Barbara WaWa will interview the guy before he heads out into the ring. And the gladiator will thank everybody in creation who got him the chance to die on television. His manager. His hair stylist. His personal trainer.”

“Can I see the apartment?”

“Oh, honey, there’s nothing to see. A couple with a baby lives there now.”

“What about the girls’ belongings?”

“I left the apartment right like it was for three or four months. The girls didn’t have much stuff and what they had wasn’t worth a bean, but I couldn’t bring myself to clear it out. Police finally tracked down some cousin out in North Dakota. This cousin – she didn’t want nothing. Not one thing. Kinda sad, isn’t it? Didn’t really know the girls. Didn’t want to bury her kin, neither. The girls are planted here, courtesy of the state. I finally gave what was useful to the Purple Heart. They came and fetched it, see.”

I’m out of questions. I thank Mrs. Brewster and turn toward the door.

She stops me with a hand on my arm. “Oh, Lord. And them in their little costumes. You think it was this audition, don’t you?” She sucks in a breath.

“The audition? What do you mean?”

“Isn’t that what you’re thinking? That some crazeball lured them, used their hopes and dreams to suck them in – had them put on their costumes, speak their lines, and go through their routines, and then… like he had them try out for their own murder.” She sucks in her breath, which launches another spate of coughing. Mrs. Brewster’s eyes close briefly, as if she might be uttering a silent prayer. “That’s dark,” she says. “That’s downright evil.”

When the skin on the back of my neck stops crawling, I squeeze out a thank-you to Mrs. Brewster for her time.

Standing next to the car as I wait for it to cool down, I think Ezme Brewster is probably right. The Gablers auditioned for their murderer. But the thing is: So what? I can’t see how it has anything to do with Sean and Kevin.

Back at the Tropicana, I have two messages. The first is from Liz. “Alex, what are you doing in Las Vegas?” Her voice is shrill and disapproving. Then she’s all business: “Please give me a call.”

The second is from Barry Chisworth, the medical examiner. He says he’ll be happy to talk to me and leaves a string of numbers.

Liz is not easy to talk to these days. She knows it’s unfair, she’s trying to work it through with her therapist – but she can’t get past focusing all her negative feelings on me. She feels guilty for letting the boys come to stay with me – and indulges in endless versions of the what-if game. So whatever remnant of blame that’s not on me, rests on her. Whoever abducted the boys doesn’t even fit into her picture. She let the boys come. If she’d refused… if only she’d let me take them on the trip to the beach…

I force myself to call.

“Hello?” Her voice is tremulous, tentative.

“Hey.”

“What are you doing in Las Vegas, Alex? Are you gambling?”

“I’m following a lead that Shoffler suggested.”

“Really? He’s not even connected to the case anymore.”

“He didn’t ask to be transferred. He continues to take an interest.”

“What lead?”

My mind spins. I’m not going to tell her anything about the Gabler twins, that’s for sure. I doubt the connection anyway, and what happened to the women is too gruesome to raise with Liz. “A bad lead. It didn’t go anywhere.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be in Vegas. My dad’s been thinking about it. You should be canvassing the houses near Shade Valley Road. That’s the most likely-”

“Liz. The police checked those homes. Over and over.”

“My dad’s convinced!” Her voice is shrill, out of control. We go on for a while. The tone continues to deteriorate. “I’m still expecting my spousal support,” she says. “Whether you have a job or not. I’m not supporting trips to Las Vegas. I mean it, Alex: The check better be on time.”

I tell myself this sour bitch isn’t really Liz. She doesn’t want to feel the loss and terror, so she’s sticking with anger.

“Liz.”

“I mean it, Alex. Don’t ask me to cut you any slack. Just don’t even try.”

I wish I could say the perfect thing, something to comfort and buoy her, something to give her hope. But the descent of my wife into this petty bitterness makes me so sad I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I might break down. I hang up.

She calls back four times. The escalating level of fury and vitriol will be recorded on my voice mail.