The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 27

I spend a couple of days going to magic shows in increasingly seedy venues, shopping my sketches of The Piper. I question the girls who work these shows. Did they know the Gablers? Do they recognize The Piper? Did they ever audition for a magic show three years or so ago? The thought of murder and magic intertwined does not cut through their boredom. They go through the motions of looking at my sketches, but they’re thinking about something else: a cigarette, a boyfriend, a chipped nail.

During the day, I work the phones, pestering every vendor or renter of ATVs and generators in the Vegas area to check their records for the time frame around the Gabler murder. “Three years ago?” one guy tells me. “That’s a lifetime here, man. Half of the places in business didn’t even exist.”

Even when I tell people who I am, a move forced by the indifference I meet, most of those I talk to are wary and defensive – or just too busy. If I were a cop, they might help me, but as it is… no. They cite “privacy issues,” liability, understaffing, poor records.

I check my e-mail and my messages at the Las Vegas Public Library. Shoffler is still in France, so I call Muriel Petrich. She listens to me talk about my breakthrough. She takes notes, asking me to repeat certain things. She promises to get on it, promises that the police will paper every magician’s association and trade-show booking agency with The Piper’s sketches and so on. But I can tell from the way she’s talking to me that either she’s not convinced that my breakthrough really amounts to much or that my case has slipped down on her list of priorities.

“Why do I get the feeling that you’re just going to go through the motions?” I ask her.

“Come on, Alex – is that fair? I’m going to take the obvious steps, but” – a sigh – “I don’t know what else I can do here. What do you want me to do?”

“Show some enthusiasm.”

Another sigh. “Look, I’ve got a family over in Severna Park – a quadruple murder. Maybe this didn’t make the news in Vegas, but it’s a pretty big deal here. They were asleep, in their beds. So that’s wrapping me up pretty good right now.”

Now it’s my turn to sigh. “That’s… horrible. I’m really sorry.”

“Look, Alex. I’m on it, this magic angle. I really am. I promise I’ll do what I can.”

I check in with the people I’ve interviewed: Tammy Yagoda, Ezme, Riggins at the Blue Parrot. Have they thought of anything new? They haven’t.

I call Pablo Moreno and explain my interest in the Gabler case. I tell him I think the perp was a magician. He listens. He’s polite. He’ll look into it. He might have some time available next week – he’s rotating off the active crew.

And then… that’s it. I’ve got what I think is a great lead, I think I found out something important about The Piper, but I don’t know what else to do about it.

I find myself in the casino, submerged in the cacophony of the slots, chatter, laughter. A sequence of beautiful smiling women in scanty outfits bring me beer. For an hour or so, I hang around the craps table, watching a big redhead named Marie on a roll. She plays with such happy-go-lucky zeal and joy, it’s painful when she starts to lose. I drift away toward the slots.

After a few false starts, I settle down at the Lucky Leprechaun, and quickly fall into the rhythm. Insert money, pull, wait for the symbols to snap into place. I’m thrilled when the little cartoon man in green clicks his heels together, gives me an Irish wink, and tumbles over his pot of gold – sending noisy cascades of coins into my machine’s waiting tray.

I feed money into the machine, pull, watch the wheels spin. Again. Again. And again.

Another beer? Why not.

I visit the casino’s handily located ATM, while asking another player to watch my machine.

Insert money, pull. Again. Again. Again.

Another beer.

Feeling bloated, I switch to a more compact beverage. Scotch.

Back to the ATM again. Max out my card for the day. My remaining balance? – $920.

Nine hundred and twenty dollars. I tell myself that’s not much, that I’m almost broke, that I should take the cash in my pocket and quit while I’m behind. I don’t listen.

I know I must be drunk but I don’t feel it. I feel a tremendous sense of clarity as I focus on the leprechaun, waiting for his jaunty little dance, his exaggerated wink, his smiling turn toward the pot o’ gold.

At one point I have three plastic tubs of coins, but I keep recycling them, fighting my fatigue, the ache in my back, the whine of conscience. I’m mechanical now, the way I push the coins back into the steel slot over and over until finally, there’s only one coin left.

I no longer want to win. It seems important, even imperative, to lose. Sometime during the past few hours, my brain made a bargain with fate. From “lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” I concocted a different formula. Unlucky at gambling, lucky in life.

I need to lose my last quarter to save my sons.

The coin feels warm, almost alive as I push it into the cool metal slot. I pull the metal arm, and wait for the wheels to stop turning. And then it happens: one, two, three shamrocks align themselves across the bar. The leprechaun dances and winks, and tumbles his pot of gold. The screen blinks on and off: WINNER WINNER WINNER. The machine bleats a tinny version of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” A small crowd gathers to watch my payoff cascade endlessly into the tray.

I’m determined to lose all my money. It’s not easy and I have no idea how long it takes. Casinos aren’t big on clocks, and there’s no hint of daylight to cue the gambler’s circadian rhythms. I finally lose my last dollar to a mean-looking pig who wallows in his cartoon sty as the screen flashes GAME OVER.

The hangover is so bad I feel weak and out of focus. I step outside the Tropicana into a wall of heat. The glare of the fading sun as I drive toward McCarran Airport almost kills me. The cheery music from the ranks of slots at the airport is so irritating it propels me into a little trot. Bad idea. Something inside my skull seems to be sloshing around. There are ominous clicks and a stabbing pain behind my eyes. I take refuge in a quiet corner and force myself to drink a bottle of water.

My plane is, appropriately enough, a red-eye, so I get in at dawn. The drive home soothes me, the familiar monuments, the practiced route. The brilliant flowers and green trees and grass seem jungle lush after my sojourn in the desert. On the river, sculls glide along the placid water.

The house has that stale, uninhabited smell. Liz used to light candles when we returned from vacation. I consider giving her a call, but what would I say? Now that I’m home, the connections between the Gablers, the Sandlings, and our boys don’t seem so solid.

Murdered Twins. I spend a few hours online, trying different search engines to see what turns up. But I’m going over old ground, and these searches don’t find anything new.

The only other murder of twins – apart from the Gablers – was the one in southern California. I remember it from my early forays online: the Ramirez twins, Wilson and Julio. I never paid much attention to the case, despite the fact that the victims were seven years old and twins. The perpetrator was dead.

But I can hear Shoffler telling me not to make assumptions. And Holly Goldstein explaining how certain facts or insights never make it into police reports, let alone into the news. For instance: Barry Chisworth’s hunch that a rotary saw had been used to cut Clara Gabler in half.

So maybe there was an accomplice in the Ramirez case – a suspect whose name hadn’t surfaced. Maybe the police didn’t have enough to charge him, and now, he’s back.

At first, it’s not promising. The killer was a man named Charley Vermillion. According to the police, he’d been released from the Port Sulfur Forensic Facility about two weeks before the Ramirez boys went missing. Forensic facility means nothing to me, although released suggests some kind of incarceration.

I look it up. A forensic facility in this case is an asylum for the criminally insane. Port Sulfur is in Louisiana.

A story in the Times Picayune, accessed through Google, reveals that Vermillion was captured after an anonymous tip. According to the same report, he was holed up with the bodies of the children in a ramshackle cabin near Big Sur. One corpse was found in the refrigerator. The body had been pierced dozens of times, then butchered and neatly packaged in plastic bags. Vermillion had apparently cooked and consumed parts of the dead boy. The other child, also dead, was found suspended by the feet in a fifty-foot-deep well.

Taken into custody, Vermillion killed himself in the squad car by ingesting a cyanide capsule taped to his shirt collar. That’s about as solved as a case can get.

Ten minutes later, I’m talking to Harvey Morris, a detective in Big Sur who worked the case.

“Wasn’t much work to it,” Morris tells me. “We got a tip and we just went where the informant pointed. And there was old Charley with a fridge full of body parts. He surrendered without a fuss, just seemed confused and talked about going home. He’s in the squad, we’ve secured the crime scene, and we’re ready to go to the station. All of sudden the sonofabitch starts making these noises like he’s strangling. I think he’s having a heart attack or something. He turns red, bright cherry red. Starts convulsing. We call an ambulance, and give him CPR but… he croaks.”

“When did you find out he’d poisoned himself?”

“Not like – until the next day. We didn’t see him take the pill, you know? I thought a stroke or something – what do I know? But the medico guessed cyanide and the autopsy confirmed it. That and a shitload of Valium. No wonder he was no trouble. Forensics found tape residue on the underside of his shirt collar. He was all ready to sign off, you know?”

“Hunh.”

“For the sake of form, you try to tell yourself it’s terrible a guy like that offs himself. Don’t get me wrong – it was terrible for me because it happened on my watch. There was an inquiry; I was put on administrative leave; I had to go through a whole load of crap. But what I think? I think killing himself was the best thing Charley ever did.”

“So, what was-?”

But Morris isn’t finished. “The guy was a psycho, right? Louisiana didn’t want to let him out of that bin, but some do-gooder forced their hand. He goes on trial here and what’s gonna happen?”

“Insanity plea.”

“Absolutely. He woulda been slam-dunked right back in the bin, our bin this time. And do Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez get any satisfaction? I don’t think so. The guy ate their kids. And before he cut that one kid up, he stabbed him dozens of times. They like… reassembled what was left of the body, you know, put the pieces together. Apparently that poor kid was run through with a long, sharp blade, and I’m saying he was stabbed front to back, side to side, every which way. I mean – the kid was a pincushion.” A disgusted snort. “Vermillion goes to trial, Mom and Dad have to sit there and listen to that crap.”

He pauses, and I can hear him take a deep breath – almost like a sigh. “I get upset,” he says, “because there were suggestions that I could’ve stopped the guy, you know? But Jesus, he’s cuffed – he gets at the pill, like… with his mouth. You frisk somebody, you don’t look for a pill taped under his collar, you know what I’m saying?”

“Maybe at the station you’d find it.”

“You got that right. Maybe there you would find it, because you’d process him, get him into coveralls.” He pauses. “So you got questions?”

“I was wondering about the cause of death.”

“Technically, cardiac arrest.”

“I mean the Ramirez boys.”

“Well, no surprise there. The one we found in the freezer? Loss of blood. All those stab wounds, right? There’s a technical term for it-”

“Exsanguination.”

“Bingo. Bled to death.”

“And the second boy? The one they found in the well?”

“The best we could figure that was that he was put in there for preservation. Like you’d hang a side a beef. It was cool down there and Vermillion only had so much room in his fridge.”

“Was he dead?”

“Oh, he was dead, all right. Been dead a couple of days. But I don’t think he suffered. He was shot in the head. Single shot. Thirty-eight caliber.”

Just like the Gablers.

One dismembered, one shot in the head.

“This tip you got? The one that led you to Vermillion’s cabin. Didn’t you wonder about that?”

“Oh, sure we did. We tried to run it down, but you know – Vermillion’s only out of the bin a short while and he’s runnin’ in what for him is foreign territory. It’s not like he’s got a lot of friends and acquaintances we can question. We figured a drifter. Maybe someone he hitched a ride with.”

“You’re probably right,” I say and thank Morris – who invites me to call again “anytime.”

But he isn’t right. He’s dead wrong.

Whoever killed the Ramirez boys also killed the Gabler twins – and that was not Charley Vermillion. It couldn’t have been because Vermillion was dead when the Gabler murders took place.

So whoever killed the Ramirez twins is the monster who kidnapped the Sandling boys. And abducted my sons.

Anonymous tip, my ass.