The Clip Killer, page 12
A few minutes passed, and by then I was trying to think how I’d explain all this to Stacy if she somehow got word that I’d been spotted in a strip club. Or worse, my mom, who’d no doubt take up the matter with her church prayer group. I considered confessing right away to both women and explaining that I really, truly was on the job when I visited The Harem, but before I could make up my mind a waitress showed up at my table and asked, “What can I bring you, sir?”
She was a slender blonde — slender through the hips and waist, anyway — and she also wore a kimono, except hers was pale pink. In fact, all the waitresses and dancers wore pastel kimonos, which the dancers then shed as they took the stage.
“A ginger ale, please,” I told her.
“Well now,” she said with a smile, “we don’t get many requests for ginger ale.”
She said it in a friendly way, and then seemed to look me over as if noting that my clothes were business casual and not the jeans, t-shirts and baseball hats worn by many of the other guests. Then with her eyes fixed on mine — and I got the feeling she appreciated that I was looking at her eyes and not elsewhere — she said, “My name’s Mandy and I’ll be right back.”
She returned two minutes later with my ginger ale. She placed it on the table and then gave me a little pat on the shoulder before walking off.
I spent the next few minutes sipping my soda and waiting for Walser. I watched the redhead just enough to be polite, but I guess I wasn’t being attentive enough because she was soon dancing almost exclusively for the long-haired guy who, unlike me, was focused on her every move. And that was OK because it allowed me to look around the club. There were plenty of boisterous spectators, but others were simply sitting and staring in stoic silence, like the guy at the next table. The waitresses, meanwhile, were doing their best to flirt with the guests, and I assumed that’s because a festive audience is probably a generous audience when it comes to tips. I saw several waitresses engaging patrons with playful banter. Or, failing that, at least bending far forward when they took drink orders. The kimonos were held together with slender sashes, but the lapels were loose enough that a customer placing an order usually got an up-close eyeful. And from what I could tell, that seemed to be the idea.
The funny thing was, the crowd also included several females. Off to my right was a table with four women. They had short haircuts and mannish attire, and from their laughter and occasional whistles I could see they were having as much fun as the many tables of men.
I was just taking a sip of ginger ale when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Turning, I looked up into the grinning face of Benny Walser.
“Good to see you, Mr. Crowley,” he shouted over the blaring music, which by this time was the old Steppenwolf hit, “Born to be Wild.”
As I stood to shake Walser’s hand, he leaned over and said in my ear, “I knew we’d get you to come back.”
I wasn’t sure how he knew that, but I smiled anyway.
He motioned me to sit and then pulled out the chair next to me. I looked at him, thinking we’d start a conversation — it was possible, despite the loud music — but his attention was already on the redhead. And her attention, no question, was on Walser. She was completely facing us, and it was almost like the long-haired guy at the other table no longer existed.
One of the perks of being the boss, I thought.
As I watched Walser watching her, I was struck by his obvious enjoyment. If you saw him sitting there, and if you didn’t know he owned the club, you’d think he was just another enthusiastic customer. A good minute passed and I was starting to think he’d forgotten all about me, but at that point he leaned over again and said, “Her name’s Raquel.”
His eyes never left her as he added, “That’s not her real name. It’s Molly. Molly Swanson, as a matter of fact. Which is a nice name, but certainly not a name that’s going to stand out in a club like ours. So we gave her the stage name Raquel because she reminds us of the other Raquel. And you have to admit there’s a certain resemblance.”
I didn’t quite see it, but agreed anyway to be polite.
Neither of us spoke for the next minute. Walser still seemed absorbed by Raquel’s obvious, well, charms. Meanwhile, I was checking my watch, having realized that my visit was going to take longer than expected.
And he must have noticed that I was fidgeting because he said, “Hey, remember Becky? The girl you met the other day? She’s gonna be dancing later tonight. It’s only her second shift, but she’s great. A real crowd-pleaser. And a natural, too. It’s like she was born to do this.”
I had to smile at that one. I couldn’t imagine that anyone was ever born to be a stripper.
“I’ll make sure she comes over and dances for you,” he said, beaming at the idea of giving me such a thoughtful gift. “I know she liked you before. And once you watch her dance, believe me, I know you’ll like her, too.”
I decided it was time to let him know the real reason for my visit.
“Mr. Walser,” I said, and it was my turn to lean over so he could hear me over the music — it was now AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” — “I wonder if I might talk to you for a few minutes. And maybe in your office where we can hear each other better.”
For the first time since he sat down, his smile receded. He regarded me for a few seconds and then said, “Sure.”
He stood, gave a last glance over his shoulder at Raquel, and then led me from the cordoned seating area to the back of the club, where he turned down a hallway to his office. It apparently led to the dancers’s dressing room, too, because just then a side door opened and two women emerged. One had shoulder-length blond hair styled in something like a Farrah Fawcett look and the other had cropped black hair. Both wore kimonos of pastel beige.
“Good evening, Amber. Good evening, Honey,” Walser said as he passed.
“Good evening Mr. Walser,” they said in unison.
The hallway was so narrow that I had to flatten myself against the wall to avoid brushing against them. But there was still contact, and that’s because both women playfully touched my chest as they passed.
At the end of the hall, Walser took a key from his pocket and unlocked his office door. He led me inside, pointed to a chair on one side of the desk, and then walked around to his own large padded chair on the other side.
As he sat, he gave me a guarded smile.
“How can I help you, Mr. Crowley?” he said.
I began with the speech I’d rehearsed in my car on the drive over.
“Mr. Walser, let me start by telling you how sorry I was to hear about your recent arrest,” I said. “Just as I was glad to hear about your subsequent release. The reason for your release was unfortunate, of course, given that another young woman was attacked and left for dead while you were in custody. But at least the police now know that you weren’t responsible for what happened to Julie Bedard, which is something I believed all along. And I told you that much a few days ago.”
Honestly, that was somewhere between an exaggeration and a flat-out lie. I’d never been at all convinced that Walser was innocent, and even at that moment I wasn’t sure. Yeah, he’d been locked up when Jenna Tomlinson was assaulted, so obviously he hadn’t been the guy with his hands at her throat. But it was still possible he’d killed Julie Bedard and Cathy Hyde, and maybe the person who’d attacked Jenna was just a sicko copycat. OK, so that was probably a stretch, given the newspaper clippings found at the three crime scenes. The clippings sure made it look like the same person was responsible for all three. But in my years as a reporter I’d seen a lot of crazy crimes and I knew that anything was possible, particularly with a shady guy like Walser.
Meanwhile, he was still just sitting there looking at me, which made me wonder what he was thinking. But at last he nodded and smiled.
“I appreciate that, Mr. Crowley,” he said. “I had a good feeling about you when you came by the other day. I knew you’d be fair with me and you were, so I’m grateful.”
Then he fell silent, waiting to hear what I’d say next.
“Mr. Walser,” I said, “someone’s killing women here in the Seattle area. The first victim was Julie Bedard and I’m convinced there’s a reason she was first. I still don’t know what that reason is, but something tells me that she’s the key to finding out who’s doing this. I also believe we’ll eventually come up with that answer if we keep looking in the right places and asking the right questions.”
I paused to see his reaction, but there was none. He was still giving me an impassive look.
So I went on, “Another thing we don’t know is if she was killed randomly or if the person who did it was someone she knew. But the police will tell you that very few homicides are actually random. Most are committed by people who know their victims, so for the time being I’m assuming that Ms. Bedard was acquainted with her killer. In time we’ll find out if that’s correct or not, but for now it gives us a place to start.
“And if we go on that assumption, it means we need to look at the men who knew her. It helps that Ms. Bedard, from what I’ve been told, led a fairly simple life. She was a mother and a student, and she also worked here as a dancer, but she apparently didn’t have a large circle of friends. So unless someone at her community college or her daughter’s preschool is a serial killer, I think our bad guy is probably someone who spends time here at this club.”
Or maybe works at this club, I thought, though I was keeping that possibility to myself for now.
Walser’s chair had one of those swivels that allowed him to lean back and rock slightly as he listened. But I still couldn’t read his expression.
Finally he said, “You know, when I spent that night in jail I had a lot of time to think about Julie. And the more I thought about her, the more I started thinking the same thing you’re saying now. It’s something I probably should’ve told the police because they kept asking me what I knew, but I was so angry about being arrested that I didn’t feel like giving them the time of day. But you’re different, Mr. Crowley. Unlike the cops, you’ve been fair with me. So I’m going to help you.”
Sitting forward in his chair, he added, “The other thing is, I really do want to find the person who did this to Julie. She was a wonderful girl and she didn’t deserve for this to happen. So I’m going to help you as much as I can and then it’ll be up to you to decide where you take it from there. If you want to go to the cops with any of this, that’ll be your decision.”
Then he asked, “Do you have a notebook?”
“I do,” I said, reaching for the pad and pen I had in the breast pocket of my jacket.
“OK, then let me begin by explaining something. This is a private club, which means we have the right to refuse admission to anyone. Occasionally we get customers we don’t want coming back, and that’s usually because they’ve been causing trouble of some kind. So we tell them as nicely as possible — and I always have a couple of my big security guys standing by in case anyone wants to argue — that we thank them for their past business, but they’re not welcome here anymore.
“Fortunately it doesn’t happen a lot. Maybe half a dozen times a year. But in the last few months it’s happened four times. I handled three of them myself, and my assistant took care of the fourth one when I was off for the day.”
By now I had a hunch where this was going.
“Did any of these men show an unusual interest in Julie Bedard?” I asked.
“Three of them did,” he replied. “Like I told you before, Julie was one of our most popular dancers. Anyone who’s been a regular here in the last year probably spent a lot of time watching her because she was that good. And there’s no question, three of the guys we asked not to return were among her biggest fans.”
“OK, so let’s start there. Do you have names?”
“Unfortunately, no. We get to know many of our longtime customers by name, of course, but I don’t happen to know who these guys were. So that’s the bad news. But the good news is, we have pictures.”
“Pictures?”
“Yeah. We have video cameras here in the club that operate whenever we’re open. We use a few of them to film the stages, but most are pointed at the seating area. It’s a protection for us because it gives us visual evidence in case something happens that’s got the potential for a lawsuit.”
“So how long would it take you to pull up pictures of these three men?” I asked.
“About 10 seconds,” he said with a smile.
Seeing my surprise, he laughed.
“Whenever we kick someone out, I always get a picture of that individual from our videos and then make copies,” he explained. “It’s important for our employees at the door to be able to recognize these people on the chance they try to sneak back in.”
“So if I was to ask you for copies of those pictures, you’d give them to me?”
He smiled again. He seemed to enjoy being magnanimous.
“For you, yeah. For that dark-haired cop” — he meant Al DiPietro — “not a chance. He’ll need a subpoena before I give him anything because he’s a jerk. But I like you, Mr. Crowley, so they’re yours.”
He opened his top right drawer and took out a folder. After placing it on the desk, he reached inside and flipped through the papers before taking out three black-and-white photographs, which he handed to me. They were grainy because they were taken from videos, but it was still possible to make out the person in each picture.
The first was a man with a short, ragged beard and a baseball hat pulled down low over his eyes. It was difficult to tell his age because so little of his face was visible to the camera. The second was a bald, rather chubby man who was probably in his mid-30s. The third was a young black man with the physique of a weight lifter. I guessed he was in his mid- to late 20s.
I placed the pictures side by side on the desk.
“How much do you know about these guys?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said. “Mostly just the stuff we observed. But there were some similarities. First of all, they always came in alone and they always sat alone. And all three seemed to spend most of their time watching Julie. It was almost like they knew her schedule. Like they always knew when she’d be dancing. And then when she left at the end of her shift, they usually left, too.”
“So what’d they do to get kicked out?”
“Different things. This guy” — Walser pointed at the black man — “kept getting in arguments with other customers. Once it was just someone sitting too close to him. Another time a guy walked by and accidently bumped him. Little things like that, but he’d still go berserk. The time someone bumped him, he jumped up and gave the poor guy a shove, knocking him into another guest. We don’t tolerate that kind of stuff, so that’s when we asked him to leave and not come back. And let me tell you, he wasn’t happy. I had my security guys with me and he looked ready to fight all three of us. But my guys are pretty big and I guess he figured that wouldn’t be very smart, so he just left. But he was mumbling threats on the way out.”
In my notebook I wrote, “Black man, angry, possibly violent, possibly vengeful.”
Then I tapped my finger on the photo of the bald man. “What about him?” I asked.
Walser gave a wry laugh.
“We used to call him Mr. Lonely,” he said. “Honestly, he’s probably a decent guy. And in a lot of ways he wasn’t much different from a lot of our guests, except maybe a little older. But the thing is, he was just a little, well, strange. He was actually a guest here for a long time and over the years he’d sometimes show unusual interest in different girls. And always one girl at a time.”
“Was he interested in Julie Bedard?”
“Yeah. In fact, I know he asked her out a few times. Now I’ll be honest, that kind of thing happens here fairly often and we understand. Our dancers are attractive and it’s natural for men to be drawn to them. So if our girls get asked out every now and then, it’s no big deal. Of course, if they don’t want to go out with someone they can just say it’s against club policy and that’s usually the end of it.
“But apparently this guy wouldn’t accept that no meant no. After he asked Julie out the first time and she told him no, he still kept asking. So we talked to him and told him he had to knock it off, but he just didn’t seem to get the message. Eventually we decided that enough was enough and we told him, here’s the door and don’t come back.”
I wrote down, “Bald guy, interested in Julie.”
Then I tapped the third photograph, which was the guy in the baseball hat, and asked, “OK, what about this guy?”
“That guy was plain weird,” Walser said. “And unfortunately we get guests like him from time to time. But I’ll be honest with you, it’s been a while since we’ve had anyone as weird as him.”
“Weird? In what way?”
“Oh, he’d sit near the stage and talk to himself. Which is strange, but probably not a reason by itself to throw him out. But he also kept trying to touch the girls as they walked past, and that’s something we definitely don’t allow. Our girls are here to be admired, but they’re not to be touched. And we have signs around the club that make that very clear.
“The other thing was, he used to upset Julie. Whenever he was around she’d have trouble putting on a good show for the other customers. She thought he was a real creep and she hated seeing him at one of her tables. So we tried talking to him to see if we could get him to shape up, but he was pretty much beyond help. And it was a problem I finally got tired of dealing with. I knew we’d be better off just not having him around, so he was also asked to stay away.”
I jotted down, “Baseball hat, very weird.”
Then I set my notepad aside and studied the three pictures, trying to decide which one might be a serial killer. My initial guess was the guy in the baseball hat. I could see why Julie Bedard thought he was creepy. He looked filthy and disheveled, and I was betting he was a pervert, too. On the other hand, my years as a police reporter had taught me that appearances are often misleading. Sometimes the most heinous criminals are otherwise ordinary people with jobs, friends and hobbies. They just happen to have a sinister side, too.
