Vicky de Groot P.I. & The Case of the Dead Stripper’s Gambit
Preface by the author: Everything I’m going to tell you is true, some of the names have been changed, and some of the events combined. These are the stories from my five years as a private investigator in Beaumont, Texas (1978 – 1983) and every single stitch of it is true.
Chapter Four: Curtain Call For The Dead
A good night’s sleep didn’t bring me any more answers than I had the night before. I roll out of bed determined to just look for the next place to look. It turns out I’m wasting brain time because some of the answers are already out looking for me. As the elevator door closes I hear my phone start to ring. If I get to do this all over, next time I’m answering that phone.
The daylight on the streets is set to extra bright. It takes me a minute to adjust where I can see Chance across the street, down by the phone booth. His boat will be tied up on the riverside somewhere between the highway and the port and he would have just walked to my building and I’m wondering why he didn’t just walk into the lobby when I hear the unmistakable click of the hammer of a revolver. The hairs raise on my neck as the hot vapor of a way too close Lt. Gallo comes down
“OK smart ass, you’re going downtown”
I turn to see Gallo and a plain clothes guy I don’t know wearing a tan hat, both with guns drawn. My throat fills up with a smart ass comment about already being downtown, but my mouth decides the better of it. I don’t fight the handcuffs. The two of them muscle me into a sedan, I see Chance and feel bad for him because he’ll want to help but will have to just watch the cops carry me off.
The cop shop is due west of my building so it’s pretty obvious we aren’t going when the car heads north.
“Where we going , Gallo?”
he says nothing
“Well if it’s going to be a bit, you want to put my hands in front of me, my shoulders are already aching”
“Just shut your mouth you smart ass … …”
I won’t repeat everything Gallo says. Just know there is a long list of names that little men use to debase women and Gallo knows them all. His sickly sweet demeanor, the one he thought would get him laid, has vaporized. I spend the next hour driving north into the Piney Woods and the majority of the conversation is Gallo calling me those words and saying I was going to regret being one of those words instead of treating him nicer.
We turn off the highway somewhere after Woodville, transitioning from cement, to asphalt, to gravel and then dirt. Finally some unmarked turnoff that is little more than a glorified donkey path and has the sedan sliding in the washed out curves. The trees close in tighter, until finally not a bit of sunlight is falling on our path. Even though my arms are completely numb, the bones in my shoulders ache and every bump and jar in the road sends another agonizing jolt. I whimper against one and I hear chuckles from the front seat, I don’t make any other sounds after that. I try to direct all my energy into the thought of getting my hands untied and around Gallo’s puffy neck. But these are police cuffs, even if I could feel my fingers there’s nothing I can do to open them. In the pictures a clever gal would pull out a bobby pin and pick the lock. Even if I had a handful of bobby pins there’s nothing I can do practically sitting on my hands.
We cross a ratty wooden bridge the size of a big bed. It creaks and sings as we start across and it’s the most scared I’ve been in a year. On the other side of the bridge the trees break away on the right exposing a broad field of hay, beyond the fields, a pleasant little farm house, a barn and some big paddocks. Between the farm and the hay and everywhere else is a prevalent, putrid odor of pigs.
We hit every bump and crack in the road for the last quarter mile until we pulled up alongside a pig pen with about sixty or seventy residents. The smell is awful, the noise constant. There’s a card table and a couple of chairs set up and lengths of bloody rope on the ground. This is where they tied up Darla for a long slow nibble. I guess the card table was set up for spectators, I imagine it’s a terrible way to go, especially since it looks like I ‘m next.
Gallo gets me out by grabbing on my arm and tugging, it hurts, a lot. He drags me over to one of the chairs. The tan hat sees this and starts to kvetch
“Just shoot her and throw her in!”
“Nah, this chick and I got beef. It coulda been groovy baby, you and me, but you’re just so damn uptight and uncool, maybe you’ll regret it now you know I’m not the man”
I am well pleased to hear I won’t be tortured to death, the joy fades at the sound of Gallo’s zipper, he loosens his belt and slips out the .38 police special. He holds it in his hand like he’s weighing it and then abruptly cracks me across the skull. I feel the skin over my eyebrow part and a warm sluice of my vital fluid cascade down one side of my face. The smack was a good one and for a second I’m hearing nothing but birds and bells. Soon enough I hear the men arguing. Tan hat standing in the door of the car, Gallo swaying over me
“This won’t take long”
“ Just kill her, she’s waiting for us at the rest stop”
“ I’ll even let you go first”
“If we’re not at that waterfall in forty minutes there’s… who the hell is that!”
A car is tearing up the farm road spitting up dirt, gravel and maybe bits of car. The plume of dust and debris hangs in the air, a detritus cloud. Both men turn to stare, Gallo pulling at his pants. I lean forward until I’m about to fall off the chair and launch myself forward with both feet. I drill my head and shoulders into Gallos mid-section, about the area where a real man would have a penis. Gallo folds up, the gun flies and we both fall down. I roll off and by some miracle my handcuffed hands roll over the revolver. I grab it and scrabble to my feet. Gallo is almost on me but trips on the trousers still around his ankles. I dash forward a couple of yards and spin back. Tan hat, watching the car crashing up, only just now notices I’m up. Gallo is fighting his pants. It’s agony but I get my hands up over my right side, shoving the butt of the revolver into my hip. My left arm screaming in protest against the cuffs. The little .38 Special is so well designed, the curved grip finds my palm. Gallo stands holding his pants with one hand, charges me like an enraged silver-back, screaming more of those names, I squeeze off a round when he’s about five feet away. I see the hole pierce his sternum. A crimson mist sprays from his mouth as he tries to say something else but I can’t hear him over the sound of the next three rounds I pump into his chest.
The Hat levels his gun right at me, Gallo’s .38 probably only holds five rounds and I feel like I just shot a dozen. Luckily he’s distracted when the oncoming car smashes into him. There is a blood curdling war cry and Chance ejects himself from the car, long knife in one hand and tire iron in the other. At this sight the Hat spins on Chance instead. I know I only shot four, my fingers numb beyond redemption, blood flowing over my eye and filling my mouth with the taste of iron and fear, I spin to bring the thug to gun point, slipping, falling and willing the bullet to find it’s mark, the gun barks and I fall face first in the mud, but I see the Hat go down.
Chance found the keys and transferred the handcuffs to the surviving bad guy, the Hat took one in the side and he was dead before we could ask him any questions. This guy’s no cop, that’s why I didn’t recognize him. Just another thug, some mother’s baby boy turned tough guy, who died with a gun in his hand.
“Where to Vicky? You got any ideas?”
“Do you know any rest stops with Waterfalls?”
“Round here? There’s one with a sort of grotto about 20 miles down 287. A person might think that was a waterfall if they had never seen a real one.”
“Can you tell me how to get there?”
“Get back out the dirt road, Take a right at the blacktop. Keep taking rights til you hit 256 , then left to 287 and left, maybe nineteen, twenty miles there’s a WPA picnic area on the right side,”
“If I pass a phone-booth I’ll call the Sheriff department, can you wait for them so these fellows don’t get ate.”
“ Well, that hardly seems fair but OK, you going to meet someone for a picnic? “
“Something like that”
Gallo’s sedan feels greasy. It may just be my imagination. I’m thinking about him dead , his blue lips flecked with the blood stained spittle of his last words, he was a bad cop and I’m glad he’s dead. If I could bring him back, I would, just to kill him again. I know too many good cops to not hate a bad one. I’ve lost too many friends to easily tolerate the badge being sullied. I find the succession of bigger roads until I pop out in Chester. Turns out we’re in Tyler county, so I call the sheriff and tell them to look for a pig farm.
The day is yielding to the dusk as I head south down the empty highway. My shoulders scream with every move, and will for days. Maybe I hate this car because I still smell the misery of my trip to the farm just a couple of hours ago. The sedan has electric windows and I drop them all to let the smell of the piney woods wash away the stench of pigs and death. The air swimming through the cabin is cool and crisp and invigorating. This breeze, the hum of the tires, my total exhaustion, together, allow me a moment of euphoria, a few miles where my thoughts are lost mingling among the golden spears of early evening light that pierce the canopy of trees.
It’s only a few minutes later when I find the rest stop, there are several large stone picnic pavilions, and a dozen more picnic areas with stone fire pits. There is only one other car in the park. I follow the single serpentine lane until we are parked side by side at the head of a stone staircase that descends into a man-made grotto. She would have seen the car, and heard the car door, but she couldn’t have known who stepped out. She calls out from below “I’m down here boys” and I recognize the voice. I have the Hat’s .45 in my hand when I descend the staircase and come face to face with my dead client, Darla Dallas. Very beautiful in a fine black dress, and very much alive
“Miss de Groot!? I don’t know why I’m surprised”
“You think you’re surprised? My dead client just put a hit on me”
“I can see that was a mistake, a bit of overkill, if you will, but this way is really so much better”
“Mistake, yes, a little miscalculation. I’m calculating that lump of flesh downtown, that’s Joan Smith, the Dancer?”
“Vicky, you and I, we can make a deal, let’s get you washed up.
“Why’d you feed her to the pigs?”
“I know. That’s really all her fault, all she had to do was make some phone calls, she just wouldn’t. After they ate her fingers, by that point it was too late to quit”
“I guess you didn’t torture her to death to call in some song requests?”
“She’s Laurie Dresser”
Laurie Dresser was officially the richest teen runaway in Texas. Her parents are old money wealth all invested in the modern weapons industry. They have the kind of wealth that inspires jealousy in mere millionaires. Her name had splashed across the newspapers over two years ago, A 14 year old missing in Amarillo, largest missing person reward in the history of Texas, over a million dollars, no one ever collected and after all this time, most people assumed she was dead.
“You needed her to call her folks for money?”
“She hated those capitalist warmongers, never wanted to talk to them again. We were going to Mexico, and we were really going to need money.”
“Well now what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to be her, I already had the passport made up. I have her birth certificate, I’ll milk her parents from Mexico, just out of arm’s reach and when they die I’ll claim my inheritance”
“Tell them you kidnapped yourself?”
“Something like that. But, you Vicky, you could come with me, I thought those two knuckleheads could handle themselves, it’s obvious you can take care of both of us”
She steps in close, the grotto is quiet except the trickle of water flowing into a brick pond. She puts her fingertips against my breast bone, her eyes pierce into mine.
“It’s gonna be a lotta money, forever and ever. I can’t spend it all and I need someone to protect me. You and I lady, we could have a whole lotta… HEY! That hurts”
I shove the .45 into her ribs a little harder and she backs up, in the distance I hear the wail of sirens.
“Get over yourself sister. I got a strict rule about not doing business with murderers, especially ones who try to murder me. Do you hear that sweet highway music? They’re coming for you “
Her eyes flash from panic to rage and then to desperation.
“But Vicky! “
The sirens are almost upon us, I see the lights hitting the trees by the main road.
“But nothing, You killed that girl, straight up tortured her, I’ve been beaten, chased and threatened. You’re bad news Darla, you can have your retainer back, what’s left of it, I quit. Lets go on up to meet the sheriff”
There are two cruisers. One enters each end of the path and they converge on our cars. She slaps at me and turns to run, trying to take the stone stairs in a leap. She slides on a heel about halfway and plants her face on a cement step. The sound is awful, the damage severe, it could even be her last words escaping her shattered lips, as I step over her, but I’ll never know what she said.
Days later I learned Chance had simply stolen a car off the street as soon as he saw we were heading north. He lost us after we left the main roads but said he followed a hunch and the smell of pig. Darla survived her stumble on the stairs, she swallowed a handful of teeth in the process. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice hires some quality dentists that will do what they can for her, they don’t have plastic surgeons to fix the rest.
I call the Dresser’s myself, or I try to, they’re hard people to get a hold of. Turns out the biggest reward in the history of Texas was for her safe return, they sent me a check, but for a lot less. I’m not complaining, it’s as much as I’d make in any three months. I put most of it in the bank, keeping out enough for a lid of Acapulco Gold and a bottle of mescal. Nighttime finds me in the garden, alone in the dark looking down on a sleeping city. Alone with half a bottle of mescal and the unrelenting memories of pigs, memories unbidden and unwelcome.