Robert Walker - Scalpers

"Too dark to tell. Regular ... nothing special. But the midget guy, he was covered with black hair, real black. Thought it was a coat at first. Looked almost like a monkey, I tell you."

"Height, weight?"

"Like I told the cop, I was flat on my back. Even the dwarf guy looked thirty feet tall to me."

Dean nodded, relenting. “Will you give me a call if you can remember anything else, Mr. Silbey? Anything at all?” Dean jotted down two numbers on a card he handed the old man, who kept his eye on Dean's pocket, where the bottle had disappeared. Dean gave in, handing it to the man.

"You mean I'm free to go now?"

"Yes."

"Listen, I ... I work at Chung Fat's..."

"The little joint on the alley where the body was found?"

"Yes, sir, and ... anyway ... had to take a whole day off, you know, to be here ... think maybe I ... I could get, you know, something for my trouble?"

Dean smiled at the old cuss, knowing he was beyond help or even pity.

Dean reached into his wallet and pulled out a twenty. “Think this'll cover your loss of wages, Mr. Silbey?"

The man's rheumy eyes lit up and he grinned wide. “Yeah, thank you kindly, Don.” He snatched up the bill and his bottle and rushed away. Dean watched the old man's departure for his known haunts, watched him shake all over half a block off, filled with a mix of joy and palsy and booze.

How much was his testimony worth? Perhaps a dime and a nickel in a court of law.

Dean took the elevator for Sid's pathology lab, which occupied most of the fifth floor and a few rooms in the basement, as near as possible to the municipal morgue. As Dean made his way to the labs on the upper floor, he mulled over all that had happened, concentrating hard on the certain connection between a pair of murdering scalpers who'd attacked Peggy Carson, and the killers of the Jimenez woman, as well as her unborn child, a part of which they'd also taken, according to Dyer.

Assuming that Silbey actually saw what he claimed to have seen through the haze of his alcohol, it simply was not likely that two separate man-and-dwarf murder teams could be at work, committing such acts in the same city. Such a notion was more farfetched than believing the old drunk had in fact seen what he claimed.

And if this were so, then what had motivated the killers to turn from scalping lone, helpless victims to attempted abduction, as Silbey had indicated. They'd chased the child down the alley. Would they have scalped the child, too, for a double murder? As it was, they'd snuffed out the life of the child Mrs. Jimenez was carrying. At any rate, it was a sure break with previous acts, their usual M.O. Had their deadly fetish with hair taken a new and even more horrible twist? Had they some new bizarre ritual which required a child's scalp? Dean shuddered at the thought.

For now, and perhaps always, little Nola Jimenez could tell them nothing. Her mind had buried the terror, wiped it out as if it had never happened. She was asking for her mother, the doctors said.

Through the glass partitions of Sid's inner office and the pathology lab, Sid saw Dean coming. Sid was on the phone, but his arm shot up and he waved Dean in, his face telling Dean of his delight at seeing him back.

"Dean!” he said, holding his hand over the mouthpiece when Dean came in. “I thought you were outa here! What's up? Forget something? Good to see you!"

"Why didn't you tell me about the Jimenez woman?” Dean replied sternly.

"Not now,” said Sid, pointing to an extension phone in the lab opposite Sid's glassed partition. “Pick up on three, Dean, this could be important"

"Who're you talking to?"

"M.E. up in Billings, Montana."

Dean pursed his lips and nodded, taking up the other phone. But it was silent at the other end. Growing impatient, Dean began talking with Sid over the extension. “Who is this guy, and where is he?"

"Checking records, Dean ... takes time."

"Why the hell did you keep the Jimenez business from me?"

"Look, Dean ... you were dead on your feet, and ... and you were on your way—"

"That's no—"

"Got somethin’ here,” said a gruff voice from Billings, and then the man cleared his throat. “Whole thing was handled by Stimson years ago, Dr. Corman. What's this all about?"

Sid capsulized the situation in Orlando better than Dean thought possible, finishing with the fact that he'd read stories and clippings collected from the dead officer, Dave Park, which led him to contact Billings’ authorities.

"I see ... I see,” replied the man at the other end, who Sid now introduced to Dean and Dean to him. They were speaking to Stimson's replacement Dr. Trenton P. Neubauer, whose more lucrative medical practice usually superseded his work as parttime M.E. Neubauer took a moment to confess he knew a great deal less about forensics than he'd like, but that time and pressures didn't allow for him to work at it fulltime. “We do what we can, when we can up this way,” he finished.

"But you have records on this unsolved double murder in 1958, Doctor?” asked Sid.

Dean made a face through the glass at Sid and raised his shoulders, wondering what he was talking about.

Neubauer cleared his throat again and began to speak matter-of-factly of a grisly double murder which, according to record, was the first reported case of death by scalping in the States since the turn of the century, since the end of the Indian Wars in the West.

"George Stimson used to talk about it a lot, specially as he got older, always said it was the very worst thing he'd ever seen; said the man and the woman had suffered terribly, you know, not having died right off, just thrown into trauma and left so long.... It was bad, real bad, and Stimson always felt pretty poor, being as how he and the police up here couldn't prove a strong enough case against the Injun that done it to see him get the chair. They got him off light, really, for manslaughter, as he was boozed up out of his mind at the time and didn't know what he was doing. Found him that way in his pappy's old place on the reservation."

"What can you tell us about the two victims, Dr. Trent?” asked Dean, warming to the old man's voice, which had a kind of Mark Twain singsong to it.

"They were a married couple, far out on Sioux Creek Road. Had bought an old house, a large house, and fixed her up, not too awfully far from the site of an old Indian massacre.... Lot of Indian and cowboy and soldier history out these parts. Anyway, the Bennimins had a son, I believe a ward of the court until he was eighteen, which was maybe three years after his parents were killed. Boy come home from school one day and found the parents dead. It was big news here, back in ‘58. An old Indian testified against his son that it was him that done it, a boy name of Parker. Some say he was last of the Quanna Parker line, but there ain't no way of telling that."

"Parker ... Park...” muttered Sid.

"Say what?” asked Neubauer, who sounded at least sixty.

"You were not the physician of record, Dr. Neubauer?” asked Dean.

"Oh, hell no, that'd be Stimson. Stimson got me out here when I was a much younger man.” He chuckled with some fond memory.

"This Dr. Stimson, did he do an autopsy on these people—what were their names?"

"No, no autopsy needed was the feeling in most cases back then. You ought to know that ... and Stimson was a friend of the family. Appears he did what was required of him. Anyway ... no, no autopsy was done, ‘cause the cause of death was quite apparent!"

Dean sighed, “Yeah. What was the name, the victims, this married couple?"

"Bennimin, Helen and Hamilton Bennimin."

"What about the boy?"

"Ian, I think Ian Bennimin."

"And you say he was twelve at the time, in 1958?"

"Yes sir, that'd be about right."