they can play rough if they get pushed too far. Especially when their reputations are at stake. Wise up to yourself, boy, or you’ll find yourself out of a job and ‘eighty-sixed’ all over the state.”
Now I started getting hot. “Does that go for you too, Fain?”
“No, it doesn’t, but… aaah, Jesus! Who can talk to you when you get like this? Look. The bureau isn’t in this officially but I’ll nose around unofficially on anything you bring me. Just between the two of us. But do me a favor. Stay away from me for a few days. Just for friendship’s sake.”
I left Bernie at Third and Bridger and ducked into the courthouse lot to my car while he headed back to Fourth Street and the Federal Building, one of the true architectural mediocrities of this age and, as I turned down Fourth Street, I gave him a loud Bronx cheer. Then I headed for the Plush Horse on Sahara just a block from my apartment.
Once there, I got slowly and pleasantly stewed, grumbling to myself about the cupidity of the D.A. and his two buddies, Lane and Butcher. I was also disgusted with my own performance and realized that within only a month I’d managed to blow whatever working relationship I’d had with the PD and the sheriff’s office, and all because I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut!
As an amateur sleuth I was, it seemed, outclassed in even the simplest mental processes. But I didn’t have the good common sense to let it go. Sherman Reilly Duffy of the pre-World War I Chicago Daily Journal once told a cub reporter, “Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.” Well, socially I fit in just fine between the whore and the bartender. Both are close friends. And I knew the world was round. Yet, as time went by I found myself confronted with the ugly suspicion that the world was, after all, flat and that there were things dark and terrible waiting just over the edge to reach out and snatch life from the unlucky, unwary wanderer.
The frustration continued to grow. I was a journalist. I stood, as Duffy put it, with Galileo. So I ask: what would you do if you could smell a news story like this and couldn’t go anywhere with it?
With me the answer was simple. I knew I was stuck. I knew I was (and am), at best, only a second-rate hack and that my dream of getting back on a big-league daily is just that: a dream.
So–I got drunk.
Drinking is an occupational hazard with many of us scribes. I have always kept an emergency supply of White Horse “miniatures” handy just in case the bars were closed. These little Scotch delights have laced many a cup of city-room coffee over the years. But drinking doesn’t get the job done. I had blown the first murder, that of Cheryl Ann Hughes, and even if I’d been on the ball, the story wouldn’t have rated an “extra” edition. And with the competition down the street hitting the newsstands in early afternoon on their regular schedule, the Daily News got scooped on Murders Two and Three. Now, in a normal town, we would have hit the streets with an “extra” at least by the third killing. But death, as I said earlier, excites little real interest in Las Vegas. The people for the most part are very conservative and insular. They mind their own business. They do not rise up en masse demanding investigations. The Asbill murder case excited much comment in the local bars and the Alsup killing caused a lot of working men to pause and ponder. But no hue and cry went up except for a few editorials. No public demonstrations. No phone calls or letters to the editor demanding action.
Stories peak very quickly and are good for only one or two resuscitations. Columnists fare slightly better and several local scribes have certain pet gripes they use as column fillers when topical issues on a local level are lacking. At the time of the “vampire killings” (the true nature of which was still not made