By Reason of Insanity (22 page)

A woman in the far corner was playing two slot machines at the same time. She would put a quarter in one and pull the handle, then do the same on the next machine while the windows were still whirling on the first. A determined look gripped her face. She had her system, something to do with electrically-charged energy coming from her constant motion, and she would win on both slot machines if it took every quarter she had. And every penny too!

Bishop watched the woman with undisguised interest. An obvious tourist, she was big and heavy and had rolls of loose flesh dangling from her upper arms and legs. A straw sun hat covered her head. The vast amount of exposed skin seemed to the young man to be stark white and he wondered what it would feel like to cut into all that soft flesh.

The waitress brought his order, coffee and a ham sandwich. “No baloney,” she said hurriedly. “Like I told you.” Then she was gone. He watched her disappearing figure. She was young and buxom and at least twenty pounds overweight. He saw her under his knife too, and his coffee got cold as he sat there thinking about it.

He had been in Las Vegas four days now, arriving in the modernized bus depot on S. Main Street in the late afternoon of August 1 after a pleasant six-hour ride from Los Angeles. An hour’s stroll gave him the feel of the downtown area and brought him to a neon-encrusted but inexpensive hotel on N. 25th Street, just off the end of a shopping plaza. His intention was to stay for a few weeks and then move on to the next place, wherever that might be.

Not that he was in any great hurry to leave Las Vegas. He was fascinated by the crowds of people who nightly descended on the gaming parlors along Fremont, many of them seemingly intent on gambling away their lives. In their faces at those moments he detected a madness he had seen many times at Willows, the maniacal eye, the pressed lips, the twitching cheek of someone deep in isolation, and of course the inevitable final vacant stare of total desperation.

The vast amounts of money also intrigued him. He had never seen so much money, never dreamed so much existed in the whole world. And these people were just throwing it away, intent only on the next throw of the dice or turn of a card or spin of the wheel. To any polite inquiry they would gruffly nod in assurance that they were fine and kindly mind your own damn business.

“Get your bets down,” the croupiers would plead in feigned urgency. “There’s a winner coming out every time.” But Bishop saw very few winners.

His daytime was spent mostly in sightseeing. Soon after arrival he rented a car, using his driver’s license and new credit card in the name of Daniel Long. The car, a Ford Pinto with unlimited mileage, was quickly his. At the hotel he had registered earlier under another name, something easy to remember, since no identification was necessary. It was a technique he had learned from a television cops-androbbers show, and it became a pattern he was to follow in subsequent months across the country.

He spent the first morning driving around the various areas of the city, including the fabulous Strip with its two dozen opulent hotels and gambling casinos. No stops were made; this activity he reserved for the evening hours when crowds were huge and his anonymity assured. During the afternoon he visited nearby Lake Mead and Hoover Dam. The incredible view from the dam inspired him with awe; he had never seen anything like it on TV. He couldn’t believe it was real. It also filled him with a certain dread feeling that he was going to fall from the great height. Upon his return to the ground he vowed never to place himself again in such danger.

The next day he drove along the Virgin River to St. George and Hurricane, arriving at Zion National Park at 2 P.M. He lunched at the Lodge, then took an afternoon tour of the park and saw famed Angel’s Landing, the Temple of Sinawava and the Great White Throne. On the return trip he dined on prime ribs of beef and a bottle of Chablis, to which he had been introduced the previous evening, at a roadside restaurant. Arriving back at his hotel after ten o’clock, he slept for two hours before changing his shirt and resuming his exploration of the city’s night life.

Each evening he would roam the downtown gaming section and along the Strip, fascinated by the thousands of neon lights, the great waves of people, the mounting excitement that always comes with money. He had seen documentaries of Las Vegas on television but they paled before the real thing, and as he wandered through the casinos he sometimes felt that he was back at Willows, surrounded by madmen of every stripe regardless of their clothing or uniforms. Only here he was not known and would not be sought or even missed when he was gone.

Of still greater significance was the presence of women. They were everywhere, thousands of them, maybe millions. The most beautiful women he had ever seen, especially in the big hotels on the Strip. Wherever he turned, women were looking at him, sizing him up, staring him down. And he stared right back. He began to feel that they were his for the asking but he didn’t intend to ask. Instead he would take.

Had anyone observed him closely during those nightly prowls, he would surely have seemed to be yet another tourist enjoying one of the gambling capital’s best views, its women. Certainly no one would have suspected that the well-dressed and oddly handsome young man with the curious eyes was carefully choosing another victim for his murderous rage, this time one who would be able to bring him money for which she would soon have no further use.

That Bishop needed money was painfully evident to him. He had less than $900 left. Yet he knew nothing of work, neither how to apply for it nor how to seek it out. And of course there was nothing for which he was qualified since he had never worked a day in his life. With no background and no references, he was doomed to the most menial laborers’ jobs. This he would not tolerate. He intended to see different places and to get as far away from California as he could, always under the cloak of complete anonymity. No one must know of him, no one must even be made aware of his existence if he was to carry out his life’s real work. No! He would get the necessary money another way.

He was dimly aware that there were many illegal means of making money but he didn’t know any of them. Nor did the idea appeal to him. He was interested only in survival. Beyond that a dollar bill held no value for him; it seemed like so many coupons that were traded for whatever was needed. And his needs were few. In truth, he even resented the thought that his pursuit and destruction of demons and monsters had to be tied to money, and he vowed that as soon as he had enough to survive he would no longer think in such terms, Then he would really be free to strike the demons down wherever he found them.

That there were so many of them bothered him. He began to look at their mouths, to picture their ripe red mouths on him. He saw their breasts, large masses of soft flesh that fit in the palms of his hands. And their flat bellies, smooth skin stretched over those things inside that he needed to see and to touch and to hold. Almost every woman he passed on the street, indoors, anywhere, stirred his imagination and prompted the flow of images. Faceless mouths, disembodied breasts, ripped bellies, endless organs, livers, kidneys, hearts, strings of intestines, sexual parts, mounds of muscle, bones and blood everywhere, gouged slabs of flesh, whole skins hanging in profusion bleached white in summer sun, severed arms and legs, hands and feet, all revolving in limbo in his tortured mind, all taunting his fevered soul.

He kept thinking of the millions of women in the world, millions he would never own even for a few moments. He would never get to kill them, to open them, to
possess
them. By sheer number they were beyond his reach. Even at the impossible rate of one a day for fifty years, not a dent would be made in the sheer impregnability of their numbers. The thought sickened him each time it entered his consciousness; he brooded over its implications. The demons had conspired against him, just as he was conspired against by all at Willows. But he would somehow defeat them too. One by one he would gain possession of them. Perhaps by so doing he would live forever, perhaps that was the secret of eternal youth. He didn’t find it strange or even uncomfortable that such might be his destiny.

On his second night he struck up a conversation with a girl in one of the restaurants in the Dunes Hotel. Or perhaps she with him. They smiled at each other, her smile even more electric than his. They talked local gossip over their food, then of themselves. He said he was from Pittsburgh, in for a good time. She was a showgirl from Chicago, so she said, trying to break into the ranks in Vegas. It was difficult, she had no juice and things were really tight for her.

“What’s juice?” he asked innocently.

She looked at him, batting her false eyelashes with equal innocence. “Juice? It’s, you know, like a connection,” she announced finally. “You need connections to work here.”

“You call that juice?”

“Everybody calls it juice. If you don’t have it, you don’t work.”

“How do you get this juice?”

“All depends who you are.”

“Well, who do you have to be?”

“It helps if your boyfriend owns the hotel.”

“Don’t you know anyone like that?”

“Would I be here if I did?” She thought a moment. “I knew someone like that a while back. Really big, you know?”

“What happened?”

“He was only in town for a week.”

“Can’t you just go to them and say you danced in Chicago?”

“Don’t mean a thing here. This is the center of the world, everywhere else is the sticks. Except maybe Broadway.”

“So tell them you danced in Broadway.”

“On Broadway.”

“Would that do it?”

“I told you this was the center of the world. Look! The people running things here, they’re the best in the business. They know all the names, they know who done what. And where and when too. And if they don’t know, they just pick up the phone. Once a girl works here she can go anywhere. Anywhere! She’ll get a job just like that. She’s made, you know? That’s why everybody wants to work here. That’s why you need juice. Or else maybe the biggest tickets in the world.”

“What’s tickets?”

“What’s tickets! Say, where you from anyway?”

“Pittsburgh,” he said quickly but she didn’t hear him.

“Tickets are, you know, fits. A girl needs a big set of tickets to work here.”

“You don’t have tickets?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my tickets.” She straightened her shoulders. “They’ll do till something better comes along.”

“But if you had big tickets you wouldn’t need any juice.”

“Listen! To work this town without juice you’d need a pair of tickets bigger than the Goodyear blimp.”

She ordered a bottle of Chablis, for which he paid. He liked the bitter taste.

“You in for a good time?” the girl asked, wondering how much she could take him for.

“Actually I’m here visiting a sick aunt,” he answered, knowing she had no money.

“I’ll show you everything you need.”

“She’s got cancer,”

“Whatever you want.”

“By the time I get there she’ll be dead.”

“For fifty I’ll take you round the world.”

“What’s round the world?”

“Say, you sure you’re from Chicago?”

“You’re from Chicago.”

“That’s nice.”

“What is?”

Eyes locked together.

“You buying or selling?”

“You don’t have big tickets.”

“You don’t have any juice.”

The electric smiles were turned off, but in the neon night no one noticed.

The following evening he returned to the Strip, this time going to the Sands Hotel where he went into the casino. He had no intention of gambling but he wanted to watch the action for a while to see if what he was seeking might be found there. A half hour taught him it was hopeless. The women were either tourists with men in tow or locals looking for men with money. The sight of all those women with mouths agape and bodies intact pained the sensitive young man and he longed to be about his father’s work. But he resolved to stick to his plan; this one time he would search out the money first.

That many of the women were prostitutes or traders of one persuasion or another didn’t bother him at all. Sex was a weapon that women used against men, and so it seemed perfectly reasonable to him that some regarded it as a profession while others used it as a means of exchange. He harbored no specific ill feeling toward such women. If he sought them out it was merely because they were the most accessible to a stranger and therefore the least dangerous. Their craft required privacy. And so did his.

He left the Sands but the story was the same wherever he went. Moneyed excitement and sexual promise, he now began to see, traveled hand in hand. Men traded money and women traded sex. The winners got what they wanted, the losers got nothing. It all seemed reasonable enough. Except for the fact that women, he reminded himself bitterly, in their total demonic rage sought to destroy men by whatever means they could. They were evil and therefore had to be themselves destroyed.

As he looked around at the players he suddenly realized that the whole concept of Las Vegas—the money-sex trade-off, the idea of winners and losers—was nothing more than another bit of insanity in an already crazed world; paper people who once upon a time had sealed themselves in a cardboard castle, hoping to escape their pursuers. They were doomed of course. There was no possibility of true exchange between men and women, nor was anyone really a winner. “Only losers,” said the bright young man as he threw a coin into a slot machine and walked away.

In the car again Bishop knew that he would shortly be leaving Las Vegas, just as soon as he finished what he was destined to do.

Sitting now in the small restaurant on Fremont Street in the fourth day of his stay, the child of destiny turned his attention to the newspaper. He ordered another cup of coffee as he glanced over the headlines in the
Las Vegas Sun
. On page 2 he found it, a three-column story from Los Angeles through UPI. He looked at the picture of Vincent Mungo—dark, menacing, scowling. He mentally checked his own face—light, bland, smiling. He pushed the smile wider.