“Yeah.” He’s referring to metal boxes that stand on many streets amidst the boxes vending USA Today or the like, but inside are the details and photos of many of the town’s prostitutes.
He shakes his head. “Most towns have real estate sheets in those things, you know? Homes for sale. We got hos for rent. Anyway, the Gabler case – showgirls massacred! – considering all it had going for it, the story actually moved to the back pages pretty damn fast.”
“Hunh.”
“No family – that really hurt, I think. So anyway, the case just kinda faded away.”
“So it’s okay if I look at the files? Moreno won’t mind?”
He holds out his hands and rolls them open in the direction of the binders. “All yours. Not that there’s a lot in there. I mean – no one reported these girls missing for more than two weeks.”
“Jesus.”
“Well, you know, it’s Vegas. New people pouring in all the time. Other people pouring out.” He thumps the notebooks again. “Clara and Carla,” he says, with a rueful shake of his head. “Even after their roommate gets around to wondering if something happened to them, it’s another week before there’s any evidence of foul play. Up to then, nobody’s even looking for these girls. That’s what you’d figure, you know? They took off for L.A. or Maui or just went back home. Whatever. I mean, apart from each other, they had no family, no one really paying attention that they’re missing. In the meantime, the trail’s gettin’ way cold. I mean – two weeks is a lifetime.”
“This evidence-” I say. “You’re talking about… when the hiker found them?”
“Right. That poor sonofabitch. He had to be hospitalized! They had to helicopter him outta there. But he didn’t find them.”
“No?”
“Not exactly. Not them. He just found half of Clara, right? The bottom half.”
CHAPTER 22
Goldstein is right. After an hour and a half with the files, I don’t know much more about the murders than I did from the news stories.
The last time anyone saw them, the Gablers were working the topless show at the Blue Parrot. The personnel director at the Parrot, one Clay Riggins, left three messages on the twins’ voice mail, ascending in irritation level – and then gave up. The messages provided the police with a probable date for the girls’ disappearance. And no, Riggins didn’t call the police, figuring the girls just blew town or got a better gig somewhere else. From Jerry Olmstead’s interview with Riggins: They were identical twins, you know? Not that hot, but they were learning a few makeup tricks and getting better at dancing. There were angles you could work with them, you know?
Tammy Yagoda, a twenty-three-year-old showgirl at the Sands, had been the Gablers’ roommate. She was the one who reported them missing. She hadn’t seen them for two weeks – and that time frame meshed in nicely with the date of their first no-show at the Parrot. Tammy told the police that the last time she saw them, the twins were fine. They were working at the Parrot, they were taking dance and speech lessons. The thing was, Tammy had more or less just moved in with a new boyfriend, Jaime, so it wasn’t until she went back to the apartment to get some clothes that she realized something was wrong. The stench from the litter box hit her as soon as she opened the door. Romulus and Remus, the two Burmese cats who belonged to the Gablers, were ravenous. Yagoda reported that the twins adored the felines; they never would have left the cats like that. So she knew something was wrong.
She was right about that.
Red Rock Canyon is a popular tourist site about twenty miles from Vegas. A well-marked thirteen-mile scenic drive leads the visitor through the Mojave Desert landscape. Dramatic rock formations form a backdrop for native fauna (bighorn sheep, desert tortoise, wild burro) and flora (cholla and barrel cactus, manzanita, Joshua tree). The rocks bear pictographs and petroglyphs, the work of Paiute Indians, dating back at least a thousand years. It isn’t just tourists who love the place – the locals do, too. It’s a haven for the hordes of native Vegas hikers, mountain bikers, and rock climbers. The brochures and maps encourage everyone to “Leave No Trace.”
Josh Gromelski, solo hiking in an isolated area behind Icebox Canyon, stumbled upon more than a trace. He’d scaled the walls of Icebox and had entered an area behind it, which led to a much smaller canyon known as Conjure Canyon. Free climbing, he nearly tumbled to his death after setting a handhold that, when he pulled himself up, brought his face about four feet from the torso and legs of what turned out to be Clara Gabler. Gromelski had a GPS system and a cell phone in his backpack. He lasted long enough to call in his gruesome discovery before tossing his Clif Bars and going into shock.
I can see why. The crime-scene photos are stomach-turning. I force myself to take a second look, although I don’t know why. Like other photos I’ve seen – the piles of naked Jewish corpses being tipped into mass graves, the gas-bloated bodies at Jonestown, the fallen Taliban fighter on the road outside Tora Bora, his pants pulled down and a crowbar jammed up his ass – the first glance is indelible. Like other sights I’ve seen in person – the carnage in Kosovo, where I beheld a pregnant woman with no head – some things don’t require a second look.
The photo of Clara Gabler’s lower half joins what has become, over the years, a gallery of horror in my head, a place where such images – the ones you wish you’d never seen – are imprinted forever. The trunk is severed at about the waist, the legs splayed apart, one of them slightly bent. The upper cavity is like some obscene bowl, the edge of skin and subcutaneous fat at the cut comprising the container that holds a gnawed mash of red pulp.
Despite the damage done by predators, the lower half of Clara Gabler did not deteriorate much in the dry Mojave air. Except for the tattered flesh still visible where the body was severed (wildlife, the crime scene report noted, removed the organs), the torso and legs look like the lower half of a doll. The shapely legs are encased in fishnet stockings, the feet – slightly turned in – are still shod in patent leather sandals with four-inch heels. A scrap of gold-sequined fabric – like the bottom half of a bathing suit, but shredded and twisted at the waistline – covers Clara’s lower trunk.
The identity of the legs and torso was not established until later, although it didn’t take long to find the other half of Clara Gabler once the police went looking. It was only twenty yards away, wedged into a rock crevice, apparently dragged there by coyotes. This is the half with a face, a face with nibbled sockets for eyes. Looking at it is difficult: the freakish way her body suddenly stops, just below the rib cage…
Carla was found about fifty yards away, facedown in a little gully. According to the reports, animals and birds had been feeding on the bodies for approximately two weeks before the hiker found them.
Carla Gabler met death in a more conventional way than her sister. She was shot, execution style, behind the right ear. It’s almost a relief to sift through the photographs in her file, and I have to remind myself that she, too, was murdered in cold blood. The crime-scene photograph shows Carla in her costume: fishnet stockings, high-heeled sandals, gold-sequined panties, jewel-encrusted bra. She was facedown on a rock when shot. Between livor mortis, predator damage, and the exit wound made by a.38 caliber bullet, her face is unrecognizable.