A Rage to Kill (34 page)

Moving back to Seattle, Jackie Emerson again started stilbestrol therapy, but he felt cheated. “That doctor was watering the pills down,” he complained.

Jackie not only had a problem with his female hormone therapy, he also had a problem with drugs. By 1974, he was hooked on heroin. He was “strung-out” for a year, and needed sixty to seventy dollars a day to take care of his habit. He had tried amphetamines and barbiturates, but they never had the power over him that hero-in did. He also used marijuana and alcohol, although Jackie didn’t feel those were a serious complication in his already murky life.

Jackie Emerson did not consider himself a homosexual; he continued to insist that he was a woman in the wrong body. He applied for public assistance—and received support—as “Miss Emerson.” Jackie, who had a rap sheet as long as his arm, was a highly skilled con man. Welfare workers didn’t know about his criminal activities; they saw only a confused and tearful boy/girl who didn’t seem able to face life or employment because of her unfortunate sexual situation. The State of Washington paid for extensive dental work for Jackie, and for an operation that removed an undescended testicle. “It is hoped that this corrective surgery will aid in the rehabilitation for Miss Emerson. She seemed hopeful and optimistic,” a naive caseworker noted in 1974.

However, Jackie could not see “herself” in a job until she had undergone a complete sex change operation. “I can’t get a job,” he lamented. “I can’t pass the physical.”

Jackie Emerson told a psychiatrist about his sad life, apparently unable to see that he had any responsibility at all for the troubles he had encountered. Emerson’s only income for four years had been through prostitution and welfare, and he had been jailed thirty or forty times in California, the last time for robbery.

If Jackie had bewilderment over his gender, his confusion was nothing compared to that of the doctors and social workers he encountered; they never could decide whether to call him “he” or “she,” and his voluminous file was filled with studies that called him both.

“Diagnostically,” one psychiatrist wrote, “she is best categorized under the heading 302.3 [in the
Diagnostic Statistical Manual
—the psychiatrist’s bible],
Transvestitism.
She also has some hysterical features in her makeup, tends to rationalize her behavior, to be quite gullible and somewhat given to fantasy. There is a fairly substantial antisocial element in her makeup. She tends to overly emphasize her need for surgery as a prelude to undertaking self-support . . . Her current employability is very much to be questioned, on the basis of her emotional stability, her history of prostitution, and her transvestite situation. Some counseling would seem appropriate for her to assist her in a more realistic appraisal of the opportunities open to her and how to make the best use of her resources.”

This psychiatrist had chosen to identify Jackie Emerson as “she,” and clearly he/she did have a sexual identity problem. But so had—and
have
—myriad others who had not turned to crime for support or to pay for a hoped-for operation.

Jackie Emerson was five feet, ten inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds. He had a fury in him, waiting to be unleashed if anyone questioned his persona or threatened him. The pretty face with the big eyes and the soft skin were a remarkable mask, a mask that made him more dangerous because he was not what he seemed to be at all.

February 13, 1976—Friday the 13th—turned out to be an incredibly unlucky day for Brad Bass. He certainly had no reason to be worried about his physical safety when he stopped into an all-night restaurant for a bite to eat and a cup of coffee. He was big enough and strong enough to take care of himself.

Larry’s Take 5 at 601 Pike Street was deep in the heart of the downtown section of Seattle. It was up and running twenty-two hours a day, with a cocktail lounge and a restaurant. It was also in the middle of the “stroll” in Seattle; Pike Street was prostitution territory, although those who sold sex for a price were sorely besieged by the Seattle Police Department’s vice squad. Pimps turned their women out along Pike Street and sat back in their zebra-upholstered Cadillacs to wait for their money. The hapless girls got arrested often and, when their faces became too familiar to the vice detectives, they were moved around the circuit to Portland or San Francisco and replaced with new faces. They were as expendable as women could be, trapped by circumstances and the lack of enough money to escape.

The pimps seemed to go on forever; it took the testimony of two prostitutes to nail a pimp, and the women were afraid of a beating with a hot coathanger—or worse. It wasn’t easy to find two women brave enough to turn on the men who controlled them.

Most of the prostitutes who worked the Pike Street stroll were no threat to their customers beyond the possibility of a sexually transmitted disease, and the seventies was an era when AIDS and even the herpes virus were unknown to the public. However, some of the prostitutes who approached men were not what they seemed to be, but it would have taken a physician to know it.

Larry’s Take 5 drew business from straight customers, cruising women of the night, and, inevitably, from the vice squad. The restaurant’s policy was to serve everyone who was behaving himself, and things were relatively calm on Thursday night, February 12. Ike Stone was the chef. The grills and ovens were in the front of the restaurant and had an excellent view of the place through the opening where orders were picked up. He could see both the booths and the front door. Ike had seen the flotsam and jetsam of life come and go through the doors of the Take 5 for a year, and nothing surprised him much anymore. On Thursday night/Friday morning he was working the graveyard shift.

Sometime around two-thirty
A..M.
on that Friday the 13th, an attractive and slender black woman walked up to the counter and, in a husky voice, ordered a grilled tuna fish and cheese sandwich and french fries to go. She wore a green pantsuit and her hair was teased in a bouffant style. Stone watched idly over the serving counter as the woman walked to the booths directly opposite him. She talked for a while with a man who appeared to be in his sixties. The man laughed and shook his head. Stone couldn’t hear the conversation but he had a pretty good idea what it was about.

Curious, the chef kept watching as she moved to a booth where a young man sat alone. The man looked up, grinned at the woman, and Ike saw that they seemed to be getting along well, as he turned away to put the woman’s order in a bag.

When she came to pick up her tuna melt and fries, the tall young fellow was with her. They were chatting easily, although Ike couldn’t tell if they were old friends or new acquaintances. They walked out the door together and Ike Stone dismissed them from his mind. He was looking forward to the two-hour break the Take 5 employees got when the restaurant closed for cleaning up before the breakfast rush.

Stone worked in a kitchen that had a solid wall on the west side. The noise of the jukebox, the hum of voices from the restaurant patrons, and the clang of pots and pans overwhelmed any street noise. So Stone neither saw nor heard what was happening outside. But he
could
see the enraged woman who ran into the Take 5 a few moments later. It was the patron in the green pantsuit who’d ordered the tuna and cheese to go. She was holding what appeared to be a black wig at arm’s length and screaming, “Look what he did to me!” at the top of her lungs.

Ike looked twice. Without her wig, it was apparent now that the woman wasn’t what she had seemed to be; usually Ike could spot one of the numerous transvestites who frequented the Pike Street stroll, but this one had fooled him completely.

Before Ike could stop him, the man in drag reached into a tray of silverware kept near the first booth and grabbed what looked to Stone like a knife. In an instant, the cook was around the serving barrier and wrestling the weapon away from the maddened man, kicking it with his foot so that it slid away from him. Thwarted, the man in the green pantsuit turned and ran back outside.

Curious, Ike Stone stepped outside to see what was going on. He could see that a crowd had gathered around someone on the sidewalk. When he pushed his way in, Stone recognized the young man who had left the restaurant with the transvestite. The youth appeared to be seized by convulsions. Stone could see no wounds, but he knew the kid was in trouble. He turned and went to the phone next to the cash register and dialed 911. He requested a Medic One aid car, on the double.

It was only a few minutes before paramedics from the Seattle Fire Department responded, followed by Seattle Police patrol officers K. Christophersen and P. McCloud. A call of a fight or a “man down” on Pike Street was hardly unusual. The tall husky youth was semiconscious now, and he appeared to be cyanotic, his face suffused with a gray-purple tinge. He seemed to have suffered a grand mal epileptic seizure, from the descriptions of the bystanders. If that was the case, he should have begun to come around by now, but he seemed to be getting worse.

As the paramedics checked him carefully, they found a very small lateral wound in his right upper chest. It was almost bloodless, and didn’t appear to be serious. They began immediate efforts to combat shock and the nameless young man was transported to the emergency room at Harborview Hospital, only a few blocks away.

Harborview Hospital (the King County Medical Center) is used to dealing with patients with major trauma and its physicians and staff are probably the best in the county in dealing with the results of violence and accidents. If a patient could be saved, they would do it. They had a chance with this patient, it seemed; his admission came well within the parameters of the “Golden Hour” before shock can begin to shut down the body’s functions forever.

“John Doe” was admitted with a systolic blood pressure of fifty, and a diastolic so low that it was off the scale of the sphygmomanometer. His pulse rate was fifty-six beats a minute and dropping rapidly. He could still speak, and he asked weakly where he was, and what had happened to him. ER physicians couldn’t answer his second question. They had hoped
he
could tell
them.
When they asked for his name, he was able to gasp, “Brad Bass.”

The only wound he had was the tiny transverse cut in his upper chest, and it wasn’t bleeding—at least externally. The first danger in a knife wound is exsanguination—death by loss of blood. And often that bleeding is internal. Life slips away silently as the lungs or abdominal cavity fill with blood. Some victims can suffer massive stab wounds and bleed enough externally that it appears as if every drop of blood in their bodies has seeped out, and still survive. Others, like Brad Bass, can die from one innocuous-looking shallow thrust.

Something was terribly wrong with Brad Bass, and he was rushed into surgery. Once the trauma surgeon had opened his chest, he could see that Bass had sustained a one-inch wide stab wound that had penetrated two and a half to three inches through his chest wall. But, in doing so, it had nicked the right auricular appendage of the heart and the aorta—the large artery that carries blood to all parts of the body. A silent, often-fatal medical situation called “cardiac tamponade” had resulted. The pericardial sac that encases the heart had begun to fill up with blood. The sac that usually protects the heart was rapidly crushing it. Each time Brad Bass’s heart contracted, more blood filled the sac surrounding it, compressing the heart so tightly that less and less blood could be pumped to the extremities of his body. Despite the surgeon’s efforts, his blood pressure continued to drop.

The surgeon mended the damage done by the tip of a thin blade to the heart and aorta, but it was too late. Brad had begun to die.

It is essential to look at all the ramifications of Brad Bass’s demise to understand what legal death is. The human body does not die all at once. Rather, it dies in stages. When there is a lack of oxygen and nutrients, death occurs first in the most fragile cells. The brain cells are the most sensitive of all to lack of oxygen and may die in a matter of minutes while skin and bone cells can continue to “live” for weeks after brain, heart, and lung death.

It was still Friday, February 13. As dawn broke only hours after he had walked out of Larry’s Take 5, Brad Bass, until this day a perfect physical specimen, lay motionless. The cells of his brain had flickered out like light bulbs cut off from electricity, and they would never live again. He was
legally
alive, but not in the sense of his having any meaningful life. But he was not yet officially a homicide statistic.

The detectives assigned to the Seattle Police Homicide Unit arrived at work at 7:45
A..M.
Detective Sergeant Jerry Yates talked to the head nurse in the emergency room at Harborview. She told him that the victim of the street stabbing of the night before was “very bad”—worse than critical, if possible. He had been admitted with ten dollars and change in his pockets. They had found no wallet and no I.D. “He was able to give us his name,” she said. “But that’s all. We have no way of knowing if he has any relatives or friends in Seattle.”

When Yates heard that the victim’s prognosis was almost nil, he realized that he and his men would have to treat this as a probable murder case.

Information gathered by patrol officers at the site of the stabbing had been sketchy; habitués of the nether world along Pike Street were not traditionally known to confide in the police. The only information that had survived the chaos of the scene was that the victim had been involved in a scuffle with a tall, sexy, black woman. Some said the glamorous figure was most certainly a female; others questioned that.