The Laughing Gorilla (25 page)

Wind cut spray into Dullea’s face. He buttoned down his double-breasted suit and cinched his raincoat. The wind could never dislodge his new hat with its latex sweatband that adjusted itself to all the irregularities of the human head. Below, the massive black trains of the Belt Line made their last cargo runs. The fire marshal drove by, lights flashing, checking for hazardous cargo, then U-turned toward his office on China Alley at the south end annex. Most of the piers were shuttered now, their massive facades closed until morning, when the Anna Lemons of the world put in another exhausting twelve-hour shift. The final Belt Train chugged past, pushing a line of SP boxcars. Dullea waited.

Freighters and rusty tramps rose and fell all about him. When the moon reaches its highest point above the Bay, the stream runs high, courses over the slick rocks of the strait, and lifts vessels along the waterfront about nine inches. Six hours later, when the moon dips behind the Farallone Islands, the ships sink lower. Actually, the entire region from Montgomery Street northeast to the Bay was floating on water, shifting sand, jettisoned cargo, and abandoned Gold Rush vessels. But no building on the waterfront is as sturdy as the Ferry Building, which sits on a foundation of thousands of creosoted Oregon pines sunk eighty feet into bedrock. In 1850, during the Gold Rush, South Seas ships had brought the ships’ worms whose descendants were still nibbling on those pilings.

Dullea heard the whine of winches, and from a dense shelf of fog discordant jangling bells, bleats, and whistles. The Ferry Building’s deep foghorn out-shouted them all. Out to sea, a deep, drawn-out bass sound repeated. He heard waves faintly slapping the hull of one of the 170 ferries bound daily for San Francisco from Marin and Oakland. Somewhere in the tulle mist a lost ferry was looking for San Francisco, which in itself is only a point of fog.

When the final streetcar departed, swinging around the Loop on the spur track, so did Dullea. He descended the slick steps to the foot of Sacramento Street. Several doors down, the Bay Hotel sign shimmered. The lights of the Harbor Emergency Hospital behind the Bay Hotel illuminated sailors out drinking and young women plying their trade. Farther down, the street was hushed. At the alley formed by two multistoried buildings, did something exit a window, hold briefly with one hand from the fire escape, and drop silently to the road? Was that a silhouette with long arms against the brick wall where the alley made a sharp turn? Was that a vague figure melting away? Dullea walked to his car. That the SFPD would lock horns with the Laughing Gorilla again was the only thing he could count on in the treacherous mist, on the shifting ground in that point of fog.

 

 

ON
a quiet street, the Gorilla Man laughed to himself—as if he could ever stop laughing. Traveling here and there, back and forth, he sailed and drank, and lost himself in blue-tinted rages and tried to forget. There was a rhythm and a flow to his outbursts, a compulsive timetable that he least of all understood, but reminded him most of the tides he sailed. Whenever he had been drinking, a curtain of blue lowered and made him do things. Sometimes the curtain was red, but whatever color it always took away his reason. When that curtain parted, he was able to blot out most of what he had done, but not completely. Faint memories remained, like footprints on the shore. Sometimes it all seemed like a dream. He shuddered. They couldn’t hang a man for a dream, could they? That the local press had forgotten him didn’t mean the Gorilla Man didn’t exist. He still moved in his odd, flat-footed shamble, hands buried to hide their size.

He had been among Dullea and his men before, close but unseen except as a fleeting shadow. He intended stalking the Embarcadero tonight, trolling for unsuspecting women at seedy waterfront hotels. He felt off-kilter. The Ferry Building is not square with Market Street but at a slight angle aligned with the arcade anchored to the seawall. It lies directly on the axis with Market and Commercial streets, but parallel with the Embarcadero. He paused at a tavern door south of Market. Drinking scared him because it was then he lost control—as if he could ever give up drinking! He went into the tavern. Tony Sudari was behind the bar cleaning a glass with his apron.

 

 

ON
Monday, August 12, 1935, the two dozen men assigned to hunt the Gorilla Man were detailed to other cases. Yet the hairs on the back of Dullea’s neck still tingled when he passed the Bay Hotel. Though a dozen other serious cases needed his attention—George Gordon, slain in a Utah Street factory, and Paul Hanson, killed at Lake Merced when he defended his date from a gang rape—he still studied every open doorway and followed long-armed strangers along the piers. Somewhere a laughing gorilla would continue his murderous ways in whatever port he landed. All sea routes eventually led back to the Embarcadero and all roads led to the Ferry Building, the second busiest terminus in the world. He would be back.

Inspectors LaTulipe and McMahon were camped in Dullea’s office. The rush of passing traffic came in through the open window as fog tumbled past in the typically frigid summer air. The Bay is an estuary filled with tidal marshes where fresh and salt waters combine. Moisture and prevailing northwesterly winds at least had the square in bloom. Dullea pawed through some circulars, then sat back wearily. McMahon wasn’t tired. After all, he was still looking for the beautiful unknown woman who’d accompanied the Whispering Gunman five years ago. “You’re smitten with her,” Dullea kidded him, pointing out that he kept her sketch, yellowed now, thumb-tacked over his desk.

The sun was just going down. Everyone in Dullea’s office was drinking, mostly Scotch. LaTulipe opened a binder and laid out photos of Mrs. Johnston, Mrs. Coffin, and a woman strangled in Golden Gate Park. “No, no, put them away,” snapped Dullea. “I don’t have the stomach for them.”

The criminologist put them away and took out a card marked “Bay Hotel.” Two types of hairs—coarse guard hairs and soft, thin down hairs were taped to the card. “The coarse hairs are animal,” he thought. “Or they might be from a chair since animal hairs are used as fibers to manufacture upholstery. If ‘Mr. Meyers’ is really a sailor perhaps he picked them up on a freighter transporting wild animals. What if they were an ape’s? Wouldn’t that be something?”

They left the HOJ to grab a bite at Il Trovatore Cafe. Busboys Vic Gotti and his brother Roland enthusiastically greeted them and brought menus. Dullea opened the tall menu. On weekdays, a complete dinner (hors d’oeuvres, soup, salad, spaghetti or ravioli, choice of entrees from the menu including filet mignon, vegetables, potatoes, dessert, coffee, and a small bottle of red house wine) cost 50¢. Because it was a Saturday, each would have to cough up an extra ten pennies.

Over ravioli, LaTulipe ventured that the Gorilla Man was mentally subnormal and morally depraved. “His subnormality removes the inhibitions that hold his sex urge in check,” he said. “He may not be more lustful than the average man, but an example of what happens when a man with a powerful libido feels he has nothing to lose. Remember Earle Nelson, the first Gorilla Man?” Dullea turned away as he felt the past drop over him like a shadow. He could still hear the killer’s laugh on the shadowed landing. “He was a strangler too with huge hands,” said Dullea.

“He’s not our ‘Mr. Meyers,’ if that’s what you’re thinking,” said LaTulipe. “The original Gorilla Man was a sex killer and religious fanatic.
He
had a motive. Besides, he’s dead, executed in Canada. I checked.”

But the Gorilla Man was alive, if only in Dullea’s tortured dreams. “The greatest reign of terror ever inflicted on the nation’s women began in San Francisco,” said Dullea. Those had been bleak and terrible times—his first big case and his worst—until now.

—E. A. POE, “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE”

 

 

 

 

 

ON
the outskirts of San Francisco, a healthy grassland was flourishing. In Woodside Glens, the neighbors had observed an unusual thing about Slipton Fell. After he moved into Ada Rice’s bungalow, he would sit shirtless on the grass playing soulful tunes on his mandolin but seemed afraid to enter the house. As evening fell, he would cast long, fearful looks at it, then around five o’clock, as the bungalow cast its shadow over him, he would start as if he had sighted a moving figure in the skylight. As the sun sank that optical effect was heightened. Then Fell’s eyes would widen, his face maple, and a light sheen overlay his brow. As fog overflowed Skyline Boulevard and rode down into the basin on the wind’s back, he would rouse himself with effort and, shivering, trudge inside.

He kindled the flagstone fireplace, stoking the logs with a poker. But as the fire cast flickering shadows along the wall, they too suggested a figure. Returning to the fire, he stabbed with the poker until sparks rose and the flare washed away the shadow. All night those passing on the road above heard his laugh.

Daily, Fell grew more nervous. He hated the square bungalow by day and feared it by night. He loathed its emptiness and the hollowness it imparted to his voice. When he did sleep, his nightmares frightened him, but not nearly so much as the terror that he might talk in his sleep. Finally, he stopped sleeping in the house altogether. “Where does he sleep?” wondered the neighbors. They studied the dark windows and speculated. “If not inside the bungalow, then where?”

Fell had concealed Mrs. Rice’s car (with different plates) and a second auto in a private garage in nearby Burlingame. When the sun went down, he left the fearful knoll with relief, unlocked the garage, and crawled into the backseat of Ada’s car. It was barely capacious enough to contain his 230 pounds and six-foot length, but it soothed him because the seats had the familiar smell of old lace. It made him realize that he had genuinely liked the older woman. But even in the familiar surroundings of Ada’s car he slept only a few hours. When he was composed enough to drift off, he would cry out and suddenly awake. What had he said? Shaken he looked around the little garage. Seeing he was alone, he pulled his rumpled suit over himself and dozed off again.

In the morning light he saw Ada had left a few personal items in the car—her passport and some insurance papers. A finance company still held title to the car. He realized if he reported it stolen he might get a few extra bucks to tide him over.

After filing a claim and collecting from the insurance company, Fell began taking long midnight drives along the coast highway. At each hairpin turn, his lights stabbed into deep canyons. He studied them as if they held the solution to his problem of the haunted bungalow. For whatever he expected to find on his lonely nocturnal drives he was well prepared. He had packed the trunk with a rolled blanket, adhesive tape, cotton cloth, a bottle of ammonia, a container of chloroform, and a sixty-foot length of rope with loops at both ends tied with a sailor’s knot. And as he sped, feeling the cool air against his face, Fell laughed as loud as he could but found no release. He couldn’t endure many more sleepless nights in the cramped garage. His mouth and throat were dry and his head throbbed. What could he do?

 

 

BY
September 13, 1935, only one person still missed Mrs. Ada French Mengler Rice. That was Mr. Rice. He desperately needed Ada’s signature, and she was nowhere to be found and hadn’t been since mid-June. At first, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s office seemed interested in locating her and though inclined to serve the divorce papers they weren’t exactly putting their backs to the wheel. Understandably, it was hard to keep their attention. Things rarely happened in their placid county and never in Woodside Glens. Only a case as big as murder could shatter their torpor. By February 1, the deputies would stop asking questions altogether, because on that day Mr. Rice would finally be granted his divorce in absentia and thus no longer be interested in the fate of Ada Rice. But for now, they continued their less-than-dogged hunt for the journalist.

So far not a shadow of suspicion had fallen on Slipton Fell. All the neighbors knew was that the house on the knoll sat vacant and presumably uncomfortable enough to compel him to sleep elsewhere. To the inquisitive neighbors he had explained away Ada’s absence with good news. Ada and a handsome young cavalry officer had taken a sudden trip to Bulgaria, perhaps, he winked, to elope. Ada had found happiness at last. And with that Fell, flexing his long arms, had returned to the house.

The next day, John and Davenport Bromfield, Realtors (told by an irate Mr. Rice to now look to Ada for mortgage payments), materialized at the Woodside Glens bungalow. Fell answered the door.

“Ada’s in New York and I’ve taken over the property,” he told them.

“But so far you’ve failed to make any payments,” said the Bromfields.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said and closed the door. After that the Bromfields were unable to locate Fell. All the neighbors could tell them was that the young weightlifter and eccentric adventurer was off somewhere on another of his excursions, his destination as mysterious as Ada’s. After three weeks, the Bromfields initiated legal action to regain possession of the lonely house on Canada Road.

In San Francisco, Dullea knew Mr. Meyers to be a seafaring man. What he didn’t know was that the devious Slipton Fell was an international sailor. Unlike some of his stories of adventuring, government toppling, and bandit joining, this was true. He had gone voyaging now, leaving the lonely and presumably haunted estate in Woodside Glens empty. The strange square house would hold its secrets until his return. Now, wherever Slipton Fell was, he could sleep again at last.