“Who did this to you?” Lamphere asked gently.
“George . . . Indian... teeth ...gone...” the girl gasped.
“Did you know him?”
Arden Lee shook her head weakly. “Not really...met him . . . at the Korea Tavern... the bartender... introduced us.”
The girl managed to tell them that she’d met “George” again the night before at about midnight and that he’d invited her to his house “for a drink.” She’d gone with him, thinking he was okay because a friend had introduced them.
“Did you have a purse with you? We haven’t been able to find it.”
“No, no purse. Just a key—a ring with a key attached.”
“Do you know what else you left at the house... where they found you?”
“Can’t remember—” was the soft reply, and then Arden lapsed back into a coma.
The trauma team of physicians who had worked on Arden Lee informed Lamphere that her condition was extremely critical and the most optimistic thing they could say was that she might survive—if infection didn’t set in, or a blood clot didn’t break free and travel to her lungs. “She’s in shock; she’s been beaten as badly as anyone we’ve ever seen,” one doctor said. “The neurosurgeon’s going to check her now for brain damage.”
And Arden Lee had been violently raped and sodomized. She had clearly been trapped by a man whose sexual desires and need to hurt someone were almost beyond the comprehension of the normal mind. One trauma doctor commented that her body was far more damaged than those of most murder victims at autopsy.
Despite her broken teeth and jaw, Arden managed to tell Pat Lamphere that the man who had hurt her had had no weapon beyond the rope which he’d carried in his pocket. She had seen him pull the rope out, and before she could stop him, he slipped it over her head. And then he’d cinched it tightly around her neck to make her obey him.
The only link between Arden and her attacker appeared to be the Korea Tavern. Pat Lamphere and Detective John Nordlund started there. They had to wait until the daytime bartender came on shortly before noon. The woman behind the bar said that her brother was the night bartender, and he was proably the one who knew Arden. “I’ll call him at home and have him come down,” she said. “But I can’t think of any ‘Indian George’ who comes in here. There’s only one ‘George’ who comes in, and he’s not Native American. Maybe my brother will know more.”
Yung Kim agreed with his sister. There wasn’t any “Indian George,” only a man named George who was employed as a bouncer at the Exotica Studio at Seventh and Pike. Nordlund and Lamphere exchanged glances. The Exotica was a thorn in the side of the Vice Squad; it operated just on the edge of what was legal and often crossed the line. There were a number of “businesses” in the area that were not what they purported to be, using facades to disguise what really went on beyond their doors. Most were massage parlors. Others offered “mattress demonstrations,” and the Exotica claimed to be a dance studio, with dance “lessons” performed by the women who worked there. Almost all of the storefront businesses were thinly disguised houses of prostitution. There were always women and runaway teenagers desperate to make money just to pay their rent and buy groceries. The owners of the sex-oriented businesses assured them that their tips would more than make up for the minimum hourly wage they got. But it didn’t turn out that way. The men who managed the tawdry enterprises kept any big money that changed hands.
The Exotica practiced a kind of bait-and-switch policy. Many male customers left without ever getting what they thought they were paying for.
Even though patrol officers working along Pike Street kept a close eye on the Exotica, its windows stopped traffic day and night, because garishly made-up young women undulated behind the glass, beckoning to the men who walked and drove by to stare at them in their tight, short, transparent clothing. However, once the men were enticed inside, they were told that it would cost them forty dollars to view a “program” in one of the private rooms. They were promised “interpretive dancing.”
“What’s that?” one potential customer asked.
One of the dancers explained: “It’s however you interpret it.”
Borrowing from the old carny routine where the rubes were asked to pay more and more for each new revelation, the men who were gullible enough and had enough cash to get as far as the private rooms were given a new price. “The forty dollars goes to the house,” the women were told to say. “We make our living from ‘donations.’ They begin at fifty dollars.”
Some of the customers balked at that point, but many put up more money. They were then allowed to disrobe if they liked—and to lie on a couch to watch. The dancers stripped then to their bikini underwear and performed their interesting—if untrained—dancing.
But that was all there was. Ostensibly there was no touching. When the “program” was over, the customers were left as unsatisfied as they were when they came in. Some were only disappointed, but most of them were very angry. Many of the women were frightened at the rage that erupted. To keep them from quitting, the Exotica managers grudgingly installed a thick pellucid screen between the plate-glass windows and the half-naked dancers.
Several irate patrons of the dance studio returned to the Exotica after being ripped off, and they threw rocks to smash the windows. One man was so angry that he came back with a jackhammer and broke out two of the expensive windows, showering the dancers and the customers inside with shards of glass. Then, with a smile of satisfaction, he waited for the police to come and take him away.
The Exotica managed to stay in business, although detectives from the Vice Squad were frequent drop-ins to check out their business licenses and verify the ages of the girls who halfheartedly rotated their hips, shook their breasts, and cast what they hoped were suitably sultry looks at passersby. There always seemed to be new girls— none of whom lasted very long when they found how little they actually got paid. Promised one hundred dollars a night, they were lucky to get a fourth of that.
The managers and the bouncers got most of the money exchanged. Because Pike Street was the downtown “stroll” for Seattle hookers, and the Exotica’s patrons almost always left angry, it took beefy bouncers to keep a semblance of peace.
Yung Kim told John Nordlund and Pat Lamphere that the George he knew worked in that capacity at the Exotica and frequently dropped into the Korea Tavern when he had time off.
“Do you know Arden Lee?” Nordlund asked.
“Oh, yeah, Arden—I’ve known her for about four years. She used to date a guy I went to school with.”
“Did you introduce her to George from the Exotica?”
“Yeah—last week, sometime. See, Arden never comes in here because we all know she’s only eighteen, so she knocks on the window if she wants to talk and we go outside. I guess that’s when I introduced them.”
Kim and his sister said that George had a pretty bad reputation, and they’d heard he’d beaten up a lot of Exotica customers. “None of the girls from there will date him because they think he’s crazy. He wanted a job here as a bouncer, but we didn’t hire him because we’d heard about him.”
“You know,” Kim’s sister said, “it’s funny. I didn’t even know his name was George. He’s the guy who always comes in to talk with me during the noon hour. Today’s the first day he hasn’t been in in weeks. I guess I never heard my brother say his name.”
“Did Arden work at the Exotica?” Lamphere asked.
Kim shook his head. “She just comes by here sometimes to talk. She has a baby about eight months old, I think.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Last night. She came by twice—once about nine or ten, and again about midnight. We were really busy, and I didn’t go over to talk to her when she tapped on the window. I never did see her again.”
“Did you see her with George last night?”
Kim shook his head. “She was alone when I saw her, never saw her with George at all.”
> The Kim siblings were certain that George was not an Indian. They thought he was possibly of Italian or Mexican extraction. “His skin is dark,” Yung Kim said, “and he has teeth missing in front, but sometimes he wears his bridge.”
“Anything else?” Nordlund asked.
“He’s got black hair and he wears it long, but he’s real careful about his haircuts and he’s always combing his hair. Oh, yeah—he’s got a big mustache.”
“And a big belly, too,” his sister added.
Nordlund and Lamphere headed to the Exotica Studio. They didn’t expect a warm welcome, and they didn’t get one. The only employees there at this time of day were two teenage dancers who were performing their desultory moves in the window. Business at two in the afternoon was hardly booming.
The girls sulkily insisted that there was no one in the place except the two of them; no managers, no bouncers. Lamphere and Nordlund didn’t believe them; it wasn’t likely that the managers had left the girls alone in the Exotica after all the fights that had taken place there recently. The detectives felt hidden eyes watching them. But they didn’t have a search warrant and they had to accept the dancers’ word.
The girls did allow that they knew a George, who was the night bouncer. “But we don’t know his last name or anything about him,” one teenager said.
“We haven’t seen him at all today,” the other said, as if she had rehearsed it.
The detectives waited for half an hour in the Exotica for someone to appear who might give them more information on George—but no one showed up. They left and called vice detectives who told them to forget about getting any cooperation at the Exotica. “We’ve raided them so many times that they’re not about to help us.”
Back at headquarters, Lamphere and Nordlund spoke with five members of the Vice Squad, but none of them knew who George was. That meant he had to be a fairly recent employee of the flamboyant dance studio. They doubted that many questions were asked of would-be bouncers. If they were big, tough, and mean, they would meet the job qualifications of the Exotica.
“The only names we have for management there are Kit Mitchell,* Al Rauch,* and Roger Pomarleau,” an undercover vice detective said. When Lamphere and Nordlund checked police files for these three “managers,” they found that none of their physical descriptions meshed with that of the elusive and deadly “George.”
Lamphere searched records to see if Arden Lee’s name was there. She found only one prior for Arden—an arrest for “offering and agreeing to an act of prostitution.” That was pretty small potatoes. There was no conviction indicated. Arden appeared to be more of a hanger-on than a working prostitute. It didn’t really matter what Arden did for a living; in this case she was the victim of a devastating attack, and nobody should have had to undergo the torture she had endured.
After leaving a message for the Third Watch crew, Nordlund and Lamphere signed out for the day. They requested another attempt to contact George at the Exotica during the evening. But after their early afternoon visit, the doors of the dance studio were closed and locked. Stakeouts watching the studio reported that the doors remained locked all night. When the heat was on over any of the activities at the Exotica, the place was known to close down until things lightened up.
When Lamphere and Nordlund returned to work on June 2, they learned that Officers Burke and Zuray had arrested a suspect near the Exotica who fit the description given by Arden Lee exactly.
He was a Native American male, five feet, nine inches tall, and his front teeth were missing. His last name was George, and he even had a ring with a key attached on his hand! The detectives were elated; it sounded as though Arden Lee’s attacker had been caught only twenty-four hours after he’d raped her.
“We arrested him in the 500 block of East Howell. He was so drunk he walked into a tree,” Zuray said.
Pat Lamphere interviewed Delroy George,* who was considerably sobered up now, and advised him of his rights. The suspect had extensive bruising on his hands and knees which could have occurred during the attack on Arden Lee.
But Delroy George insisted that he’d just come back to Seattle from Canada. “I took the Greyhound, and I know I got in at two in the morning,” he said weakly. “Ask my aunt. She’ll be able to tell you. I came in on a bus from Vancouver.”
Lamphere asked him about the ring he wore with a key attached, and he insisted that he owned the ring. “That’s so I won’t lose my house key.”
“Do you go to the Korea Tavern?” she asked.
“Sure. I drink there sometimes, but I wasn’t there this month because I was up in Canada.”
Photos of the numerous abrasions and bruises on Delroy George’s knees and hands were taken, and he was booked into the King County Jail. He looked good for the crime. Right name. Right neighborhood. Finger ring with a key. Everything seemed to fit.
Sergeant Noreen Skagen, head of the Sexual Assault Unit, agreed. She and Lamphere headed to Harborview Hospital to see if Arden Lee might be able to identify Delroy George. But if anything, she looked worse than the day before. Her condition was listed as extremely critical.
“We can’t risk trying to reduce her jaw fractures until her condition stabilizes,” the trauma attending doctor said. “But she wants to try to talk to you. Just don’t stay too long.”
Arden whispered that she remembered more about her assailant. “Most of what I said was right, but I think he was taller than I said yesterday. He’s probably more like six feet tall.
“And I remember now that it was that George from the dance studio.”
“Are you sure he worked there?” Lamphere asked.
“Yes. Absolutely. Kim introduced him to me in a back room at the Korea Tavern a couple of weeks ago. He said he was a bouncer at the Exotica.”
Lamphere showed Arden the ring they’d taken from Delroy George.
“That’s not mine,” Arden said faintly. “Mine was a ring made out of a spoon—”
Incredibly—but luckily for Delroy George—they had found information that let him off the hook. Detectives are all too aware of the fact that there are many instances where a suspect who seems to be perfect for a crime turns out to have no connection at all; only coincidence.
A very relieved Delroy George was released, swearing to give up drinking.
Skagen and Lamphere checked with Harborview to see if the patients’ property room was holding anything belonging to Arden Lee. She had been naked and shoeless when the paramedics found her, but they learned that the hospital had Arden’s ring. It was just as she had described it—a ring made by bending a silver spoon into a circle; it had a key attached to it. The paramedics had removed it from her finger as she was being treated, and turned it in to the hospital’s property room.
Skagen and Lamphere took pictures of Arden Lee, showing bruises that had become darker and uglier since the day before. Her body was black-purple from her chin to her waistline and her face was like raw hamburger. Her knees and hands were purple. She was on oxygen because her tongue was so swollen that she couldn’t maintain oxygen levels beyond 85 percent through her own breathing. Most people’s normal oxygen level is between 97 and 100 percent.
Her physicians explained that Arden was suffering from severe muscle spasms in her back. Her entire spine was pulled out of line, although they now felt the vertebrae themselves were not broken. She had sustained a concussion, but not a skull fracture. Her broken jaw and facial bones would be set when—and if—she got better. She would have to have a tracheotomy (a tube inserted through her throat into the airway) before the surgery could be accomplished. Her neck, burned by the rope that garroted her, was held rigid in a neck brace.
Both Skagen and Lamphere had interviewed many rape victims, but they had never seen anyone so badly hurt, not anyone who had survived.
An informant called to say that the Exotica had reopened. “I think several of the bouncers are there. They usually stay in the back rooms and out of sight.”
Lamphere,
Nordlund, and Larry Gordon of the Sexual Assault Unit, accompanied by three homicide detectives for backup, headed once more for the Exotica. There they talked with Roger Pomarleau, the dapper, bearded overseer who was currently on duty. An owner-manager, Pomarleau was twenty-four—although he looked older. He was a tall man, handsome in a dangerous kind of way, with thick, curly hair. He was not unfamiliar to the Vice Squad. He had several entries on his rap sheet—both as a victim and as a suspect. Pomarleau had been beaten up by a husband of one of the Exotica dancers who had claimed she was being held captive. Later, he was charged with assault on another girl. That case never got into court; Pomarleau took care of that by marrying the victim—who then refused to testify against him. The marriage didn’t last long, only long enough to see that Pomarleau didn’t go to court. The divorce came soon after, and Pomarleau, a marrying kind, married another of the dancers, a sixteen-year-old girl.
He had discovered that was the best way to have ultimate control over his women. He was a pimp as well as an instructor of dance, and control was extremely important to him.
Pomarleau told Lamphere and Nordlund that he didn’t know the last name of his night bouncer. “I only knew him as George,” he lied smoothly. “He’s worked here for the last week. We let him live in a room just behind the window. But I’m afraid George is long gone. We checked his room, but he didn’t leave anything but a bunch of torn-up papers. Nothing with his name on it.”
How the Exotica’s management team was going to follow IRS requirements for their employees without knowing their last names was questionable, but then the whole of their business operation was suspect.
Pomarleau was being remarkable cooperative, and he willingly called his fellow manager, Kit Mitchell, at home. Mitchell said that George had come into the Exotica between eleven-thirty and noon on the first of June. “He packed up all of his belongings. He told me he was quitting and was on his way to the bus stop. Seems like he had some kind of trouble and he was leaving town. He didn’t say where he was going.”