I sat alone on a boardwalk bench, hunched over as I bled. It was all I could do to keep my rolled up jacket pressed against my stomach so that my guts would not slip out of the gash along my lower abdomen that ran from hip to hip.
I pressed my left arm against my gut over the jacket. My legs hurt. The iron odor of my blood soaking the boards beneath the bench mixed with the salt air made me think of rusted garden tools in my old man’s shed when I was kid.
My fear was that the killer was going to come back to finish the job, to open up my neck the way he did my lower abdomen. I was unarmed. Earlier, he had blindsided me, carved me up, and when I could move again my pistol was gone. I had no doubt he would have finished me off the way he did my partner. I had seen first-hand what that killer had done to three migrant workers in room 225 at the Seahorse Motel on Oceanview Avenue. It was a small consolation that my eyes remained intact. Those migrant workers were not so fortunate.
It took less than a week to figure out it was the guy with the Louisiana drawl who was part of the migrant work crew. Bentley, my partner, made some calls to New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Neither department had any murders that resembled what had happened where we were in Ocean City, Maryland. One old-timer still working homicide in the NOPD remembered a case in which a kid killed his aunt and uncle by cutting their throats.
“There was another victim found with his throat cut thirty-some odd miles away in Slidell,” the old detective said. “The Slidell Police never found any evidence to link the three murders. The dead man in Slidell was found in his car beneath an overpass. His wallet had been tossed. And his throat wasn’t the only thing cut.”
“Oh yeah?” Bentley held up his fingers and tapped them against his thumb, indicating the New Orleans detective was a talker.
“His killer cut his pecker to ribbons before he killed him,” he replied. “The victim also had a .38 snub nose holstered under his coat.”
“The murdered couple in New Orleans was your case,” Bentley said.
“It sure was. The theory I pushed was that the boy hitched a ride with the wrong man,” the old detective went on. “The guy exposes himself, thinking he’s picked up a boy who won’t run to the cops when he sodomizes him, and then the boy panics and kills him.”
“But no one looked into the dead man’s past?”
“That was a matter for the Slidell Police Department,” he replied. “If they did, I never heard anything.”
“This boy’s aunt and uncle ended up with their throats cut like the victim thirty miles away in another parish,” Bentley said, “but no one besides you thought that wasn’t just a coincidence?”
“This is the Big Easy,” the old detective said. “People have been getting their throats cut here ever since the first French settlers landed.”
Bentley asked him if he could remember anything else about the old case.
“A curved knife the Orleans Parish medical examiner said,” the detective replied, “like a linoleum knife. Rory Gavol was the boy’s name. We never found him, the Gavol boy I mean. Could be he’s turned up there all these years later. If that’s the case, let me give you a bit of unsolicited advice: save your taxpayers their money and put that murderous bastard down for good. The world won’t much miss poor white trash like him. Y’all take care now. Bye.”
Bentley didn’t get a chance to thank Perkins, the old detective from NOPD. That didn’t prevent him from leaning back in his chair the way he always did when he was satisfied with his own work.
“This Perkins fella down in New Orleans,” said Bentley, “He said this Rory Gavol kid ran away from his aunt and uncle’s place. Later the next day, he came back and killed them both. The aunt was his mother’s older sister who became Gavol’s legal guardian after his mother died from a hard attack brought on by hardening of the arteries.
“Drinking can do that to a person of a certain disposition,” Perkins had told Bentley.
Gavol lost his mother at an early age.
“Perkins believes that the Gavol boy stole his uncle’s linoleum knife for self-defense when he ran away.”
“And he returns to kill his aunt and uncle with the stolen knife,” I said. “Sounds like something out of a William Faulkner novel.”
“Faulkner hailed from Mississippi,” Bentley informed me.
“You know what I mean,” I countered. Then. “What year did Gavol kill his aunt and uncle down in New Orleans?”
“Perkins said it was early 1949,” he said. “That makes Gavol right, age-wise, at thirty-three years old.”
I applauded Bentley’s work, but it didn’t get us any closer to pinning the murders of the three migrant workers on Gavol.
“I wonder if it’s the same knife after all this time?” Bentley said.
My partner and I thought we had this one all sewed up. Gavol worked at McKee Farm in Selbyville, Delaware along with the migrant workers who were largely Mexican by birth with a few black men and women who come up from down South.
A couple of days after the murders we secured a warrant to search Gavol’s room at the Seahorse Motel. The manager said that Gavol had gone out fishing in the bay. Our worry, naturally, was that Gavol would return while we were tossing his room to find evidence to link him to the migrant worker murders.
Two plainclothes officers, Robbi Edson and Burt Campbell, were put on Gavol. Robbi and Campbell would pose as a tourist couple waiting for the charter to return so they could go out for the afternoon run. There were only two boats running charters at that time of year. One of them, the Chantilly Lace, was having its engine overhauled. That left the Anne Bonny.
When the motel manager told us that Gavol had gone fishing, Bentley and I assumed that he meant on the Anne Bonny. It was Robbi who called the manager’s office at the Seahorse to track us down. The news wasn’t good. Gavol had parked himself at the end of a pier with a cheap pole and live bait.
“You’re kidding,” I said to Robbi.
“He’s sitting there like some backwoods Cajun with no shoes or socks on,” she informed me, “as sure as my tits are sweating.”
“Call room 221 if he gets up and moves,” I said.
The only thing of note Bentley and I found in Gavol’s room was a journal. On the inside of the front leather cover he had painstakingly written his name out in cursive writing. We also discovered in one of the dresser drawers an expired state I.D. card from Georgia with his name on it. It was the journal that caught my attention. It was filed with details of various murders. It wasn’t enough to arrest him, but it meant we could bring him in for questioning. The murders chronicled were not dated, on the last used page of the journal, Gavol had written I killed me three Mexicans because they thought I was queer. The truth is I am, but that’s none of their damned business.
When Gavol finished his pier fishing expedition, he returned to the hotel tailed by Officers Edson and Campbell. When Gavol entered the room Bentley held up the journal like it was a bible. At that point I informed Gavol that he was wanted for questioning regarding the murders of his three coworkers Alfonso Delacruz, Jorge Jimenez, and Tomaso Paz.
Gavol played it cool. Even after we let him sit for a few hours in a locked interrogation room.
When we felt the time was right, Bentley and I entered the interrogation room. We started in on Gavol. This was no time for the good cop, bad cop routine. We wanted to wear him down, but we only had so much time that day.
“I’m a writer, detectives,” Gavol informed Bentley and me.
“Anything I’ve read?” Bentley asked.
“Alas,” he said, “I am unpublished for now.”
“Mr. Gavol,” I started to say. “Look, you’re not in the Deep South. If you cooperate, maybe we can get the judge to show some leniency—”
“Would you hall in my idol John Steinbeck for fleshing out murder scenes in a notebook?” Gavol asked. “I think not. Besides, I find it insulting that you both are insinuating that I’m stupid enough to write down actual murders. Now, since you pinned all of your hopes on my journal, which is in itself a work of fiction, you either present indisputable evidence that I committed this crime of which you speak, or you cut me loose.”
The biggest drawback was that none of the entries in the journal were dated. We had nothing else. So, we let Gavol go.
When the harvest season ended, migrant workers would come through Ocean City for a couple of nights before making the trek to points south of Virginia for the winter. By then most of the tourist traps had already shuttered in anticipation of hurricane season. That didn’t stop migrant farm workers from renting rooms at places like the Seahorse Motel on Ocean Highway in North Ocean City. It was there at the Seahorse where Delacruz, Jimenez, and Paz had all been murdered in the same room.
It takes an efficient killer to take out more than one person at a time. From the looks of the scene in the motel room we knew that the killer was proficient with his blade. It didn’t help that the workers had been drinking and playing cards that night. My partner and I had Rory Gavol all figured out as the. He was just another drifter with abandonment issues who took out his pain on innocent victims.
It turned out we didn’t know half of it about Rory Gavol. But that part came later. If we had, Bentley and I would have been more cautious. Poor Bentley. He got it worse than me that night.
My partner had been following Gavol on his own when the farmhand got on a bus to head south along Coastal Highway in search of other entertainment. None of his farm worker colleagues liked him, that much we found out when we interviewed those who spoke English. One of the workers, a middle-aged woman named Maria Lopez, said that Gavol’s eyes looked like a dead man’s.
I was already home by the time Bentley had decided that night to go out and keep an eye on Gavol’s movements. Bentley tracked our man to a bar near 20th Street. Then he went inside to have a word with the farmhand. Gavol must have sensed Bentley was a cop. He lit out the back through the kitchen. Bentley followed him.
My partner was married with two teen daughters. One of them had just been accepted to the University of Virginia. Bentley worried that his daughter might fall in with some hippies and quit college. Until the night of the triple homicide at the Seahorse, Bentley’s biggest worry was hippie culture which he believed had been sparked by the Soviets. He was obsessed at times with making connections where none existed, but he never let that obsession bleed into police work. As a cop, he was methodical and meticulous.
Bentley telephoned me from the marina near Dolphin Street, not far from where officers Edson and Campbell surveilled Gavol while he was fishing. From what I could get out of him he had followed Gavol on foot there. Then Gavol shook him off. Or so he thought. Gavol had cut him up. Bentley started to say something about his service revolver. Then it sounded as if he dropped the pay phone receiver. The howl that followed I once heard in Korea when some overzealous guys in my unit castrated a Chinese soldier they had tied to a tree. After that I heard a familiar voice say, “I’m fixing to pass a good time now.” It was Gavol all-right. Bentley screamed some more. Then Gavol hung up on me.
Fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the place where Bentley lay dead. Gavol left him propped up against the fence that belonged to a marina motel that was closed for the season. As I pulled up, so did the reinforcements. I called the station after I got off the phone.
Gavol took his time with Bentley, even after my partner had expired. He had cut out my partner’s eyes before he decapitated Bentley and left his eyeless head in his lap.
If you know anything about Ocean City, Maryland, you know it’s a long narrow barrier island. Today, it has built up so much compared to when I worked at the OCPD. But back in 1968, nearly four years after the bay bridge had opened, there was plenty of construction up and down the island in those days. That meant that at night there were plenty of places to hide.
We ended up calling in the Maryland State Police and the Selbyville Police Department over in Delaware for assistance.
My chief thought I was too close to it all. He suggested I sit out the search for Gavol.
“We got roadblocks going up, Frank,” said Police Chief Tully. “We’ll get him.”
“I need to do this, Chief,” I said.
“Detective Veltman,” he said, “what if I gave you an order?”
“Then you can arrest me after I find him,” I replied.
It was pointless to wait around for the rest. I left it to the medical examiner’s crew to take custody of my friend’s mutilated corpse.
***
There was a girl that night. She wore cut-off denim shorts and a tube top. It was October, and her arms, face, and legs were still tan. She looked like one of those California girls you imagine from the Beach Boys song. She was walking barefoot south along Baltimore Avenue.
I followed the girl. She turned left onto 11th Street and headed for the beach. At Washington Lane, she turned right toward 10th Street. I parked my car on 11th and jogged down Washington Lane after her.
“Miss,” I called out. “Ocean City Police. Please stop.”
She ignored me.
At the end of Washington Lane, a narrow street, only a car’s width from curb to curb, the girl turned onto a driveway on the left. It was dark. I heard a wood gate slam shut. On my left were stairs that led to an inn on the boardwalk with a four-car garage beneath the structure. The girl stood behind a three-foot white picket gate.
“Didn’t you hear me calling you?” I said to the girl as she stood there in the dark.
The girl didn’t reply. Gavol jumped on me from the landing of exterior stairs to my left. From that height, though he was slightly smaller than me, he drove me straight onto the pavement. Blood from a cut on my forehead stung my eyes. We rolled to the right. For a brief moment I was free of him. I was still on my back. I went for my pistol. He waited until I removed my weapon from its holster. Gavol stomped on my wrist, shattering it, and kicked my gun away after it fell from my grip.
With my good hand I wiped the blood from my eyes. The California girl had vanished.
***
Gavol grabbed my lapels and hoisted me to my feet. He headbutted in the face twice. The second time something cracked. It hurt like hell. Later I’d find out that both my nose and the occipital bone on the left side of my face had been broken.
I tried to swing on Gavol. He pulled my jacket down, pinning my arms to my sides. Out came the linoleum knife. The blade was bigger than I expected. He swung once at my neck, but I whipped myself backward, which turned out to be a mistake. The back of my head bounced off a cast iron drain pipe.
Pinpoints of light, too many to count, converged at a point a few feet from my face. My knees started to give. I was sure I was going to pass out. That’s when Gavol swung his knife again from a low angle as I stumbled forward. The curved tip pierced my lower left side. As it did, Gavol drove me back against the rear wall of the inn. My head struck the cast iron drain pipe again. Gavol twisted his knife deeper into my abdomen. Then he wrenched the blade to my right, slicing my stomach open like I was livestock suspended over a killing floor.
Gavol chose to leave me breathing. Something must have spooked him. Or maybe he just wanted me to survive so that I would testify to his savagery.
Somehow I managed to get my jacket off. As I lay face-up on the ground I rolled my jacket up like a bread loaf, and I pressed it against the wound. I wasn’t thinking straight. All I knew was that I didn’t want my guts falling out. I also had to get out of the driveway where I lay. It was pointless calling out for help. Everything was closed for the season.
Worse, I had no idea where my gun was. It didn’t take long to figure it out. That revelation came in due time, though, as all good revelations do.
Somehow, I managed to get to 10th Street where I collapsed. Then I was moving again. I got it into my head that I’d like to be on the beach to hear the hypnotic crash of waves as they broke when I died.
I only made it as far as a bench on the boardwalk before I sat there, unable to go on. In all, from the driveway behind the inn to the boardwalk the distance was only two hundred feet or so. It felt like miles.
Gavol was out there somewhere. That much I knew. So was the California girl. How did they know each other? Even in my injured state, it wasn’t hard to figure out. For the past few summers, we had a lot of riff-raff in town over the summer. Bikers, hippies, and other assorted derelicts. Most of them moved on when the season was over. Some stayed. The California girl must have been one of them. And my guess was that Gavol offered her money to lure the next cop he saw down the side street.
When you are about to bleed to death, you think of the strangest things. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol came to mind when I heard the chain leash. It was only after the dog, a little mutt, licked the dried blood on my hands that I realized it wasn’t some ghost chained to this world. The old woman walking the dog remained a blur. She was there and then she wasn’t. I never got her name. Even after flashing red lights told me the cavalry had arrived at last.
Later that morning on the beach, between 8th and 9th Streets, they found the California girl. She didn’t have any identification on her. She had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in the cheek below her right eye. It was the head shot that was the tell. The shooter had been left-handed. The bullet to her face took out the back of her skull. The one she took in the chest embedded itself in her spine after it tore a hole through heart.
The medical examiner was able to extract the bullet from the girl’s spine. He turned the slug over to the Maryland State Police.
My Colt 1911 was found between two stones on a jetty not far from where the girl lay. The pistol was sent to the Maryland State Police as well. Everyone knew what the outcome would be. The slug pulled out of the girl matched the bullets from my Colt when it was test-fired. Had I not been nearly disemboweled by Gavol I might have been in big trouble. Granted, I still had to answer for my sidearm being taken from me.
When I was well enough, I put in my paperwork. I was done in Ocean City. One by one, guys in the department had less contact with me. For a couple of years I worked in a smaller mainland police department, but it didn’t last. My heart was no longer in it.
Almost ten years have passed. These days I sell cars in Elkton, Maryland. It’s a living. At night, I sometimes dream about the California girl with tan limbs and blond hair. In my dreams she’s alive. We sometimes sit on the beach in the dark waiting for the sun to rise. But it never does. In other dreams I hear a dog leash. In those dreams my savior, my angel of the boardwalk, is still a blur. Of the two women I often dream about, it’s my angel who scares me most. While I was recovering some guys in my department tried to track her down. They never did find her. The California girl was never identified. She was interred as a Jane Doe in a mainland county cemetery.
As for Rory Gavol, he slipped through the net and got away. I don’t dream of him. And for that I am grateful. No man should dream of the devil that often and expect to come out the other side unscathed.
[Image Credit : Photo by Mohamed hamdi on Unsplash]
by 
Richard O'Brien
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- The Devil and the California Girl - December 4, 2025
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