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WE SWUNG PAST the Harmon House Hotel, retrieved Elvis’s bag, zipped out to the airport, and met up with Scotty, D.J., and Bill.
Out on the tarmac, we exchanged kisses and hugs before they climbed into the belly of the DC-7. Elvis lingered behind. After several awkward gestures and half-begun words of farewell, he made his move and did so with style, enfolding his arms around me and delivering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The kiss went on and on until I thought I’d faint from lack of oxygen. He lifted his lips away. An apologetic grin consumed his succulent mouth. He was gee-whizzing with Southern manners and shy ways. “I’ll never forget you, Iris Grenadine.” He gathered up his things, bounded up the stairs, and waved before disappearing through the cabin door.
I returned to consciousness with an aching sigh. Undoubted, he’d already forgotten me, but I would never forget him.
“Gree’ ’ith e’vy,” Starr pidgin-talked through his teeth.
I blew raspberries and marched back to the terminal. Starr, Centanni, Munson, and Ratmeat closed ranks around me.
“She doesn’t know the effect she has on us,” Ratmeat said.
“She toys with our feelings,” Centanni said.
“Get off it,” Munson said. “She almost got us rubbed out.”
“And still could,” I said. That pretty much shut them up.
On the way back to the city, Munson polished his shotgun and Centanni stared at me like a lovesick puppy. Ratmeat agreed to drop me off at my apartment before running Starr home. I made them promise not to lay a finger, glove, or feather on him. I only had to say one word: Arezzo. They promised.
We ran into a traffic jam. It was stop and go. The rhythm was sleep inducing. Giving into exhaustion, I lowered my head onto Starr’s lap, curled up, and closed my eyes. He rested a hand on my shoulder, stretched out his long legs, and slung the fedora over his face. Since the Chrysler was equipped with an Airtemp cooling system, we were deliciously comfortable on one of the hottest days of summer.
Ratmeat pulled into a White Castle and went inside. When he climbed back into the limo, bringing along the appetizing odors of hamburgers and French fries, Starr tried to shake me awake.
I protested and fell back into a fitful slumber, dreaming about a day at the park with Daddy and my sisters. My mother wasn’t there. I was probably five or six. I remember falling off the swing and scraping my knee. I remember Daddy comforting me. I remember pulling away from his embrace and drying my eyes. It was a momentous decision in my life. At a tender age, I decided I didn’t need anybody.
Starr tried to shift into a more comfortable position without disturbing me, but I was a light sleeper, especially when lethal weapons were nearby. I sat up. Rubbed my eyes. Yawned. “Any sliders left?” Suddenly ravenous, I dug into the last four hamburgers and a bag of fries. “So who’s left as suspects?”
Starr grasped at straws, including the one he was sipping his Coca-Cola through. “Byrnes’s mother?”
Swelling forced him to drop several consonants and diphthongs, but even my sluggish brain could translate his utterances. “Mothers don’t snuff out their own sons.”
“Returning to your original theory.”
“The missus? I guess she could’ve followed her hubby to the Big Dive and plugged a hole in his head,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced.
Neither was Starr. “Or paid a hired gun to do it.”
“Other than you?” I said, nailing him with a hard stare.
He groused and huffed and expelled a dispirited sigh.
“Okay, not you, but someone could have been following Byrnes.”
He grunted.
“You’re right. How would he know which window to climb through?”
He groused.
“Maybe the bimbo gave him a signal.”
He grumbled.
“Okay, wise guy, what do you think?”
He made a vacillating sound.
I gazed over at him, narrowing my eyes. “How did you know about room 2201, anyway?”
“Same source as you.”
“Damian Kane didn’t know you from a hole in the wall.”
He pulled a face.
I started to think. Lilith always hated when I did that since I always found the fallacies in her lies or my father’s smokescreens or my sisters’ lame excuses.
Everything, I reasoned, started when the mayor’s bean counter was shot dead in a dayroom at the Big Dive. The gunshots must have roused all the girls, who would have gathered around and observed a dead dick with his pickle in the air. Since he was a regular, most of them knew him by name. And one of them called Pennyroyal. By the time the cops arrived, Byrnes had already been transported to the Harmon Hotel. Body or no body, Pennyroyal had enough time to put out an all-points bulletin, wake up the mayor, and call on an old friend.
“Dollars to doughnuts,” I said, “your source was Pennyroyal.”
His eyes didn’t flinch.
Since employees at the Harmon Hotel have loose lips, bad news travels fast, rumors leak from City Hall like water from a sieve, and I’m usually one step ahead of the police, Starr running over me outside City Hall or showing up at room 2201 weren’t coincidences. I did a slow take. “You were following me.”
He blinked.
Something else nagged at me. “Kirk said that the man we should look for wore black pants, a black turtleneck sweater, black boots, and a Panama hat.”
Starr tried to follow my logic. “Yeah ....”
“But he couldn’t see his face.”
“Hmm-hmm ....”
The fat man had probably gotten everything right, except first impressions always lie, especially when the killer doesn’t want to be recognized. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“What are you thinking?”
“The killer didn’t have to break into the dayroom―”
He finished for me. “Because the killer already worked at the Big Dive.”
I leaned forward. “Ratmeat, change of plans.”
