WALTER TOOK OFF his hat and ran his chubby fingers through his thinning grey-brown hair. His moustache twitched.
“Well, here’s one we can wrap our head around, at least.”
David lit a cigarette. The proprietor raised a finger in protest, opened his mouth, and thought better of it. He stood on the motel room porch, wringing his hands and glancing nervously from side to side as if attending not a crime scene but a crime in progress. David exhaled a plume of smoke into the room, watched it eddy off the cheap wallpaper and twine around the slowly-twirling blades of the ceiling fan. He clamped the cigarette between his teeth and looked over his partner’s shoulder into the bathroom.
The room resounded with the buzz of flies. Blood clung to every surface, rivulets of it dried to a tacky paste. The owner could scrub all he wanted, but he’d never get those tiles clean.
The two bodies formed a crude J shape. The lanky man curled semi-fetal in the tub, his akimbo legs intersecting with the truncated cross of the heavy man collapsed on the floor beneath him. His head nestled in the narrow gap between tub and toilet while his feet poked out the doorway into the hall. David crouched down and inspected the man’s leg. Blood soaked his pants from shin to knee, but the soles of his shoes were pristine save for a bit of road grit caught between the treads. The cigarette danced and jigged from one corner of David’s mouth to the other. He removed the yellow caution tape crisscrossing the doorway.
There was scarcely any spot to stand that wouldn’t involve compromising the crime scene. David eventually found a sliver of unbloodied tile and set one foot there, balancing the remainder of his weight on the bare rim of the toilet. The heel of his shoe hooked snugly against the porcelain, providing enough leverage for him to bend forward and examine the body in the tub. A bullet hole gaped from his right temple. It expanded to a gaping crater on the head’s opposite hemisphere. A spew of bone and brain clung to the wall like an ugly silhouette, a pantomime exhibit of the force and angle of the shot. Another wound split the man’s neck, which had been rendered to raw meat between chin and collarbone. Pale shards poked from the desecrated flesh. David plucked one free with a gloved hand and held it to the light. Porcelain. He shifted the body to one side, revealing the shattered remains of the cistern lid.
“A nasty gash to the neck and a bullet to the head to finish the job. Your guy?”
Walter stood with a small grunt, his knees popping. “Same capper, though this mook took a bullet to the elbow first, point blank.”
“Eesh.”
“I’ll say. Skin’s peeled back, too. Buddy was poking around in there.”
David took a look for himself. “Trying to make him talk.”
“I’d be singin’ any tune the bastard called out, it was me.”
They stepped from the bathroom into the annex by the double bed, free from the contortions of preserving evidence. David tapped his cigarette into an ashtray he found on the nightstand.
Walter lit a smoke of his own. “Let me paint you a picture.”
David gestured for him to go on.
“Our perp finds himself cornered in his room. Maybe he owes money, maybe he made it with the wrong girl. Anyway, it’s two to one and the guy’s spooked. He holes up in the bathroom, clocks the first guy who comes in with the toilet lid, takes his gun, bu-blam.” Walter cocks a finger at David’s temple, mimes pulling the trigger. “Body number two charges in after his friend, gets one in the elbow. Maybe he begs, maybe there’s a bit of a struggle. The perp pumps him for info, kills him, and gets the hell out of dodge.”
David nodded slowly. “Sounds about right. Only I don’t think we’re dealing with your run-of-the-mill deadbeat here. Whoever pulled himself out of this scrape knew his business.”
“Or he got his blood up and got lucky.”
“That’s a lot of luck for one little bathroom.”
A curtain of smoke descended from Walter’s nostrils. “Guess we’d better see whose room we’re standin’ in.”
They found the owner in the reception room lobby, running his fingers compulsively over the rubber fronds of a fake palm tree. He was a compact man, his lip shadowed with a wispy black moustache, his otherwise bald pate bisected by a peninsular widow’s peak. A large mole sprouted from the soft flesh above his chin. Its bulbous weight pulled the right corner of his lower lip down slightly, giving his face a perpetual pout.
“You are done with room. I clean now, yes?”
“Not just yet, I’m afraid,” said David. “We’ve seen all we need. The forensics guys’ll be here soon. They’ll get everything bagged up for you. Once they’re done, someone’ll let you know.”
“Until then, that room’s occupied,” added Walter. “No maids, no guests—though I’m guessing you’d need to offer a pretty cheap rate, eh?”
The owner didn’t find this funny. He tugged at the mole on his lip.
“They come already. They take picture.”
“Different guys. I’m sorry, it won’t be much longer.”
“No good for business,” the owner said. “No good at all for business.”
“You kiddin’?” asked Walter. “All sortsa whack jobs get off on that stuff. ‘Stay in the Murder Room! Commune with the spirits of the dead!’ You get the place spruced up a little, you’re gonna have lines around the block.”
David gave Walter a small waving hand gesture. Enough. He put a guiding hand on the owner’s shoulder. “Listen, sir. We appreciate your patience. We’re just about ready to go, but before we do, we’re wondering if we could get a look at your guest registry.”
The owner led David—or rather, David subtly led him—to the motel computer, an ancient desktop faded to the yellow-beige of a smoker’s teeth. A fan wheezed dusty air over the heat sink as the processor grumbled to life. The owner clicked about the screen, bringing up a primitive spreadsheet of names and room numbers. He highlighted a name and pointed.
“There. This one.”
David leaned forward and read the name Krist Novoselic. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” He straightened up and looked at Walter. “Fake name.”
“Yeah? What’d he go for? Hugh Jazz? Seymour Butts?”
“No, our guy kept it classy. Unless the former bassist for Nirvana’s made someone very angry lately.”
“No one’s ever cared enough about a bassist to blow one, let alone try an’ off one. Especially not from a second-rate band like Nirvana.”
“Watch your mouth,” David said, still studying the screen. “They defined my generation.”
“Yeah, and The Stones and Zeppelin defined mine. Three guesses which one of us wins the culture war.”
David shot Walter a surreptitious middle finger and turned to the owner. “I’m guessing it’s too much to hope for, but this guy didn’t pay with a credit card, did he?”
The owner shook his head. “Cash deposit. This I will not be returning. It will cost twice so much to clean the room, not to count the lost business.”
“Absolutely. If he should come back to claim it, you’re under no obligation to give it to him. We’d appreciate if you gave us a call immediately, though.” David’s eyes flicked to the corners of the lobby. Cameras sprouted from the drywall like mechanical flowers. “You guys got closed circuit TV?”
“Yes. But the tape is deleting itself every twelve hours. Mr. Novoselic comes in here for the last time on Tuesday when he rents the room. This is five days ago.”
“This Mr. Novoselic, you remember what he looked like?” asked Walter.
“He is young guy. No beard or moustache. Brown hair in short haircut. Light skin. Same height as you, maybe taller.” He pointed to David. “His clothes are not so nice. Not like bums, but like young people. The baggy t-shirts and jeans.”
“Any tattoos? Piercings?”
“I see none of these.”
Walter jotted the responses down on a small notebook. “Would you mind coming down to the station to speak to one of our sketch artists? See if we can paint a clearer picture of this guy?”
“I have no time for this. I am busy running my business.”
“It won’t take long.”
The owner seemed unhappy about this, but didn’t protest further. David toyed with the alligator ring on his finger. “One more thing. Would you mind making us a copy of the surveillance tape?”
“I am telling you, the film is being deleted every twelve hours. You will not see him.”
“Probably not, but we might get lucky. And if we do, we won’t need you to come down to the station after all.”
The owner reached under the counter and pulled out a blank VHS tape. “Please give me fifteen minutes.”
They piled into David’s unmarked Impala fifteen minutes later on the nose, tape in hand, and drove to his house. Dandelions peeked through hairline cracks in the pavement. David’s house was humble but well-kept, two storeys of 1930s red brick perched above an amended veranda and garden. Steeps gables gave the roof a high-browed, inquisitive cast. He’d purchased it two years ago when he’d moved back to Niagara Falls from Toronto, amazed at what the combined might of a detective and realtor’s salaries could fetch him outside the megacity’s vortex-like pull. Inside, a narrow hallway fed into a network of cozy, closed-concept rooms. Vistas of open-concept space were more fashionable, but David appreciated the way older houses compartmentalized domesticity, partitioning life into discrete chambers. Categorization appealed to the investigator in him.
A woman sat in the living room, leaning sideways against the armrest of the couch. Mid-thirties, slender, curtains of brown hair draped over either shoulder. She looked up from her book at the sound of their entry, smiled.
“Oh, hey, hun. What’s up? Hi, Walter.”
“Good to see you, Nancy,” said Walter. “You mean you haven’t left this bum yet?”
“No point, he hasn’t found out about the two of us.”
“I’ve been too damn discreet, that’s the problem.”
Nancy arched her back, meeting halfway as David stooped down to kiss her. “What are you two doing here?”
David held up the VHS tape. “Official police business.”
“What, from 1998?”
David smiled. “Exactly. VCR at the precinct went bust last year. Tape heads all worn to hell. We could probably dig one up somewhere, but if I’m gonna watch a movie I’d just as soon do it on my own couch.”
Nancy’s gaze drifted back to the tape, their cast solemn. “It’s not about, you know . . . that strip club murder, is it?”
“No, nothing like that. It’s security camera footage from a motel. Not a murder in sight.” But maybe, if we’re lucky, a murderer. “Shouldn’t take us more than an hour, then we’ll be out of your hair.”
“Take all the time you need. I’ve got a house to show at eleven, so I should start getting ready anyway.” She set her book down with its pages splayed open over the armrest and gave David another quick peck as she passed. “Good seeing you again, Walter. You and Rose should come by for dinner again some time.”
“Make ribs like last time, you got a deal.”
Walter settled on the couch while David queued up the VCR. A varnish of dust coated the lip below the tape slot. He wiped it away with a pinky finger and slipped the tape home. Gears whirred and crunched as the tape heads slotted into position. It occurred to David how strange and alien this technology must seem to his son, much the way a Victrola would have seemed to him as a boy.
David set the tape to rewind and plopped on the couch next to Walter. The older detective ran his fingers over the ribbed ledge of a glass ashtray—purely decorative, as David had cut out smoking inside years ago.
“Hey, since we’re loungin’ and all, how ‘bout a beer?”
“It is”—David checked his watch—“9:43 in the morning.”
“Scotch?”
David shook his head and went into the kitchen. He came back with two bottles of Mad Tom, coils of frosty carbonation rising from their uncapped lips. Walter sniffed his before drinking, his face puckering at the sting of hops.
“There somethin’ wrong with Budweiser?”
“There’s everything wrong with Budweiser. Now can we watch the tape?”
Walter took another swig of his beer—his disgust, as David had suspected, was largely feigned—and twirled his hand in a go-ahead gesture. The VCR let out a mechanical hiccough as the tape reached its starting point. David hit play on the remote.
The lobby of the Jupiter Motel filled the television screen, its colours wan and muted. The camera peered onto the scene from a steep isometric vantage point that gave the room a warped appearance, as if the angles of the walls had been tweaked. A dull but steady tape hiss comprised the sound. Despite these limitations, the picture itself was crisp, allowing David and Walter to make out the finer details of patrons’ faces as they filtered to and from the desk. The overnight receptionist fumbled in the register for change and passed keys indifferently to customers. He was a young kid, high school probably, greasy hair tied back in a ponytail. His shirt, wrinkled and poorly fit, bulged from his belt in patches where he’d half-heartedly tucked it in. David’s detective eyes cycled into full-on profiling mode: five-eight, one-twenty pounds, a skinny burnout in the making, hadn’t dropped out of school yet but thinking about it. He scored Ds and Cs, plus maybe the odd A in shop or art. Worked bum hours to avoid the hardscrabble duties of fast food or retail, scrubbin’ through midnights for pot money. He’d turn around come college, given a kick in the ass and parents who gave half a fuck. David considered imparting these deductions to Walter but decided against it, his focus too keenly honed on the goings-on depicted by the juddering half-speed tape.
“We should talk to the kid.”
“Clemens and LaFleur already milked him dry. Kid heard a couple of shots, but says he figured it was a punk with the TV up too loud. More like he was too drunk or stoned to care and don’t wanna cop to it.”
“Still. Set the kid in an interrogation room and his memory might get a bit sharper.”
Walter shrugged and sipped his beer. “Suit yourself. Once we watch this tape I’m catchin’ a nap.”
“I suppose you want to use my spare bed.”
“Well, I’d drive the Impala home, but I’ve been drinking.”
“Do you not want to solve this thing? Between the Stanford Acres fire and the Sundown Lounge murder, this city is starting to look like Sarajevo in the nineties. You’ve seen the memos.” Circulated by email to all PR personnel, with Walter and David deliberately CCed, they included the text of forthcoming articles from the Niagara Falls Review, in which crime and politics reporter Dawna Lane covered the proceeding investigations, her prose aflame with increasingly incendiary comments about the force in general and Chief Delduca in particular. The memos refrained from editorializing, but the subtext was clear: get Stanford Acres and the Sundown Lounge off the front page and into the dustbin with the other old news, or else.
Walter waved his hand in David’s general direction, his eyes on the screen. “I’ll go about it my own way. Now hush up. I’m tryin’ to watch this thing.”
“There isn’t even any sound.”
Walter’s hand flapped more vigorously and David hushed.
The tape stuttered on. The recorder captured images at a reduced frame rate to save space, but the VCR wasn’t designed to compensate, so everyone on screen moved with the herky-jerky franticness of pratfall artists in old silent movies. The urge to fast-forward was overpowering, but it was easy enough to miss something as it was, given the playback speed. A clock in the corner counted forward the minutes: 11:51, 11:52, 11:53 . . .
“Hold it,” Walter said. David hit pause. The image onscreen froze, lines of static carving it into horizontal segments. Two figures could be seen through the plate-glass window at the front of the lobby: one tall and lanky; the other muscled, giving way to middle-aged fleshiness. Both wore neatly-cut suits.
“Our boys?” David asked.
“Looks like it. Check out that swagger. They didn’t know what they had coming.”
“The receptionist puts the shots at what, three?”
“Two-thirty or thereabouts. Other guests nearby give the same time, more or less.”
“But none call the cops, of course.”
“‘Eh, I hear a bang, it ain’t none of my business’,” said Walter, aping a middle-aged Italian they’d come across on their brief and fruitless canvassing of the motel.
“Good Samaritans abound.”
“Warms the cockles of my heart, man.”
David pulled out a notebook and jotted down 11:53 -> Victims arrive. He fast-forwarded to two o’clock and resumed playback.
“So our boys show up first, let themselves into the room somehow. Through a window, maybe, or maybe it’s just unlocked. They’re still there two or three hours later when Mr. Novoselic arrives.”
“Late to the party.,” said Walter, tsking. “Typical rock star.”
“Our boys are dressed too nice for burglars, so we’re talking ambush. Only they let Novoselic get to the bathroom, which means they did some talking first. No way the guy just bumbles in there and dives into the john without them so much as firing at the door.”
“Could be they weren’t there to kill the guy. Just put a scare into him, break his legs, that sort of thing.”
David shook his head. “They didn’t seem to have the tools for that.”
“Could be the guy took them when he booked it.”
David nodded. “Or could be they were there to take him someplace else.”
“Yeah, I’d buy that. Guy uses a fake name to book a motel, he’s either fucking around on his wife or he’s into something he shouldn’t be.”
“Or both.”
Walter tapped the end of his nose knowingly. He snapped his fingers, pointing excitedly at the screen. “Hey hey hey, we’ve got some movement.”
David snatched up the controller and hit pause. A blur of cloth and denim haunted the outer ridge of the frame. David walked the scene back with a tap of the rewind button and played through again. He and Walter focused on the screen with grim intensity.
The second pause was quicker and better timed, but revealed little more than the first. Unlike the two victims, who’d sauntered along the slab concrete walkway running the length of the building, the lone figure cut diagonally across the parking lot, putting him only partially in frame, and at a bad angle to boot. Even if they cut open the tape and had a photographer blow up the frame to poster size, they’d never get a clean look at his face.
“Might not be the guy, anyway,” Walter said.
David shook his head. There was no way he could know for sure, but he did. The compass needle whirling in his mind found true north at his first glimpse of the faceless figure on the screen. He hit play and set the remote beside him. His index finger hovered over the pause button. The minutes skittered past. Walter took occasional sips from his beer, the lip of the bottle hovering inches from his face, his gaze lacking David’s overt intensity but no less keen.
At 3:01 a figure passed the window, this time heading in the opposite direction. He walked briskly, a hurried stride that wasn’t quite a run. David hit pause, freezing the man in place. His light hair stuck up at odd angles. A bag, hurriedly packed, dangled half-zipped from one hand, the hem of a pair of jeans poking out like a denim tongue. A line of pause static obscured his neck and jaw, but his face was clearly visible—early thirties, clean-shaven, handsome but showing the first folds and tears of hard living. David guessed the ladies came easy and still would for a while to come, until the guy’s bad habits scrawled their usual graffiti over his features. He struck his open hand with his fist.
“Fucking A. Let’s get this bad boy to the photo lab. They can grab a still, get it blown up for us. We’ll hit the skin bars and other dives tomorrow, see if we can scrounge up a positive ID.”
“No need,” Walter said. A tiny smile hid beneath the fronds of his moustache. “I know exactly who that motherfucker is.”
“Yeah?” David watched the wheels turning behind Walter’s hazel eyes. “And?”
“This shit just got a lot more interesting.”