Dark, silent morning
Geese bark, wind sighs, furnace hums
Wheels thump on the bridge—Soezi
“I’m not—”
Crowberry’s steady gaze vaporizes any prevarication. “Come on, Mansion, you’re wasting time. Got a bunch of flat-footed uniforms in there trampling your crime scene. Better get to it before there’s nothing left.”
Crowberry waves me into the room. I drag wooden feet over the threshold and he announces, “Mansion’s back.”
Grady glowers. Swbyra looks anxious, expectant. Probably wondering how to ask me about the four hundred bucks I owe him.
“Lieutenant thinks it was a drug deal gone sour,” I say.
Swbyra nods. “You knew the man. Was he using?”
“I have reason to believe he was.”
“And what reason is that?” Grady asks.
“Uh, heard it on the street.”
That seems to satisfy.
With the intent of looking for needle tracks, Grady and I both extend gloved hands toward Waltann’s right arm, withdraw and reach again. Burlesque like that got us all tagged the Three Stooges only this time Grady growls at me. He takes the right arm, I take the left, and we roll up Waltann’s sleeves. No tracks. That doesn’t tell me much. Waltann could have shot up between the toes, in the thigh, ingested or, as I know all too well, inhaled. The autopsy may tell.
“So this is Hector Waltann,” Swbyra says. He points to the monogram on the shirt cuff: HW.
Together Grady and I go through Hector’s pockets. An empty eel skin wallet. Small change. Cigarettes and matches. A much-used hanky, a half roll of breath mints, a tube of lip balm. There should be something more but I can’t put my finger on what’s missing.
The single drawer to the pressed wood night stand holds a Bible and an unopened three-pack of condoms. Did Hector come to this anonymous address for sex? It doesn’t smell like sex, just something herbal, cigarettes, sweat, and foul death.
Consumed with anger, resentment, apprehension, and sick to boot, I can barely see. Determined to quell the mental yammering, step by metered step I circle the room. Paying attention quiets the mind, dispels distracting thoughts, helps calm the shaking that rattles my bones.
Drapes of jade green synthetic fabric cover room-darkening yellowed liners. A black plaster ginger jar lamp lies on its side on the thin red carpet, its red paper shade dented, the bulb still valiantly glowing. The double bed with rumpled bedclothes the color of dirty snow is bolted to the wall, the headboard simply a pressed wood panel glued above the mattress. More pressed wood makes up the bureau which is empty.
A plastic ice bucket holds a few inches of clear, odorless liquid. Water? Melted ice? How long for ice to melt at room temperature? Hours. So, if it was ice, it was obtained not this morning, but earlier. Last night? For a solitary drink or did Waltann have a guest, his last guest? Though there are no empty bottles, no drinking glasses anywhere, the protective shrink wrap from two of them lies crumpled in the bottom of the wastebasket. I make a mental note to retrieve it, to look in the Dumpster for the tumblers they protected, check for prints.
At command volume Crowberry says, “Grady, you’re the primary.” He claps his hands once. “Ok, men, ready to roll?”
Swbyra nods vigorously. “Yessir.”
“Grady?”
The big man scowls.
“Problem, Grady?”
“Nossir.”
“Fine. Report at fourteen hundred.” Crowberry turns on his heel and exits the room.
“You do have a problem, don’t you, Grady?” Swbyra asks.
“About time he got his ass back here,” Grady says, sliding his eyes at me.
“Why are you so hard on him? Cut him some slack, the man had a near death experience.”
There wasn’t anything near about it. For a moment I was dead.
“Life is a near death experience, dammit. Mansion doesn’t have the fucking market cornered on mortality. Hell, I’m the short timer. Ah ...” He waves his hand in disgust and stomps outside. I tell Swbyra about the discarded wrappers and tumblers and hustle after the big guy.
Grady stands in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette, his head turned toward an approaching vehicle, the medical examiner’s station wagon.
“Where do you want me to start?” I ask Grady, more out of respect for him as primary than a real need for direction. He knows it, but acknowledges the gesture with a slight relaxing of his shoulders.
“Swbyra’ll process the scene. You canvass the other people here, see what you can find out about the past twenty-four.” He tilts his head toward a small group huddled halfway between Room Eight and the office. To the side of the rubberneckers, two working girls stand whispering under a cigarette-smoke umbrella. One of them lifts her head and catches my eye. Her hard features soften, she looks up through bristly lashes, and smiles shyly. She nudges her friend and she too gives me a smile.
“Mansion, you are a goddam pussy magnet, you know that?” Grady says.
I think of Carlotta Trephino and sigh. This is not the blessing he thinks it is. I acknowledge the girls with a nod and a small smile. They giggle behind their hands.
Grady snorts. “Wait a sec’, I’ll get an approximate time of death from the M. E.” He returns a moment later to report, “Time o’ death, middle of the night, early morning.”
Nothing that lividity and an inch of water in an ice bucket haven’t already suggested.
“He says stab wound’s probably the cause since he didn’t find any tracks.”
Nevertheless, I tell him, let’s wait for the drug screen.
One of the rubberneckers strains at the barrier. “Hey, officers, I got to hit the road. You want to talk to me or can I go?”
Grady goes to rejoin the M. E. and I take the impatient man, a trucker who had the room next to Waltann’s.
“My sleeper time is up and I got to get back behind the wheel,” he says. “I don’t get paid for miles I don’t run and I need every dime.”
“Just a few questions, sir. Look, a man’s been killed here.”
“Well, I didn’t do it if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He could have. He’s got the strength in his shoulders and arms to overpower the victim, drive a blade. If I didn’t already have a handful of suspects in Waltann’s intimates, I’d pay closer attention to his statement. I should anyway. Otherwise I could focus on any one of my likely suspects only to find out too late that Waltann was killed by someone who thought he had the TV up too loud. Knowing is good. Not knowing is better. The open mind is receptive to all possibilities, including the truth.
“I didn’t even know who was in that room.” The trucker glowers. “When I got into town, I dropped my load and came over about midnight for a shower and some shut-eye. I got a sleeper in the cab, but once every trip I treat myself to a real bed. This was it and I meant to enjoy it. Slept like a rock.”
“Could you say whether your neighbor was in his room when you pulled in, sir?”
The trucker scratches his wire-haired head under a Castrol GTX ball cap. “Curtains were drawn. That’s all I can say.”
Not much help. “How about a car in Room Eight’s space? A gold Eterniti?”
He puffs on a cigarette he smokes so nonchalantly. “Not that I recall. Can I go now?”
The best I can do is verify his name, home address and phone number, license, and employer. Given his occupation, they’ll have fingerprints plus criminal record and drug use if any on file. If I need more from him later, I should be able to catch up with him through his dispatcher.
The flannel-shirted young man who took the room on the opposite side is an unemployed construction worker. He’s been here a week, was out job hunting yesterday.
“And I should be pounding the pavement now. Don’t want someone else to get the jump on me,” he says.
“Just another minute if you don’t mind, sir. The guy next door to you’s been killed.”
“Yeah, pretty exciting.” His eyes are feverish the way people’s sometimes get when they ogle a road wreck.
“When did you return to the motel, sir?” I ask.
He answers he returned to his room about six yesterday evening with a six-pack and a bucket of chicken. “Don’t remember no car, no.” He thinks Waltann’s curtains were open.
Like the truck driver, the construction worker claims he spent the night in his room alone. “Got no spare cash for a movie or nothing. I already paid for the room, I figure I’ll watch TV and like it.”
He fell asleep about eleven, doesn’t remember any noise from his next-door neighbor, “but then, it wasn’t like I was paying attention. Look, man, I got to hit the bricks.”
As with the trucker, I can’t stop him. But I get his pedigree and make sure I can find him again if I need to.
The two pros, Rhonda and Champagne, are eager to talk. From them I learn the trucker and the hammer jockey lied. Neither of them spent the night alone.
“Rhonda here only just pre-tripped that trucker before all the commotion started,” Champagne explains. Her eyes, though black-walled with makeup, are a pretty pale blue.
Last night, she says, she was with the construction worker from about eleven to one. Afterward, she walked to the Firefly Lounge next door and caught the crowd—”that’s using the term loosely, you understand”—just as the place was closing, which was a profitable move for her.
“You don’t need the details, do you, Doll?” she asks with an eagerness that says she would share them with relish.
“No, ma’am. Not unless it has something to do with the man’s death.”
“Well, not exactly. Except that it put me back here maybe around one-thirty or two. And you know, I think I saw someone go into his room.”
“Someone. A man? A woman?”
“Yeah, woman,” Rhonda chimes in, punctuating the statement with a sway of slim hips encased in a stretchy black skirt no bigger than a loincloth.
“You saw her, too, ma’am?”
“No, Champagne told me,” Rhonda says.
“Then maybe we better let her tell it, OK?”
Rhonda pouts in disappointment.
“About the woman, ma’am,” I urge Champagne.
“Tall, skinny.”
“How tall?”
Champagne shrugs. “Let’s see. You’re what? Six feet?” She leans in close, her breasts graze my chest. She smells of cigarettes and hair spray. “Five eight, maybe five nine. Long legs.”
“What color?”
She has to think. “Black. But you know, I think now she must have had tights or stockings on, because her hands were white.”
“Those could have been gloves.”
“Mmm, I don’t think so.”
“What about her face, hair, eyes?”
She shakes her head. “Sorry. Didn’t see them. She wore a cape. With a hood. She held the hood closed around her face, that’s how I remember the hands were white.”
A cape. With a hood. How Hollywood. A specialist in kinky sex? With three condoms in the night stand, Waltann was ready for something. “So who is she?”
Again, Champagne shakes her head. “Didn’t recognize her.”
“Come on, I know you girls are all tight. I don’t want to bust her for the date, I just want to ask her some questions.”
“Oh, I believe you, Doll. It’s just I don’t know.”
Rhonda suggests, “Maybe she’s new in town.”
“Maybe.”
A long-legged mystery woman in a hooded cape. “You see her again, or you think of anything else, you get a hold of me.”
“Can we get a hold of you even if we don’t?” Rhonda asks, batting those clotted lashes. Little flakes of black stuff fleck her cheekbones.
“Show you a real good time, Doll,” Champagne adds.
“Champagne, do I understand you to be soliciting a police officer?”
She reels back, plants a hand on her hip. “Certainly not. It would be on the house. A professional courtesy, like.” She leans forward again. “It would be my pleasure.”
“Our pleasure.” Rhonda smiles. “We could double.”
Champagne drops her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You ever have two women at the same time?”
With every brain cell dedicated to imagining that, I can only shake my head and point my feet toward the front office.
“We don’t ask people their life story,” the front desk man says. “‘Specially if they’re paying cash. Man wanted a room for the night, we gave him one.” He slides the guest register across a countertop so worn the shiny black paint has bare spots.
The penciled entries on the register’s dog-eared and yellow pages are smudged. There don’t appear to be enough of them to substantiate the business that this place does and they’re incomplete. Like Waltann’s illegible scrawl they lack home address and vehicle information. It appears the desk is somewhat lax in the record-keeping department.
“The guy in Room Eight. Ever see him before?” I ask.
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Did he get any visitors? Phone calls?”
“Not while I was on duty. Might want to check with the night man.”
“I’ll do that. How about a car, sir? Did he have a car?” Because he didn’t have any keys. That’s what was missing from Hector’s pockets: keys. I tap the guest register. “There isn’t anything in this column for vehicle information.”
“Guess he didn’t have a car.”
Then how did he get here? Hitchhike? City transit doesn’t serve Forbes. Maybe there’s a cabbie who could fill in the blanks of Hector’s last night. Or did he ride with his killer? And where is the Eterniti? “You’re sure? There’s no vehicle listed for anyone.”
The front desk man touches his upper lip with the tip of his tongue and nods slowly. “Oh. Yeah. Well, uh, sorry.”
“So? Did he have a car or not?”
He shrugs again. “Try the night man. He might remember.”
“All right. How about the man who died here a few weeks back?”
“Which one? People die here all the time.”
Put that in the hotel/motel guide. “Scott Corcoran. The sheriff’s deputy?”
“Oh, yeah. What about him?”
“Everything. What room was he in? When did he arrive? Did he stay the whole time or did he go out? Did he have visitors?”
The desk man doesn’t appear to be listening. “Hell, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the night man.”
The night man is taking on oracular proportions. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”
I blow out my exasperation in a puff and exit the front office. Grady waves me over.
“Why don’t you play Western Union?” he says. “You’ve met the Mrs. Maybe she’ll take it better from you.”
Based on my last conversation with Marybeth Waltann, in which she wished her husband dead, this could be the easiest death notification any of us has had to do.