19

“Fortier to six leader.”

“Six leader to Fortier. Yeah, Frank, what is it?”

“Sorry to say this, Phil, but I been made.”

“In-damn-credible,” Gatlin muttered. “Jack, we may have just lost the war.” He hit the button on his radio. “Six leader to Fortier. Serve your warrant, Frank, and take him in for questioning. I’ll be there shortly. Andy, Kit . . . don’t go anywhere. I’m coming up.”

“The Hyatt?” Green asked over his shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m gonna toss his room. Nothing turns up there, we’ve had it.”

“You want me?”

“Not many places to hide things in a hotel room. You might as well pack it in.”

THE ASSISTANT MANAGER OF the hotel unlocked the door to Harvey’s room, tapped the light switch, and stepped aside. “I still think we deserve to know what this is about,” he said, the tiny muscle under his right eye twitching.

“Sometimes people get what they deserve and sometimes they don’t,” Gatlin said, still angry at Fortier’s screwup. He pushed past the man and entered a small alcove with a bathroom on his right and a closet with sliding glass doors on his left, Kit close behind. Broussard was back in his room waiting for that phone call, which, to Kit’s mind, couldn’t be as important as this.

The assistant manager came in behind Kit.

Gatlin had already learned that Harvey had nothing in the hotel’s safe. His first objective, therefore, was to get a look at the room safe to see if he was going to need hotel help in getting it open. Sitting as it did, in plain view from the doorway, he saw instantly that no safecracking would be required.

“We need anything else, we’ll let you know,” Gatlin said, looking over Kit’s shoulder. Obviously put out, the assistant manager left, grumbling.

Gatlin went into the main part of the room and pushed the door of the safe fully open with his foot. “Bad sign,” he said, stepping back and looking inside to be sure it was empty. “Best place in the room to put something you don’t want anybody to know about.”

“Maybe not,” Kit said. “It’s the first place you looked.”

Gatlin examined her through narrowed eyes and said, “Want to help?”

Ignoring the faint suspicion he was about to tell her to keep quiet and stay out of the way, she said, “Sure.”

“Ordinarily, there are rules to a search. If you’re looking for something the size of a bread box, you can’t look in a shoe box, ’cause you can’t get a bread box in a shoe box.”

“Sounds like the law was made to protect criminals rather than put them away,” Kit said.

“Too damn many liberals in the country,” Gatlin growled. “But you want to see a liberal turn mean, show him one of his relatives on a morgue table. Anyway, one of the things we’re looking for is Scrabble letters. Since they’re small, we can look anywhere. How about you go through whatever’s in the closet.”

While Kit frisked Harvey’s suits, Gatlin went to Harvey’s Forensic Academy tote bag, which was on the bed, and dumped out the contents. It contained the thick black book of abstracts Gatlin had seen everyone carrying around, as well as a thin yellow pamphlet listing the times and places of all the talks. He also found a small loose-leaf notebook, which he thumbed through, a couple of Bic pens, and an unopened roll of Rolaids.

The foul-up with the tail had brought back his indigestion, so when he was putting everything back in the bag, he helped himself to a couple of the Rolaids. He tossed Harvey’s one suitcase onto the bed and opened it.

The main compartment was empty, but he found three Band-Aids and another roll of Rolaids in a side pocket. A compartment on the other side yielded a small umbrella and an adapter for 220 electrical outlets.

“Nothing in his suits,” Kit said.

Gatlin gestured vaguely to the low-slung bureau of pale oak and black Formica. “Check those drawers.”

He went into the bathroom and rummaged through Harvey’s leather toiletry bag, felt inside the Kleenex dispenser, then took the lid off the commode and peered in.

“I wouldn’t have thought to look there,” Kit said.

“It’s why I get the big money,” Gatlin replied. “His drawers clean?”

“Some are, some aren’t.”

Snorting a small chuckle, he put the lid back in place, then felt behind the commode as far as his fingers would reach. He took a quick look behind the shower curtain, then shook out all the towels and spread one on the floor so part of it went under the Formica faceplate for the sink. He got down with his back on the towel and slid forward so he could look at the large hidden space under the sink.

“Anything?” Kit asked hopefully.

He made a negative grunt and his face reappeared, his color distinctly higher from his efforts. They returned to the main room, where he pulled out one of the bureau drawers and held it up so he could examine the underside. “See if he’s taped anything inside there.”

Kit peered into the dim recess where the drawer fit. “Nothing.”

They did the same for the other two drawers, then Gatlin moved the bureau away from the wall and checked on the back. “See if there’s anything under the beds.”

“Isn’t that kind of obvious?”

“We once had a guy kill somebody in a hotel room and leave the corpse under the bed. It was two days before it was found and two different couples had occupied the room.”

Gatlin examined the underside of the round table and two chairs by the window and looked behind the curtain. He went to the nightstand, opened the drawer, and flipped through the phone books and the Bible, tossing each onto the bed as he finished. He pulled the drawer all the way out and gave it the same treatment as those in the bureau, then tugged the nightstand away from the wall and looked on its back panel. He would have looked behind the headboards as well, but they wouldn’t budge.

While Kit waited for further instructions, he put the nightstand back in order, then patted the pillows and began yanking the blankets and sheets off the bed near the window. Following his lead, Kit did the same with the other bed. After they both had worked their way down to bare mattress, Gatlin hoisted his off the springs.

“The maids are going to love this,” Kit said.

“I don’t really care,” Gatlin replied, flopping the mattress more or less back in place. He moved to the other bed and did the same.

They both saw the brass key at the same time.

“Get that, will you?” Gatlin asked.

“Do I have to pick it up any special way?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Kit got the key and Gatlin let the mattress drop.

The key had a square head and the number 251 inscribed on one side. The other side was blank. The Hyatt used plastic cards as keys.

Gatlin held out his hand and Kit put the key in his palm. He examined it briefly, then took it to the lamp on the bureau and perused it again in better light. Suddenly, Kit saw what the key could mean. “If we locate the room that key opens, we might find the things we’re looking for.”

Instead of being pleased at the find, Gatlin’s perpetually unhappy expression darkened, if anything. “Law says we can’t take the key. But that doesn’t mean we have to leave empty-handed.”

He put the key on the bureau, took out his wallet, and fished a business card from between his folding money. He laid the card facedown on the bureau and centered the key on it. With his pen, he traced the key’s outline.

“You can’t take the key, but that’s legal?” Kit said.

“Justice is a fickle mistress,” he said. “I read that somewhere. Wouldn’t want you to think I was profound or anything.”

Pocketing the card, he took the key back to the bed where he’d found it. He hoisted one corner of the mattress and tossed the key back onto the bedsprings. “Now, let’s go over to the YMCA,” he said, letting the mattress fall.

“How do you know that’s where the key came from?” He opened his mouth to answer, but she raised a cautioning hand and said, “I know . . . that’s why you get the big money.”

“No, there was a Y scratched on the back.”

“Could belong to the YWCA. . . .”

Gatlin shrugged. “Could be neither one.”

THE HOUSING DIVISION OF the YMCA sits on St. Charles Avenue at the edge of Lee Circle. In the center of the circle, Robert E. Lee stands with his arms folded on a sixty-foot spire of Tennessee marble, apparently greatly offended at the Y’s orange facade with horizontal black stripes. Gatlin parked out front and Kit followed him into a seedy lobby with a stained yellow YMCA banner on the wall behind a small U-shaped registration counter. The clerk at the counter had thinning hair, a pale oval face with a big nose, and closely spaced eyes that were partially closed by drooping lids.

Gatlin flashed his badge. “You got a room two-five-one?”

“Yeah . . . why?” the clerk asked in a neutral tone.

Gatlin put the tracing of the key on the counter. “Your keys shaped like that?”

The clerk bent down for a closer look and stayed that way for a long time.

Finally, Gatlin knocked on the counter with his fist. “Hey, buddy, you asleep?”

“Looks like ours,” the clerk said, straightening up. He had a slow, uncertain cadence to his speech that seemed at odds with the importance of the situation.

“How about letting me see a dupe for two-five-one,” Gatlin said.

Puzzle lines appeared above the clerk’s thin eyebrows.

“Duplicate key,” Gatlin said as though he thought the guy might be a lip-reader.

“I’ll see if it’s okay.” The clerk left the enclosure and headed for the stairs to his left.

“It’s police business,” Gatlin reminded him. “So it’s gonna be okay.”

The clerk didn’t acknowledge this, continuing up the stairs.

While they waited for his return, Gatlin busied himself studying the intricate compass design in the terrazzo floor, hands thrust unhappily in his pockets. Figuring they might be there a while, Kit sat in one of the two plastic and vinyl chairs flanking a big plant that seemed to be growing too well for the available light. Over the next few minutes, several men came down the stairs and dispersed in various directions without so much as a glance their way. None of them looked like derelicts.

Finally, the clerk appeared on the stairs and Kit joined Gatlin at the counter.

His face a blank, the clerk moved behind the counter and began working on something under it. There was the sound of a drawer opening and the jingle of metal. He came up with the key.

Gatlin took it and placed it against the outline on the card. While Kit waited breathlessly at his side, he shifted the key around, then said, “We got a match.” Then to the clerk, he said, “Who’s got that room?”

Instead of turning to the cards in a rack on the wall behind him, the clerk stared at Gatlin without moving. Finally, after a long pause, he said, “Ain’t no occupant. It’s empty.”

“How long’s it been empty?”

“What time is it?”

Gatlin checked his watch. “Nine-thirty.”

The guy went into hibernation again and Kit half-expected Gatlin to grab him by the shirt front and shake him. Eventually, the guy said, “Nine and a half hours.”

“Then there was somebody in it this morning?”

The clerk made a vague gesture with one hand. “Dunno when he was last in it. I ain’t got time to keep up with that kind of stuff.”

Kit had begun to think this clerk and the one she’d encountered at the toy store were related.

“Are you telling me he checked out at noon?”

“Didn’t check out.”

“Skipped without paying?”

The clerk shook his head. “Paid in advance for three days. That ran out at noon.”

Gatlin pulled out the faxes he’d shown Phyllis Merryman and put them on the counter. “Is one of these the guy who rented the room?”

The clerk shifted slowly through the pile, then shook his head. “Ain’t a one even close.”

Exhaling forcibly and shaking his own head like he’d just come up from swimming across the YMCA pool underwater, Gatlin folded the faxes and put them back in his pocket. “That’s all I want to know.”

“So the key didn’t belong to Harvey, after all,” Kit said.

“Apparently not.”

“You want to talk to the guy who rented the room?” the clerk said.

“I might,” Gatlin replied, turning. “You know where he is?”

“No.”

Gatlin seemed about to reach for the clerk’s neck when the guy said, “But he might come back for the stuff he left in his room.”

“What stuff is that?”

The clerk bent down and came up with an old briefcase that he put on the counter. He flipped the latches and turned it around. Inside was a folded newspaper, a Baggie full of Scrabble tiles, and two large serrated knives still in their cardboard and plastic wrappers.

HEART TRIPPING WITH EXCITEMENT, Kit knocked on Broussard’s door at the Hyatt. When he opened it, her story poured out.

“It was Harvey. We found a key under his mattress to a room at the YMCA and when—”

“Why don’t you come and sit down,” Broussard said, stepping away from the door.

She went in, still talking. “When we got to the Y, Gatlin showed the desk clerk a picture of Harvey, but the clerk said he wasn’t the one who’d rented the room whose number was on the key.” She pursued Broussard to his chair at the table by the window and sat opposite him.

“And at that point, we almost gave up, but as we were about to leave, the clerk said something about the last guy who rented the room leaving some belongings behind.” Feeling too restricted by her chair, she got up. “He put this briefcase on the counter, opened it, and there they were— Scrabble tiles, the rest of the newspaper he’s been leaving, and two more knives just like the one we found with the third body.”

“Where’s Phillip?”

“Went to the office to charge Harvey with the murders.”

“He think it’ll stick?”

Kit lost some of her enthusiasm. “He has doubts. He says it’s all circumstantial, the big problem being we can’t tie Harvey directly to the briefcase. Even if we had his fingerprints on the key to the room at the Y, the key would likely be inadmissible evidence, since it wasn’t listed on the search warrant. We would have been better off to see Harvey claim the briefcase, but since he realized he was being tailed, he wouldn’t have done that. And he goes home tomorrow. Gatlin figured the best thing to do was take the briefcase and have the lab run the contents for prints. He seemed to think he was on safer legal ground with the briefcase than the key. He thought the clerk saying it wasn’t Harvey who rented the room hurts, though.”

“He could have hired somebody to rent the room for him,” Broussard suggested. “I take it the rent was paid in advance?”

“Yes.”

“At the Y, a cash transaction wouldn’t require any ID, not that it’ll help the case much.”

Since Gatlin was always pessimistic, Kit hadn’t really given his concerns much weight. But Broussard was another matter.

“You think he’ll beat it?”

“I think a good lawyer’ll make mincemeat out of it.”

“Then he just walks away?”

“That’s how things work.”

“But he’s guilty.”

“Not until it’s proven in court.”

“If he walks, I’m going to be very upset.”

“I’m sure you’ll have company.”

“At least we’ve ended his game. He can’t get at anyone else now. Whatever he was building up to, we’ve stopped him.”

“You ought to go home now and get some sleep.”

“I suppose.”

“Starrs’ll be givin’ his results on the assassination of Huey Long tomorrow mornin’. Oughta be a good show.”

“What time?”

“Eight-thirty—” he reached for his yellow pamphlet of presentation times and places “—in the Peach Tree Room.”

“I don’t know . . . maybe I’ll see you there.”

AS KIT DROVE HOME, she reflected on how quickly things had changed. When they’d first found the briefcase at the Y, it had set every nerve tingling and she’d experienced a heady rush of exhilaration. And it wasn’t just because she’d believed Harvey was nailed. Much of it was because it wouldn’t have happened without her help. And that should have earned her at least a word of acknowledgment from Broussard. But he’d said practically nothing, except to exceed even Gatlin’s pessimism.

She turned off St. Charles onto her street, well aware that a self-assured personality wouldn’t need outside approval for a job well done. But she had done well, damn it. It wasn’t her fault Harvey might walk.

She pulled into her driveway and cut off the engine. Instead of getting out, she thought about Harvey’s offer of a job. What would she have said if it had been someone else offering . . . at twice her present salary? Would she have considered it? Probably not. She still had unfinished business here. Someday, she was going to get Broussard to cough up a direct, unambiguous compliment on her work.

She got out of the car and went up the porch steps. By the light of a streetlamp, she found the front-door lock with her key and went inside. With the days since Lucky’s poisoning so full, she had often gone hours without thinking of him. But every evening, when she opened the door to a silent house, her thoughts had gone to the little varmint. Tonight, coming in so late, the gap his absence had left in her life loomed even larger. She took solace, though, in what she’d found out when she’d stopped at the animal hospital on the way home from the upholsterer. She could pick him up tomorrow.

She locked the front door, took off her shoes, and carried them into the bedroom, where she undressed and put on a long nightie and robe Teddy had given her on her last birthday.

She looked at the digital clock on the nightstand: 10:30 . . . not all that late. She went into the hall, picked up the phone, and entered Teddy’s number.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said when he answered. “Did I wake you?”

“No. I just got in from a heavy date.”

“Didn’t know you liked overweight women.”

“It’s a relatively recent interest. Is Lucky home yet?”

“I’ll pick him up tomorrow.”

“Terrific. How you doing with those murders?”

“Solved.”

“No kidding.”

“It was a medical examiner attending the Forensics meeting.”

“What was his motive?”

The question caught Kit by surprise, for this was something she had not discussed with either Gatlin or Broussard since their first inkling it was Harvey. Thinking about it now, she saw that Fleming’s comment in Broussard’s office was right on the mark. “Broussard and this guy clashed in court once and since then they’ve really disliked each other. They even had a couple of run-ins at the meeting. It looks like Harvey—that’s the guy who did it—was playing a sick chess game with Broussard, trying to embarrass him. You were right about the numbers on the Scrabble tiles. That was the key to it. . . . You’re still coming over on Saturday, aren’t you?”

“Sure.”

“That part is pretty complex, so I’ll wait and explain more when I see you. The short version is Harvey was leaving clues to his identity that he didn’t think we were clever enough to get. But he was wrong.”

“There has to be more to it than that. You don’t kill people as part of a game.”

“Not if you’re sane. Anyway, thanks for the help on the letters. It was a major factor in figuring it out.”

“I exist but to serve.”

“Oh really. We’ll have to discuss that Saturday night.”

Since the poisoning of Lucky and the discovery of the first body, Kit’s life had been out of kilter. Now, with Harvey in custody, Lucky’s return imminent, and Teddy’s voice fresh in her mind, she felt herself inching toward normality.

Still too edgy to be sleepy, she went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of hot chocolate in the microwave. She would have preferred to make it with milk rather than water, but when you won’t shop, there are penalties.

She took her cup to the big chair in front of the TV, sat down, and threw her legs over the arm. In thinking about the steps leading to Harvey’s arrest, she remembered Grandma O’s role. True, her comment about the Scrabble number being a date was not intuitive, but sort of an accident; it was still extremely important. And unlike some people she could name, she wasn’t one to ignore a person’s contribution. Maybe she’d buy Grandma O some of that gardenia perfume she liked so much.

Tired of thinking, she picked up the remote and clicked on the TV. Not interested enough to check the schedule, she channel-surfed, pausing on a forties musical with all the girls dressed as bananas. If any film needed colorizing, this one did. Still, the images were intriguing enough that she watched the routine all the way through. Then she moved on, stopping a couple of channels later to watch a few minutes of Citizen Kane. Maybe it was because she’d never seen it from the beginning, but she couldn’t get into it any more this time than any of the other times she’d tried.

Sleepy now, she turned off the set and shuffled to the kitchen, where she rinsed her cup and put it in the dishwasher. From there, she went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Coming out of the bathroom into the bedroom, she detoured past the light switch by the door, flicked it off, and headed for bed, guided by the old night-light with a cloudy shade on the far wall. Well before she reached her pillow, her big toe smacked against something hard. Holding her breath, she prepared herself for the pain.

Ahhh. It was worse than she expected. Though the puny night-light allowed her to see nothing of the floor between the bed and the near wall, she knew what it was without even turning on the light—the damn footstool. In its absence, she must have unconsciously adopted a new, more direct course to her bed from the light switch. Now that it was back from the upholsterer, she’d blundered into it.

Ahhh, but that hurt. She hobbled the last few feet and dropped into bed. This had been some kind of day.

The pain gradually subsided to where it could no longer stave off the drowsiness that had sent her to bed, and she lapsed into a deep sleep.

Two hours later, Kit’s eyes flicked open and she sat up quickly at the sound of the doorbell. Fully awake now, she got up, pulled on her robe, and headed into the hall, a remnant of pain in her toe reminding her to avoid the footstool.

When she switched on the porch light, she saw two shapes through the sheers at the glass in the front door. Pulling a corner of the curtain aside, she peeked out at two uniformed cops.

Her first thought was that something had happened with Harvey. She turned the latch and opened the door, confronting a wall of blue. One cop was blond and had huge shoulders. The other, though more normal in size, still looked like he could take care of himself. They smelled like leather and when they shifted the least bit, they squeaked like leather.

“Sorry to bother you, miss,” the blond one said. “We—”

“Are you from Lieutenant Gatlin?”

“No, ma’am. Dispatcher sent us. We got a report that there was some kind of trouble here.”

Remembering how the cops had gone to the house across the street a few months ago when she’d called them to report a screaming row in the backyard of the house behind her, Kit said, “Are you sure you’ve got the right address? There’s no trouble here. I was asleep when you rang.”

“Would you step out on the porch, please?” the blond one said.

“Why?”

“Please, ma’am. We’ll explain in a minute.”

The cops moved back and, reluctantly, Kit went out onto the porch, which felt cool and gritty on her bare feet. While she pulled her robe tighter around her, the big cop went inside and looked behind the door. From the sound of his footsteps, she concluded that he went over to the threshold of the living room. Then he came back outside.

“Just wanted to be sure nobody was making you say things were okay when they weren’t,” he said. “Guess it was a mix-up. It happens. Hope we didn’t disturb you too much.”

“Not at all. Thanks for checking.”

“Our pleasure. Good night.”

Back inside with the door shut and locked, Kit rubbed the grit from her feet on the hall carpet and hurried back to bed. Had she not been who she was, a visit like she’d just had might have caused lingering excitement. But since she worked with cops all the time, the event was of no particular consequence and she was soon as lost in sleep as before they’d showed up.

Twenty minutes later, she woke to the sound of the footstool stuttering across the floor.