American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (26 page)

H
e considered turning himself in. Failure to report violations was punishable by a five-hundred-dollar fine and revocation of his hotel security license. Still considering, he sat up, felt inside his shirt pocket, found only an empty pack, and groped among the butts until he located one slightly longer than an inch. He set fire to it with a match from a book he found at the base of the lamp. A red inverted pyramid decorated the cover, with the Triangle Bar’s logo scripted across it at a forty-five-degree angle. He wondered what had become of his Zippo.

He was wearing a blue shirt and the gray pleated trousers of his good suit. Both needed pressing. The nail of his right big toe poked through his argyle sock, and there was a familiar gamey smell beneath the stale tobacco that told him he hadn’t changed in two days. It reminded him of deer camp. He trusted his sense of time. His nose was infallible when it came to measuring how long a particular form of corruption had been in progress. It was just his luck this least pleasant of all his detecting skills should be the last to desert him.

In the midst of this philosophizing, a key rattled in the lock and Clare Sayer came in.

She had on a knit blue sleeveless top that set off her short auburn hair, blue eyes, and the muscle tone in her upper arms. Her skin was ethereally pale, and freckled before a sunny disposition. She avoided exposure and there were no freckles visible now. Navy capri pants caught her strong calves at midpoint. She wore cork sandals and painted her toes a businesslike shade of oxblood. She had high breasts and buttocks you could bounce BBs off all day.

“It’s alive,” she said, when she saw he was sitting up. “I was all set to sell you to the medical school.” She unstrapped her bag from her shoulder, dropped it to the floor, and changed hands on the greasy paper sack she carried.

“I hope to hell there’s a bottle in there,” Palmer said. The echo of his own voice cut a rusty kerf in his skull. His throat felt furrowed and his tongue seemed to be peeling.

She opened the sack under his chin. Hot grease exhaled into his face, inserted a lever under his stomach, and heaved it over.

“Jesus Christ.” He pushed away the offering and clamped a hand over his nose and mouth until the spasm passed.

“Man’s got to eat,” she said. “That’s a rule of this hotel.”

“So’s No Soliciting.”

“You’re still a fair-looking man, if I squint a little. Your hygiene needs work. Anytime I want to crawl under a dead carp, all I have to do is walk down to the Drain.”
As she spoke she took a cheeseburger wrapped in paper and a waxed cup with a plastic lid out of the sack and put them on the nightstand. Then she thrust the sack back at him. “Look under the fries.”

Breathing through his mouth, he rooted inside. The open cardboard packet of French fries had been dumped in upside down—a drive-in regulation, he’d decided—and he groped among dry charred shoestrings until he felt the bills.

“This how they give you your change now?” He left them there and withdrew his hand.

“Some work, others sleep. I did more by nine
A.M.
than most people do all day. Or in your case, since Tuesday. That’s your end, Rockefeller. Now you know what it’s like to make money on your back.”

“You didn’t use this room.” His stomach started another slow revolution at the thought.

“What if I did?”

“Shoot you, then myself.” It surprised him that he said it without hesitating.

She watched him. He noticed the thin craquelure at the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t that old. He’d known her, what, four years. When they’d met he was thirty-nine, had guessed her to be in her early twenties. It was possible he’d guessed wrong; but then four years in The Circle were like twenty most other places.

“At least take a bite of the burger,” she said. “I made them do it over twice to get it the way you like it. They never believe me when I tell them to ruin it.”

“They serve eggs, you know. This is breakfast for me.”

“You don’t like eggs.”

“When did I ever say I don’t like eggs?”

“I’ve never seen you eat one.”

“You’ve never seen me pee, either. That doesn’t mean I don’t.” Saying it, he became aware of another discomfort. His bladder was full to squeaking.

“Yeah, I never understood that. Most men don’t care if I watch. A couple even had me hold it. They paid me twenty.”

He got off the bed. His head sloshed, as if the urine had backed up that far. One leg was asleep and a thousand electric needles tattooed him from knee to ankle as he wobbled into the bathroom. Just to reinforce his principles, he locked the door and turned on the tap. His stream was better than the plumbing’s, which wasn’t saying much.

When he came out, he realized he was famished. He sat on the edge of the mattress and ate the cheeseburger in six bites. The Coke was heavy on syrup and light on fizz; the formula varied according to who was in charge of the fountain.

The drive-in was a woolly mammoth, one of the last of a small regional chain edged out by a franchise with headquarters in Salt Lake City. In times past there had been cute carhops on roller skates, but the current management had torn out the carports and intercoms to make room for tractor-trailer rigs to park. Now you drove up to a window and tried not to look too hard at the people who were preparing your food in the Third World kitchen.

Clare sat in the blown-out easy chair with legs crossed and watched him eat, as if he might hide most of the meal under his pillow. For some reason she’d taken
on the responsibility of keeping him alive. He figured she’d made a bet with someone. Maybe there was a pool and she’d drawn a late date. She was a hooker with a heart of shit.

She didn’t speak again until he was foraging for fries among the seams in the sack. “Turnbull’s been asking for you. Something about one-oh-eight.”

“What’s the matter, somebody make off with the bedspread?”

“I didn’t ask. I’d sooner make conversation with a fire bucket.”

The rest of the fries were cold. Since all they ever had to recommend them was heat, he took the bills out of the bottom of the sack and crumpled it. He laid it on the nightstand, folded and stuck the bills inside his shirt pocket without counting, and bent to fish his shoes from under the bed. His head filled to bursting. He straightened to keep from blacking out.

“You ought to go back to your room and hose yourself down,” Clare said. “You look like Beaver Cleaver’s been at you.”

“That isn’t new. You need to get out more.”

“Look who’s talking.”

A killer had been depositing pieces of his victims, prostitutes mostly, in inconvenient places throughout the city for weeks. Clever reporters for
The Derrick
had named him Beaver Cleaver. Clare knew he’d been following the case. She probably thought he wished he were back with the police. But his interest came from relief. Assembling bloody parts and interviewing winos were someone else’s responsibility.

He ran the back of a hand down his cheek. It was like
stroking a rusty hull. “How’d I wind up here, anyway? I usually try to pass out in a smoking room.”

“You passed out in the hall. This was as far as I could drag you.” She bounced her crossed leg. “You know, you’re an amateur drunk. Two little snorts and you drop like a bucket of spit.”

“Cheaper that way.” He went through his pockets, found only his passkey. “Seen my lighter?”

“You threw it out the window when the flint wouldn’t work.”

He kissed her and thanked her for feeding him, gave her buttocks a polite squeeze, got one in return, and was pleasantly surprised to feel himself reacting. He had a blurry recollection that he had had some trouble in that vicinity sometime in the past forty-eight hours, which was why he hadn’t quizzed her too closely about circumstances. On his way out he noted that the room was 309, and took the fire stairs down a flight to his room. He left his clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor and stood under the hot spray for five minutes, then stepped out to mow off the stubble. He felt the many planes and angles on his face for signs of bloat. His eyes were puffy, but apart from that there was no evidence of a dead carp as yet.

He put on a white shirt, gray flannel slacks that hadn’t bagged too badly in the knees, his second-best argyles, the shoes he’d had on in 309, and his corduroy sport coat with suede patches on the elbows, which Clare always told him made him look like a disgraced English professor. He combed his hair, which was getting to be more salt than pepper, inspected his cheeks for broken blood vessels and found one, poured a slug from the pint of Ancient Age he
kept in the medicine cabinet into the toothpaste glass, and tossed it back. The shock paralyzed his vocal cords. He waited while the tingling spread from the floor of his stomach where the cheeseburger lay to the tips of his ears, then screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it away. He’d thought about pouring another, but remembered what Clare had said about him and two little snorts. She’d been right so far as she’d gone: He was an amateur drunk, but he was a gifted amateur. And he still had a job, unless that was what Turnbull wanted to talk to him about. Whatever was going on with 108 may have been just a jumping-off point for the let-you-go speech. He brushed his teeth, rinsed his mouth with bourbon-flavored water from the glass, and went down to the lobby.

Turnbull, the day man, sat in his platform rocker behind the registration desk, reading a boating magazine with his head tilted to keep cigarette smoke out of his eyes. He’d quit smoking, but his posture hadn’t gotten the message. In earlier days, Palmer thought, Turnbull had struck one match per day, when he lit up before breakfast, igniting the rest of his two-and-a-half packs off his own smoldering stubs. Now the day man was gaining weight, cheeks turning convex. Palmer felt a little more lonely than usual. The vice was the only thing they’d had in common.

“Must be payday,” Turnbull said. “Getting so I don’t see you any other time.”

“I missed you too.” Palmer unzipped a fresh pack, slid a filter into the groove in his lower lip, and lit the other end with a Triangle Bar match. “What about one-oh-eight?”

Turnbull fanned away smoke with his magazine and
planted a finger on a registration card lying next to the green metal file box on the desk. “David Egler, checked in last night. Checkout was two hours ago. No answer when I knock.”

“Skip?”

“Paid up front. Guerrera checked him in.”

“Lose your passkey?”

He shook his head slowly. “I got a feeling.”

Palmer waited.

“Feeling says, ‘This is one for Palmer.’ One of those things we pay you for.”

The hotel detective peeled the cigarette from his lip. It always took him half a day to resume manufacturing saliva after a binge. “Let yourself in, didn’t you? Didn’t like what you saw.”

“Just go take a look, okay?”

The room was on the ground floor. The building was half vacant, plenty of space high up, but Guerrera, the night man, had feelings too, genuine ones. He didn’t care about jumpers one way or the other, but he was a good Catholic. He didn’t believe in making it easy.

Palmer knocked twice, waited both times, then used his passkey. The room was directly above the old pottype furnace in the cellar, unrentable in winter because of the relentless heat. There was a warm spell on, and the furnace was cold. The sweat of residents who could afford to rent only the unrentable rooms soaked the walls to the studs and gave off a clammy feel when the room wasn’t broiling, as it wasn’t now. Faith alone kept the wallpaper in place, and guests discovered the chronic damp patch in the carpet when they stepped on it in their stocking feet. The room itself seemed to be perspiring.

The double bed, centered between two hopeful windblown seascapes bolted to the wall above it, was unmade and unoccupied. A charcoal pinstripe suit coat, freshly pressed and smelling faintly of cleaning solvents, hung neatly in the closet; a pair of crisp black penny loafers lay on the carpet near the foot of the bed, arranged side by side with the toes pointed toward the door.

Palmer pushed against the bathroom door. It bumped against something and he sidled in around it. The obstruction was a foot in a ribbed black sock.

The man who belonged to the foot lay twisted onto his right shoulder in the narrow space between the toilet and the sink. His bottom half was propped on his knees and one arm hung down inside the porcelain bowl, submerged to the elbow in foul water. He had on a white dress shirt and charcoal pinstripe trousers. There was gray in his hair, which had been cut recently; a strip of untanned skin bordered the nape. Palmer leaned down and felt his neck for a pulse. The skin was cool.