Mike Reuther - Return to Dead City (2 page)

I felt nature’s call and decided to make a quick trip for the bathroom located beneath the stands. Up near the exit leading down to the bathroom the society couple had stopped to converse with some people. As I drew nearer, I could see it was another couple. I didn’t get a real good look at either the man or the woman at first. He was pale and thin with a little brush mustache. His knobby hands were perched atop a walking stick where he sat in his aisle seat making conversation with the society twosome. He was doing all the talking to the couple. The woman beside him sat turned partly away from the other couple and facing the field with a look of cool contempt. She wasn’t bad looki
ng either
,
but there was an aroma about her of toughness
‒
a good-looking bar maid, you might say. The heavy eye-makeup, the long earrings dangling like wind chimes from her lobes, the heavily painted nails couldn’t mask the raw sex appeal though. She sipped
beer from a plastic cup between drags on a cigarette, and by the look on her face it was obvious she cared neither for the game nor the couple. What she was doing with the pale-skinned gent was anybody’s guess.

When I got back from the bathroom, the four of them were gone. I stuck around long enough to see Lance knock out another home run and bring the Mets to within one run of the visiting team. The small crowd went nuts. The guy in the tank top had changed his tone: “Ya playin’ like champions. Ya hear me. Like goddamn champions.” He lofted his beer toward the field in tribute to the Mets. Then the game turned. A five-run rally in the top of the eighth for the opponents blew the contest open. God knows why I hung around for the end
,
but I did. In the top of the ninth, the visiting club batted around three times. It was ugly. The few fans that were left turned from booing the home team to actually rooting for the visitors. The guy in the tank top was livid. For a full five minutes he stomped about his seat and cursed the team. Finally, he fell heavily back into his seat and began to sob.

The Mets had gone through
just about
every one of their pitchers when they brought in some string
bean of a kid named Walter. By then, the visitors had put up an incredible twenty-five runs. It was the kid’s professional debut
,
but rather than get nervous and walk the ball
park he struck out both batters he faced. He was a cool customer this Walter. After fanning the second batter, he strutted off the mound and tipped his cap to the crowd who greeted him with mock cheers. The Mets went down quietly in the bottom of the ninth
,
and I joined the rest of the weary fans in making an exit from the place.

When I got back to my apartment on Third Street it was already evening. I checked the answering machine. There was a call from Joe Gallagher. Joe was a boyhood pal who had helped get me set up in town a couple months earlier. He was another St. Mary’s product from the First Ward who had been my sole contact with Centre Town through the years. Since hitting town, the two of us had become drinking partners.
Given our struggles with the bottle, i
t was the last thing either of us
needed
.
But there it was. I had been off the stuff for the final few months of my days in Albuquerque
,
but I’ve learned it’s easy to find an excuse to resume any cozy and loving relationship
‒
be it in the embracing arms of a woman or in a bottle of Scotch. Gallagher, I’m sure, had his reasons for drinking too, though he didn’t share them with me. He’d been through AA, therapy
,
the whole shebang. He didn’t want a counselor, a preacher, a confid
ante to pour out his trouble to. And I sure as hell didn’t want to play those roles. And so the two of us were drawn together in those early months of my return to town. Ours was a pretty uncomplicated friendship when you got right down to it really. We saw each other for what we were: a couple of guys, cops really, battling the bottle and staring hard at forty as we prepared for the big slide while we tried to forget a lot of crap.

Gallagher wanted to meet me over at Red’s later that night. Red’s was our watering hole. I looked at my watch. It was only 5:30. I checked the ice box for any edibles and finding none decided to place an order for Chinese. My room on Third Street afforded me little in the way of frills. It was clean and well-lit. I had a couch that folded out to a cot. A walk-in kitchen and a bathroom with a toilet and sink provided me with the basic hygienic necessities. Showers I took down the hall. Like I said, no frills, but then at
one hundred and eighty-five bucks
a month I wasn’t looking for the Taj Ma
h
al. From my third floor room I could take in the uptown street life. The early morning yells and curses of drunken rampages and twisted love affairs sometimes snapped me from out of a deep sleep. Several bars, including Red’s, were within easy walking distance.

During the day the area wasn’t so bad. A few shops operated to keep the neighborhood from going completely to seed. At night the place became vaguely dangerous. You could get by without carrying a gun or a blade in your pocket. On the other hand, if you went looking for trouble
,
you could find it. The pickpockets, the winos, the perverts lurked about the boarded up storefronts. The drug dealers had set up shop at the street corner a few blocks away and talk was that it was only a matter of time before the shady characters and other riff-raff took over the neighborhood. There were worse places to live and worse places to set up a detective agency
,
even if I didn’t expect to get a lot of walk-in business.

Since hitting town back in June I’d had all of two cases to handle. I barely got my phone hooked up when I was hired by a lady to investigate her husband’s after-work activities. It turned out the middle-aged Romeo was bedding down his long-legged secretary at various motels outside town. The roving husband left a trail that a blind man couldn’t have missed. If I hadn’t needed the money so badly I might have returned the lady’s
five hundred bucks
.

The other case involved a heist from a struggling lumber mill which looked to be a clear case of employee theft. Gallagher shoved that one off on me after
it
had left his own detectives stymied. But after weeks tracking down leads that took me nowhere, I took myself off it. I was batting .500 and wondering where my gumshoe career would take me next. As it turned out, it wouldn’t be long before I was to get that answer. I was just finishing up throwing out scraps of sour pork from my Chinese order to the cats out on the fire escape when the phone rang.

“Someone murdered Lance Miller.”

The voice sounded muffled as if the words were being spoken through a sock. There was a pause then and I could hear his heavy breathing on the other end.

“Where?” I asked

“On Fourth Street at the Spinelli Hotel.”

His voice had begun to crack.

“Have you informed the police,” I asked.

“They should be there now,” the voice said.

The heavy breathing started up again. And before I had a chance to ask who he was there was a resounding click on the other end.

The Spinelli was just three blocks away, in the heart of downtown. It stood ten stories high to easily command the skyline of Centre Town. Ever since I’d grown up in this burg, it had been the one and only place in town for the few visiting dignitaries and celebrities who saw fit to honor the city with their presence. It was, in short, the one place around town that smacked of luxury.

Gallagher was just coming out of the revolving doors of the Spinelli’s front lobby when I got there. He was a heavy-set guy with the ruddy complexion and wide open face of those Irishmen you see walking the beats of old B movies. We were the same age
,
but it’s a safe bet to say that Joe looked much older. What hair he had left was now completely gray. And as he moved toward me in his rolling gait slowed now by the heavy burden of the situation, he appeared even older.

“It’s bad Cozz. Real bad,” he said.

I looked past him at the revolving doors. A couple of other cops were now emerging from out of the lobby.

“Shot?” I asked.

He shook his head. “He took a knife in the back.”

“Mind if I take a look?” I asked.

“My boys have gotten their fill.” He shrugged and fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. I started to move past him.

“Hey Cozz,” he said, grabbing my arm. “There’s a lot of blood.”

I nodded and went into the hotel. Over at the check-in desk, a clerk had just finishing speaking with a cop. He saw me coming and turned his back on me. Then he began fumbling through some boxes on the floor. I was left standing there feeling like some idiot whose pants had suddenly dropped to his knees.

“Hey, how about a room,” I said, as way of an ice-breaker.

“We’re all filled sir,” he said, without looking up.

He was a little skinny guy and looked about as old as the hotel. He wore one of those vests with gold buttons. The vest was worn over a white shirt, the kind with the puffy sleeves.

“Actually, I need to ask you a couple of questions,” I said.

He was still fiddling with the boxes.

“You a cop?” he asked.

“Not quite.”

He rose up and gave me the once over. He had huge frog
-
like eyes behind thick glasses. “A detective?”

I nodded.

“All I know is what the cops are saying,” he said. “Some ballplayer got stabbed.”

“You know Lance Miller?”

“Sure,” he said. “He’s the one who got it.”

“He lives here?” I asked.

“Sure. Room 301. Last room on the left. That and Room 302 are the only ones being used on that floor now.”

“Oh?”

“Hotel’s being renovated,” he said.

“That must explain the stuff over there,” I said, nodding across the lobby to some skids resting against the wall on the other side of the lobby.

He shook his head. “No sir. We needed them to move the statue.”

“Statue?”

“It sits over there in the East Ball Room. They carried it in there on those skids today for the banquet.”

“What banquet?”

The big frog-like eyes blinked in astonishment.

“You aren’t from around here are you?” he said. His tone was snotty, impatient.

“I eat in a lot,” I cracked.

“They had a banquet to unveil the statue. All the
officials
from the ball club were there, along with some of the community leaders.”

“Did you say ball club?” I said.

“Sure. A real formal affair. It broke up early though. What with the murder upstairs and all.”

“Sure,” I said.

He was studying me from across the counter. “You say you’re a detective huh?”

“Yeah Crager’s my name. Tell me. Did you see anyone go up to Lance’s room tonight?”

He looked away and began tapping a key on the counter. “The cops already asked me that,” he said.

For some reason the guy was getting nervous. Some people just hate it when they’re asked a lot of questions. Beads of perspiration formed on his forehead.

“Yeah. So.”

He tapped the key more furiously now. He gave me a look, adjusted his glasses and blinked those frog-like eyes a couple more times. “I don’t really see how … I got work to do,” he said, turning away.

“C’mon pal,” I said. “Help me out.”

The poor guy was actually sweating bullets now. I gave him a handkerchief which he used to wipe away the sweat. Then I reached across the counter and stopped his hand from tapping that damn key. It was getting on my nerves. He tried to pull away
,
but I tightened my grip.

“Please,” he protested. “I don’t know anything.”

“I think you do.”

“You don’t understand. This could be bad for me” he pleaded.

“Look pal,” I said, tightening my grip. “There’s a guy upstairs dead. You want that on your conscience?”

He sighed. “Okay. There was one man who went up there while the banquet was in progress.”

“Yeah. How do you know?”

“I saw him take the elevator there,” he said, nodding with his head toward the wide hallway off to the left which separated us from the ballroom. “But really … you can’t let anyone know I told you this…”

“Who was the guy?”

“His name’s Mick Slaughter,” he whispered.

“He runs a gym over on Market. Believe me when I tell you. He’s nobody to mess with.”

“How so?” I asked.

And now the guy leaned real close to me. “They say he’s connected.”

Gallagher turned out to be right. There was a lot of blood. It was like a huge red ink stain in the yellow carpeting all around the dead ballplayer where he lay prone on one side of the bed. Whoever had done the job had been smart enough to take the knife too. Miller had apparently been ready for a night on the town. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, the coat of which now bore the crimson stains of the attack. I looked around the room as one of the police photographers continued snapping pictures of the body where it rested near the foot of the made-up bed. Other than an overturned lamp on a table next to the bed, there was nothing else I could see that had been disturbed in the room. It looked like any other slightly upscale hotel room. I went over to the bathroom. It appeared all but unused. It still had that fresh smell of having recently been sanitized. Clean enough to eat out of, I thought. The enamel surfaces of both the bathtub and sink were dry, leading me to conclude that no one had tried to wash away any evidence. Either that, or the water had been swept dry by someone careful to conceal the evidence. The medicine cabinet was clean too. I went back in the room and checked the single closet in the corner. It was empty.