Moon Music (25 page)

"Me and herpes—just can't get rid of us."

Madison screwed up her face. "Any specific reason why you compare yourself to a virus?"

"It's what I am—an invader." Poe rocked on his feet. "No, I haven't filled out the proper papers. But you're going to let me in anyway, because I outrank you and I'm feeling extremely violent. Next person who gets in my way is roadkill." He held out his hand. "The keys?"

Madison frowned, but stood up. "What year?"

"'Seventy-three."

"Homicide?"

"Actually a suicide."

"Those are filed under Homicide." She pulled out a key ring, unlocked the door to the vault, and switched on the light. "This way."

"Madison, you deserve a raise."

"I deserve to win the lottery. But I'm not going to win any more than I'll get a raise, so why dream."

Born in Utah, Linda Joanne Hennick née Paulson had been thirty-eight years old at the time of her demise—three years older than Poe, which gave him pause. He had always thought of Alison's mother as a pretty but much older woman.

She had been found in a room at the Four Aces Motel and Casino. Poe knew the place. It was one of a quartet of cheap joints that sat in a dustbowl at the Nevada/California border. Twenty-five years ago, the casino hadn't been much more than a barn with tables and slots. When the wind blew, the rafters would rattle, and grit would coat the floor. Now the Aces was a hard-core gambling mecca for those who couldn't afford or couldn't wait for Vegas. Recently a grade-school child had been murdered in one of the motel's arcades. The father had been paged by security guards to take the kid home; the child had been crying and had wanted to go to sleep. But the lure of cards had been a powerful aphrodisiac, obliterating whatever little paternal love might have once existed.

He flipped through the microfiche.

A head-shot picture of the victim when she had been in one piece. Like her daughter, Linda had been beautiful. Alison had inherited her hazel eyes and blond hair. But Linda's face had been fuller, her lips not quite as lush. The snapshot showed a thirtyish woman with intense eyes. They were not only looking at you, but looking you over.

Another turn of the spool. Poe read on.

Cause of death was voluminous shock brought on by profuse arterial bleeding from multiple cuts and stab wounds to her wrists and arms. The postmortem black-and-whites showed a seminude woman sprawled on a bed, head thrown back, a pillow resting under her neck. One leg was straight, the other was bent at the knee. Her left arm rested by her side, the right draped across her wounded breasts. Her bottom torso and thighs were covered by a red dress. Her legs were bare.

About a half-dozen close-ups of the inflicted areas, the most notable being deep incisions across the wrists. There were also cuts and slashes across the belly and face. A head shot showed superficial crisscross slices on her cheeks, a swollen lower lip, and a couple of bruised eyes.

Poe winced, averting his eyes for a moment to catch his breath. It defied logic to classify the wounds as self-inflicted, as they were surgical in appearance. Yet homicide had been considered, then ruled out.

Why?

He continued scrolling through the chart on the screen.

A snapshot of her stomach. It was also spiderwebbed with cuts, but they didn't appear to be as random. As he looked harder, a pattern emerged—a cross or at least something Tshaped. Faint but definite.

Again the wounds were meticulous in appearance.

Had she just gone crazy, or had she been undergoing some form of religious self-abnegation…some form of penitence? Or had the cuts been inflicted by the hands of another? Cults had been known to torture their subjects hideously for absolution.

He finished with the photos on the monitors, then scrolled until he came to the pathology report. Skimming through the details, he gleaned that when she was found, Linda had been dead for approximately ten hours. Rigor had come and gone, sped up by the intense desert heat. (The room temperature had registered at ninety-five.) Lividity had set in, the blood pooling to the lowest points of her body.

Poe flipped through the film until he hit upon the actual police report. She had been discovered by the hotel maid, who, having received no answer to her knock, unlocked the door to the room around ten in the morning. Linda had checked in at six the prior evening, listing herself as a single occupant. She had signed the register card, had given the clerk forty-nine dollars in cash for the room.

Checked in at six, found dead at ten. Narrowing her death between ten and sixteen hours—whatever good that did.

Articles found at the scene:

One leather handbag.

One medium-sized wallet containing a driver's license, a gas credit card, a picture of a little girl, and twenty-five dollars in cash.

One gold braided necklace chain.

One gold-and-diamond watch.

That got his attention. The Hennicks were not a wealthy family. A gold-and-diamond watch was unusual enough. Why wear something so pricey to such a cheap dive?

Unless she had met someone before her death. Someone she had wanted to impress. Or someone had given the jewelry to her before he had murdered her. A lover's quarrel gone bad? Yet, the death had been ruled a suicide. Why?

Other items:

One red dress.

One matching pair of red shoes.

One set of car keys on the nightstand.

One bloodied carving knife.

Poe shook his head.

The last item listed was a note left by the victim.

A
note?

Poe's eyes widened. Alison had never made mention of any suicide note. Perhaps she hadn't known.

Frantically, Poe ripped through the microfiche trying to find the note's contents. Scrolling page after page. Where the hell was it? For some reason, it kept eluding him.

He really didn't want to have to dig up the original file. Where did they keep them? Did it even exist anymore?

Calm.

Another trip through the reel. And then he found it. A single sentence.

This is for what I did.

Leaving Poe to figure out exactly what Linda had done.

TWENTY-FOUR

H
E COULDN'T
ask Alison about it. If he did, she'd know he'd been snooping. Besides, how reliable was an eight-year-old's memory? The next logical choice would be Gerald Hennick. But, officially, the case had been closed twenty-five years ago, and Poe was reluctant. Hennick had suffered long before his wife's death. The humiliation as the ladies gossiped…

That poor man.

He's such a saint.

God will reward him his place in heaven for his devotion.

While men snickered…

What a cuckold!

Why does he put up with it?

The man has no pride.

Hennick the henpecked.

In truth, Hennick hadn't deserved the shameless pity or the callous scorn. His wife had been a victim of mental disease, and he had coped—just like millions of others plagued with tragedy, illness, and bad luck. God was a fickle dealer.

Without the Hennick family as sources, Poe was left with only one option.

He pulled out of the hospital parking lot at eleven in the evening, knowing that Y wouldn't hit the bars much before then. For the first time in several weeks, he felt upbeat.

Emma would be discharged on Monday. Yes, she'd need more treatment, but her body required a break—a three-week interlude to build up strength for the next assault of chemotherapy. While Emma recuperated, she'd be living with him. Poe had also hired on a full-time nurse. Three people living in his clay oven. Privacy would be done Japanese-style.

His mother had completed her first round with flying colors. Her white cell count was close to normal, and her neoplastic neutrophils seemed to be in fast retreat. If only she could gain some weight. Every time Poe saw her stick frame, her frail movements and labored breaths, he felt a nagging twinge in his gut.

Enough of worries. Onto the streets, into civilization. He kept the windows of his car rolled down. The night was beautiful and balmy, studded with stars, colored by neon, and a full moon acted as a spotlight. He breathed deeply, savoring the air of freedom as he inched his way up the Strip. The sidewalks held people and laughter—a glorious city of anonymous millions.

Turning his Honda into the Luxor's driveway, Poe stopped, stepped out of the car, and handed the attendant the keys. He took another deep breath, staring at the holographic face of King Tut, who looked middle-aged, not like the fourteen-year-old boyking he had been.

He went inside the towering black glass pyramid, his eyes immediately drawn to the up escalator, angled as steep as the Eiger. The triangular ceiling was pitched so high that it often gave momentary vertigo. A fantasy Nile riverboat ride encircled the lower casino like a moat. During the ride, tourists saw the various Ramseses and their consorts, adorning rock-coated walls speckled with graffiti in hieroglyphics. Poe often wondered what the words actually said.

For a good time, call Thutmose at…

Once again, Poe craned his neck upward. Suicidal people loved to leap from high places, and the Luxor had not gone unscathed. A few years back, a distraught woman had jumped from one of the top floors of the hotel and landed smack in the middle of one of the hotel's sumptuous buffet tables. The force of her fall had been so great it had blown off her fingernails. It wasn't one of the cleanest jobs Poe had ever seen, but it had been effective.

He started out by playing a couple of dollar slots, losing five hundred dollars in fifteen minutes. He then moved on to a table, nabbing a thou before being asked to go. Apparently his luck was pissing off the losers at the table. Before he left, Poe searched the bars; the old man was nowhere to be found.

Out the door, making his way down the Strip, the neon flickering in the warm breeze. The blocks were long, the traffic was thick, and Poe was happy to be counted among the living. From the Luxor he went to the Excalibur, from the Excalibur to the Tropicana. As the clock struck midnight, Poe began to feel restless. He had come on a mission and refused to admit defeat.

Moving north, into New York—New York. Built to simulate the Great Apple, the hotel and casino held the city's famous sights and buildings, including a replica of the Statue of Liberty scaled down to a third the true size. Poe supposed that the hotel had been meant to conjure up nostalgia in transplanted East Coasters. To him, it was an urban nightmare of noise, shadows, and graffiti, giving the impression of being dirty even though it wasn't. Choppy in design, the casinos were separated from one another by waterways, shops, and restaurants, making it difficult to spot people.

Poe's eyes traveled up, following a sizable flow of people being transported by the up escalator leading to the Coney Island Midway and Arcade. Lots of games and prizes, but the main attraction was a roller coaster which coursed through the entire hotel and casino. Those staying for the night were often wooed into slumber by the dulcet tones of grinding gears and bloodcurdling screams.

Lighting a cigarette, Poe stopped in front of a concrete brook of water spangled with pennies. Behind him stood a restaurant reeking of garlic. Off to the left was a bank of dollar slots, to the right were shops faced in phony brick and covered with fake tagging. Whenever Poe examined the walls carefully, he'd inevitably find the real stuff mixed in with the ersatz defacing. Bloods and Crips logos…signs of the notorious L.A. Eighteenth Street Gang. In the city that hosted the shooting of rapper Tupac, he wondered about the wisdom of elevating anything associated with thugs.

Bouncing on his feet as he looked around. No sign of Y.

Instead, he caught a glimpse of the bowler.

He realized he was already moving in Hat's direction. His legs had processed the information quicker than his brain. Pushing through the crowd, he took off after the blip of felt. But the man tore away as fast and fluidly as a raging river, through the endless mazes of shops, stores, and restaurants. Poe kept pace with him, squeezing through the throng of people, darting down the casino's mock alleys and dingy side streets. The bowler jumped across his visual field, materializing, then disappearing. As Hat rounded corners, Poe saw flashes: the flapping motion of a loose double-breasted suit jacket and the hint of a rubber-soled shoe.

Running shoes with a suit.

Which made for an easy escape.

A few twists and turns and abruptly the hat was gone. Common sense dictated that Bowler was heading for the exit. Poe raced toward a side door nearby. Stumbling through the labyrinth, he felt blindsided. A chance meeting twice? Not in this solar system. Someone was playing games with him.

Poe bolted out the double glass side doors, into a
real
alley—a small lane meant as a conduit for taxis. He slowed and looked around. The roadway was sandwiched between two massive buildings which created a wind tunnel.

Dark…narrow…hidden.

Here the breezes had turned to menacing gusts, kicking up soot and dust, moaning a death dirge.

Brushing hair from his eyes, Poe blinked rapidly as he surveyed his options. To the left were the lights of the Strip. On the right were more narrow strips of asphalt and a web of service roads. A few lone souls in the distance, moving like finger puppet shadows against the walls. No hats. In these winds, a hat would have blown off anyway. Most of the foot traffic was headed east toward the Strip. If someone wanted to escape and blend, east was the way to go.

But something told Poe to turn into the bowels of the buildings. The gray night air blackened as the winds blew faster. Poe tightened his jacket around his body. Checking over his shoulder, he walked steadily until boulevard traffic had receded to background noise. He could hear his shoes against the ground. He became aware of his breathing.

A shout!

Poe jerked his head around, his heart doing double-time. Where did it come from? The right? The left? Another blast and suddenly a cab was upon him, honking like a foghorn. Poe slammed his body against the building, cursed the reckless driver. The car motor receded, replaced by the howling winds. Scraps of paper and debris glided through the air like vampire bats. Warm winds. Ominous.