Paper Doll (9 page)

“How’d you get in there?” I said.

“Bullied the desk clerk,” Quirk said.

“You’re a scary bastard,” I said.

“Lucky for you,” Quirk said.

We were quiet.

“This a rental?” I said. Quirk shook his head. “Federal guys in Columbia lent it to me.”

“So why are we sitting here in it?”

“I thought we ought to see if we could get a read on the two suits in there,” Quirk said. “I’d like to know who sent them.”

From where we parked, we could see the front door of the courthouse and the parking lot entrance on the side street.

“We going to follow them?”

“Yeah.”

“And they spot us?”

“They won’t spot us,” Quirk said. “I’m a professional policeman.”

“Sure,” I said.

Quirk grinned. “And if they do,” he said, “fuck ‘em.”

Some cars came and went from the parking lot, but none of them contained Vest or the Partner. People went in and out of the courthouse, but they weren’t ours.

“Why didn’t you send Farrell?” I said.

“He’s got some time off,” Quirk said. “Trouble at home.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Guy he lives with has AIDS,” Quirk said.

“Jesus,” I said.

Quirk nodded, looking at the courthouse.

“How about him?” I said.

“He’s okay,” Quirk said.

“So you came because Farrell couldn’t?”

“Right, and Belson’s tracking down the other Olivia Nelson, or the real Olivia Nelson, or whoever the fuck that is in Nairobi, and the case is getting to be sort of a heavy issue… and I figure I better come down and save your ass, so Susan wouldn’t be mad.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” Quirk said. “I called Hawk and he said he’d keep track of Susan until this thing shook down a little.”

“You think someone might run at her to get to me?”

Quirk shrugged.

“Being careful does no harm,” he said.

The two suits walked down the steps of the courthouse, came down the side street and into the parking lot. In a minute they exited the lot in a green Dodge, and passed us, and headed out Main Street. Quirk let his car into gear and followed them easily, letting several cars in between. Quirk was too far back to stay with them if the suits were trying to shake a tail. But they weren’t. They had no reason to think they’d be followed. Quirk and I should be lickety-split for home. In ten minutes, they pulled into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn, out near the little airport, where Cessnas and Piper Cubs came and went several times a day, carrying Alton’s heavy hitters to and from important events. Quirk and I dawdled in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly across the street, while the suits got out and went into the motel. Then we pulled over to the motel and parked. Quirk adjusted his gun onto the front of his belt so that it showed as he let his coat fall open. Then we went into the lobby and walked briskly to the desk clerk. Quirk flashed his badge, and put it away. It could have said Baker Street Irregulars on it, for all the clerk had a chance to read it.

“Lieutenant Quirk,” he snapped, “Homicide. I need the room number of the two men who just came in here.”

The desk clerk was a middle-aged woman with a lot of very blonde hair. She looked blank.

“Come on, Sis,” Quirk said, “this is police business, I don’t have a lot of time.”

“The two gentlemen who just passed through here?”

Quirk looked at me.

“Is she a smart one?” he said. “Is this one a quick learner?”

He looked back at her.

“That’s it, Sis. The two guys just passed through here. Room number and make it pretty quick.”

He drummed on the counter softly with his fingertips.

“Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “That would be Mr. O’Dell and Mr. Grimes. Room 211.”

“Okay, we’re going up.” Quirk said. “If you do anything at all, except mind your own business, I’ll close this dump down so tight it’ll squeeze your fanny.”

“Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “Stairs at the end of the corridor, sir. Second floor.”

“No shit,” Quirk said, and turned and hustled down the corridor toward the stairs with me behind him.

“So tight,” I said, “it’ll squeeze your fanny?”

We were going up the stairs.

“Cops are supposed to talk like that,” Quirk said.

“I liked `The Killers’ bit from Hemingway.”

“ ‘Is she a smart one?’ Yeah, I use that a lot.”

We were on the second floor and stopped in front of room 211. Quirk put his ear to the door. He nodded to himself. Then he knocked on the door. There was a moment of silence, then the door half opened and Vest looked out. Quirk hit the door with his shoulder and Vest stumbled back. The door banged open wide.

The Partner was sitting on one of the twin beds with his back to the door, talking on the phone. He half turned as we came in and I kicked the door shut behind us.

He said, “What the fuck?”

Quirk walked over and broke the phone connection.

“Exactly,” Quirk said.

A small holstered gun lay on top of the television set. Vest made a grab at it and yanked it from the holster. Quirk barely glanced at him while he chopped the gun out of Vest’s hand and kicked it under the bed. Vest threw a punch at Quirk’s head. Quirk slapped it aside and stepped away. He looked at me.

“You want this?” he said. “Even up the business in the jail?”

“Thank you very much,” I said, and Quirk stepped behind me.

“All yours,” he said, and I snapped a straight left out onto Vest’s nose and drew blood. He put both hands to his face and took them away and stared for a moment at the blood on them. Noses bleed a lot. His partner moved toward me, in a low crouch, swaying gently, his hands up and close together. I turned slightly and drove my right foot in against his kneecap. His leg went out from under him and he fell over. Vest lunged toward the door and as he went past me, I hit him on the back of the head with my clubbed left forearm and he sprawled forward and banged his head on the door and slid to the ground. His partner was on his hands and knees now, scrambling toward the bed. I caught him and dragged him to his feet and turned my hip as he tried to knee me in the groin and took it on my thigh. I banged his nose with my forehead, and pushed him away and hit him left cross straight right, and he fell over on the bed and stayed there holding his nose, which had started to bleed as well. Vest was not unconscious on the floor, but he stayed there on his stomach with his face cradled in his arms.

“You guys are in trouble,” Quirk said, “at several levels.”

I glanced around the room. There was a wallet and a set of car keys on the night table beside the other twin bed.

“First of all, when you had enough help you were banging on a guy, with a billy.”

I walked over to the night table and picked up the wallet. Nobody moved.

“Now you are alone, without backup, in a hotel room with the same guy, and look what happens.”

I opened the wallet and looked at the driver’s license. It was a Washington, D.C., license, issued to Reilly O’Dell. The Partner’s picture was there, unsmiling. And a Georgetown address.

“That’s one level,” Quirk said. He ticked it off on his thumb. His voice was quiet, without anger, a little pedagogical, as if he were discussing evidence evaluation at the police academy, but tinged with sadness at the plight these men were in.

“Then there’s the fact that this asshole”-he nodded at Vest on the floor-“told me to butt out and go back to Boston, and he made fun of my accent, by pronouncing it Bahston.”

Quirk ticked that one off on his forefinger. “I am, of course, en-fucking-raged,” Quirk said. “Which is not good either, because I also can whup you to a frazzle.”

Quirk smiled briefly and without humor at both of them, and held up a third finger. In Reilly O’Dell’s wallet I found some business cards, with his name on them, and the name of his company, Stealth Security Consultants. I passed the license and one of the business cards to Quirk. Still holding his third finger up, in mid-count, he read them. And put them in his pocket.

“Third,” he said. “You guys were participating in the illegal arrest and interrogation of a man whose constitutional rights you have violated worse than Sherman violated Atlanta. Fortunately, I happened by, and seeing an illegal injustice in progress, made a citizen’s intervention. And now”-Quirk held up a fourth finger-“I discover that Mr. O’Dell, here, appears not even to be a police officer.”

I bent over Vest and took the wallet from Vest’s left hip pocket. I opened it and learned that his name was Edgar Grimes and that he too lived in Washington. And he too worked for Stealth Security Consultants. I gave his driver’s license and one of his business cards to Quirk.

“Dandy,” Quirk said. “Now, what the fuck is going on?”

Grimes had turned over on his back and sat on the floor, his back against the wall. His head was in his hands and he was rubbing his temples. The blood continued to run between his fingers and soak his shirt. O’Dell sat up stiffly on his bed not looking at anything. There was very little color in his face, and I could see his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed. His nose seeped only a trickle of blood.

I went to the bathroom, put cold water on a facecloth, wrung it out, and handed it to Grimes on the floor. He held it against his nose.

“You can’t stonewall,” Quirk said. “You’re down here representing somebody with enough clout to get the cooperation of the local Sheriff. Since you’re from DeeCee, it’s probably somebody in government. You’ve participated in a kidnapping. You’ve been caught by a policeman. We get the U.S. Attorney down here from Columbia with one phone call. We get the press down here with one other phone call. You people have fucked the duck, and your only chance to step out of it is to talk to me, frankly”-Quirk flashed the humorless smile again-“and openly.”

I could hear both breathing, and then O’Dell sighed.

“You got a good argument,” he said. We waited.

The late morning sun beamed in through the east-facing bedroom window, and highlighted the dust motes, which drifted in and out of sight as they passed through the sunlight. The motel room was generic. Combination desk, dresser with a television set. A straight chair, two queen-sized beds separated by a table. A phone on the table, a lamp on the wall above it. The walls were beige, the rug was tan, there was an inexpensively framed print on the wall of some Anjou pears in a rose medallion bowl. The closet was behind a louvered door, the bath was past it. There was a brown Naugahyde armchair by the window. On top of the television set was a cardboard stand-up, which described the fun to be had in their lounge.

Grimes continued to hold the cloth against his nose. O’Dell sat up straight. His face was pale and scared; his wide, loose mouth seemed hard to manage.

“You used to work for the government,” Quirk said. “Twenty years in, you took your pension and your contacts and set up in business for yourself.”

“Yes,” O’Dell said.

“And when you were a Fed,” Quirk said, “you mostly spent your time subpoenaing records.”

O’Dell started to protest and stopped and shrugged his high shoulders and nodded.

“You’re in with tough guys, now,” Quirk said.

O’Dell nodded. His hands were folded down at his paralleled thumbs, and he studied them, as if to make sure they were perfectly aligned.

“Your original question,” O’Dell said.

Quirk nodded. Grimes’s nose appeared to have stopped bleeding. But he continued to sit on the floor with his head in his hands.

“The thing is, we don’t know what the fuck is going on.”

“Tell me what you can,” Quirk said. His voice was quiet.

Grimes’s pale blond hair was thinning on top. With his head down, it showed the care with which he had combed his hair to hide that fact. The interchange with me had badly disarranged it, and, stiff with hair spray, the hair stood at random angles.

“We were told to come down here and try to get what he had found out about Olivia Nelson,” O’Dell said.

Quirk smiled.

He said, “Un huh?”

“That’s why we were kinda rough in the cell there,” O’Dell said. “We didn’t really know what to ask.”

Quirk smiled understandingly.

“And you had four guys to help you,” Quirk said.

O’Dell shrugged. “Who asked you to find this out?” Quirk said.

“Mal Chapin.”

“Short for Malcolm?” Quirk said.

“I guess.”

“And who is Mal Chapin?” Quirk said.

O’Dell looked surprised. In his circles, Mal Chapin was probably an important name. “Senator Stratton’s office.”

“He hired you?”

“Well, yeah. We’re, like, ah, friends of the office, you know?”

“And the office steers business your way,” Quirk said.

“Sure. That’s how DeeCee works.”

“Who arranged the deal with the Alton County Sheriff?”

“I don’t know. I assume it was Mal. He’s got a lot of clout with Party people around the country.”

“And when you found out what Spenser knew,” Quirk said, “what then?”

“We see if we can scare him off,” O’Dell said.

“That’ll be the day,” I said.

I sounded exactly like John Wayne. No one seemed to notice. Quirk looked at O’Dell for a long, silent moment. Then he took one of the business cards out of his pocket and went to the phone. He read the dialing instructions, and dialed.

“This is Lieutenant Martin Quirk,” he said. “Is Reilly O’Dell there?… How about Edgar Grimes?… I’m the Homicide Commander, Boston Police Department. Please describe O’Dell for me.”

He waited. Then he nodded. “How about Grimes?” he said. He waited some more.

Then he said, “No, Miss, that’s fine. Just routine police business. What is your name, Miss? Thank you. No, they are not involved in a homicide.”

He hung up. “Your secretary is worried about you,” he said.

Neither of them said anything.

“What is your secretary’s first name?” Quirk said to O’Dell.

“Molly,” O’Dell said.

“What’s her last name?” Quirk said to Grimes.