Poisoned Pins (27 page)

I snatched up the packet and went into the office. “Excuse me,” I said coldly, “but I'd like you to see if you recognize any of these girls.”

“What are you—a high school principal?”

I spread out the photographs. “I do not care to discuss my personal life. Have any of these girls ever rented rooms here?”

Clearly daunted by my steely demeanor, he studied each photograph with great care, occasionally whistling softly or holding one so closely his breath clouded it. He licked his lips so often that soon his chin was glistening, but no more so than his beady little eyes. I was finally getting somewhere, I told myself smugly as I waited for his response.

“No, never seen any of them.” He picked up the tabloid and flipped it open. “Can you believe this about Elvis? I for one think he's deader'n a doornail, but people keep seeing him all the time. I don't see how he can keep popping up like this if he's dead.” He scratched his head with enough enthusiasm to send flakes of dandruff adrift.

“Elvis is dead, and you have seen these girls before,” I retorted, a shade less smugly but determined to hear the truth if I had to shake it out of him. “If you refuse to admit it, I will call the police and report indications of prostitution and drug transactions on these very premises.”

He wrenched one eye off the “actual artist's depiction” of Elvis entering the White House. “You got no proof.”

“No, but I'll tell them I do, and once they start poking around, I'm sure they'll find plenty of evidence. If nothing else, there must be enough violations of the health and fire codes to close you down.”

He plucked the cigarette butt from his mouth and gaped at me as if I'd arisen from the page in front of him and, like the Peoria housewife, claimed to be capable of spontaneous combustion. “But that's lying, lady.”

“It most certainly is, and I must warn you that I've had a great deal of practice at it and will be quite convincing. Would you like to take another look at the photographs?”

“Maybe I ought to ask Doobie,” the man said as he dropped the butt and ground it out on the floor. “He's usually on the night desk, but he wanted to switch so's he could watch some fool basketball game. Won't take more than a minute.” He gathered up the photographs and disappeared through a doorway, the door closing behind him before I could protest.

As I waited, I became aware that I might as well have been on the screen of the drive-in movie theater. The darkness outside emphasized the lights of the office, and I knew I was visible from the far reaches of
the parking lot, if not the highway. Unlike the Kappa Theta Etas, I was not haunted by the specter of a tainted reputation, but the thought of having to explain my presence at the Hideaway Haven was so chilling that goose bumps dotted my arms and whatever hackles I possessed rose on my neck. I was tempted to hide behind the lurid pages of the tabloid, then considered the additional hardship of explaining both my presence and my reading material to anyone who drove by. Such as a cop.

Nearly fifteen minutes had passed by the time the manager returned, the photographs in his hand and a deeply distrustful look on his face. I closed the tabloid, thus doomed never to find out the facts about Big Foot's amorous attack on a Canadian farmwife, and smiled expectantly.

“Doobie ain't seen any of them,” he reported, avoiding my eyes and speaking with all the animation of a dead Elvis. “He sez they're welcome anytime, dressed or otherwise, and in particular that piece of angel food cake with the black hair, but he ain't seen any of them. But”—he held up a grimy hand to stop me from retorting—”Doobie sez Hank might have been on duty some of the time, so you can come back next week and ask him. Hank took his wife to a bowling tournament over in Sallisaw, on account of it being her birthday.”

“It took all this time for Doobie to say that?” I said.

Once again dandruff rained softly on his shoulders as his fingernails dug into his scalp. “Doobie studied the pictures real carefully before he decided he hadn't seen them girls. We get all kinds of college kids out here, especially on the weekends, and they all look the same, a bunch of Kens and Barbies in designer clothes and fancy athletic shoes.”

As I put the photographs back in the packet, I decided to take one last shot. “There's someone else who might have been here frequently,” I began, then proceeded to describe John Vanderson.

The manager flinched, his eyebrows furrowing for a
second, his lips suddenly in need of a lick. “No, nobody like that.”

I'd seen the recognition in his eyes, the same flicker I'd seen in Winkie's when I'd rattled off the description in her suite. I said as much, but he steadfastly denied having seen John Vanderson, and at last took his tabloid and went into the back room. This time the door slammed a sullen goodbye, although I suspected in his mind it was a more colorful idiom involving areas of his anatomy—or mine.

Lacking the courage to storm after him, I went back to my car. As I reached for the handle, I heard a faint groan, and swung around to stare at the impenetrable darkness of the parking lot alongside the building. “Hello?” I called tentatively. “Is someone hurt?”

A second groan was as slight and insubstantial as the breeze that carried it. It was not the whimper of a sick animal, I decided as I moved toward the corner, crushing the packet in my damp hand, keenly conscious of my vulnerability and my inexperience in dealing with mishaps at brothels.

A few cars were parked in front of motel units, but heavy curtains kept any light from spilling onto the pavement. Across the narrow lot stretched a vast field that undulated like a serene expanse of ocean, dotted only by stubby, skeletal trees and the rotted remains of a car.

I stopped in the oblong of light from the office, shielded my eyes, and peered for some indication of the location of the groaner. “Is someone there?” I called.

Headlights came to life, blinded me, startled me as if I were a deer on the highway, left me rooted and unable to so much as blink. An engine roared. Tires dug into the gravel, spinning and shrieking. The headlights charged me. What flashed before me was not an encapsulated version of my thirty-nine years of life, but a much more vivid image of what I'd resemble if I didn't move pretty darn soon. Pancake batter came to mind.

I flung myself into the side of the building. The headlights veered at me, then swept past while gravel pelted me like hail. I peeled myself off the wall in time to see swirling taillights as the car squealed onto the highway and sped away.

The manager and his unseen pal Doobie did not rush out to ask me if I was all right, and in fact did not so much as poke their noses out of the back room to ascertain if the window was shattered and the floor splattered with blood from my mangled corpse.

Massaging my shoulder with one hand while picking gravel from my elbow with the other, I made it to my car and eased awkwardly into the driver's seat. Once the doors were locked, I inventoried the innumerable throbs, and concluded nothing was broken or even seriously damaged, with the exception of my amiable nature and sense of humor. What a lovely target I'd made, I thought angrily as I removed a chunk of gravel from my raw knee. Had I been invisible to a pie-eyed drunk or had someone tried to frighten me—or kill me in the same fashion he or she had killed Jean Hall?

A station wagon pulled in next to me. Two teenage girls, both dressed in skimpy shorts and skimpier halters, tramped into the office, banged on the silver bell, and exercised their magenta-lined lips until the manager emerged from the back room. After some discussion and a great deal of hilarity, a second man came out the same door, his arms laden with beers and his porcine face contorted with a leer.

If he was Doobie, then neither of the men had exited through a back door and attempted to run me down. Then again, it had taken Doobie a suspiciously long time to determine that he didn't recognize any of the Kappas. It had certainly been long enough to call someone. But who? I hadn't caught so much as a
glimpse of the driver, and I was fairly sure no witnesses would come out of the motel rooms to offer a description of the car or its driver. Calling the police might lead to momentary amusement when they demanded the names and addresses of the Hideaway Haven clientele, but it ran the real threat of obliging me to explain all sorts of complicated things . . . to Lieutenant Rosen.

The little party in the office was well on its way to an orgy by the time I went inside, politely ignoring Doobie's hand inside a halter and the semi-seduction in progress on a noxious red plastic couch, and announced, “Someone tried to run me down in the parking lot. I insist that you call the police right this minute.”

“Oh, honey,” said one of the girls, her fake eyelashes fluttering like moribund spiders, “look at your poor knee. Doobie, why doncha take your hand off my tit and get the first-aid-box for the lady? Can't you see she's bleeding like a stuck pig?” She gave me a solicitous smile as she guided me to a chair and settled me down as if I were an errant patient from the nursing home. “I'm taking a course in home nursing this summer. If Doobie'11 get his lazy butt in gear, I'll fix you up in no time flat.”

Perching on the counter, the other girl popped her gum as if she were chomping down on a firecracker. “Why'd somebody try to run over you? Did you like have a fight with your boyfriend or something? Me and my boyfriend had a fight last week, and he showed up drunk at my house and tried to rip out all my hair. I learned him a lesson or two.”

Doobie and the manager were conferring nervously behind her. My would-be nurse repeated her demand for medical supplies while her friend described in gruesome detail how she'd dealt with someone named Billy Bob or Bobby Bill or whatever, who reputedly was limping. I simply sat and waited for the two men to figure it out, and after a final exchange of bellicose whispers, they did.

The manager came across the room and thrust out his hand. “Lemme see those pictures again.”

The girls attached themselves to his arms and oohed and giggled as he flipped through the photographs. Shrugging them off, he said, “Yeah, a few of them have been here, but I dint ask for names or anything. This is the sort of place where everybody's name is Smith, and the only thing I care about is the color of the cash.”

“Which girls?” I asked with commendable composure.

He handed me half a dozen shots. “Some of the others may have been here, too, and stayed in the car while their friend paid for the room. Sometimes I happen to see ‘em when they come out to get sodas from the machine, if I'm looking.”

Four of the girls were unknown to me. I was less than astonished to find Pippa among the crowd, but my jaw dropped as I gaped at Debbie Anne Wray wiggling into pink shorts. “Are you sure about this one?”

He looked over his shoulder at Doobie, who nodded sullenly. “That one,” he said, sucking on his lower lip, “was staying here up until yesterday. I dunno what she was doing, but she paid for a full week and dint bother anybody.”

I rose slowly out of deference to both my knee and a bout of dehabilitating bewilderment. “How did she get here? Did she have any visitors? When she left, did she say anything about where she was going? Who picked her up?”

“This ain't a Girl Scout camp,” he said, beginning to retreat as I closed in on him. “She showed up middle of the afternoon on maybe Friday, no suitcase or anything—but that's nothing new. Once I saw her going across the highway to a convenience store, another time at the soda machine. The only reason I know she split is that the door was open in the morning and I went over to see if she'd dropped dead. There wasn't nothing in the room but cups and hamburger wrappers.”

“I saw her getting in a truck,” volunteered the girl who'd popped her gum so bombastically. “Darlene and me were hanging out here while Doobie went to buy us some beer, and the only reason I noticed was that the truck was green like Doobie's and I was gonna be pissed if he'd forgotten to get our beer on account of some simpery whore.”

“That's right,” Doobie said from the doorway. “She left with some clown and never came back. Look, lady, the girls came by to have a little fun, and unless you'd like to join us in the back room, why don't you run along?”

I was moderately confident that I would not be assaulted in view of the highway, but his tone held enough menace to suggest distasteful possibilities. I washed them a pleasant evening, darted to my car, and drove away from the Hideaway Haven as briskly as the law allowed.

Once I'd parked in my garage, I sat in the dark and examined this most peculiar story. Debbie Anne had appeared at the motel on Friday, the afternoon of Jean's death, and remained there until the previous morning, when she'd gotten in what had to be Arnie's truck and found a new burrow. Based on what little I'd heard, she'd done so with no visible coercion or intimidation. And where had the photographer who would be chauffeur taken her? Not to the sorority house. Ed Whitbred had mentioned that Arnie had not been home since the raid, and presumably he would have noticed if Debbie Anne had been hiding next door.

If she'd moved to another motel, I'd never find her—and I was beginning to feel it was imperative that I did. I preferred to think someone had tried to frighten me; whoever it was had succeeded. Suddenly, the dark recesses of the garage seemed more a hiding place for aspiring killers than a storage area for broken tennis rackets, brittle newspapers, and furniture that would never be refinished.

I made sure the bolt on the kitchen door was firmly in place before I snapped on a light and called for
Caron. Her failure to answer did not prove she wasn't there, but a quick search did. I was by no means surrounded by silence, however. The bottle clinked against the rim of the glass as I poured myself a stiff drink, and the ice cubes rattled as I went into the living room and settled on the sofa. Nocturnal birds chirruped in the trees, as did tree frogs and crickets. The woman who lived below me was watching television. An occasional car drove past the house, its headlights flashing on the ceiling.