The Butcher's Boy (10 page)

"Take your pick," said Mistretta. "They've closed off the whole floor for the time being. They're all empty."

They tried the next room, but it was torn up too.

"The assistant's room?" asked Hart.

"Right," said Mistretta, who closed the door and led them to the next one.

Inside, Elizabeth ’s imagination felt comfortable again. The room was designed to be exactly the same as the Senator's, but it still had that peculiar air of suspension that hotel rooms seemed to have, as though somebody had been there so recently that if you turned your head quickly some relic or remnant of their personal lives would be visible for an instant. She walked around the room, opening drawers, peering into the closet, finally, focusing her attention on the bathroom. Everything gleamed with a precarious expectancy that made her want to open the seals and move things around, like walking on fresh snow. But her mind moved for her, counting and calculating and remembering.

When she returned to the bedroom Hart was kneeling in the open doorway scrutinizing the locks. He said, to nobody in particular, "Not much to stop anybody if the deadbolt wasn't in."

Mistretta said, "No good. The assistant says their bags were with them from the time they left the airport, and they didn't go out after they got here.

When he left the Senator threw the bolt. In the morning they had to call the maintenance man with an electromagnetic gizmo to open it up. That didn't work either because the fit was too tight, so they drilled it."

Elizabeth wondered why she hadn't seen that, but apparently Hart hadn't either. It wasn't much comfort, she realized, as she walked to the window.

Mistretta saw her fiddling with the latch and said, "That's been checked too. There's a little wear on the molding, but the lock is working perfectly. No prints on the inside handle, and no handle on the outside."

Elizabeth went out onto the balcony. It was really night now and an icy wind clutched at her hair and the skirt of her coat. She looked around at the identical balconies, beside her and above and below. No, it was probably too farfetched. Four floors below her was the parking lot, where the cars were only shiny-colored rectangles with no depth to them. Somebody who wanted to kill a senator could do it in a thousand ways that didn't involve swinging on a rope that high up in the cold. Might as well ask, anyway.

Elizabeth came in and shut the window. The air in the room seemed unnaturally still and quiet and warm. "What about the balcony?" she asked. "Any way to tell if anyone was on it?"

"Not much point to it, since the lock would have kept him in the cold anyway," said Mistretta, "but they checked it. There wasn't anything much. No prints on the railings, no rope marks, nothing on the glass except the usual smudges and a couple of spots where the maid had given it a quick swipe with a dustrag."

Elizabeth said, "Wait a minute. Let's go take a look."

Mistretta shrugged and followed her back to the Senator's room. Hart appeared to be unaware of them; he was now in the bathroom, kneeling beside the bathtub and studying the drain.

Elizabeth went directly to the Senator's window, walked out to the balcony, and looked back into the lighted room. There was a thin film of dust over the whole surface of the glass, dappled with lighter dots where fingers had touched it. But in two places about two and a half feet apart, there were clean spots, where someone had brushed a cloth in a circular motion. She came back inside.

"Joe, the whole window is covered with prints and smudges and dust, except those two places. The one we were in before doesn't have any clean spots."

The telephone rang, and it startled her. "Hello?" she said, far too loud.

"Mike Lang here."

"Yes, Mike," said Elizabeth .

"I think it's going to be a long night. The poison turned out to be curare, of all things. It's in the glass where he soaked his dentures, in the dentures, and no place else. No container anywhere, either, and the Polident box is clean."

"So it is murder," said Elizabeth .

"I hate to pin it down that tight, but I'm damned if I see any other 47

explanation. He couldn't have carried curare in without a container, and a man doesn't kill himself with his own false teeth. At least not if he's got any sense of dignity."

"No. But curare? Are you sure? It's not exactly the American murderer's favorite form of poison, is it?"

"Of course I'm sure. And I don't have anything else to tell you that'll make it seem sensible. But at this point I'd be willing to listen to anything anybody else has."

"I think there's a chance somebody came in from the balcony," said Elizabeth . "We're not sure yet, but it looks as though somebody had both hands on the glass, about chest high."

"You mean they got prints on it?" asked Lang. "Terrific!"

"No," said Elizabeth . "That's just it. Somebody wiped the glass off.

Nobody who works for a hotel would wipe two spots on a six-by-eight-foot window. They'd wash it or forget it. And no guest would wipe the outside of a window for any reason."

"Is Mistretta with you?"

"Yes, he's right here."

"Then let me talk to him."

Elizabeth handed the phone to Joe, who listened intently for a few seconds and then said, "Yeah, it's possible she's right, but we're still looking it over."

He listened again, then said, "The police didn't think so. No. Too obvious, I guess. The window latch was the first thing they went for after the corpse was moved. They said no indication of forced entry."

He was silent for a moment. "Yeah, that too. Of course. We'll keep you posted."

Mistretta hung up and chuckled. "That's something, isn't it?" he said to Elizabeth. "We earn our pay on this one all right. Which do you want to work on first? Proving a man came in through the locked fourth-floor window because there are no fingerprints, or figuring out how he arrived at the idea of using curare on the old guy's false teeth when he got here? I don't suppose the MO file will help much on this one, unless it was a South American pygmy we're looking for." He shook his head and the false bravado began to fade.

Elizabeth wasn't looking at him, though. She was standing before the window with both hands in front of her. "Pygmies don't live in South America,"

she muttered absently, staring at her reflection.

"I suppose we'd better get the forensics people back up here," he said, picking up the telephone again.

Elizabeth didn't turn, just said, "Yes. I'd like to be here when they come."

She'd never noticed that before, she thought. When you press your palms against a flat surface, the tips of your fingers are just exactly shoulder height. If you allowed for shoe soles, five foot ten? Six feet? They'd measure it, though.

You could always count on them to measure.

Hart came into the room, bringing with him his notepad, still scribbling on it. He said, "I heard a phone ring. Was it the lab report?"

"That's right," said Elizabeth. "It was curare that was put into the glass where he soaked his dentures, believe it or not. Mixed with his Polident."

"What's the report on the rest of his stuff? Any curare or containers for it?" He seemed to Elizabeth to be hiding his surprise at the poison and it annoyed her a little. How could he not be surprised?

"No," she said tonelessly.

"Then I'd say we have only a few things we can check on," he said. "One is that somebody close enough to him to get into his luggage put poison on one of the Polident tablets and only one. Maybe his assistant or whoever packed his bags. Another is that somebody tampered with them between Washington and here." He hesitated for a moment, but Elizabeth wasn't going to help him, since he hadn't had the decency to be surprised. Then he said, "But I'd say the least unlikely thing is that somebody came in through the window."

"The forensics people are on their way up now to check the window out,"

said Mistretta. “ Elizabeth figured it out a little while ago."

"Good thinking, Elizabeth," he said, with apparent sincerity.

Elizabeth wasn't ready to accept the compliment. Patronizing bastards, all of them. She was past that part of it anyway, thinking about the killer. He had to be athletic, or at least fit, to be able to go from any other room to this one. No matter how it was done he still had to get from one balcony to another in the cold and dark. That probably meant he wasn't over forty. He was between five foot nine and six feet tall. And he was sneaky. God, he was sneaky.

There was something clean about the sun in Las Vegas . Even in February there was a searing, blinding white light that made you feel as if you were being sterilized, even cauterized, so there wasn't a germ that could stick to you.

Everything extraneous would be burned off your skin, desiccated and sucked dry, its empty husk blown clattering away in the hot wind out of the desert. Even the air itself felt like that—a breeze that carried with it tiny abrasive particles of ground-up quartz and topaz too small to see. You could feel them buffing and polishing away at you.

He rolled over on his stomach. Better be careful the first time out. Getting a sunburn on top of all those scrapes and bruises would be about the limit of what he could endure. He could already feel the sun gradually heating up his back and shoulders, breathing its energy into them so that moment by moment the temperature of his skin rose in infinitesimal gradients. In a few more minutes, he decided, he'd go back to his room and get cleaned up, then take a 49

nice long nap before dinner. Your body heals faster while you sleep, he thought.

There was no reason to think about anything at all until Friday night. Friday was payday.

The soft electronic female voices were alternating on the public address system: "Telephone for Mr. Harrison Rand. Harrison Rand, telephone. Telephone for Princess Karina. Princess Karina, telephone," a steady murmur going out across the swimming pool from nowhere in particular, the volume just high enough to flicker across the corner of your consciousness. There was no more urgency to it than the constant whir and click of the slot machines in the casino.

This, he thought, was the only place he knew of where clock time didn't matter.

You measured time against the size of your bankroll—unless you were lying on a chaise longue next to the swimming pool, he remembered. Then the sun would damned well remind you what time it was if you weren't careful. Enough for today.

He sat up and put on the dark brown terrycloth robe and zoris he'd picked up in one of the hotel stores this afternoon. Then he changed his mind again.

The vast empty surface of the swimming pool sparkled at him. There was time enough for one more dip in the water, he thought. There was no reason not to do exactly as he pleased, and swimming was good for you—the best thing in the world for damaged muscles, and it would be time to stop when you didn't feel like it anymore.

The water was warm, almost hot, like a gigantic Roman bath. He swam lazily from one end to the other, testing the flex and fluidity of his muscles against the solidity and support of the water. It had always struck him as funny that they should have a heated pool that was twice the size of the ones they used in the Olympics, and that he should be alone in it every time. People who were serious about swimming didn't drive through the desert to do it. He stopped at the shallow end and let himself go limp in the warm water, feeling the deliciousness of it, held there as though by a broad, gentle hand. He floated on his back, surveying the people sprawled on lawn chairs, absorbing the sunlight. Most of them had probably been up all night, he thought. Gambling, drinking, fucking, and now they were recharging their batteries by the energy of the sun. No, they weren't swimmers, but it seemed to comfort them to be near all that water. Something to look at through your polarized sunglasses while you waited for night.

He swam back to the deep end, acutely aware of the workings of his muscles as he stroked. He was going to be all right. Everything felt exactly as he wanted it to. At least his body did. His head was going to take longer. It felt big and soft and sensitive today, a peeled pumpkin held in anxious balance on a neck too thin for it. Just so there weren't any scars on his face. The pain he could live with.

He pulled himself up out of the pool and flopped down on his chaise longue. In a few seconds he could feel the water on his body disappearing into the parched desert air, leaving his skin feeling tight. He let the sun settle its 50

gentle pressure on his face for a few moments before he put on his sunglasses.

Then he closed his eyes and let himself slip into a state that felt as good as sleep but wasn't quite a relinquishment of consciousness. "Telephone for Mr. Arthur Walters. Arthur Walters, telephone. Telephone for Mrs. Natalie Beamish, Natalie Beamish, telephone," crooned the soft unanxious voices in monotonous alternation.

"You do all that to yourself or did you have help?" said a voice above him.

His eyes flicked open for an instant like camera shutters behind the sunglasses, and brought back with them into the darkness an imprint of the familiar, hulking shape. Little Norman .

"You know how it is, Little Norman," he answered. "You want something done right, you have to do it yourself." He heard the scrape as Little Norman dragged a lawn chair across the pavement to his side. Little Norman . The first thing anybody said when he heard the name was that he never wanted to see Big Norman. Little Norman was six foot four without his hand-tooled Mexican cowboy boots, and must have weighed in at two-fifty without the two rolls of quarters he always had in his pockets. As if those fists needed the extra weight.

And Little Norman was no longer young. He had to be at least fifty-five and semiretired, so that wasn't it either.

"What brings you to Caesar's Palace, Little Norman?" he said. "I thought you hung around at the Sands."

"Nice sunny day out," said Little Norman. "Good day to get a tan." Little Norman was wearing his usual tailor-made suit and stiff-collared white shirt with pearl studs. Little Norman was also blacker than the bottom of a coal mine.