Body Blows

by Marc Strange

  “Joe Grundy, right? I’m Detective Mooney.”

  “I chased somebody down the fire stairs, Detective,” I say. “Don’t know if they started from this floor. And someone had a motorcycle stashed at the construction site.”

  “Get a look at it?”

  “Went by in a hurry. Wasn’t big. Sounded like a dirt bike, 250cc, something like that. And you’ve got a dead body at the bottom of that construction pit. Hard to tell anything in the dark. He could have come straight down from the railing out there.”

  “Oh,Christ,” he says sadly. “Wait here.”

  Mooney goes off to make arrangements for more police.

  “Tell who it is?” Gritch asks.

  “He’s stuck on top of a pylon or something. Twelve feet off the deck.”

  “Be tricky getting him down,” he says.

  Roland says, “Somebody fell from here?”

  “Or got tossed,” says Gritch.

  Mooney looks around at the crowded foyer. More cops are arriving. “Can you arrange for another room?” he wants to know. “We’ll have to seal off this floor.”

  Gritch gets on the cellphone and tells Raymond D’Aquino, the night manager, what needs to be done.

  “What does it look like to you, Detective?” I ask.

  “Tell you one thing,” he says. “Looks like she put up a helluva fight.”

  I don’t find the statement comforting. The image doesn’t sit well.

  The Lord Douglas has almost a full house tonight and Leo won’t inconvenience guests. Raymond did the best he could. We’re on the eighth floor, in a small suite that hasn’t yet reopened because the new shower stall was damaged during installation. Leo looks completely out of place, sitting at the writing-desk/vanity/entertainment centre, doodling on hotel stationery with a hotel ballpoint, diamonds and Xs and checkerboards, now and then looking at his face in the mirror, looking his age, not liking what he sees.

  Gritch is standing in the hall giving a statement to Pazzano. Roland has been released to continue his shift. Connie comes to me, puts her arm through mine, we stand side by side squeezing each other’s upper arms.

  “You okay, big guy?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Might want to restrict kisses on the right cheek for a few days.”

  “Aww, that’s my favourite.” She glances at Leo. “He going to make it?”

  “It’s killing him,” I say.

  “You knew her, didn’t you?”

  “She was always there.”

  She looks up at me. I know what she’s asking. She has eloquent eyebrows. I shrug.

  “After you talk to the detectives why don’t you head home?” I give her arm an extra squeeze. “I’ve got a lot to do. They might want to bring us down to the station for statements.”

  “Why?”

  “I was his bodyguard. Obviously he was concerned about his safety. They’re going to want to know what he was concerned about.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “I never did,” I say.

  She pulls her arm free, turns to stand in front of me, hits me softly on the chest with the flat of her hand.

  “This is a story, you know,” she says.

  “Do your job, Connie. It’ll be okay. It’s going to come out. I’d rather you set the tone than the front page of the Emblem.”

  Mooney talks to Leo inside the suite while I have a chat with Pazzano in the hall. It’s four a.m., we’ve agreed to show up at the station in the morning for a more detailed statement. Right now, all Pazzano wants are the basics: when did we leave, when did we come back, who was she? That’s the question that hits the hardest. Past tense. She was. She isn’t any longer.

  Raquel. Mendez. Raquel Esperanza Mendez. She lived up there. She had her own suite. She was Leo’s housekeeper. I don’t know if she had any family. I don’t know if she and Leo had “a thing.”

  My own questions are met with the usual police reticence. The body hasn’t been recovered from the construction site, no identification, and no motorcyclists have been apprehended, and when we know, you’ll know. Maybe. I won’t hold my breath.

  After Mooney and Pazzano quit for the night I check on Leo. He’s taking off his tux and putting on a hotel robe.

  “I’ll need a suit for the morning,” he says.

  “I’ll get it, sir,” I say.

  “In the morning.”

  “Yes, sir. Just tell me what you want.”

  “In the morning,” he says.

  “Are you going to be all right in here? Raymond says he can move you into the Ambassador Suite tomorrow.”

  “You get some sleep, Joseph.”

  “I could stick around, sir, if you want to talk or anything.”

  “No. I’d rather be alone now.”

  As I head for the door he stops me without raising his voice.

  “Joseph?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I need to know who did this.”

  “The police will take care of it, I’m sure,” I say. “It looks like a robbery that went sour.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe that’s what happened.”

  The lobby is almost deserted — exhausted late arrivals checking in, a vacuum cleaner pushed along the far wall. The police presence is evident but low-key — one marked cruiser still near the entrance, one further down the block. I feel weary. My knee hurts. Too much dancing probably.

  Gritch follows me around as I climb out of the overpriced soup and fish that I can’t imagine ever wearing again.

  “Might want to get those pants sponged and pressed,” says Gritch.

  “I suppose.”

  “Tiny perfect newswoman gone home?”

  “She has,” I say. “Unless she decides to do a special report from the front steps.”

  “Think this will be a big story?”

  “Not to her,” I say. “She’d rather be dodging RPGs around Kandahar.”

  “Damn,” Gritch says. “I never checked back on that limo driver.”

  “It can wait,” I say. “I’m hoping there’s nothing.”

  “You mention it to the cops?”

  “No.”

  “You going to mention it to the cops?”

  “Sure. Sooner or later,” I tell him.

  “What are you being coy about?”

  “I’m being careful. I don’t know what’s going on with Leo. Has he got himself into something? We still haven’t had a straight talk about any of this.”

  “You know anything about the demon biker you haven’t told the cops?”

  “Nope. Strangers in the night,” I say. “I know he was in a hurry to get out of there.”

  “Don’t blame him,” says Gritch. “I don’t like people unexpectedly dropping in either.”

  As I’m hanging up my jacket I feel the extra weight in the pocket. Three fine cigars sheathed in leather, and a heavy gold lighter.

  “Check the other pocket,” says Gritch. “Maybe there’s a ham sandwich.”

  Gritch and I sit for a while in my “private space,” the small office between the main office and my living quarters. I sit at Louis Schurr’s old desk, in his creaky oak chair with the one wobbly castor, and Gritch sits on a chair that he drags in. We light up a hundred dollars’ worth of Cohibas and fill the confines with expensive smog.

  “All connected, right? Gotta be.” Gritch is being hypothetical. “Two is coincidence, three is conspiracy. What they say. Got the trashed award plaque thingy, got The Case of the Missing Ponytail, and then there’s —” I know what just went through his head … the first two are absurd, the last was tragic. “— what happened upstairs,” he finishes carefully.

  “Could be connected,” I say.

  “Damn right could be. And don’t forget what happened seven years ago, eight years ago. That could be connected. Whoever did that is still running around loose.”

  “As far as we know,” I say.

  “We know diddly. Except we know nobody got arrested for that little caper, and
we know Leo was still being careful about something, otherwise why would he drag your carcass to a fancy-dress ball?”

  “He was tense. All evening,” I say. “He handled it well but I could tell. Like he was waiting for something.”

  “Been waiting for the other shoe to drop for eight years,” says Gritch.

  Eight years ago.

  Leo didn’t come to see me. I would have checked myself out of the hospital by the third day but he insisted that I take my time. His personal GP was keeping an eye on me. Madge Killian bounced in with flowers and a fruit basket and magazines. She seemed really proud of me, kept patting me on my good shoulder. She told me that Leo had arranged for someone named Wallace Gritchfield to provide security for me.

  “He should keep it for himself,” I say. “Until whoever did it is caught.”

  “He’s in a secure location,” she says. “He wants you to come and see him when Dr. Markle releases you. Not a day before.”

  “I will,” I say.

  Wallace Gritchfield didn’t look like a bodyguard. He was short, round, balding, and looked like he’d stopped a few pucks with his nose over the years.

  “Hi,” he says. “Call me Gritch. Leo wants me to park myself in the hall overnight, make sure nobody tries to finish the job. ‘Course if they come through the window, you’re screwed.”

  “I don’t think it’s necessary. They weren’t after me.”

  “If he really thought you were in danger he’d have a platoon of rent-a-cops at the main entrance. The old man doesn’t fool around.”

  “You work for him?”

  “I do security at the hotel.”

  “What hotel is that?” I ask.

  I didn’t know much about the Lord Douglas back then. I’d never stayed there. It was out of my price range. My manager, Morley Kline, liked to have a drink in the Press Club once in a while, shoot the breeze with the sportswriters, Hap Reynolds sometimes gave us a promo for an upcoming fight. I guess the hotel was showing her age, had faded somewhat from her heyday. Still, she had that look, the look that grand hotels have — a lobby as big as a ballroom, lofty as a cathedral, crystal chandeliers, washroom attendants, and mahogany doors on the water closets. If the Persian rugs had a wide pathway worn from entrance to elevators, and the leather sofa cushions sagged a little in the middle, there was no mistaking the era, or the refined sensibility of the people who had built the place. The Lord Douglas wasn’t a rush job. She wasn’t poured concrete, she was cut stone.

  “The house dick, Ceece Lund’s his name, had a thrombosis about, I don’t know, six months ago maybe,” Gritch is telling me. “I was working for him for seventeen, eighteen years, so I’ve been filling in. I don’t think he’s coming back. Ceece.”

  “Shouldn’t you be over there?”

  “I’m not the only guy working,” he says. “I’ve got assistants. Don’t know their asses from their elbows, either of ’em, but Leo knows where I am if something comes up.”

  “What kind of stuff comes up?”

  “What doesn’t?” he says.

  Leo was reopening the original owner’s penthouse above the Fifteenth Floor and was planning on living there. When I arrived there were workmen all over the place — plumbers, glaziers, electricians. Leo was personally overseeing every phase of the operation. He had already established a small office complete with phone, fax, computer, and a leather couch where he was spending his nights pending completion of his bedroom.

  “Joseph,” he says. “How are you feeling? How’s the arm?”

  “I’ve healed up just fine, sir,” I say. “How are you?”

  “Very busy, very busy, Joseph.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I don’t mean all the hammering,” he says. “I’m retrenching, circling the wagons so to speak. Backing away from a number of interests, going to concentrate on getting the Lord Douglas back on her feet.”

  “That’s nice, sir. She’s a fine old hotel.”

  “And I want you to be part of that.”

  “In what capacity, sir?”

  “Hotel security. There’s a job opening.”

  “Working for Mr. Gritchfield?”

  “No. He’d be working for you.”

  Gritch had spent much of his working life sitting between a fern and a palm tree in the lobby of the Lord Douglas, from which observation post he surveyed every entry and departure. He was a married man, but his wife maintained that he was a bigamist and that his first wife was the hotel.

  In the old days Gritch would lift whatever newspaper he was hiding behind to sip from a flask but when we first teamed up he told me he was on the wagon.

  “I’ve been sober for three years,” Gritch told me. “Three years, three months, and one, two, three days, hey, no, it’s after midnight, four days.”

  “Congratulations,” I say.

  “No mean feat,” he says. “I was never a binge drinker. I was a steady, well-schooled, dedicated souse, ambulatory and capable of coherent discourse. I was a pro.”

  “What made you stop?”

  “Oh, you know, wife.”

  “Oh.”

  “She said there were three things in my life: the hotel, the booze, and her. She said I was going to have to drop one of them.”

  Louis Schurr retired a few months later, died a few months after that, and I started work at a job I wasn’t particularly well-suited for, running a small staff of less-than-stalwart operatives. Nonetheless, I managed to make a go of it, predominantly because of Wallace Gritchfield.

  That was eight years ago.

  “How many special keys are there anyway?” Gritch wants to know. “Keys that will get you up to the penthouse?”

  My expensive cigar suddenly tastes foul. Extravagance is an acquired habit. Gritch seems able to deal with it.

  “One in Lloyd’s office. We’ve got one.”

  “You carry that one all the time. Is there another one in this office?”

  I shake my head. “Maurice has one I think.”

  “Nope. Maurice has to get the one from Lloyd’s office.”

  “Got to be more than two, right?” I say. “Leo has one. And Raquel. She must’ve had one.”

  That brings a moment of silence.

  “Housekeeping,” I say. “Mrs. Dineen.”

  “Yeah. Her too,” Gritch says. “And there’s the fire door.”

  “Someone went out that way,” I say. “Why didn’t the bells start ringing?”

  “Maybe they knew the security code.”

  Right, I’m thinking — keys, security codes, but no cameras.

  “Should have had cameras up there,” I say. “The place just got outfitted with security cameras on every floor. Why didn’t Leo install them up there?”

  “Privacy,” says Gritch. “He’s a bear for his privacy.”

  chapter six

  First thing in the morning, before toast and coffee, I check in with Lloyd Gruber and Margo Traynor, manager and assistant manager respectively, in Margo’s office (Lloyd doesn’t like me in his office, he worries that I’ll break something). Their reactions are predictable. Margo says, “Oh, my God, that poor woman. Is Leo all right?” And Lloyd says, “Christ, the papers will have a field day!”

  He can put his worries on hold for a few hours at least. The morning papers haven’t yet picked up the story. I have a look at the Emblem in the Lobby Café while Hattie butters my toast.

  “It’s true, Joe?” She doesn’t want to believe it. “Raquel?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe it,” she says. “Such a nice person.”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “The police don’t know, I don’t know, Leo doesn’t know. It looks like someone broke in somehow.”

  “Up there? How?”

  “That’s what they’re trying to find out.”

  “Who would do a thing like that? Such a nice person,” Hattie says. “She gave me a Christmas card last year. She said Mr. Alexander
always spoke well of my mother.”

  “Yes, she was very thoughtful,” I say. I’ve just remembered that Raquel wanted me to pick up something for her. Where’s the receipt? Still in the pocket of my tux, likely. Leo’s not going to feel much like celebrating a birthday tomorrow, but I suppose I’d better attend to it anyway. I promised.

  “Is there going to be a funeral?”

  “I’ll let you know, Hattie,” I say. “The police haven’t released the body yet.”

  “Oh, the poor dear,” she says. “Such a sweet person.”

  The uniformed cop who lets me into Leo’s closet is impressed with the array. For someone who never went out, Leo has a long clothes rack. I follow Manny Bigalow’s old-school rules. “No cufflinks until evening …” White shirt, charcoal grey suit, striped tie. “Always appropriate …” Plenty to choose from — black shoes, dark grey socks. I get the socks and fresh underwear from one of the dressers in his bedroom. I’ve never been in here before. King-size bed faces a big-screen television, reading material on both side tables, an ashtray on the left side, a Martha Stewart magazine on the right. Leo’s linen is perfectly sorted and aligned in the dresser drawers. I can sense Raquel’s careful attention to detail. And something more. She smoothed these stacks of laundry with her hands before she closed the drawer. I can feel it.

  The policeman lets me stare into the living room for a few seconds before he gets twitchy about my presence. The French doors are smashed. Possible point of entry. But from where? The floor below? I’ll need to get out on the terrace to see if it’s possible, but that isn’t going to happen on this trip.

  “Sorry, sir. The Crime Scene Unit will be up here pretty soon. They want everything the way they left it.”

  “Sure, I understand,” I say.

  Dark sky, no sunrise, rain starting to fall. The air is unnaturally warm and humid. Leo stares through the windshield, doesn’t say a word, his mood as dreary as the clouds moving in across the water. When he gets out of the car I give him my arm. He has no strength this morning.

  “Did you get anything to eat, sir?”

  “My stomach’s in a knot,” he says.

  That makes two of us.

  Mooney and Pazzano tag-team the interviewing sessions, me in one room and Leo in another. Pazzano drops in to start things off.