Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

  "We don't know for sure the towels were dirty, Matt. We don't know he took a shower."

  "He chopped her up and put blood all over the walls. You think he got out of there without washing up?"

  "I guess not."

  "Would you take wet towels home for a souvenir? He had a reason."

  "Okay." A pause. "A psycho might not want to leave evidence. You're saying he's someone who knew her, who had a reason to kill her. You can't be sure of that."

  "Why did he have her come to the hotel?"

  "Because that's where he was waiting. Him and his little machete."

  "Why didn't he take his little machete to her place on Thirty-seventh Street?"

  "Instead of having her make house calls?"

  "Right. I spent the day talking to hookers. They aren't nuts about outcalls because of the travel time. They'll do them, but they usually invite the caller to come to their place instead, tell him how much more comfortable it is. She probably would have done that but he wasn't having any."

  "Well, he already paid for the room. Wanted to get his money's worth."

  "Why wouldn't he just as soon go to her place?"

  He thought about it. "She had a doorman," he said. "Maybe he didn't want to walk past the doorman."

  "Instead he had to walk through a whole hotel lobby and sign a registration card and speak to a desk clerk. Maybe he didn't want to pass that doorman because the doorman had seen him before. Otherwise a doorman's a lot less of a challenge than an entire hotel."

  "That's pretty iffy, Matt."

  "I can't help it. Somebody did a whole batch of things that don't make sense unless he knew the girl and had a personal reason for wanting her dead. He may be emotionally disturbed. Perfectly levelheaded people don't generally go batshit with a machete. But he's more than a psycho picking women at random."

  "How do you figure it? A boyfriend?"

  "Something like that."

  "She splits with the pimp, tells the boyfriend she's free, and he panics?"

  "I was thinking along those lines, yes."

  "And goes crazy with a machete? How does that mesh with your profile of a guy who decides he'd rather stay home with his wife?"

  "I don't know."

  "Do you know for sure she had a boyfriend?"

  "No," I admitted.

  "These registration cards. Charles O. Jones and all his aliases, if he ever had any. You think they're gonna lead anywhere?"

  "They could."

  "That's not what I asked you, Matt."

  "Then the answer's no. I don't think they're going to lead to anything."

  "But you still think it's worth doing."

  "I'd have gone through the cards myself at the Galaxy Downtowner," I reminded him. "On my own time, if the guy would have let me."

  "I suppose we could run the cards."

  "Thanks, Joe."

  "I suppose we can run the other check, too. First-class commercial hotels in the area, their Jones registrations for the past six months or whatever. That what you wanted?"

  "That's right."

  "The autopsy showed semen in her throat and esophagus. You happen to notice that?"

  "I saw it in the file last night."

  "First he had her blow him, then he chopped her up with his boy scout hatchet. And you figure it was a boyfriend."

  "The semen could have been from an earlier contact. She was a hooker, she had a lot of contacts."

  "I suppose," he said. "You know, they can type semen now. It's not like a fingerprint, more like a blood type. Makes useful circumstantial evidence. But you're right, with her lifestyle it doesn't rule a guy out if the semen type's not a match."

  "And it doesn't rule him in if it is."

  "No, but it'd fucking well give him a headache. I wish she'd scratched him, got some skin under her nails. That always helps."

  "You can't have everything."

  "For sure. If she blew him, you'd think she could have wound up with a hair or two between her teeth. Whole trouble is she's too ladylike."

  "That's the trouble, all right."

  "And my trouble is I'm starting to believe there's a case here, with a killer at the end of a rainbow. I got a desk full of shit I haven't got time for and you've got me pulling my chain with this one."

  "Think how good you'll look if it breaks."

  "I get the glory, huh?"

  "Somebody might as well."

  I had three more hookers to call, Sunny and Ruby and Mary Lou. Their numbers were in my notebook. But I'd talked to enough whores for one day. I called Chance's service, left word for him to call me. It was Friday night. Maybe he was at the Garden, watching a couple of boys hit each other. Or did he just go when Kid Bascomb was fighting?

  I took out Donna Campion's poem and read it. In my mind's eye all the poem's colors were overlaid with blood, bright arterial blood that faded from scarlet to rust. I reminded myself that Kim had been alive when the poem was written. Why, then, did I sense a note of doom in Donna's lines? Had she picked up on something? Or was I seeing things that weren't really there?

  She'd left out the gold of Kim's hair. Unless the sun was supposed to cover that base. I saw those gold braids wrapped around her head and thought of Jan Keane's Medusa. Without giving it too much thought I picked up the phone and placed a call. I hadn't dialed the number in a long time but memory supplied it, pushing it at me as a magician forces a card on one.

  It rang four times. I was going to hang up when I heard her voice, low pitched, out of breath.

  I said, "Jan, it's Matt Scuddder."

  "Matt! I was just thinking of you not an hour ago. Give me a minute, I just walked in the door, let me get my coat off… There. How've you been? It's so good to hear from you."

  "I've been all right. And you?"

  "Oh, things are going well. A day at a time."

  The little catchphrases. "Still going to those meetings?"

  "Uh-huh. I just came from one, as a matter of fact. How are you doing?"

  "Not so bad."

  "That's good."

  What was it, Friday? Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. "I've got three days," I said.

  "Matt, that's wonderful!"

  What was so wonderful about it? "I suppose," I said.

  "Have you been going to meetings?"

  "Sort of. I'm not sure I'm ready for all that."

  We talked a little. She said maybe we'd run into each other at a meeting one of these days. I allowed that it was possible. She'd been sober almost six months, she'd qualified a couple of times already. I said it would be interesting sometime to hear her story. She said, "Hear it? God, you're in it."

  She was just getting back to sculpture. She'd put it all on hold when she got sober, and it was hard to make the clay do what she wanted it to do. But she was working at it, trying to keep it all in perspective, putting her sobriety first and letting the rest of her life fall into shape at its own pace.

  And what about me? Well, I said, I had a case, I was looking into a matter for an acquaintance. I didn't go into detail and she didn't press. The conversation slowed, and there were a few pauses in it, and I said, "Well, I just thought I'd call and say hello."

  "I'm glad you did, Matthew."

  "Maybe we'll run into each other one of these days."

  "I'd like that."

  I hung up and remembered drinking in her loft on Lispenard Street, warming and mellowing as the booze worked its magic in our veins. What a fine sweet evening that had been.

  At meetings you'll hear people say, "My worst day sober is better than my best day drunk." And everybody nods like a plastic dog on a Puerto Rican's dashboard. I thought about that night with Jan and looked around my little cell of a room and tried to figure out why this night was better than the other had been.

  I looked at my watch. The liquor stores were closed. The bars, though, would be open for hours yet.

  I stayed where I was. Outside, a squad car went by with its siren open. The sound died down, the minute
s slipped by, and my phone rang.

  It was Chance. "You been working," he said with approval. "I've been getting reports. The girls cooperate okay?"

  "They've been fine."

  "You getting anywhere?"

  "It's hard to tell. You pick up a piece here and a piece there and you never know if they're going to fit together. What did you take from Kim's apartment?"

  "Just some money. Why?"

  "How much?"

  "Couple hundred. She kept cash in the top dresser drawer. It was no secret hiding place, just where she kept it. I looked around some to see if she had any holdout money stashed anywhere, but I couldn't find any. Didn't turn up any bank-books, safe-deposit keys. Did you?"

  "No."

  "Or any money? S'pose it's finders keepers if you did, but I'm just asking."

  "No money. That's all you took?"

  "And a picture a nightclub photographer took of her and me. Couldn't see any rightful reason to leave that for the police. Why?"

  "I just wondered. You went there before the police picked you up?"

  "They didn't pick me up. I walked in voluntarily. And yes, I went there first, and it was before they got there, far as that goes. Or the couple hundred would have been gone."

  Maybe, maybe not. I said, "Did you take the cat?"

  "The cat?"

  "She had a little black kitten."

  "Right, she did. I never thought about the kitten. No, I didn't take it. I would have put out food for it if I thought. Why? Is it gone?"

  I said it was, and its litter box too. I asked if the kitten had been around when he went to the apartment but he didn't know. He hadn't noticed a kitten, but then he hadn't been looking for one.

  "And I was moving quickly, you know. I was in and out in five minutes. Kitten could have brushed against my ankles and I might not have paid it any mind. What's it matter? Kitten didn't kill her."

  "No."

  "You don't think she took the kitten to the hotel, do you?"

  "Why would she do that?"

  "I don't know, man. I don't know why we're talking about the kitten."

  "Somebody must have taken it. Somebody besides you must have gone to her apartment after she died and took the kitten out of there."

  "You sure the kitten wasn't there today? Animals get scared when a stranger comes around. They hide."

  "The kitten wasn't there."

  "Could have walked out when the cops came. Doors open, kitten runs out, goodbye kitty."

  "I never heard of a cat taking its litter pan along."

  "Maybe some neighbor took it. Heard it meowing, like they do, and didn't want it to go hungry."

  "Some neighbor with a key?"

  "Some people exchange keys with a neighbor. In case they get locked out. Or the neighbor could have got the key from the doorman."

  "That's probably what happened."

  "Must be."

  "I'll check with the neighbors tomorrow."

  He whistled softly. "You chase down everything, don't you? Little thing like a kitten, you're at it like a dog at a bone."

  "That's the way it's done. Goyakod."

  "How's that?"

  "Goyakod," I said, and spelled it out. "It stands for Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors."

  "Oh, I like that. Say it again?"

  I said it again.

  " 'Get off your ass and knock on doors.' I like that."

  Chapter 18

  Saturday was a good day for knocking on doors. It usually is because more people are at home than during the week. This Saturday the weather didn't invite them out. A fine rain was falling out of a dark sky and there was a stiff wind blowing, whipping the rain around.

  Wind sometimes behaves curiously in New York. The tall buildings seem to break it up and put a spin on it, like English on a billiard ball, so that it takes odd bounces and blows in different directions on different blocks. That morning and afternoon it seemed to be always in my face. I would turn a corner and it would turn with me, always coming at me, always driving the spray of rain at me. There were moments when I found it invigorating, others when I hunched my shoulders and lowered my head and cursed the wind and the rain and myself for being out in them.

  My first stop was Kim's building, where I nodded and walked past the doorman, key in hand. I hadn't seen him before and I doubt that I was any more familiar to him than he was to me, but he didn't challenge my right to be there. I rode upstairs and let myself into Kim's apartment.

  Maybe I was making sure the cat was still missing. I had no other reason to go in. The apartment was as I had left it, as far as I could tell, and I couldn't find a kitten or a litter pan anywhere. While I thought of it I checked the kitchen. There were no cans or boxes of cat food in the cupboards, no bag of kitty litter, no nonspill bowl for a cat to eat out of. I couldn't detect any cat odor in the apartment, and I was beginning to wonder if my memory of the animal might have been a false one. Then, in the refrigerator, I found a half-full can of Puss 'n Boots topped with a plastic lid.

  How about that, I thought. The great detective found a clue.

  Not long after that the great detective found a cat. I walked up and down the hallway and knocked on doors. Not everyone was home, rainy Saturday or no, and the first three people who were had no idea that Kim had ever owned a cat, let alone any information on its present whereabouts.

  The fourth door that opened to my knock belonged to an Alice Simkins, a small woman in her fifties whose conversation was guarded until I mentioned Kim's cat.

  "Oh, Panther," she said. "You've come for Panther. You know, I was afraid someone would. Come in, won't you?"

  She led me to an upholstered chair, brought me a cup of coffee, and apologized for the excess of furniture in the room. She was a widow, she told me, and had moved to this small apartment from a suburban house, and while she'd rid herself of a great many things she'd made the mistake of keeping too much furniture.

  "It's like an obstacle course in here," she said, "and it's not as if I just moved in yesterday. I've been here almost two years. But because there's no real urgency I seem to find it all too easy to put it off and put it off."

  She had heard about Kim's death from someone in the building. The following morning she was at her desk at the office when she thought of Kim's cat. Who would feed it? Who would take care of it?

  "I made myself wait until lunch hour," she said, "because I decided I just wasn't crazy enough to run out of the office lest a kitten go an extra hour without food. I fed the kitten and cleaned out the litter pan and freshened its water, and I checked on it that evening when I came home from the office, and it was evident that no one had been in to care for it. I thought about the poor little thing that night, and the next morning when I went to feed it I decided it might as well live with me for the time being." She smiled. "It seems to have adjusted. Do you suppose it misses her?"

  "I don't know."

  "I don't suppose it'll miss me, either, but I'll miss it. I never kept a cat before. We had dogs years ago. I don't think I'd want to keep a dog, not in the city, but a cat doesn't seem to be any trouble. Panther was declawed so there's no problem of furniture scratching, although I almost wish he'd scratched some of this furniture, it might move me to get rid of it." She laughed softly. "I'm afraid I took all his food from her apartment. I can get all of that together for you. And Panther's hiding somewhere, but I'm sure I can find him."

  I assured her I hadn't come for the cat, that she could keep the animal if she wanted. She was surprised, and obviously relieved. But if I hadn't come for the cat, what was I there for? I gave her an abbreviated explanation of my role. While she was digesting that I asked her how she'd gained access to Kim's apartment.

  "Oh, I had a key. I'd given her a key to my apartment some months ago. I was going out of town and wanted her to water my plants, and shortly after I came back she gave me her key. I can't remember why. Did she want me to feed Panther? I really can't remember. Do you suppose I can change his name?
"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "It's just that I don't much care for the cat's name, but I don't know if it's proper to change it. I don't believe he recognizes it. What he recognizes is the whirr of the electric can opener, announcing that dinner is served." She smiled. "T. S. Eliot wrote that every cat has a secret name, known only to the cat himself. So I don't suppose it really matters what name I call him."

  I turned the conversation to Kim, asked how close a friend she'd been.

  "I don't know if we were friends," she said. "We were neighbors. We were good neighbors, I kept a key to her apartment, but I'm not sure we were friends."

  "You knew she was a prostitute?"

  "I suppose I knew. At first I thought she was a model. She had the looks for it."

  "Yes."

  "But somewhere in the course of things I gathered what her actual profession was. She never mentioned it. I think it may have been her failure to discuss her work that made me guess what it was. And then there was that black man who visited her frequently. Somehow I found myself assuming he was her pimp."

  "Did she have a boyfriend, Mrs. Simkins?"

  "Besides the black man?" She thought about it, and while she did so a black streak darted across the rug, leaped onto a couch, leaped again and was gone. "You see?" the woman said. "He's not at all like a panther. I don't know what he is like, but he's nothing like a panther. You asked if she had a boyfriend."

  "Yes."

  "I just wonder. She must have had some sort of secret plan because she hinted at it the last time we talked- that she'd be moving away, that her life was going to take a turn for the better. I'm afraid I wrote it off as a pipe dream."

  "Why?"

  "Because I assumed she meant she and her pimp were going to run off into the sunset and live happily ever after, only she wouldn't say as much to me because she'd never come out and told me that she had a pimp, that she was a prostitute. I understand pimps will assure a girl that their other girls are unimportant, that as soon as enough money's saved they'll go off and buy a sheep station in Australia or something equally realistic."