They walked into the office. Gage, in no condition to suffer the pain in his knee, took his cane. The counter, the chairs, even the paneling were made from redwood, all stained a warm brown. From the outside, and seeing only the man's head, Gage got a sense that Bob Martin was heavy, but it wasn't until he saw the man's massive, pear-shaped body that he realized just how overweight he really was. His cascading folds of flesh completely swallowed the chair, making it seem like Martin was sitting suspended in mid-air. His pasty head sat upon his shoulders like a giant snowball, no neck visible, as if the whole thing might roll off if someone pushed hard enough. He did have more hair than Gage had thought, but it was so blond and spread so thinly across his shiny scalp that it was practically invisible. Even his eyebrows, atop his fleshy drooping brow, looked as if they had been drawn on his skin with colored pencils.
Gage always felt a piercing sympathy for people so obese. He'd been a little pudgy himself until he'd hit puberty. His sympathy quickly faded, however, when Martin did not so much as glance up at them. Ten seconds passed. Then ten seconds more. Martin was writing something in a ledger book with great care, the scratching of the pen as loud as a dagger against concrete in the tiny office.
"Hi," Gage said. "We'd like a room for the night."
"We're full," Martin said, still not making eye contact.
"Excuse me?"
"Someone just called and reserved the last couple open rooms. I was just about to get up and turn off the vacancy sign."
"You're kidding," Gage said.
This finally got Martin to put down his pen, clasp his hands, and place what little chin he had on his fingers. There was an air of superiority about him, a smugness, that immediately made Gage want to rap the man across the side of the head. What good would come from that? He might even break his cane, the man's skull was so thick. Martin knew he was the king of his own little domain, but smugness wasn't the only emotion on the man's face. Dew-sized droplets of sweat beaded his forehead like a crystal headband.
"I'm sorry, sir," Martin said, clearly not sorry at all. "I'd suggest the Best Western down the street."
"We have our hearts set on staying here. I love the smell of redwood in the morning. And I see you have complimentary coffee in those carafes over there. A real plus."
"Sir—"
"Besides, we both know you're not really full. Let's cut to the chase, shall we?"
Martin tried to maintain his smug facade, but his loud swallow gave him away. "Excuse me?"
"There's only one reason you don't want us here. It's because you didn't like the questions my associate was asking you earlier."
Blinking rapidly, Martin did his best to appear nonchalant as he glanced at Tatyana, but it was all too forced and hurried.
"Oh, I didn't recognize you until now," he said. "Did you find that woman you were looking for? I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help."
"Didn't want to be of more help, you mean," Gage said.
"What? I don't know what you're talking about. I simply didn't know who this woman was."
"Bullshit."
"Excuse me, sir! I'm afraid I will have to ask you to—"
"You can ask whatever you want, but I'm not leaving."
"Well now!"
Gage leaned over the counter so that he was only inches away, a short enough distance that he got a good whiff of the musky scent emanating from the man's body. "Bob—can I call you Bob? Sure I can. I've had a long day, Bob. A very long day. We drove six hours to get here. Then someone tried to knock me unconscious with chlorophyll. If that wasn't bad enough, he would have killed me if I hadn't head-butted him. Still have a hell of a headache from that one. Oh, and I shot somebody and watched as two others got shot and died. I'm sure it will be all over the news tomorrow. You can read about it then. So maybe you can excuse me if I don't have a lot of patience. I know you're lying."
Bob's pasty white countenance bulged and darkened like a marshmallow over a fire. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, but nothing came out but a faint gasp of air.
"Here's the thing, Bob," Gage said. "I'm a private investigator from Barnacle Bluffs. My hunch is you might already know that. You've probably already heard all about the woman we're calling Miranda. You saw her picture and recognized her. You know she can't remember who she is."
"I really—I really dont—" Bob began.
"Sure you do," Gage said. "I don't know what you got mixed up in here, but there's some very bad people involved in this. One of the men who tried to kill me is still at large, and I'm sure he has friends. Now, if you look across the street there, over by the beach, you'll see a blue Tahoe. That's my police protection. I'd be happy to tell them to extend their services to watching over you if you cooperate. If you don't, and we walk out that door, they're going to go with us. Which means nobody watching over you when we're gone."
Bob stared past Gage out the window. With the darkness outside, it was hard to see more than their own reflections, but the shape of the Tahoe was still evident.
"So how about it, Bob?" Gage asked. "We already have someone nearby who identified her, and what this person said leads us to believe she was either working or staying down on this end of town. I'm guessing it was here. Am I right?"
Bob remained silent a long time, but all the smugness was gone. The highway was still. Suddenly the phone rang and Bob flinched, a double chirp that must have been an internal call from one of the rooms, but he made no move to answer it. He sat there until it stopped ringing, then sat there some more. Finally, he looked down at his hands.
"She worked here," he said.
"All right," Gage said, "now we're getting somewhere."
"It was—it was all under the table. She said she'd clean rooms if I just gave her a place to stay and a little money for food. She told me she couldn't sign anything or have it be official in any way. That's the only reason I didn't want to say. I didn't know what she was mixed up in. I didn't really know anything about her. She just seemed like she—like she needed some help. I thought I'd help her out."
"And fact that she was a very pretty woman didn't have anything to do with it, huh? Did she give you a name?"
"Mary. Didn't give me a last name. I don't—I don't think that was her real name, though."
"Why is that?"
"Because a couple times early on, when I called her by that name, she didn't really respond right away."
"How long did she work here?"
"I don't know."
"Bob."
"A few weeks. Maybe a month. I guess it was about a month. Must have—must have been about a month. Yeah, it was right after most kids are on spring break, because we had a lot of families heading home. A lot of rooms to clean. I'd just had one housekeeper quit on me, so I needed the help. Listen, you don't need to tell the police any of this, do you?"
Gage drummed his fingers on the counter. "Well, that depends."
"Depends?" Bob said.
"It depends on whether I feel you're holding out on me. When was her last day?"
"I don't know. A couple weeks ago."
"Bob, I need you to be more specific."
"Okay. Okay, hold on."
Bob opened a black ledger book and flipped through the pages, each of them filled with handwritten entries. The man's trembling fingers left sweat marks. While Bob's attention was fixated on his book, Gage glanced at Tatyana, who smiled furtively but he could see the concern in her eyes. He knew what she was feeling. What he'd said to Bob wasn't a lie—there really was somebody out there in the city who'd tried to kill him—and the danger was real. He wondered if he was making a mistake, having her stay in Crescent City. He shouldn't have brought her at all. He was always doing this, putting the people he cared about at risk. And for what? Because he wanted company? His selfishness knew no bounds.
"M-M-March 24," Bob said, stuttering over the words. "No, wait. Wait. March 22. Yeah. That would have been the last day I saw her."
"You don't put all this
in a computer?"
"I do. I do. I just, I transfer it later. I don't trust the computer. We have lots of power outages."
Gage nodded. The same was true in Barnacle Bluffs. With the high winds so common on the north coast, most locals developed a healthy skepticism that electricity was a dependable fact of life. "Why do you know that was the last day?"
"Because—because she was ... well, she was staying in room 214, on the back side. She didn't show up to work one Wednesday. When she didn't show up the next day either, I checked her room. All her stuff was gone. I mean, she didn't have very much, just one suitcase, but it was gone. I ... uh, I cleaned out her room that night. We were real busy and I figured I might as well rent the room. It was real annoying, though. Sonya had to work round the clock until I hired more help."
"Sonya was your other housekeeper?"
"Yes."
"Does she stay here, too?"
"No. No, she lives in that trailer park not far from here. Misty Village, I think it's called."
"Why did Miranda—I mean, Mary—leave?"
"I don't know. Like I said, she just didn't show up."
"Bob, come on. Tell me the truth.
"I am, I am!"
Gage had gotten to be a pretty good judge of whether someone was giving it to him straight, but he didn't need keen powers of observation to know that Bob Martin was hiding something. The sheen of sweat coating his face was so thick he'd just emerged from a dunk tank. Ugly red splotches dotted his forehead and cheeks. To top it off, his left eyelid twitched regularly, as if in time to a silent beat.
Sometimes, when facing someone so wound up about whatever secret they kept buried inside them, the best move was simply to wait—which was what Gage did. An engine with some loose gears would rattle apart if left alone. He stared at Bob, letting the moment stretch out uncomfortably, the tension grow. Most people couldn't stand being confronted by someone who offered them only silence, even a few seconds of it, and would usually blurt out something far more helpful than if Gage kept pressing. Bob turned out to be no exception.
"She quit, okay?"
"She quit?"
"Yeah."
"Why did she quit?"
"I don't know."
"Bob."
"What do you want from me? I didn't really know her at all! Nothing I tell you can help her. I read about it, her amnesia. If I knew about her past, I'd say something, I swear. But I don't. I don't know anything."
"You don't know anything," Gage said. "Fine. So if I talk to Sonya, you think she'll give me the same story?"
Bob's eyelid twitched even faster. The beat of the twitching had moved from a waltz to ragtime.
"See," Gage said, "it really is hard to spin a lie for long. Eventually it will catch up to you. So here's how it is. You can either tell us the truth now and save us a lot of trouble, or I can go find Sonya and get the truth from her. In the meantime, my police protection will come with me. What's it going to be?"
"You have to understand something," Bob said in a strained voice, as if someone had just tightened a noose around his neck. "There was—there was an accusation made. It was not true at all, but it did not—I understand the accusation. I understand how it looked. But it wasn't true."
"Tell me," Gage said.
"It—it sounds bad."
"Bob, out with it."
Bob glanced at Tatyana, swallowed hard, then leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner. Since Gage was quite a distance above him, the gesture seemed absurd, but he played along anyway and leaned in himself.
"It's like this," Bob said. "She thought I was, um, spying on her."
"What?"
"I guess she found a hole in her wall. It was in the middle of a painting, and—and it led all the way to the other side, to the room. You couldn't, um, see it unless you took off the painting. There's a storeroom on the other side, so someone could stand there and see into her room. But I didn't do it! That's where she was wrong. I agree that someone put it there, but it wasn't me. That hole has probably been there forever. I've only owned this place for nine years. It was probably the previous owner or manager or whatever."
"And yet," Gage said, "you're the one who gave her that room when you agreed to hire her?"
"It wasn't because of that hole!"
"And that's what Sonya would say?"
"She just got the wrong idea! She saw me in the storeroom one day and thought I was—I was looking through the hole. But I was just getting new hand towels for one of the rooms. They both had the wrong idea, that's all. I'm not that kind of person. I'm not."
Gage let this admission stand for awhile without saying anything. Good old Bob was obviously living with enough guilt about the whole thing that offering him nothing but a wall of silence, no kind of absolution at all, was probably the worst kind of punishment. The question was whether Gage could get the man to admit a little bit more, because while finding out that Bob was a pervert was certainly disturbing, all they had really accomplished so far was confirm what they already suspected: Miranda, or Mary, had spent some time in this town. What they didn't know yet was how and why she had ended up on that boat with Marcus.
"Okay, Bob," Gage said, "here's what we're going to do. I could do a whole song and dance with you about this story you've cooked up. I believe on some level, you even believe this crap yourself. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a peeping Tom."
"I'm not—" Bob began.
"Hear me out. I really don't give a rat's ass. I may find your personal behavior disgusting, but focusing on that is not going to help me with the main purpose I'm in your city. I need to find out who Miranda is and how she came to be on Marcus Koura's boat."
"I told you—"
"I know what you told me, but I don't think I'm getting the whole story."
"I don't know her real name! I swear!"
"Do you know how she ended up on that boat?"
"No!"
"I want the truth."
"It is, it is!"
"The whole truth?"
"Yes!"
Bob blurted his reply without hesitation, but there was still something in his eyes, a cloud of doubt or guilt or something else that gave him away. He was like a pressure valve that needed to vent or the whole thing would blow. The water cooler in the corner, which had been silent this whole time, suddenly gurgled and bubbled, as if it, too, was buckling under the strain. Gage didn't want the man to completely crack. A man who cracked was much more unpredictable. He needed Bob to stay focused on the moment, on seeing the clear benefit of cooperating. Leverage. Gage needed a different kind of leverage to get this pathetic little small-town motel owner to tell Gage what he needed to know—and it was in the motel part of the man's identity that Gage saw his opening.
He picked up the man's card from the tray on the counter, holding it between his thumb and forefinger as if examining a specimen in a lab. "Owner. That's true, right? You are the owner of this fine establishment?"
Bob nodded.
"And as the owner," Gage continued, "you undoubtedly care quite a bit about the reputation of the Mill Creek Motel, correct?"
"Yes."
"See, Bob, I'm not the most technologically savvy guy in the world. Hell, I can't even manage to keep a cell phone for long without finding a way to destroy it. But I do try to stay up on things. I know how important reputation is to hotels these days. I know about Yelp, Trip Advisor, and the like. These things matter, right?" He turned to Tatyana. "Wouldn't you agree? Some bad customer reviews can really hurt a business, especially in a small-town motel like this one."
"I agree," Tatyana said.
"So let's do a little thought experiment," Gage said. "Let's say someone—oh, why be coy—let's say that someone is me, and I tell the news media all about this little hole in the storeroom wall and how it connects to this fascinating amnesia story. They won't be able to resist. Maybe we bring in Sonya, too. This won't just make the local paper. It'll go national. How long do you think your motel will
survive once it's known there are holes in the walls that let the owner watch while you're undressing? It'll be much worse than a bad review on Yelp. So, you see, the truth doesn't really matter, does it? It just matters that it will seem true to people."
Bob, who listened to all of this with a grave expression, slowly bowed his head. When he finally mustered up a reply, he sounded defeated.
"You'd do that to me?" he said.
"You did it to yourself. Besides, those cops across the street are probably wondering why we're spending so much time talking to a motel clerk. We don't move this along quickly, I won't have to do anything. You're going to have lots of other people asking questions. But, Bob, it doesn't have to be that way. Your little secret can stay between the three of us if you tell me what you know. Oh, and Sonya, too, but I imagine she's probably afraid of being deported or something if she comes forward. Am I right?"
Bob nodded, still avoiding eye contact. "I don't know all that much."
"Tell me."
"I don't know her real name. I didn't know the guy's name, either, but it is the guy from the paper. Marcus. I think they met when he came to shore. I know Mary—Miranda, whatever, she liked to sit on the docks and watch the boats. Oh, and she liked to draw. When she wasn't working, I often saw her with that sketch pad under her arm and she'd go down there and draw the seagulls and stuff."
"What else?"
"I actually don't know much else. When they were in here, in the motel, they actually didn't talk a lot. They spent their time, um, doing other things."
"Which I'm sure you thoroughly enjoyed watching," Gage said.
Bob swallowed.
"Sorry," Gage said, "that was punching low. What else do you know?"
"Not much. She really didn't talk about herself. She didn't talk much at all, really. I just got the sense she was on the run. Then we had ... we had our misunderstanding. She came into the office screaming at me. She wouldn't even hear my side of it! Next day, she was gone."
"Did you see her leave?"
A Shroud of Tattered Sails: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series Book 4) Page 17
