Diamond Solitaire

by Peter Lovesey

The Firbank reeked of some cheap scented spray. It didn't run to a lift and the stairs creaked so mere was no point in trying to approach the room by stealth.

  A "Do not disturb" notice was hanging from the handle of room twelve. Diamond knocked.

  No one responded.

  "Seems they went straight to bed," De Wint suggested.

  "With a child in the room?" said Ken in disbelief.

  "To sleep. They could be jetlagged if they came from England."

  Diamond called out, "Anyone there?"

  Still silence.

  He rattled the handle. The manager unhooked a bunch of keys from his belt.

  When the door was unlocked, there was still no word from inside. And the room was not in darkness.

  Diamond stepped in.

  A moderate-sized, cheaply furnished room. Twin beds, one with the bedding pulled back. On the other, an open suitcase.

  "They went out, then," De Wint commented. "People are so dumb, leaving notices on the door like that. When are my staff supposed to make up the rooms?"

  "You said they were up here."

  "So I made a mistake. Mister, this is a hotel, not the city jail."

  Diamond crossed to the bathroom door, tapped once and opened it. The light was on. A saturated towel lay on the floor. There was water in the bath to the level of the overflow. He stepped closer.

  "Someone is in after all," he said.

  The manager went closer. His reaction was less restrained. "Jesus—why in my hotel, of all places?"

  Lying along the base of the bath under several inches of water was a body, facedown and dressed in a white blouse, gray trousers and shoes. The hair was short and dark.

  Diamond warned Ken not to look.

  Discovering a death is disturbing in any circumstances. What made this the more shocking was that the wrists were fastened behind the woman's back, bound with cord. Around the ankles a belt had been wound several times and fastened.

  Diamond took off his jacket and handed it to De Wint, who was still carrying on about his misfortune. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and stooped over the bath in an attempt to turn the body face upwards. The New York Police Department wouldn't be too thrilled at having the corpse disturbed; however, he needed to confirm the victim's identity at once. Taking a grip of the clothes, he tugged, but his figure wasn't shaped for turning over bodies in baths and he had to ask for the manager's assistance. "Come on, man. I'm not talking to myself."

  De Wint was backing out of the bathroom. "I can't touch it. No way."

  Fortunately, Ken was less inhibited. She came forward and said, "Let me help. I'm not bothered."

  Splashing themselves liberally in the process, they managed the maneuver at the second attempt

  Without any doubt the body was that of the Japanese woman they'd followed from John F. Kennedy Airport, the woman who had brought Naomi from England.

  He turned to De Wint, water dripping from his arms. "Is she the woman who occupied this room? Come forward, man. Now, do you recognize the lady, or don't you?"

  "Oh my God, yes. She's the one."

  Now the head could be lowered under the water again.

  The question no one had spoken because it was so horrible to contemplate had to be faced, and quickly: where was Naomi?

  Diamond felt some unsteadiness in his legs. He was literally shaking at the knees, and it wasn't brought on by what he had just discovered. He feared for what he might discover next. Without a word, he straightened, turned and moved back to the bedroom, leaving the manager bowed over the toilet bowl in the act of retching.

  There weren't many places where a child's body could have been concealed. He could tell without pulling back the bedding that nothing was trapped beneath it And the space under the divan beds was far too narrow. He opened the wardrobe. It contained only a woman's jacket, gray, with the name Rohan embroidered on the front in yellow.

  There remained the window to check. In truth, he didn't expect to find Naomi dead inside the room. Some combination of intuition and experience told him she wasn't here. He felt less secure about looking out of the window.

  It faced the rear of the building in the next street, and overlooked a narrow yard bounded by grime-stained brick.

  He had to brace himself to look down.

  Plastic bins. Some tired-looking geraniums in pots. A few dead leaves and scraps of paper shifting fitfully with the breeze. Nothing resembling a small body. A pigeon eyed him from a window ledge opposite.

  He leaned out further. "This fire escape on the left," he called to De Wint. "How do you reach it from inside?"

  "The door at the end of the corridor."

  "And if I had to go down it, how would I get to the street?"

  "There's a passage to 113th. You can't see from up here."

  "That's the way he left with the child, I reckon." He withdrew from the window.

  Time was precious. Faced with the dilemma of immediate pursuit, or trying to make sense of what was happening by going through the woman's things, he chose the latter and started a rapid search of the bedroom. No doubt he'd be hammered for disturbing the scene of a murder. Sod that: Naomi's safety came before anything else, and if there were clues here, they had to be found fast.

  He went through the suitcase first, a blue fabric case with no manufacturer's name and no labels on the exterior.

  The dresses and underwear folded neatly in layers were of fine quality. There were also some clothes for the child, bearing the Marks and Spencer label. He ran his hand several times through the contents of the case in hope of locating documents or an address book. There was nothing more helpful than an A-Z Street Atlas of London and a copy of The Times, three days old. A toilet bag contained wash things, lipstick and other makeup and some Aspro Clear in tinfoil. A brush and comb. A portable hair dryer. It was all very predictable.

  He flicked over the pages of the A-Z and found a cross penciled in against the location of the school. That, finally, made a categorical connection with Naomi.

  With a face not markedly different from the pale green of the bathroom he was emerging from, the manager reappeared in time for more questions from Diamond.

  "This man who was with them, did he say anything when they registered?"

  "Do you figure he could have done this thing?"

  "Would you answer me? Did you hear him speak? Was he British?"

  "No, the woman was doing all the talking, trying to shut the kid up."

  "The child was upset?"

  "She was giving them hell."

  From across the room Ken's tough front suddenly gave way to the realization of what that small girl must have been through. "Oh, my God."

  Diamond, rigidly holding his imagination at bay, said to De Wint, "Let's concentrate on the man for a minute. How was he behaving when they arrived?"

  "He was smiling plenty."

  "While the child was giving them hell?"

  "Yes, as if it embarrassed him."

  "Did he seem possessive towards the child?"

  De Wint shook his head. "He just grinned and left the woman to it. Don't know if this is any help, but there was a gold tooth somewhere. I noticed it when he smiled."

  "Somewhere," Diamond repeated without gratitude. "The front? The sides? Upper jaw or lower? Come on."

  "Upper. This side."

  "The left."

  The mention of the tooth must have brought the rest of the face into focus in the manager's recall. "His eyes were brown and he had a nose you wouldn't forget easy, kind of narrow and elegant, like some movie actor."

  "Charlton Heston?"

  De Wint looked impressed. He didn't know Diamond had been charged down with a luggage cart by the man with a Charlton Heston nose.

  Resuming the search, he found a handbag upended and left between the beds. The ejected contents—comb, another lipstick, pens, compact, some keys, two matches and a roll of peppermints—lay scattered over the carpet. A purse was left containing six hundred dollars and a handful of Br
itish coins. This was not a murder for money.

  He picked up the handbag. Every section had been unzipped and emptied.

  So what was missing?

  The passport.

  The photo of Naomi that the woman had shown to Mrs. Straw.

  Presumably a checkbook and credit cards.

  The United flight tickets and boarding pass. She may have discarded these at JFK, but it was unlikely. People tended to dispose of them later.

  In short, any documentary evidence that might have been used to identify the woman and child had gone.

  He moved the beds and looked under them. Lifted the pillows and bedding. Went through the pockets of the jacket in the wardrobe.

  Nothing.

  Leather-jacket had taken what he wanted as efficiently as he had killed. With a terrified child looking on, he must have behaved with exceptional single-mindedness. Or callousness.

  Diamond drew a hand across his bald crown, trying to decide if there was anything more to keep him here. The impulse to go in pursuit of the killer was almost irresistible. The man had Naomi. He might be taking her to some place to kill her too.

  Yet where? It had to be faced that the trail was cold. Leather-jacket could have gone in any direction, anywhere in New York. Finding them wasn't a one-man assignment. It required the resources of the police.

  He picked up the phone, got an outside line and dialed 911.

  A patrol would be on its way directly, they promised. He was to stay where he was and touch nothing.

  A bit bloody late for that, he thought.

  He was racked with the helplessness of the situation. What a cock-up. Those cops were going to throw the book at him for handling the body and the dead woman's possessions, and so they should.

  He'd defied the rules for Naomi's sake, and achieved precisely nothing.

  He was so wound up that when Ken spoke from across the room there was a delay before her words got through. If the police were about to take over, she was telling him, she figured she didn't really want to stay, particularly as she couldn't do anything else to help.

  He thanked her with as much warmth as he could muster, saying that she had come to his aid in a crisis and put up with him heroically. She said something about wishing the kid would be rescued real soon, and then she shook his hand and left.

  This was no time for self-pity, but he was sorry she was leaving.

  Alone in the room—De Wint having taken the opportunity to escort Ken downstairs—he found the wait unendurable. With nothing else to occupy him in the bedroom, he entered the bathroom again.

  The corpse of Mrs. Tanaka lay face upwards, submerged, the eyes closed, the mouth gaping. There was no point in turning her facedown again, even if he could have managed it. He'd tell the patrolmen exactly what he had done since entering the room.

  As he looked down at the body he recalled the rigidity of the thigh when he had gripped the clothes to turn her. He'd handled the dead as a matter of necessity in his work on murder squads; for some reason the rigor mortis—experienced through the sensation of touch—always affected him more profoundly than the sight of the corpse. The loss of flexibility in the muscles, transforming the body into something like a plaster cast, was such a contrast with living flesh.

  Then he thought, hold on, this is wrong. She was killed less than an hour ago. I know that. I saw her at the airport. I followed her here in the car. Rigor mortis takes effect after hours, not this short time.

  He bent over the bath and put a hand on the upper arm. The flesh was soft to the touch. He placed his hand on the thigh again, where he had gripped it before. It still felt rigid.

  A memory was triggered, and he had the explanation. He recalled something the switchboard operator at Earls Court Police Station had said. "Rohans are really something else— all those pockets."

  The stiffness wasn't the result of rigor mortis at all. On each side of the trousers there were two front pockets fitted over each other, the inner one fastened with a zip. He pulled the tab. The cause of the rigor mortis effect was inside that inner pocket.

  He drew it out: a substantial leather wallet. He opened it and found a Japanese passport, issued in December 1988. The water had seeped through, damaging the edges of the pages, but the entries inside were unimpaired. Everything was written in English as well as Japanese. The passport holder was Mrs. Minori Tanaka, aged thirty-six. The photo was clearly of the dead woman.

  She had a Yokohama address. He took out a pen and pad and noted it.

  There was an entry for her child Emi, date of birth February 2,1984, sex female.

  He sighed and shook his head. Emi... Naomi. Poor little kid.

  Voices sounded downstairs and the tone was familiar to anyone who has worked in the police. They hadn't come to read the gas meter. There were solid footsteps on the stairs, and De Wint's voice came in at intervals, pitched high as he played the respectable hotelier who has never had trouble before.

  Quickly Diamond examined the rest of the wallet. Those missing boarding passes were there, and the flight tickets. Also, tucked inside, a small batch of photographs. He glanced through them, picked one out and then stared at it in some surprise before slipping it into his pocket. On this occasion, he decided, he wouldn't declare everything to the police.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The two patrolmen first up the stairs had one thing, and one only, lodged in their brains: if this was murder, the scene had to be sealed until the Crime Scene Unit arrived. Having viewed the body, they didn't go so far as to take off their shoes and tiptoe from the room, but they were pretty fastidious about avoiding contact with anything except the carpet. Such discipline ought to have sounded a warning bell for Diamond, but his mind was on other things. He followed them out and told them that something else had to be done, and urgently. He gave them descriptions of Naomi and the man in the leather jacket, and the white Buick, including its license number. The patrolmen seemed to take umbrage at this big, bluff Englishman issuing orders, so he changed to a more respectful approach. Patiently, more patiently than anyone who knew him would have credited, he repeated everything until one of them took the decision to transmit the message to Central that a murder suspect was at large with a seven-year-old Japanese girl believed to be mentally handicapped. He could do no more. The machine took over.

  The scene of the killing became a honeypot for homicide detectives, the forensic team in white overalls, police photographers, the coroner's assistant and the medical examiner. Procedural activity compartmentalized the horror of violent death and made it manageable.

  For the next three hours Peter Diamond was put through the grinder by detectives.

  Violent deaths were commonplace in New York, but the case of Minori Tanaka had unusual features. More than one of the interrogators commented that it was a cruel killing. Even murders have their scale of acceptability and a bullet through the head rates several points above a drowning. The tying of the victim's hands was picked out as a particularly nasty feature. One officer commented that drowning may have been used because it was a relatively silent way to kill. It was true that the manager, De Wint, hadn't heard anything to alert him. If Diamond hadn't arrived and demanded to be let into the room, the body would have remained undiscovered until the next day.

  The workover he was given was outrageous, in his opinion, considering who he was, and he told them so. Homicide were unrepentant. As an ex-detective he'd conducted himself, in the words of one lieutenant, like Winnie the Pooh in a James Bond movie. While he didn't accept the comparison, he pretended to see it their way after a couple of hours of being shouted at.

  He was driven to the 26th Precinct station house to assemble a photofit of Leather-jacket; a task he'd often demanded of witnesses himself, without appreciating how difficult it was to arrive at a likeness. Afterwards, they got him to look through photos of known criminals. A fruitless exercise that had to be gone through.

  By eleven that evening there was still no news of the Buick ex
cept that it was identified as a stolen car, taken from a street in Queens early that morning. If a car isn't stopped within the first two hours of a call going out, he was told, the chances of arresting anyone are slim. They abandon the car and take another if they're professional crooks, and who in New York would admit to being an amateur? He asked if the patrols were being reminded of the details. The transmitter was red-hot, he was told. When a kid is at risk, really at risk like this Japanese girl, the alert has top priority.

  "So is there anything else I can do?"

  He got the answer he expected.

  "You're asking me to leave, then?"

  "You got it. What's your address?"

  "What?"

  "Where are you staying, man?"

  He hadn't even considered until this moment. "I, em, haven't checked in yet."

  "Mister, it's a little late in the day."

  He settled for a room in the Firbank. Downstairs, without bath, at sixty dollars. Probably a sensible choice. While his sumo sponsor might conceivably have stumped up for a five-star hotel downtown, this was where the action was. And a five-star hotel downtown might have looked askance at a guest without any baggage at all.

  The action! Why do I kid myself, he thought. I'm sidelined here. A killer is holding a handicapped child somewhere in this city. Even the police are getting no information.

  Patience, self-discipline, confidence that something will turn up—these are the props a senior detective learns to support himself with when everything has been done and nothing seems to be happening. He'd been through it many times. The pressure was extreme, but you had to be strong.

  In the privacy of the first-floor bathroom, he took from his pocket the photograph he'd found in Minori Tanaka's wallet, having suppressed his curiosity for hours. A curious picture to carry in a wallet. Not the kind of snap people hand out to friends when families are mentioned. It was a shot of a gravestone.

  Most of the inscription was in Japanese, with the exception of some numerals showing the dates of birth and death of the deceased. He had to squint to read them: 2.2.1984-12.12.1988

  He dipped into his pocket for the notes he'd made of the passport details and found that his memory wasn't at fault. The child named in the passport, Emi Tanaka, had been born on February 2, 1984, which was identical to the date of birth on the gravestone.