“Sounds great. I could use a rhinestone-studded blow fly in my collection.” I was tempted to tell him that I had stopped to check out a road-killed rabbit outside San Luis Obispo on the way down, and nabbed a gorgeous burying beetle. I doubt he would’ve been as disgusted as I was with his tableside hygiene.
For the rest of lunch we talked about some of the new equipment that had been featured in the exhibit hall, where each morning the conventioneers were welcomed with a banner saying, “Refreshments courtesy of SprayTech”—or whichever manufacturer had overpaid for gallons of weak coffee and trays of flattened pastries topped with gobs of jelly and striped with frosting. Sergio could afford the newest rigs, but I was too small-time for the fancy stuff. My company was growing, but with just three technicians and Carol managing the office, I wasn’t going to be dropping a couple grand on shiny new sprayers.
My mind wandered as Sergio shared his analysis of motorized backpack sprayers. I was ready to get back home. I hadn’t seen Tommy since I left on Sunday. And my crew would be disappointed that I missed today’s after-work beers. Or more precisely, that I wasn’t around to pay for drinks, although I guessed that Brian—the proprietor of our watering hole—had let them put the evening on my tab. I took them out every Wednesday to hear what was going right and wrong at Goat Hill Extermination (my father loved the nickname for Potrero Hill since it reminded him of the pastoral landscape of his childhood). I interrupted Sergio’s monologue on the pros and cons of brass versus stainless-steel nozzles.
“I’d go with brass,” I said, not knowing if they were superior but understanding that they were a helluva lot less expensive.
“You get what you pay for,” he noted sagely, giving the impression that he’d just come up with the idea on his own.
“Speaking of which, you’ve had your lunch. Now what’s the room number?”
“Oh yes,” he murmured, as if he’d completely forgotten that he’d squeezed a free meal and a bottle of Jameson out of me. “It’s 162. East wing, ground floor.”
We shook hands, and I promised him the rest of his payment. I respect a man who drives a hard bargain. I don’t need charity from friends, just integrity and companionship. Sergio had these in spades. I would’ve preferred to head back up the coast, but I couldn’t miss the chance to see which of my insect pals were still milling around after the meat course had been removed from their dining room.
CHAPTER 4
A hotel security guard was standing in the hallway. His slouch suggested the poor sap had been manning his post since the body was reported sometime in the morning. The way his suit coat hung on him, he’d either lost a lot of weight while standing there or he’d gotten bad advice from a salesman. I told him I was with DiMaggio Pest Services. He grunted and lifted his chin toward the room as if I couldn’t figure out which one it was.
I opened the door. The stench stopped me in my tracks. From what Sergio had told me, the guy had probably died last night. So the reek wasn’t from decomposition. There might’ve been a sweet-musty hint of death, but there was none of the thick, sickly odor of rotting flesh. Instead, it was like the depths of a cesspool. A lot of people piss when they die, and in my experience a fair number shit themselves. We come into the world screaming and we leave crapping. It’s always struck me that our two most rebellious moments are birth and death. But this was taking the last act of defiance to another level.
Hoping to keep my lunch down, I clenched my teeth and drew short breaths through my mouth, slowly exhaling through my nose, a technique I’d learned working on ripe corpses while a detective. I didn’t need to turn on the lights, as the heavy curtain had been drawn back at the far end of the room. The afternoon light poured through the sheer drapes that hung over the sliding glass door. Past the short entryway, I found a pair of queen-size beds. The one nearest the doorway had the covers thrown back, as if somebody had just gotten up. A tan blanket, one of those cheap foam things that hotels favor, was piled at the foot of the bed, and the spread lay crumpled on the carpet. The floral print against the blue shag made it look like an overgrown island rising from the sea. The other half of the room was less artistically composed.
The bed was soaked in watery shit, as if the poor bastard had died of a diarrhea attack. The pillows were slathered in what I presumed had been his dinner. The sheets were pulled out from the mattress and twisted in clumps. And the blanket and spread lay off to the far side. He must have thrashed around for a while before surrendering to a most unpleasant end.
My gut was getting used to the reek. It’s funny how you adapt to the environment. People can get used to most anything, which explains a lot about ghettos, dictators, and factories. The room, like the rest of the hotel, was overly air-conditioned, and the coolness made the place more bearable. I wasn’t enjoying the odor, but at least it faded into the background. And this allowed me to concentrate on the flies.
A dozen or so metallic-green flies were buzzing around in circles, evidently frustrated by having the object of their devotion zipped into a plastic bag and hauled off. The blow flies were looking to lay their eggs on a corpse that they could smell but couldn’t find. From what I’ve seen, they favor bullet holes and knife wounds. A shotgun blast is a virtual nursery. But they’ll settle for most any orifice, including the openings that nature provides. I remember the naked corpse of a hooker that washed up on Hunters Point. Somebody had smothered her by tying a plastic bag over her head, and the flies had played the hand they’d been dealt. After working that crime scene I wasn’t interested in sex for a month. Which was fine, given my luck with women at the time.
There was also a cluster of flesh flies, grayish insects with black stripes. They too were hoping to find a home for their little maggots. Several were resting on the landscape painting over the bed, making it look like a mountain valley invaded by giant flies. I thought the insects improved the unimaginative original. When I was on the force, I called these “sergeant flies,” which pleased the guys on the beat to no end. I told them that three stripes meant you’re dealing with a sergeant, so the same holds for flies. If only the two-legged sergeants could find bodies as quickly as their six-legged counterparts. The insects home in on the first whiff of death, before we can detect the faintest odor. I’ve seen ’em coming in for a landing ten minutes after a victim’s last gasp, especially on a hot day. And LA had started delivering its renowned heat yesterday afternoon, once the rain quit.
Having accounted for the usual visitors, I turned to the unexpected arrivals. I was not used to so many house flies and other filth flies at a death scene. Dozens of them were having a feast on the soiled mattress. And that seemed to explain their numbers—they’d been attracted by the stench of the guy’s final act. I waved my arm over the bed and a cloud of aggravated flies lifted off. Nothing remarkable there, but what caught my eye was what was left behind—a couple dozen dead flies. If somebody had sprayed the room, there should’ve been dead flies everywhere. These were all on the bed. A few were trapped in the smear of filth where the coroner had dragged the body to the edge of the bed. But I didn’t see any on the floor. Which isn’t to say that my search of the carpet was futile.
Along the track of the sliding glass door I found a frantic mob of winged ants. I pulled the door open a few inches to let in a breath of fresh air, or what passes as fresh in LA. The ants had evidently worked their way into the room through a tear along the bottom of the screen door. I figured the flies had availed themselves of the same opening. The little bastards are crazed when it comes to getting at a corpse, and they’ll work their way through the smallest gaps. So a torn screen is like the Bay Bridge on a Friday afternoon. The sliding glass door opened to a slab of concrete which boasted a couple of cheap plastic chairs. You’d think that at seventy-five dollars a night, the Hyatt could do better. Beyond the low, neatly trimmed bushes edging the patio was an expanse of gardens overflowing with daylilies, begonias, and zinnias. Beyond those, the hotel swimming pool shimmered in the afternoon
sun.
I coaxed a few of the ants into a medicine bottle. I’d already put a couple of the dead flies in another bottle, along with a few of their dumber living comrades, which I managed to catch because they were hell-bent on banging themselves against the glass door. I’ve carried a couple empty bottles in my pocket ever since I missed collecting a gorgeous spider wasp. She was perched on a bench in McKinley Square—a dinky park in Potrero that barely holds a dozen trees and should be the last place to find interesting insects—and I had nothing to contain what would’ve been a prized specimen. Neither the flies nor the ants looked anything special at first glance, but it’s hard to know.
Having worked my way from one end of the room to the other, I put my face to the screen and took a few deep breaths of outside air. Then I headed back through the room, where a quick inventory gave me a good sense of the stiff and his roommate. The beds were a mess, but the rest of the place was neat as a pin. Aside from his last miserable moments, it seemed the guy had been anal retentive. There were no personal items left by the occupants on the low dressers, just a hulking color television, a coffee maker, a couple of paper-wrapped water glasses on a tray, and a glossy copy of 100 Things to do in LA. The cover featured photos of Mickey Mouse wading through a sea of tourists, kids thrilled with riding a fake log down a water-filled trough, an enraptured couple sipping wine with palm trees in the background, some ditz emerging from a clothing store toting a jumble of shopping bags, and a gorgeous young couple emerging from the surf holding hands. There was something for everybody here.
Two suitcases were lying closed on folding stands. I looked inside one and found a few days’ worth of rumpled clothes, presumably to be brought home and laundered. The other held carefully segregated clothing, including a section of neatly folded socks and briefs—who folds socks and underwear? A couple of dress shirts and pants hung in the closet. The occupants had evidently been running low on clean clothes, so I guessed they’d been close to leaving when one of them checked out early.
The bathroom had the usual toothbrushes, toothpaste, razors, and shaving cream beside the porcelain sink. The stuff on one side was arranged as if a butler had been included with the room. Or more like a pharmacist who moonlighted as a butler. On the neatnik’s side was an impressive array of vitamins, herbal elixirs, lotions, and “homeopathic tinctures”—whatever the hell those were—lined up like medicinal troops. I glanced at the ingredient lists and figured whoever bought this stuff had to be from the Land of Fruits and Nuts. Only Californians are flaky enough to buy into medicines made out of seaweed and dandelion extract.
One of the bath towels was slightly damp, presumably from a shower last night. The dead guy hadn’t bathed this morning, and I doubted his roommate had done so in light of the circumstances. The other towel was almost dry, but it might’ve been used sometime the previous day after the maid had provided clean linens. None of this was terribly informative, although a person’s hygiene can sometimes make a difference in terms of the insects that show up to the funeral. In this case, however clean the guy might’ve been when he went to bed, it sure hadn’t done him any good by morning.
I figured if I stayed any longer, I’d absorb enough of the room’s odors that I’d need a shower of my own. And I’d already checked out, so I decided to get out of there with my meager collection of postmortem visitors. I had planned to just head back up to San Francisco, but something wasn’t quite right.
At every death scene, the stiff and the insects are the only ones that know the truth. In this case, everything seemed pretty typical for the most part. Flies show up at deaths and ants crawl into buildings. But I’d never seen dead flies around a fresh corpse and the ants seemed somehow out of place. It wasn’t a big deal, but I thought maybe I’d swing by the front desk. Hotel staff have a way of knowing things, and I wanted a little more information about the guests in room 162.
CHAPTER 5
On the way out of the room, I asked the security guy whether he’d been the first one on the scene.
“Yup,” he said, “but can’t say that I stayed long. Place smelled like a sewer. I told management they needed somebody to come clean up the mess. No way the maids are going in there. Not at what they get paid.”
“Anybody else go into the room?”
“Just a couple of cops, but they didn’t hang around. Some guys from the coroner’s office picked up the body around noon.”
“Doesn’t sound like they were in a big hurry to collect the stiff.”
“There’s plenty of work for them in this city. We got bodies in dumpsters, dead bums in the parks, niggers shootin’ each other in Watts, wetbacks dying under overpasses. It’s a fuckin’ smorgasbord of corpses.” He smiled at his turn of phrase.
“I don’t suppose the hotel is anxious to have bodies carted down the hall and through the lobby in front of guests during the morning bustle.”
“You’re telling me.” He shook his head. “The Hyatt executives are pretty connected, so I’m sure they can have the meat wagon show up whenever they say. Late morning is a good time to bring the body snatchers in through the back. Minimizes the chances of having little Jimmy ask his daddy what’s in the bag as the family heads out to Disneyland.”
“So the room’s just like it was when you saw it this morning?”
“Nobody moved anything around, if that’s what you’re asking. What’s it to you anyway? You guys hafta clean it up in any case.”
I’d nearly forgotten that I was supposed to be affiliated with DiMaggio’s people. “Just trying to figure out the best way to get the smell out of there. It helps to know if the room’s been aired out when we’re selecting a deodorizer.” It was a pretty good dodge, if you ask me. “Were the sliding glass door and screen closed when you got there?”
“You guys are real pros, eh? I’m sure the door was closed cuz I remember thinking some fresh air would help. I thought about opening it up, but I figured this was potentially a crime scene. So I knew not to do nothin’ to disturb stuff. That’s what they taught us. But what I couldn’t figure was how all the flies got in the room.”
“They’re pretty wily. Maybe they found a crack or something.” I hadn’t seen any openings to the outside, so I shared his uncertainty. The hole in the screen wouldn’t matter if the glass door was closed tight.
“Why’s it matter to you how they got in?”
“After we’re done, we want to make sure the flies don’t come back. They’re attracted to traces of odor that we can’t smell. And the last thing we want is to leave a job and have a customer complain that there are flies.”
I was getting good at this ruse. But Sergio’s crew was coming down the hallway, and I didn’t want them to blow my story. Besides, I had all the information I needed from my new pal. I thanked the guy and met up with the cleaners before they got too close to the room. I stopped them, said that I was turned around, and asked for directions to the lobby. This gave the impression that I was exchanging some professional advice, although the security guard seemed to have lapsed back into his bored slouch. As they headed down the hall, I headed to the lobby.
At the front desk I caught the eye of a petite woman who was talking on the phone. She was wearing the none-too-flattering uniform that some corporate genius had chosen to give the appearance of professionalism and dissuade guests from hitting on the staff. The straight skirt didn’t do much for her, but it did draw my eye to a nice pair of gams. The navy-blue jacket and starched white blouse hid whatever upper assets she might’ve had, but her build suggested there wasn’t a whole lot to showcase in that regard. I pushed aside further evaluations, having been warned about a women’s liberation thing that makes it wrong for a guy to appreciate well-shaped bodies—as if my own shortcomings were not fair game.
I’m no great shakes myself. Between an unruly shock of sandy-blond hair and a nose that looks like it’s trying to avoid my left cheek, nobody would describe me as tall, dark, and handsome. But I’ve kept myself in shape, and
at five foot nine, what I lack in height I make up for in the width of my shoulders.
She gave me a quick wink and gestured at the phone with a roll of her eyes to let me know she was not avoiding me. I smiled back and shrugged sympathetically. I enjoyed watching her while she nodded patiently toward whoever was calling. I guessed she was in her mid-thirties, an age that I still had a chance of charming. She had a healthy look about her, not sexy but genuinely pretty without all the makeup and silicone that’s been slathered onto and injected into the women of southern California. After three days of blue-eyed blondes, a brown-eyed brunette was refreshing.
Hanging up the phone, she stepped to the counter. “Now then, how can I help you?”
“Well, Linda,” I began, reading her name from the tag on her lapel that indicated she was a “Customer Service Agent,” which used to be a desk clerk before everyone needed their self-esteem massaged. “I need a favor.”
“I see.” She hesitated, with the slightest hint of a smile. “And you are?” I put my arms on the counter and leaned forward to suggest that we might need to get to know one another a bit better—at least if she was to trust me with a bit of inside information.
“I’m C. V. Riley. Everyone calls me Riley.”
To my delight she edged closer. She smelled clean. Not the flowery cover-up of perfume but the scent of soap. “And so, Riley, what can I do for you?”
“It seems that one of your guests checked out last night, without paying his bill.”
“Oh? And, assuming this happened, why is it any concern of yours?” she asked, cocking her head in a way that suggested more curiosity than suspicion.
“You see, Linda, that’s the favor. I can’t really go into why it matters to me. I’m just hoping you might be able to tell me something about the fellow.”
Poisoned Justice Page 3
