Frenzy

by John Lutz

  Sal told himself he was way off base, but he should keep an open mind. The way you had to do with Harold around.

  “Of course I’m not a suspect,” Duke said. “I didn’t mean that.”

  Harold flashed him a reassuring smile. He pretended to check his notes. Fishes. “What kind of knocking was it? I mean, hard and loud? Knocks close together? In a pattern? Like somebody had something important to relate to you?”

  “Nothing like that. Just knocking. That’s why I went to the door and looked out in the hall. But there was nobody at my door.”

  “You sound as if you were disappointed, Mr. Craig.”

  “It’s Duke. I was, slightly. I was hoping it was one of the Glow View color people. If it wasn’t, I was gonna go down to the bar and look for somebody to talk with. Nothing else to do, I guess. I was waiting for the drying competition. You know, how long it takes different brands to set up in various temperatures and humidity.”

  “Sound’s interesting,” Sal said, stifling a yawn.

  “Like watching paint dry,” Harold said, perfectly deadpan.

  “So you saw a man and a woman at the door across the hall?” Sal asked, hoping to keep Duke on track.

  “Yeah. I got a good look at the woman when she let him in.” He swallowed. “I found out later she was one of the victims. Andria Bell. She was the guide or chaperone for those young girls.” Duke looked slightly nauseated and absently touched his stomach. Swallowed hard enough that Sal and Harold heard phlegm crack. “Jeez, what a shame!”

  “What did the man look like?” Sal asked.

  “Well, he was kinda facing away from me. He looked pretty average. I think he had brown hair, but I’m not sure. He had on dark slacks and a gray or pale blue sport coat, I think.”

  “How tall would you say?” Sal asked.

  “Think in terms of the door,” Harold said. He drew a fish.

  Duke looked at him.

  “The door’s height is standard,” Harold said, “so you can use it as a guide to height.”

  “Yeah, I guess you can,” Duke said. “I’d say he was right around six feet. Maybe a little taller, maybe a little shorter.”

  Good work, Harold. “What about eye color?” Sal asked.

  “Oh, I never got that good a look at him. She—Andria Bell—stepped back right away and let him in.”

  “Did you see a weapon?”

  “No, but he could have had one shielded from view by his body, the way he was standing.”

  “Close your eyes and look at him going into the room again,” Harold said, closing his own eyes. “See it in your imagination. Smell it. Hotels have a certain smell. Breathe it in. Be there. Look around again. You might see something you didn’t notice before.”

  Sal wished Harold would shut up. His role in the interview was supposed to be simple. He was supposed to keep the conversation flowing from Duke, and to pretend he was taking notes. Maybe even take some notes.

  “Anything?” Harold asked.

  “No,” Duke said. “Sorry.”

  “Keep your eyes shut. Go through it again. There’s the knocking.” Harold rapped a mahogany end table with his knuckles. “Now you walk to the door.”

  Sal was about to put an end to this nonsense, when Duke said. “Scar.”

  “Star?” Sal asked.

  Harold looked at Sal and silently mouthed Scar.

  Sal looked bewildered.

  “Odd how I’d forgotten that,” Duke said. “The look I got of the man, sort of a quarter view from behind, gave me a glance at the side of his face when he stepped across the threshold. Just before the door shut. There was a kind of curved scar on his right cheek.”

  “Like a knife scar?” Sal asked.

  “No, no. Slightly reddened, slick skin. More like a burn.”

  “Like he was in an accident and got burned?” Harold asked.

  Duke shrugged. “I’d assume it was an accident.”

  “Like a car accident. Or a plane,” Harold said.

  Duke nodded. “Could be, I guess.”

  “Did he walk with a limp?” Harold asked.

  “Limp?”

  “A slight one.”

  Duke thought. “I couldn’t say he didn’t.”

  “After you saw this, when you knew the knocking wasn’t on your door, what did you do?” Sal was hoping Duke might also recall that he’d heard screaming, or some other indication of the hell that was going on across the hall.

  But the horror was suffered in silence or near silence.

  “What did you do?” Sal repeated.

  Harold chimed in, “These are routine questions.”

  “I did like I was thinking about,” Duke said. “Went down to the bar. Had a scotch. Ate enough pretzels and nuts that I didn’t feel like having supper. I didn’t see anybody from Color View, so I talked for a while with Bonnie the Barista. They call her that because she’s responsible for coffee as well as booze.”

  “It’s crept into the language,” Harold said.

  “Then I went to one of the ballrooms where the paint setup contest was going on. Watched that for a while. Met up with some Color View guys from Milwaukee and went back to the bar with them. We drank and talked till about eleven o’clock, I guess. Then I came up to my room and went to bed. I woke up this morning, went down to breakfast, and heard about Andria. Made me sick. I came back upstairs and heard somebody knocking on a door. This time it was my door. It was you guys. Not you two personally, but the police.”

  Sal thought this was a logical place to stop the interview. He thanked Craig Duke, and he and Harold moved toward the door.

  Harold turned. “Who won the paint drying contest?”

  Duke seemed surprised that he’d be asked, but he answered without hesitation. “Guys from Minnesota. They always win. It’s cold there and the paint’s blended to set up fast.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair,” Harold said.

  “Like life,” Duke said. He made a head motion toward the door and the suite across the hall. Meaning, that was where it always ended. Sooner or later, in one way or another, death had its way with us, and fair didn’t enter into it.

  There was a thought to cheer you down.

  On the descending elevator, Harold said, “Time not to have a drink.”

  Knowing Harold code, Sal understood what he meant. It was time to drop in at the hotel bar and talk to Bonnie the Barista.

  13

  Early as it was, there were only a few people in the Fairchild Hotel’s bar. Four solitary male drinkers were spaced about the place as if trying to be as far apart from each other as possible. Two women sat at a small round table. One very attractive woman was perched on a stool at the end of the bar.

  Sal and Harold took stools at the opposite end of the bar from where the woman sat nursing some kind of drink that looked like a bloody Mary. Yep, there was a stalk of celery on the napkin where the glass rested. The woman picked up the celery, dipped it in the drink, then took a bite of it that could be heard around the bar. She pursed her lips and chewed. Harold had never thought of eating celery as sexy, but now he did.

  A tall woman about fifty, in a white shirt and red vest, came over, and Sal ordered seltzer water, Harold an espresso. Sal flashed his shield, given to Q&A detectives while they worked for hire for the NYPD. The barista looked at it briefly and then went and got their drinks. She set them on cork coasters in front of the two detectives. A small plastic nameplate pinned to her vest identified her as Bonnie. She had one of those round, perpetually almost-smiling faces that made her hard to read. An all-purpose expression.

  “You here about what happened upstairs?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I heard about it,” Harold said.

  Bonnie looked confused. “No, I mean—”

  “He knows what you mean,” Sal said. “He’s being a smart ass.”

  Bonnie smiled all the way. It was like the sun coming out. “Like half the people who come in here,” she said.

  Sal didn’t doubt it. He a
sked, “You know something, Bonnie?”

  “No, I’m listening.”

  “No,” Sal said. “I mean do you know something we should know?”

  “I know none of those murdered women was in here while I was on duty. The girls were too young, and their chaperone stayed dry to set a good example. They were an up-an’-up bunch. It’s tragic, what happened.”

  “Nobody even came in the bar for a latte?” Harold asked.

  “Nope. You gotta remember, they were only here one night.” She shrugged, smiling at about half amperage. “Sorry to be a dry fountain of knowledge.”

  “A fella who kind of interests us did come in, though. Said he did, anyway. One of the paint convention people.”

  “Plenty of them were in here,” Bonnie said.

  “How about at guy named Craig Duke. Middle-aged, thinning brown hair, mighta had on a gray blazer, white shirt, pink tie.”

  Something changed in Bonnie’s eyes, and she smiled. “Yeah, I know Mr. Duke. From the Midwest. Some kinda paint salesman. With the Glow View people.”

  “Was he down here yesterday evening?”

  “Sure. About six o’clock on.”

  “On what?” Harold asked, not surprised that Bonnie’s account of last night was going to differ from Craig Duke’s. “Does that mean he was here till closing time?”

  “No, no. I mean he just stayed here for a while.” Bonnie looked uneasy and her gaze shifted to the woman at the other end of the bar. What was going on here? She knew she’d better play straight with these two. And it wasn’t like she had something to hide. “He left around six thirty,” Bonnie said. “But he came back later.”

  “Alone?”

  Sighing, Bonnie said, “You probably oughta talk to Wanda Woman.” She motioned with her eyes, ever so slightly, toward the woman down the bar.

  Sal added up the conversation and looked at Bonnie. “You’re kidding me? Wonder Woman?”

  “Wanda. And it’s a nickname. She works this lounge on her own.”

  “Works it, huh.” Sal was thinking. There’s a lot of vulnerability here. How best to use it to get to the truth? “She a barista, too?”

  “Not hardly,” Bonnie said. “She’s not exactly a hotel employee.”

  “Ah,” Harold said.

  “Nobody’s pimping for her,” Bonnie assured them. “She says her real name is Wanda Smith.”

  Sal sipped some seltzer. Waited. Letting Bonnie think about that vulnerability. About how she’d better level with the law. This was a homicide investigation. And the homicide was one of the worst this city had ever seen.

  Harold was wearing his disinterested look. Yeah. Sure.

  “You want the real story?” Bonnie asked.

  “Yep”

  “It won’t go no further?”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Sal said. “But remember this is a murder investigation.”

  “And a newsy one.” Bonnie pretended to be thinking it over, weighing options, knowing she’d better not be so vague about the times.

  Finally she said, “Wanda came in with Mr. Duke about six o’clock, they had some drinks. He left here a little after six thirty. Then, a few minutes later, Wanda left.”

  “Left just here, the bar, or the hotel?” Sal asked.

  Bonnie shook his head. “I dunno. Couldn’t see from here even if I’d tried. Which I didn’t particularly wanna do, as I had no reason.”

  “That you knew of,” Harold said.

  Bonnie nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Duke come back here alone?” Sal asked.

  “Yeah. Well, not exactly alone. I mean, not with Wanda. He went to the desk, I heard to get a different room. He was spooked by something.”

  Right after he saw the killer enter Andria Bell’s suite, Sal thought. So that part of his story holds.

  “About seven forty-five Duke comes back, only not alone. He was with some other paint convention people. They came and went, hung around a while and got a good buzz on. Duke sort of stayed on the fringes. That’s all I know,” Bonnie said, “which ain’t much.”

  Harold chewed his mustache. Sipped his espresso. Sal sat staring into his seltzer water.

  Sal’s cell phone buzzed and danced against his thigh. He pulled it from his pocket, turning away, and glanced at the phone and saw that the caller was Quinn.

  He walked half a dozen paces away so he wouldn’t be overheard and filled Quinn in on what he and Harold had discovered at the Fairchild.

  After a few seconds, Sal broke the connection and turned back to Bonnie and Harold.

  “Quinn?” Harold asked.

  “Quinn,” Sal confirmed. “He’s a few blocks from here. Said to go ahead and start talking with Wanda Woman before she’s joined by somebody or leaves. He’ll be here in five or ten minutes.”

  “Motion for Wanda Woman to come over here,” Sal said to Bonnie.

  Then Sal said, under his breath, “Maybe we can find out why somebody’s story is a bunch of bullshit.”

  But he had a pretty good idea why. Craig Duke didn’t want to be caught with his pants down with a prostitute, who didn’t want to be caught plying her trade, and was friends with or working for Bonnie the Barista, who didn’t want their relationship to become known. These people were worried about their reputations and jobs, maybe marriages.

  Like this didn’t involve six dead women.

  People and their secrets.

  He watched Harold draw a fish.

  14

  Wanda looked uneasy when Sal and Harold identified themselves. But then lots of people looked that way when they met cops. For all she knew, they were from the vice squad, and everybody had a vice.

  Sal took the bar stool next to her, and Harold stood on her other side, not trying to be openly intimidating with their closeness. Their presence should be sufficient.

  Wanda Woman didn’t seem intimidated. More like amused. She looked at Sal, then glanced at Harold as if he were a worm. She had strong features framed by dark brown hair, and would have been tall even without her six-inch heels. Narrow-waisted, with a large bust and plenty of hip, there was a kind of force about her. Her unadorned black dress would have looked plain on most women. But then most women didn’t have her legs and cleavage.

  “I’m minding my own business,” she said in a throaty voice that went with the dress and all the rest. Harold thought she was probably great at telephone sex.

  “We’re not interested in your business,” Sal said. “We’re not with vice.”

  “Oh, darn,” she said flatly. “I thought you were going to ask me to move on, just so you could see me move.”

  Harold swallowed. Said, “Mrs. Robinson, are you—”

  “Can it, Harold,” Sal interrupted.

  “Is that straight vodka you’re drinking?” the one named Harold asked.

  “Water.”

  “Good for you.”

  Wanda Woman looked slightly confused. These guys didn’t seem interested in her as a woman; they seemed to want to kill time.

  “We only want to talk,” Sal said.

  “Until you change your minds,” Wanda said with a wink. “What do you wanna talk about?”

  Sal said, “Craig Duke, the paint salesman.”

  Wanda smiled. “Is that what he does. He told me he worked for the government.”

  “We all do, in a sense,” Harold said.

  “This is about what happened to those poor girls,” Wanda said.

  “And their chaperone,” Sal reminded her.

  “Yeah. Some chaperone.”

  “When it happened, you were with Craig Duke, in his room right across the hall.”

  “Might’ve been. Truth is, I don’t know what happened when. We were about to start—secret agent Duke and me—when he said wait a minute, he thought he heard somebody knocking on the door.”

  “Start what?” Harold asked.

  “A game called find the key. It involves handcuffs and a—”

  Quinn had come in. “I though
t it was you two when I glanced in here,” he said.

  “It’s us,” Harold confirmed. “We were just talking to Wanda—what’s your real name, hon?”

  “Wanda Tennenger. Sometimes I go by Wanda Smith.” She smiled at Quinn. “And I don’t have to ask who this handsome gentleman is. I’ve seen his photo in the paper.”

  “I wanted to be in on the conversation,” Quinn said, sizing up the woman in the tight black dress. A look into her eyes suggested she was a pragmatist.

  Wanda didn’t seem particularly impressed by Quinn, but she brought him up to speed on the conversation with the other two detectives, to where Duke suddenly lost interest in her. “There was something else,” she said. “After the knocking from across the hall—once we knew what it was—me and Duke went on about our business. Though something had gone out of Duke after he looked out the door. I’m not accustomed to that.”

  She described how Duke went to the door and peeked out, how the knocking was on the door across the hall, and what Duke told her he’d seen.

  When she’d run down, she took a sip of her water that smelled like vodka.

  “That it?” Quinn asked.

  Wanda looked from Sal to Harold and back at Quinn. She knew she’d better not leave anything out or lie to Quinn. “The air kinda went out of us for a while,” she said. “I came down here to have a drink. That was about seven thirty. Duke stopped at the desk and made them give him a different room.”

  Quinn waited silently. He knew Sal and Harold would also remain silent.

  “Duke just suddenly stopped,” Wanda said.

  “Stopped what?” Quinn asked.

  “What he was doing. What we were doing up on the room. He just suddenly froze and said he couldn’t stop thinking about what he thought he’d heard coming outta that other room. And something else—he looked scared.”

  “What did Duke say he heard?” Quinn asked.

  “Thought he heard,” Wanda corrected. “He tried to explain it to me, said it sounded like an injured animal wailing, only it was soft like. That’s when he told me he’d seen somebody entering the room across the hall. He said maybe the guy had forced his way in. The reason he hadn’t said what he’d seen earlier was . . . he had other things on his mind.”