Never Cross a Vampire

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Cawelti paused but didn’t take his eyes from mine or his fist from my jacket.

  “Let him go,” Seidman said softly.

  Cawelti looked at Phil, who had moved to his desk to get the report.

  “Do what you think best,” Phil said, looking down at the report and loosening his tie to the point that it was no longer tied at all.

  What Cawelti thought was best was to throw an open fist in my face. It caught my nose and cheek and a corner of my eye. I spun around and started to fall but grabbed the edge of the desk. I knew I had wanted Cawelti to do that and that I was going to hit him as hard and fast as I could, but I was too late. Phil had moved around Cawelti’s desk like a handball on a hard court and had him by the neck.

  Cawelti’s bewildered face turned red and then redder as he tried to pry Phil’s fingers off.

  “You ever touch him again,” he said through teeth that looked as if they would break from the pressure, “you won’t be able to eat anything but jello for a long time. You understand?”

  Cawelti tried to talk, but Phil’s hands around his neck wouldn’t let him. He was turning slowly from red to blue.

  “Phil,” Seidman said without moving, “Enough.”

  Somewhere deep inside, Phil heard and slowly responded, letting Cawelti slip from his reluctant thick fingers. The part in his hair showed Cawelti’s crimson scalp as he staggered back against a desk.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Come with us,” Phil said over his shoulder in my general direction and went to the door with Seidman trailing back to be sure I didn’t throw one at Cawelti, who was choking.

  “I think you have a sore throat,” Seidman said to Cawelti. “Go on home, gargle, stay in bed till noon tomorrow.”

  Hate would have been bliss compared to the look Cawelti shot me as he staggered back to his desk, gasping and holding his neck. I limped quickly and caught up with Seidman and Phil, who was reading the Newcomb report as we walked.

  “Phil,” I said.

  “Shut up,” he hissed, going down the stairs. “Just shut up. I don’t like what I just did, and I may do it to you, which I would like. So shut up.”

  “We’re on a call,” Seidman said as we went through the lobby, stepping over an overturned garbage can that almost blocked the doorway.

  “Clean this thing up, Swartz,” Phil shouted at the old cop on the desk.

  “I’m Clayton,” the old guy shot back, “and it didn’t happen on my shift. Some guy tried to run. Swartz should have cleaned it. If I stopped and …”

  Phil stopped and turned to face Clayton, who shut up.

  “I’ll clean it up now, Lieutenant,” he said softly, and out we went into a car at the curb.

  When we were in the car with Seidman driving and Phil next to me in the back seat, Phil put down the report and said, “Now talk. No jokes, no lies, no errors and you’ll have a no-hitter.”

  I talked as we shot through the early morning darkness, headed I didn’t know where. I told him the truth from start to finish including the Shatzkin and Lugosi material.

  “So,” said Phil, “what do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s no link between the two cases. It’s crazy.”

  “There’s a link,” said Seidman from the front seat. I could see his sunken-eyed skull of a face in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me. I’m the missing link.”

  “And …?” said Phil.

  “I’ll work on it,” I said.

  “How’s your knee?” Phil said, turning his head away from me out the window.

  That was the blow I almost couldn’t handle. My mind went blank, and I reviewed more than four decades of life with Phil. There had never been anything like this.

  “Ruth told me,” he explained.

  “Told you?”

  “The money,” he said.

  Seidman pretended to hear nothing.

  “I thought you’d break my head if you found out,” I said.

  Phil’s hands were in his lap. They wanted to do something, but his mind was stopping him.

  “I don’t like it,” he said, “but I need it.”

  “Then why are you holding your hands like that? If I forgot your words, I’d think you wanted to crush my head.”

  “Different reason,” he said. “You scared the hell out of Dave. You were supposed to take him to see Dumbo. You took him to see some zombie movie. He had nightmares last night. You forget he almost died last year after the car hit him? He’s eight years old and living with the idea that he was almost killed.”

  “I was wrong,” I said quietly.

  “You’ve been wrong ninety-nine times out of one hundred since you were …”

  “Since I was eight,” I finished. “Where are we going?”

  “Mrs. Shatzkin’s friend Haliburton just had an accident,” said Seidman.

  We didn’t say anything more. Seidman drove and turned on the police radio to break the pained silence. It purred numbers and addresses to us, soothed us with reports of vandalism and possible mayhem, made us think about something besides ourselves.

  We got where we were going in about ten minutes. It was a downtown hotel on Main Street a few doors from the bus depot. A sign outside said rooms were two dollars and up, with separate bath.

  When we hit the lobby, the desk clerk came around the counter and moved toward us, his mouth open to speak. Phil held up his hand to stop him from saying anything and told Seidman, “Talk to him.”

  A young cop, his face pale, sweat on his collar and his LAPD badge new and shiny, was waiting at the elevator. The lobby, which wasn’t much beyond some sagging stuffed chairs and three stunted palms, was empty.

  “Elevator’s out, Lieutenant,” the young cop said. “I’m Officer Rnzini. The crime was on the fourth floor.”

  “I think I can walk it without a heart attack,” Phil shot back.

  “I didn’t mean …” Rnzini began, but Phil was already taking the stairs two at a time, trying not to pant. I followed behind Rnzini, trying not to smell the building’s rancidness.

  “It’s crazy,” Rnzini whispered confidentially to me but loud enough for Phil to hear. “The guy looks like he was shotgunned, but he was alone in a locked room, window locked tight, looks like it hasn’t been opened in years. Doesn’t make any sense.”

  Phil stopped suddenly on the stairs, and Rnzini had to throw himself against the wall to keep from bumping into my brother, who looked like an angry refrigerator. Phil had stopped to catch his breath, but he masked the reason by turning on the cop behind him.

  “Maybe you did it,” he said. “Just to confuse the police department. Maybe you’re bored. Maybe seeing crime has warped your brain.”

  Rnzini started to smile and stopped. Phil wasn’t smiling.

  “Lieutenant, I’m Catholic,” he said seriously.

  “Of course,” Phil answered and started up the stairs again. Rnzini stayed a bit farther behind him.

  There was a small crowd on the fourth floor and a sleepy uniformed cop standing outside a room with a door snapped off its hinges. The cop woke up.

  “You talk to all these people?” Phil said over his shoulder.

  “All the ones who admit hearing anything,” Rnzini said, catching up.

  Phil elbowed his way past two young Mexican kids. One of them turned an angry face, and Phil looked back at him.

  “Something on your mind, Chico?” he said.

  The two kids backed away.

  Inside the small room, Phil looked around, but there was no doubt what we were drawn to. The body on the bed.

  “That Haliburton?” he said to me.

  I walked over to the body. Shotgun victims do not look peaceful, and depending on how close the shotgun was, they may not look like anything at all. Haliburton still had his face. He was also clutching a .45 in his right hand.

  “That’s him,” I said.

  “Your notebook,” Phil spat at Rnzini and pulled it out of the hands
of the sweating young cop before he could hand it over. Phil moved into the small washroom and read it through slowly. Rnzini stood next to me, trying not to breathe or think. In a few minutes, Sergeant Seidman came into the room and looked around. There was no change in his expression when he looked at Haliburton’s big body on the bed.

  I had told Haliburton to pack and leave earlier, and it looked at if he might have taken my advice, but he hadn’t run fast enough or far enough. Seidman walked to the washroom, and Phil got off the toilet seat, handing him the notebook. I followed Seidman and watched Phil take off his tie, stuff it in his pocket and sit on the bed next to the dead man but far enough away to keep from getting bloody.

  “He had that gun in his hand and the door locked because he was afraid that someone might be looking for him who wished him no good,” said Phil. “Make sense to you, Rnzini?”

  I read the notes over Seidman’s shoulder. It was printed carefully in neat letters and easy to read. After the preliminary business about time and call, it consisted mainly of a statement from a witness, a Richard A. Mann, 1488 Sagamore Drive, Cleveland, Ohio.

  The statement read:

  “My name is Richard A. Mann. I live at 1488 Sagamore Drive in Cleveland, Ohio. I’m a salesman, costume jewelry. I usually stay at the cheapest clean hotel I can find. You know, profit margin, but I’ve been a little down in sales. I’m not the only one. No one’s sure what’s going to happen with the war. They don’t want to buy. Tell the truth, if I knew just how bad this place really was, I wouldn’t have stayed.

  “It was just about one in the morning, maybe an hour ago. Couldn’t sleep. Read the news and Li’l Abner. Got up, lathered my face for a shave. Threw a towel around my neck. This place is made out of balsa wood. The guy above me had been pacing back and forth. I had half a mind to go up and tell him to sit down, but I’ve had nights like that on the road, you know. So, I figured, let the guy alone. Maybe he’s got enough troubles. Live and let live.

  “I was in the room by the bed, shaving cream on my face, you know. Not much room to wander with one small room and that little bathroom. I could tell exactly where the guy upstairs was, and I’m sure the guy below me knows where I was. Well, I was standing next to the bed deciding whether to watch the wallpaper peel for a few hours or listen to the radio after I shaved when I heard the shots. Loud, real loud. And I knew right away where they came from. A blast and an echo. For a second, I thought the building’s boiler blew. Probably happen some day. Radiator’s rattling all night. It probably hasn’t been checked in years. Well, there I was, ready to shave, just standing there for a second. I put everything down and went out into the hall. My face was still covered with cream, towel over my shoulder, you know.

  “The Belvedere doesn’t have a lot of curious tenants. In a place like this, and I’ve been in plenty of them, people have their own problems and aren’t about to get into anyone else’s troubles. But there were a few people in the hall. One old guy with white whiskers looked like a scared bird. He had on an undershirt with a big hole in it. His mouth was open like he was trying to say something, but nothing came out.

  “‘Shots upstairs,’ I said, and went for the stairs. Maybe I should have minded my own business, but I didn’t think. The pacing guy might have killed himself or someone else. Those shots were too damn close.

  “The stairs sagged as I went up. You can see I’m not a little guy, but hotel stairs should be made to hold a lot more than me. This whole damn place is coming apart. When I got up to the fourth floor there were maybe three, four people in the hall. One woman looked like … well, officer, you know this place better than I do. Most of the doors were closed and quiet, like they hadn’t heard what they must have heard.

  “‘In there,’ I told them, and I pointed at the door of the room above mine. I must have looked like a foaming screwball. They backed away, and I knocked on the door. No answer. The door was locked. I told everyone in the hall to get back and I went with my shoulder against the door. It snapped away, banging open. I think my ten-year-old daughter could have gone through it. Then I saw him. Lying on the bed covered the way he is now. I’ll never forget it. I went back into the hall before any of the others could see it. I was sorry I had seen it. I told the nearest guy, a thin guy in his sixties I think, to call a cop. Then I went back into the room to see if he might still be alive. Believe me, I didn’t want to check and I didn’t think he could be, but you know, there might have been a chance. He was dead. I yelled at the people in the hall not to come in, not to touch anything, and I just waited till you got here. Now if there’s nothing else, officer, I’m feeling kind of shaky, and I’d like to get back to my room and clean up. If you need me, I’ll be in the room right below.”

  It was the most unnecessarily complete statement I had ever seen. It must have been Rnzini’s first murder, and he didn’t want to leave anything out. If he stayed a cop, the reports would get sloppier and sloppier and reach a point where they’d start getting better again or deteriorate to where he’d be one of the crowd.

  “You know who killed this guy, Rnzini?” Phil said, looking straight at the young cop.

  “No,” Rnzini answered. He looked like he was going to giggle and confess himself.

  “You should,” sighed Phil. “By God, you should.”

  “He’s right,” said Seidman, coming back into the room and handing the notebook back to Rnzini.

  “It’s right in your book, kid,” I said.

  Rnzini looked at his notebook, wondering whether someone had written something inside it he hadn’t seen.

  Without looking at the body, Phil said in a rumble of familiar anger, “Look at our friend Haliburton on the bed here. Pellet holes in him with a narrow pattern, powerful. Pellet holes in his feet, from the bottom up. Strike you as strange, Rnzini?”

  “He was shot while he was lying on the bed?” Rnzini tried.

  “No pellet holes in the bed by his feet. Lots of blood, but no holes. Blood on the floor,” said Seidman, looking around the room and at the floor.

  “Someone moved him, Rnzini,” said Phil, looking at the wall. “Any idea who?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Rnzini said defensively.

  “Well, that eases my mind and narrows the list of suspects,” Phil said. “Any ideas beyond that?”

  “You’ve got a guy alone in a room,” Seidman picked up the conversation. “He’s got a gun and he’s afraid someone is after him. Suppose you were after him and found him here. What would you do?”

  Rnzini tried to think, but nothing came, nothing except a look that showed that being a cop might not be such a good profession after all.

  “Rnzini,” Phil interrupted.

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant.”

  “Well, in a tin-can hotel like this,” Phil said, looking at the circular imitation Oriental rug on the floor that had long since lost its pattern, “you might get a room next door or below or above the guy you were after. You might get a shotgun with a hell of a kick, listen to our old friend Haliburton here pace the floor for a few minutes, figure out where he was standing and send a blast through the wall or floor or ceiling. You wouldn’t have to be too accurate. You see any holes in the walls or ceiling, Rnzini?”

  Rnzini looked. There was nothing.

  “Five will get you ten if you move that dime-store Chinese rug, you’ll find some holes in the floor,” said Phil.

  “Mr. Mann from downstairs?” said Rnzini.

  Phil winked sourly, and Rnzini got on his knees and moved the rug. The pattern of holes in the floor under it was almost symmetrical. The room below was dark.

  “Mr. Mann,” I began, “put shaving cream on his face, threw a towel over his shoulder, stood on a chair, and put the blast on Haliburton, who must have been surprised as hell.”

  “He put down the shotgun,” Seidman continued, “ran out in the hall, and started to yell about the gunshot upstairs before anyone had a chance to think or say that the shot might have come from his room. He went up
the stairs and got to the door of Haliburton’s room, broke it down and told everyone to get away and call the cops. He wanted to make sure Haliburton was dead and to buy himself some time. He put the body on the bed, moved the rug to cover the holes, and waited for you to show up. Then he told you his story.”

  “But,” said Rnzini, “why the shaving cream?”

  “Hide his face,” I said. “He could wear a mask right in front of you. He probably used his towel to move the body, keep from getting blood on him. Then he just walked into the washroom over there and took another clean towel. Bloody one’s probably under the body or the bed. Then he gave you his story, walked down to his room, grabbed his already packed bag, if he even had one, and went out the door.”

  One of the two forty-watt bulbs in the ceiling fixture sputtered and died. Phil pointed downward.

  “We can go downstairs now and find an empty room and no fingerprints,” he said, “then we can start doing legwork.”

  “I didn’t …” Rnzini started.

  “You didn’t ask enough questions,” Phil said wearily. “You weren’t suspicious enough. You didn’t make everyone sit down someplace where you could keep an eye on them. You get a crime and witnesses, you sit them down where you can see them till someone who knows what he’s doing shows up. I don’t care if it’s your mother or your priest.”

  Rnzini had nothing to say. Phil got off the bed slowly and walked out of the room into the hall. I stayed long enough to give Rnzini a look of sympathy.

  “My brother and old man have a dry cleaning business in Pasadena,” he said. “I could go in with them.”

  “Your report was good, really good,” I said.

  “What’s with him, anyway?” Rnzini said, nodding in the general direction of my departed brother.

  “He’s a cop,” I said. “If you stick around a couple of dozen years, you’ve got a chance at being as good a cop and as miserable a man as he is. It comes with the badge.”

  By the time I caught up with Phil and Seidman, they were already back in the lobby, leaning on the desk clerk, who looked surprisingly unseedy for the Belvedere. His suit was wrinkled but a suit nonetheless. It looked better than mine. His tie was neat. His dead giveaway was the stubble on his face. He needed a touch of grime and that was it. His face was pale and somewhere between twenty-five and forever years old, with a few strands of dark hair combed, brushed, and plastered forward to give himself and no one else the illusion that something was growing up there.