From my jacket pocket I removed one rubber band about five inches in length. I was good at this, but there would be some noise—there was always a little chain rattle. It was an entry technique worth a shit only if the occupant was deep asleep or an invalid. My odds here were okay at best. If I got a reaction from within the room, I’d have to shoulder the door open, bursting the night latch and going in shooting. At which point I’d wonder if that fucking noise suppressor might not have been worth taking, after all.
For now, the fingers of my right hand in the surgical glove slipped inside the ajar door and secured the rubber band around the bolt on the chain at the end of the metal track. The hours I’d practiced this trick had paid off before, but right now I really needed to be deft. My fingers felt for the rubber band and stretched it to loop taut around the tip of the door handle. I pulled the door almost shut—another eighth of an inch and I’d have to unlock it again—which slid the rubber band with the chain on its linear track, chain-bolt still connected to the rubber band, which broke with a snap as I pushed the door all the way open. I went in, transferring my nine mil to my right hand.
There had been some noise, and certainly as I shut the door behind me there was a click. But he appeared still to be deep asleep, a long slender figure under covers, on his back, snoring gently.
Faking?
Buying time, maybe, to reach for that .22 Magnum automatic on the nightstand?
But he was still sleeping when, after sweeping his little automatic onto the floor, I straddled him, sitting on his stomach, my knees pinning his arms, and pressed his big fluffy spare pillow down over his face, pushing hard, making sure his nose and mouth were getting the brunt without putting so much into it that there would be bruising, the nine mil still in my right hand as I bore down, and when he woke up and started flailing, the kicking he did was useless, the can-can of a dying chorus girl.
It took about two minutes that to me seemed much longer— probably true for him, as well, though those two minutes or so could hardly compare to the suffering he’d over the years administered to others.
Hey, I wasn’t here to punish him. He was the sick fuck, not me.
I just wanted him dead.
FIVE
I had put in for a nine o’clock wake-up call, even though that meant getting only five hours of sleep. But I wanted to be at my window onto the Rest Haven Court around the time housekeeping would start on the cabins. I sat in my shorts and t-shirt and watched, drinking some coffee and chewing on a Danish that Room Service brought me.
Rest Haven housekeeping was a black woman in her forties or fifties with a cart. It occurred to me she was the first non-white I’d seen in Stockwell. Judging by the cars I’d spotted last night, only about half the cabins were taken, and three of the cars at this time of the morning were still in their spaces, including the Chevy Cavalier, of course. That left three rooms for housecleaning at this point, and she started down at number 4. That gave me time to shower and brush my teeth and take a crap. When I returned to the window, she was on the second of the three car-less cabins. So I got up and put on a sweatshirt and jeans.
By ten-thirty she had cleaned the three cabins, and now began again on the cabins with cars parked outside. She would knock, saying something (presumably, “Housekeeping!”), and in the first two instances was apparently told to come back later. Last night I’d noticed NO DO NOT DISTURB signs, so apparently the Rest Haven Court did not splurge on such niceties.
When she tried the door to Cabin 12, she for some reason didn’t get a response from the occupant. She unlocked the door with her passkey and went in. Perhaps a minute and a half later she came out. She looked only mildly upset. Not that I had expected her to come out screaming, “Laws a’mighty!” People die in their sleep in motel and hotel rooms all the time.
She did move fairly briskly over to the manager’s office in the oversize cabin by the neon sign, leaving her push cart behind, and I took in the action with the bored semi-interest of somebody watching a Love Boat rerun (one of which was playing on my room’s television, volume down low enough to keep me company but not distract me). The manager came out, moving quickly, and she followed. This was a small man in a brown suit, tie flapping, not the bald snoring guy of the night before. She waited outside as he went in. He came out in under a minute. He said something to her along the lines of “You need to wait here,” and went back to his office. She lighted up a cigarette and leaned back against the windows of Cabin 12. White man dead in bed. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
I went over and swung the desk-perched TV around to face me. A lot would happen now over at the Rest Haven, but the pace might be slow. The Love Boat was over. Pretty soon a very dumb game show on NBC came on, called Hit Man. I wouldn’t kid you.
What I was watching for was whether the cabin got treated like a crime scene. I didn’t figure it would, and I was right. A patrol car with two uniformed cops arrived first, then a Ford Fairmont driven by a dumpy guy in a dumpy suit pulled in—a plainclothes cop. He and the manager went into 12 and weren’t gone long. The plainclothes cop was giving the manager instructions and the manager was nodding. Then all the cops left.
During Family Feud, an ambulance arrived, no siren, no hurry. Within five minutes, the body of a man who had caused so much suffering to so many (you’re welcome) was carried out in a body bag. No need for a gurney for so short a distance.
Not a crime scene, then. No small-town forensics guy, no photography, no yellow-and-black tape. Some guy had died in his sleep. Because the room had been Mateski’s originally, Farrell would probably be listed under whatever fake name his partner checked in under—a good chance that was the name Farrell had used, too, to keep things clean. When the dead man’s I.D. would prove to turn up nothing interesting—no priors, no relatives—that Chevy Cavalier would be seized and eventually raffled off for some city or county fund or other.
Was I a genius to predict all this? No, I just knew how deaths in the lodging business were handled, particularly in a small-town vacation destination. No hotel likes its living guests disturbed by the exit of a deceased one. Vacationers get sent the wrong signal when people are dying around them. Even businessmen on the road don’t like the thought that they might die in bed, far from home.
So motels and hotels checked dead guests out with as little fanfare and as much alacrity as possible, with (in Stockwell’s case, anyway) the cops complicit in helping along the town’s main industry. I’d been careful to avoid bruising Farrell and the only thing that might indicate he hadn’t died in his sleep of a heart attack or aneurism would be his slightly bloodshot eyes, if anybody bothered to notice. That was a byproduct of forced suffocation.
Anyway, by eleven-thirty the housekeeper was rolling her cart back into Cabin 12. She didn’t look at all put out about it. If people have seen enough in their time, they can get pretty hardened, I guess.
I thought about calling Vale to let him know the heat was off, but I didn’t want to discuss that kind of thing on the phone. Face-to-face was called for, and I wasn’t up to it right now. I was beat, suffused with the kind of tiredness you feel when you’ve been working hard and the stress had lifted.
So I kicked off my sneakers and flopped onto the bed in my clothes and fell asleep in seconds. No worries about being bothered. The Holiday Inn was a class joint, DO NOT DISTURB hangers and everything.
* * *
The dance studio was just a black shape in a late afternoon already turning to night. Cold again, if not as much so as last night, though I’d left my fleece-lined jacket behind, substituting a camel sport jacket; I’d also replaced the sweatshirt and jeans with a light blue long-sleeve shirt and chinos. There was a chance I would run into parents at the studio, dropping their girls off for private lessons. From here on out, on my Stockwell sojourn, I was a journalist, and needed to class my look up a tad.
Vale was expecting me. I had called from a pay phone and said I needed to stop over—was five-thirty all right? He�
��d said his lessons started at seven, and I said this shouldn’t take long. Could he have my five grand handy?
The slender dance instructor let me in the front door after I knocked and identified myself. His handsome, narrow, hoodedeyed features had an apprehensive aspect, probably because I’d jumped him the last time he’d answered my knock at these doors.
I smiled easily, said, “Everything’s cool. Nothing to worry about.”
A white grin flashed under the Tom Selleck mustache, in the orange-tinged tanned face, and he sighed in an almost comic weight-of-the-world manner. “Good to hear, good to hear.”
He was back in his black tee, tights and Capezios. As he led me into the half of his quarters where we’d spoken before, he gestured toward the kitchenette. Some rye bread and cold cuts and cheese slices were on a plate on the counter.
“I was just getting ready to fix myself a sandwich,” he said. “Can I make you one?”
“No thanks. Why don’t we sit down? You might not want to be eating when I make my report.”
Following my assurance that everything was cool, this threw him a little. I meant it to.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
We sat as before, me on the brown-leather couch under the framed Broadway posters, him on the edge of the nearby matching comfy chair.
“The man sent to kill you is out of the picture,” I said.
“By which you mean...?”
“I’m going to spare you the details. You don’t need to know any more than that.”
He swallowed. Smoothed his mustache with a thumbnail. He seemed to be trying to decide whether to be relieved or unnerved, and settled for a bit of both. “I can’t know who it is was, or...?”
“Less you know the better.”
He thought about that, brow furrowed. “You said there were... were two of them.”
“Yeah. The guy watching you, the last week or so? He left town yesterday, after his partner arrived.”
“Oh.”
I nodded. “They exchanged information, in a public place actually, and the surveillance man headed home. I followed him long enough to make sure.”
He was frowning again, confused. “You...you indicated you would have to remove both of them.”
“I know. And I may still have to. He’s a loose end and loose ends sometimes need tying off. But I didn’t want to leave the more dangerous half of the team out of my sight for long. And, Roger, that guy was very goddamn dangerous.”
He swallowed like a kid in the middle of getting the facts of life from his father. “Really?”
“Yeah. You got a bargain at ten grand. If I’d have known who was being sent after you, I’d have either asked for a shit-pot more or taken a pass.”
The dark eyes flared. “And just let me die?”
“Roger, we’re not friends. I didn’t know who the fuck you were two weeks ago.”
He swallowed again, nodded. “What made him so...so dangerous? Or don’t you want to talk about it?”
“Actually, we need to talk about that. A bit, anyway. This was a specialist, not just somebody who removed problems. Somebody who made his subjects suffer.”
“Subjects?”
“Targets. Victims. You.”
He was trembling. “You’re trying to scare me again, like you did Sunday. Why are you always trying to scare me?”
“I’m not trying to scare you, Roger, and anyway, you should be scared because somebody obviously wants you more than just dead.”
That seemed to knock him back. “What’s ‘more than just dead’?”
“I told you. Pay attention. Whoever hired this done wanted you to suffer before you died.” I sighed. “Roger, the man sent to kill you had a reputation in my business. A reputation for torturing people. To death. Slowly.”
“That’s...that’s crazy. Why would anyone want that?”
“For revenge.” I shrugged. “Somebody thinks you murdered Candy Stockwell, and they loved her so much that that’s how much they hate you.”
“What do you mean, exactly...torture?”
I gave him some examples.
“Jesus Christ,” he gasped.
“Actually, he did crucify a guy once. Priest who diddled a choir boy who was a mobster’s nephew.”
He rushed over to the sink and puked. I waited while he splashed his face with water; finally he staggered over, an extremely awkward gait for a guy in Capezios.
As he sat down, leaning back this time, he was trembling even more visibly. His face was white, or as white as the phony tan would allow.
His voice seemed distant as he asked, “Why should I believe you?”
“What do you mean?”
“How do I know this isn’t some sort of shakedown? Maybe you’re a cop. Maybe you’re...what do they call it? Wearing a wire! And you’re trying to get me to confess to something I didn’t do.”
“Aw, shit,” I said.
I stood, took off the sport jacket, tossed it on the couch. Unbuttoned the long-sleeve shirt, slipped it off, tossed it on the jacket, did a pirouette that was unlikely to get me a slot in his dance class.
Then I spread my hands and said, “Satisfied?”
He nodded a bunch of times and I put myself back together. “It’s not a shakedown.”
“Well, you can see why I might think it is.”
I sat down. “No. I can’t.”
Again he sat forward, his expression painfully earnest. “Quarry, you come around a week and a half ago, you say somebody has hired a contract on me. You come around later and wave a gun around and scare me some more. Now you show up and you say you’ve killed the killer, but can’t tell me who it was because the less I know the better off I am, and can you have your other five grand, please?”
Maybe he had a point.
I sighed. I pointed toward the phone on the wall in the kitchenette area. “Go call the Rest Haven Court.”
He frowned in confusion. “What? That sleazy motel across from the Holiday Inn?”
“That’s the one. Tell them you’re...what’s the name of the local paper?”
“The Sentinel.”
“Tell them you’re calling from the Sentinel and wondered if the guest who died in Cabin Twelve had been identified yet. Ask if they can provide any details at all.”
He thought about that for a moment, then nodded, and went over quickly. He got a phone book from somewhere, found and called the number, and did as I asked. He listened to the answers, then said goodbye, hung up, and returned to the comfy chair.
“Well?” I asked.
“They said the name of the guest who died is being withheld till the family can be notified, but that it was death by natural causes. He died in his sleep due to a heart attack.”
Pretty specific, considering I doubted anybody had done an autopsy.
“And,” Vale went on, “I was advised to check with the police before putting anything about it in the paper.”
“No surprise.”
“...You did that?”
“Yes.”
He sat forward again, eyes tensed. “You really did that? How? With a needle, or...?”
“You don’t fucking need to know.”
That had come across a little stern, and he seemed almost hurt as he defensively asked, “Well, what about that other man? The surveillance one? You seem awfully vague about it. Content to let him roam around and maybe team up with some other torturer. Vlad the Impaler possibly. Torquemada maybe.”
“I’m pretty sure those guys are dead, Roger.”
“Very droll I’m sure.”
I sat forward. “Look, I don’t take taking lives lightly. We’re lucky that the police here look the other way when a motel guest croaks and disrupts the tourist industry. You’d think in the off-season they might take it more seriously, but no. Anyway, there won’t be a second team of professionals killer sent to remove you—not if we act now.”
He nodded slowly. “You mean, if I give you the go-ahead to find out who did this?”
“Right. But you need to decide, and decide now. I may only have a few days to pull this off.”
“How...how would you do it?”
I gestured to my spiffed-up look. “As far as anyone in Stockwell is concerned, I’m a reporter for the St. Louis Sun. That allows me to go around asking questions. I’ll talk to everybody you consider capable of paying to have you killed. Particularly those you consider capable of wanting the kind of sadistic revenge we’re talking about. And I’ll assess the situation. That simple.”
His eyes were wide. “Simple. And you’ll kill that person, too? If it’s one of the Stockwells, and it almost has to be, that’s not some anonymous out-of-towner dying ‘in his sleep’ in a motel room. Say it’s the old man. He’s feared and revered in this town. That’s as front-page a death as you could find in this part of the state. How would you manage it? And don’t tell I don’t need to know. I’ll still be living here, and I’ll be the prime suspect!”
“Good point. We’ll make sure you have an alibi when I take that step.”
“But how will you take it?”
I shrugged. “Probably with a bullet. I don’t stage fake accidents—that’s a specialty, like torture. But I can rig a suicide or a robbery. We’ll be fine.”
He laughed without humor. “And this will be another ten thousand?”
“That’s what I quoted you, yes. I’ll stand by that. And you don’t have to pay me a dollar till the job’s done.”
That sent his eyebrows up and his attitude shifted. “Really? Why is that?”
“Frankly, I can’t guarantee I can pull off this part of the assignment. I can only spend a few days at it, before getting rid of the guy in Cabin Twelve catches up with me.”
“Because you didn’t deal with the surveillance guy, you mean.”
I shook my head. “Even if I had, the middleman who sent them will know very soon that they failed.”
“Middleman...?”
I nodded. “There was almost certainly a middleman involved, someone with mob ties probably, hired by whoever it is locally that wants you taken out, literally in the worst way.”
The Wrong Quarry (Hard Case Crime) Page 7