“This is a homicide.” He scowled. “A high-profile homicide.”
“I promise not to touch a thing, not to tell anybody I was there,” I pleaded, ignoring my persistently beeping pager. “We’ve worked on this together from the start.”
He sighed. “I get called in on this, I deny everything and arrest you for criminal trespass. What d’ya think, Fitzgerald?”
“You know her better than I do.” The Daytona detective shrugged. “If you trust her, wouldn’t bother me. Your turf, your call.”
I knew I liked the man.
“So where is it?” Rychek asked.
“The Amsterdam,” I said. “One of the places I canvassed. The desk clerk lied to me.”
“Or you just talked to the wrong clerk,” Fitzgerald said.
“Ha,” Rychek said. “They all lie. It must be in the employee handbook. That place has got a track record for it. That’s exactly where I was gonna start, the priciest address on the block.”
I quickly told them about Marsh. “Totally creeped me out. I feel sorry for the guy, at least I did till he grabbed my knee.”
“Can’t fault his taste in knees.” Fitzgerald winked.
“That son-of-a-bitch,” Rychek growled. “I called the guy and he had nothing to say.”
“You have to ask right,” I said.
“Nice knees help,” Fitzgerald said.
“He’s just a lonely lech in a wheelchair, into word games.” I smiled at Fitzgerald in spite of myself. “Wait till you see his toys and the size of the chip on his shoulder. He wants to be appreciated, and he resents everybody taking credit for his vigilance.”
Rychek sighed at the news that Kaithlin’s father did not die, as believed, but had disappeared.
“What the hell is it with these people?” he grumbled. “Only way to be sure any of ’em are dead is to put a shovel in the ground, dig up their ass, and positively identify it.”
“Or shoot ’em yourself,” Fitzgerald offered helpfully.
The news desk beeped me again, and I told the detectives I’d catch them later at the Amsterdam.
I blew into the newsroom psyched into deadline momentum. The elevator ride had sent my blood pressure sky high.
“Where ya been, Britt?” Fred scowled at his watch. “We need the story.”
“Then do something about that damn elevator,” I complained. “I break the sound barrier getting back here, burst through the door at a dead run, and that thing clanks and grinds and takes forever.”
“Try taking the stairs.” He grinned. “Good for your heart.”
I rolled my chair up to the terminal. There is something exhilarating about the immediacy—the urgency—of news deadlines. Excited, you pump adrenaline and fight the clock, fatigue, and fear of failure. The high when you defeat them all is amazing—and addictive.
Tubbs edited my copy as Fred read over his shoulder. They questioned identifying Marsh as a witness to murder.
“It’s safe,” I insisted. “He can’t identify the killer and he wants recognition. I didn’t use his street address, and he’s well insulated. He has excellent security, all kinds of electronics, and he’s not out and about.”
“What’s this guy do?” Fred rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“Sits in a wheelchair and scans the horizon. That’s it. He’ll be a great source. He’d make a good profile, too, when I have the time. You know, unsung hero still finds way to contribute despite physical challenges.”
“If his security is so excellent, how the hell did you get in there?” Tubbs’s round face screwed into a skeptical frown.
“Because I’m good, really good,” I said sweetly.
The newsroom was abuzz about the story. Janowitz was writing a first-person reprise of the trial for Monday’s paper, and the editorial board was meeting to ready a hard-hitting slam at capital punishment.
This case would fuel the controversy. Personally, I support the death penalty in certain cases. Rabid dogs are put to sleep, and I’ve met people far more dangerous. Those who claim the death penalty is no deterrent forget that it definitely deters those to whom it’s applied. They kill no more.
“Great package.” Fred stood at my desk. “Nice work, Britt. Keep it up. A helluva story.” He squinted through his thick glasses and ran his fingers through his thinning brown hair. “Where the hell has the woman been hiding all these years?”
“With any luck,” I said, “we’ll know in time for tomorrow’s street edition.”
7
It was nearly dark when I arrived at the Amsterdam, hoping the detectives hadn’t already finished their work and departed. Hot pink and blue neon halos ringed the royal palms outside. Whose bright idea was it, I wondered, to embellish something as perfect as a palm tree with neon?
I was relieved to see Rychek’s unmarked on the ramp. The four-story oceanfront low-rise provides intimate high-style pied-à-terres for the wealthy who like to keep their playtime private. His car’s dents, dings, and yellow city tag made it easy to spot among the gleaming luxury sedans and chauffeured limos.
I saw no sign of cops in the elegantly understated lobby. The woman behind the desk was not the clerk I spoke to the day I canvassed. I flashed my photo ID, my thumb covering the word PRESS.
“Where can I find Detective Rychek?” I asked, my tone official.
She said nothing, but her furtive eyes darted to the small office. I heard raised voices as I approached. The short swarthy manager was wringing his hands as I stepped inside. Rychek was shouting into the phone.
“…exactly the way it was, or I’ll charge you personally and every member of your staff with obstructing justice and lousing up a homicide scene. If I hafta shut this joint down, I’ll do it. Go ahead. Call the mayor, the governor, call the pope if you want. I don’t give a rat’s ass. Do that, and I call every reporter in town, along with Geraldo Rivera, who happens to be a close personal friend-a mine.”
According to Fitzgerald, who filled me in, Rychek was talking to the hotel’s owner in New York. The detective was demanding that the hotel staffers, who had packed up Kaithlin’s belongings, unpack them and return them to her room to re-create the scene.
“And may God help you all if a single bobby pin or Tampax is missing,” he warned.
“These people oughta be kicked to the curb,” Rychek grumbled, as we waited in the small office for the staff members he wanted to arrive from home. Only after he had flashed his badge and persisted, he said, had management reluctantly acknowledged that Kaithlin had been a guest. She was registered as Kathleen Morrigan of 7744 Epona Drive, in Chicago. She never checked out.
After her corpse surfaced only blocks away, management had her room stripped and her belongings placed in storage, even though they claimed ignorance of the tragedy. Image is all in South Beach.
“They hadda know all along,” Rychek griped. “Guest goes to the beach. Doesn’t come back. Her bed never slept in again. Woman of identical description turns up drowned nearby. And nobody here put two and two together?”
Her death did not involve the hotel. She was not murdered in her room, didn’t drown in their pool—yet it was entirely possible, I thought, that worried management had sent someone to retrieve her telltale towel and beach bag. That dreaded phrase “The victim, a guest at the Amsterdam” was negative exposure.
“Bastards did the same thing last year,” Rychek muttered. “Remember the honeymooners who crashed their moped into the electric bus?”
I did, but was unaware of the postscript.
Distracted by the sight of Madonna jogging near Flamingo Park, the young Canadian couple on a rented moped had broadsided one of the city’s new electric buses. He died instantly. She suffered only minor injuries.
The widowed bride returned from the hospital emergency room to their honeymoon suite at the Amsterdam but found the lock changed. Their luggage waited in the lobby. In lieu of sympathy, management offered a cab. Reporters who called were told the couple was not registered.
/> Death was a turnoff to their target market.
“Chicago,” I murmured. “What was Kaithlin doing there?”
“She was probably never there at all,” Rychek growled. “Chicago PD has no record of a Kathleen Morrigan and no such address. No Epona Drive.”
“Told ’im,” Fitzgerald said happily. “Minute I heard the name. My grandmother used to spin stories from the old country. The Morrigan was an Irish goddess of war.”
“Well, if she showed up here to do battle,” Rychek said, “she sure as hell lost this one.”
“What about her credit card?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Checked in three days before she’s killed, paid for five plus in advance, with traveler’s checks, issued at Sun Bank, right here on the Beach.”
The hotel manager, still wringing his hands, reappeared with a request.
Could Kaithlin’s room be “re-created” on another floor? Her suite, he explained, was currently occupied by a Swedish industrialist and a model from Brazil.
“Move their asses outa there. Now,” Rychek said. “I want you to put that room back exactly like it was. And I need a list, names and addresses of every guest who’s been in there and every employee who’s serviced it since the occupant in question disappeared. We need to fingerprint ’em all for elimination purposes.”
The manager reacted as though Rychek had announced plans to detonate a small nuclear device in the lobby. He scurried off to use the telephone.
“You think the killer was ever in her room?” I asked.
“Who knows? Fat chance we’ll find anything now, but I’m doing everything by the book. Don’t want nobody asking me later ’bout all the things I coulda, woulda, shoulda done. The assholes running this place sure as hell could have saved us a lotta time and trouble. All they hadda do was pick up the phone and say they had a missing guest.”
The manager grimly returned with a metal box, the room safe.
“Where’s the key?” Rychek demanded.
Guests retained possession of the sole key, the manager explained. A $250 charge was added to the bill if it was not returned.
“Open it,” the detective ordered.
A maintenance man punched out the lock, and the detective spilled the contents out onto the manager’s desk.
Greenbacks, a flash of gold, the fire of diamonds, but not a single valuable we sought. No passport, no driver’s license, no ID.
The cash totaled nearly $10,000, with an additional $5,000 in traveler’s checks bearing the name Kathleen Morrigan. The gold was an intricately carved wedding band. The diamonds studded a gold Patek Philippe wristwatch.
Head back, squinting through his reading glasses, cigar clenched between his teeth, Rychek scrutinized the timepiece beneath the light of a banker’s lamp on the desk.
“Engraved?” Fitzgerald asked.
“Yeah,” the older detective grumbled in disgust, and handed it to him.
“What does it say?” I demanded.
Fitzgerald passed it to me.
For all time. Somehow I doubted it was a gift from R. J.
“What about the ring?”
The slim gold band looked small and delicate in his rough fingers. She was the last person to touch it, I thought, imagining her as she slipped it off. “See if you can make it out.” He handed it to me.
The ring was custom-made, with carved hearts entwined. The inscription was a promise. I read it aloud: You and no other.
“That’s it? Nothing else?” Rychek groused. “Didn’t these people ever hear of engraving initials, dates, social security numbers?”
“Oughtta be a law,” Fitzgerald agreed.
Her suite’s drapes were cheerful and flowered, the wall-paper gold-flocked. Her terrace faced the sea. The housekeepers were sisters, two small round women from Honduras. The bellman who had assisted them was from El Salvador. None spoke English.
“What’s the similarity between these people and cue balls?” Rychek muttered, out of their hearing. “The harder you hit ’em the more English they pick up.” He and Fitzgerald seemed amused at his bad joke.
I tried to translate, but nobody seemed to comprehend until Rychek began to talk residency and immigration status, asking for green cards and work permits.
Instantly, all three employees became animated. They smiled eagerly, nodded, and fired machine-gun rapid Spanish at one another. Yes. Yes. Of course! They remembered the woman now, the room, her belongings. Yes! They would restore them precisely, just as they had been.
The sisters placed objects just so, stepping back to study their work, rearranging them again, disagreeing as passionately over artistic differences as temperamental Hollywood set decorators. They folded silky lingerie in the hand-painted chest of drawers, arranged toiletries and perfume on the mirrored vanity table in the dressing room adjacent to the bath. Standing on tiptoe, they hung high-fashion designer garments in the spacious closets.
They restored a lined legal pad, its pages blank, to the night table next to the bed, along with a pen and a telephone message memo pad bearing the hotel’s trademark logo. With a final flourish, one hung a lacy cream-colored bra, embroidered with tiny seed pearls, from the bathroom doorknob. Are they improvising? I wondered, eager to please, or did the room’s prior occupant leave it dangling at just that rakish angle? Did she really leave the bed rumpled just so?
She had, they swore. They had re-created the room exactly as she left it. A crime-scene technician snapped photos as the detectives and I watched.
The rumpled bed with its soft pillows and flowered coverlet beckoned. I suddenly yearned to crawl between its silky sheets for a nap. How long since I had slept?
“What’sa matter, kid?” Rychek asked, “you crapping out on me?”
“No way.” I stifled a yawn. “Let’s look around.”
“She had a helluva view,” Fitzgerald said from the terrace.
Kaithlin’s makeup was Christian Dior, her perfume Chanel. I inhaled the fragrance, feeling her presence. I imagined her wearing the clothes, all finely tailored in luxurious fabrics. Her cashmere sweaters, silk blouse, soft suede jacket, all looked as though they’d fit me. But there was no way to be sure. Because everything, even her lacy intimate apparel, shared something in common. The labels were missing. Every clue to the designer, owner, size, or origin had been methodically snipped away. The name tag and what must have been a monogram had been cut from her leather luggage, probably with the manicure scissors on the marble counter in the bathroom.
The crime lab technician was tweezing hairs from her comb and brush set, for comparison to the corpse. Fitzgerald lingered over the nightstand while Rychek examined the pockets and linings of her clothing and I studied her shoes, size six medium, practically new. Two pairs of pumps, a pair of leather boots, and casual sandals, all expensive, but all major designer names in mass distribution.
“Hey.” Fitzgerald tipped the bedside lamp, spotlighting the top sheet on the legal pad. “Will ya look at this?”
We did. The page was blank.
“What?” Rychek demanded.
“Looks like somebody used it, wrote on the top page,” Fitzgerald said. “You can barely see faint handwriting indentations. Might be a letter. Maybe the lab can raise something off it.”
“That would make me a happy man,” Rychek said. “She musta mailed the original. It sure ain’t around here.”
The manager provided a printout of Kaithlin’s bill. Room service charges indicated that she had dined alone in her room with one exception: dinner for two, served in her room along with a bottle of wine, the night before her death.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Rychek muttered, chewing his unlit cigar. The server, from Ecuador, recalled her meals on the terrace, but that night he had set up a table in her sitting room. He lit candles, opened the wine. He remembered her well. She was an excellent tipper. No, he never saw her guest, who must have been elsewhere in the suite. No one in the busy hotel admitted seeing the guest arriv
e or depart.
The sisters recalled cigarette butts in the ashtrays just that once. Both they and the room service waiter also remembered stacks of papers and file folders on the desk. None remained among her belongings. Had Kaithlin destroyed the missing documents, were they stolen, or had they been inadvertently discarded by employees?
The bill also revealed that she had sipped vodka and orange juice from the minibar but never touched the snacks. The second night, she had ordered a film, my own favorite, Casablanca, that timeless classic of lost love and war. Surrounded by Kaithlin’s possessions, her perfume, her presence, I felt I was beginning to know her.
“Yes, sir, we are certainly getting somewhere here,” Rychek muttered, as he scrutinized her phone bill at the desk in her suite. “Yes, sir.” The lengthy bill included more than a dozen international calls, all to points south. As his thick index finger roved down the list of dates and times that calls were placed, he paused. “Uh-oh.”
I peered over his shoulder at the charges, then glanced at the sisters and the bellman, clustered close to the door. Conspicuously nonchalant, they looked everywhere but at us. I exchanged glances with Rychek, who nodded.
“Let’s talk.” I steered the youngest sister into the bedroom and closed the door. “So, you still have family in Honduras?”
She nodded. Her relatives there had been left homeless by the flood, she said, staring at the floor.
“You must be very concerned about them. It is troubling, a big worry,” I said. “Staying in touch is so important. So many who work here are worried about families back home.”
Sí, she agreed. Reynaldo, the bellman, had a cousin and an uncle injured in a bomb blast in El Salvador. The election strife in Peru was affecting other employees, as was the financial crisis in Ecuador.
I learned that, despite management’s claims of ignorance, word had swept among employees shortly after the body was discovered that the lovely occupant of this suite had drowned. By the time her belongings were packed up and moved out, numerous telephone calls had been placed from her room.
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