“Don’t worry about it, kid. Just don’t leave a crime scene unattended again. Not that it matters. It’s just bad form.”
He nodded. I grabbed my coat and after asking McHale at the duty desk to send the first officers who walked in the station house door to the hotel to assist, we left for the crime scene.
When we got to the there I showed my badge to the desk clerk, and we climbed the three flights to Peck’s room. The building had eight storeys, but the upper levels were used by the town and provided as permanent housing to paupers and destitute families. The hotel floors were kept in a state of modest repair, but I’d seen the upper floors and they were not a pretty sight. The hallways stank of mingled cooking smells, a lot of the windows were boarded up for lack of glass or plastic sheeting to replace the old panes. Most of the wiring didn’t work, as the city had decided it posed a safety risk and didn’t have the money to fix it. The plumbing was a mess. Credit to the hotel manager that he was able to maintain some semblance of comfort and even luxury on his floors, considering the vertical slum above it. The hotel itself was owned by one of the wealthier merchants who lived up on the hill, who leased the floors from the city. That’s what paid for what little upkeep that got done on the building.
Thinking about the owner, it struck me as odd that none of the towns truly wealthy inhabitants, the merchants who dominated trade in the state, had bothered to show up to the meeting last night. They lived in town, but they had their own private security, didn’t mix with the townsfolk, and sent their servants down the hill to do their shopping. In the end, maybe it didn’t matter to them who was running the place, as long as they were left alone.
We walked down a hallway towards the room. As we turned the corner I could see two figures standing in the hallway. A man in a dress shirt poked his head out of his room as we walked past, and then quickly shut his door, as if spooked. As we approached, Velasquez pointed to one of the figures, who was standing nervously at the door in a dark jacket and oddly enough, slippers. “That’s the manager.” He was talking to one of his cleaning staff. He looked relieved when he saw us.
“Thank goodness you’re here detective.”
“And you are?”
“Louis Hiram, Manager of the Smith House Hotel.”
“Can you let us in?”
He struggled to get a grip on his keys with his shaking hands and finally managed to unlock the door.
“Keep everyone away from here, and don’t let anyone check out. Get me a list of everyone in the hotel.”
He nodded, and turned to the cleaner, a middle-aged man in overalls and an apron, and repeated the instructions.
I wasn’t prepared for what we found in the room. I was expecting blood, but this was a deluge. And there was Irving Peck, on his back in the middle of it, a small bloodied object erupting from his jugular. There was blood on the bedspread, where it looked like he might have tried to stand up. Perhaps he’d been alive for a few minutes before the blood loss had caused him to black out.
Looking at the scene I could discern two sets of footprints, one which was obviously Velasquez’s.
“Who found the body?”
“The hotel manager said he did, after the cleaning staff noticed blood dripping from the ceiling in the room below.”
“So these would be his footprints.”
“Yeah. He showed me the shoes. He switched to those loafers he was wearing. The tread on the shoes matched the prints in here. These ones around the edge are mine.”
There was no indication anyone else had been in the room. I squatted closer to the body to look at his neck. The object did look like a pen, and grabbing my handkerchief, I pulled it out. Attached to it was a kind of metal chain, and then I realized what I was looking it. It was Nora Cartwright’s pencil, the antique she wore on a chain around her neck.
“What is that,” Velasquez asked me.
“It’s a chain. You wear it around your neck. It looks like the one Nora Cartwright owns.”
Velasquez looked worried.
“What do you think is gonna happen?”
“We’re going to take this body to the morgue and arrest the person who did this.”
“No, I mean, what’s going on? Why would Nora Cartwright kill Irving Peck?”
I could see the kid was scared. He’d joined up to protect his family and his loved ones, but I think seeing a dead body up close like this was too much for him. What we were up against had become real.
And he was right to be scared. If we couldn’t hold our own people together, we had no chance against an army. As for the case, it looked open and shut, but it didn’t make sense. Unless Nora had really lost her mind last night, come to Irving’s hotel room, stabbed him, and run away without her pencil, it didn’t really make sense. If it had happened that way, there probably would have had words first, and someone would have heard something or the ensuing struggle. And it took a lot of strength to jam something that blunt into a person’s neck. Nora was tough, but small. She certainly could have done it, but it would have had to have been a lucky blow.
“Look at this,” I said. “The chain is broken.”
“Like it was ripped off someone’s neck,” Velasquez said.
I took a look at the body. The blood was all over his neck and shoulders. I couldn’t see any other wounds, but he was a mess. We’d need to do an autopsy to be sure, but it looked like the wound in his neck was what caused him to bleed out.
There was talking in the hall, and two more uniforms walked into the room.
“Jesus eff Christ…”
“Boys, can you wrap the crime scene up and get the body down to the morgue? We need the complete package on this one. Collect everything and don’t let anyone in the room.”
They nodded, and started setting up to collect evidence and seal the room.
“Velasquez, I need you to canvas every room on this floor, the floor below, and anyone you can find upstairs. If you see any cleaning staff, tell them to lay off and go home for the day, on the orders of the B.P.D.”
“Sure thing, detective.”
I handed the murder weapon to one of the uniforms and went downstairs to talk to the hotel manager. The desk clerk led me to his office, where I found him sitting at his desk, his head in his hands.
“You never had a murder here before?” I asked.
He looked up at me, a twinge of anger in his eyes.
“Not on any of my floors, certainly not. Our guests are of a certain class. They aren’t the murdering kind.”
“Then how do you account for old Peck up there?”
“Well, he’s a farmer isn’t he?” the manager said petulantly.
“I suppose he is. Do you think that might have anything to do with his murder?”
The hotel manager looked nonplussed.
“How should I know?”
“You seem to have an opinion on the matter.”
He sputtered for a moment, then: “I just meant…I just meant that he’s not our usual kind of customer.”
This was true enough, but I was going to let him twist in the wind as long as I could. You never know what people are going to say when they realize they’ve put their foot in it, and they start flailing around, looking for a way to save face.
“What is your usual kind of customer?” I knew the answer to this, but again, I wanted to hear him say it.
“Salesmen, merchants, dignitaries.”
“Dignitaries, eh? Sounds important. What kind of dignitaries?”
Here he demurred. “I really don’t feel comfortable discussing the particulars of our clients’ livelihoods. I’m sure you understand.”
I did. Most people in town would never dream of being able to stay in a hotel. People didn’t usually pay for rooms with their own money.
“So how did the President of the Farmer’s Union pay for the room.”
“He lucked out. We had the room, it was empty, we gave it to him for a quarter the price. Otherwise it would have just sat unoccupie
d.”
This would just about have made it affordable, if the Farmer’s Union was providing for his expenses. And it made sense that they would have, given how important the negotiations were.
“Is anyone else from the Farmer’s Union staying here? Do they know about the murder?” I asked.
“There’s a man named Andrew Fenster staying down the hall from where Peck was. I’ll give you the room number. He’s the deputy head of the union.”
“Do you know if he’s still here?”
“I don’t think he’s checked out. I would imagine he might be in his room,” the hotel manager said.
“How does someone get in and out of the hotel after hours,” I asked.
“Through the front door.”
“There’s no other way?”
“The emergency exits are locked, and connected to an alarm that has a battery backup.”
“Fancy.”
“We take the safety of our guests very seriously.”
“What about the other entrance?” I asked. There were two separate stairwell entrances for the other five floors of the building. It kept the riffraff away from the Smith House’s guests.
“There’s no connection. The other stairwells were tacked onto the building about twenty years ago. The doors to the original stairwell are all closed up. There’s no communication between the floors. For all intents and purposes they are separate buildings.”
“So anyone coming in and out would have had to go by the front desk. Was there a clerk on duty the whole night?”
“Of course!”
“Can I speak to him?”
“I’ll give you his address.” He took out a small writing pad, a little handmade thing with square pieces of thick, rough edged paper held together with polished wooden loops.
“His name is Reinhold. Willy Reinhold. He lives at this address on St. Paul Street. It’s close by. Given how late he worked, he should be getting up in an hour or two, though I don’t imagine you’d be concerned about waking him up.”
“No, I don’t imagine I would.”
I went back upstairs to find Andrew Fenster’s room. I knocked on the door but there was no answer. I tried the knob, and it was open, so I let myself in. There, sitting on the bed, with his head in his hands, was the man who’d sat next to Peck in the bingo hall. It was hard to tell, but it sounded like he was crying, or at least sniffling. I cleared my throat, and he looked up at me, suddenly aware that I was in the room.
“I know you, you’re with the police,” he said, looking at the floor.
“How did you find out?”
“Find out what?” He looked confused for a moment. “About Irving?”
“They’d already found him when I went to go knock on his door this morning. We were set to go speak to our membership.”
“Where was that happening?”
“In the park. There aren’t a lot of spaces in town that can hold forty people.”
“Why do you need so many members in town for the negotiations?” I asked.
“The Union is a fully democratic institution. We need the consent of our membership. Each Union rep in town represents a town or self-selected grouping within the Union. They all need to be here to understand what they need to take back to their communities.”
“When was the last time you saw Irving?” I asked.
“In his room, about ten p.m. last night. We briefly discussed strategy, but decided it would be best to go back to the membership in the morning, and make a decision collectively. That would have been today.”
He fiddled with the lapel of his jacket. He was well-dressed for a farmer. Jacket, collared shirt, brogues. None of it looked expensive, but he was clearly more fastidious than his co-unionists.
“And you didn’t see him again? Did he leave the hotel at any point?”
“I didn’t, and he didn’t leave, as far as I know. He seemed tired when I left his room. I can’t imagine he went out again.”
“You hear any noises in the night?”
“Nothing that struck me as unusual.”
“What will you do now?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
He looked genuinely crestfallen. He took out a handkerchief and patted his brow.
“Don’t leave town, alright?”
He nodded.
Before I left the hotel, I took a walk around the building. The emergency exits looked secure, with working push bars. These weren’t your standard early 21st century metal doors left to rot and swing in the wind. Someone had sourced working parts from somewhere and kept them in good shape. If anyone had wanted to get into the building unnoticed, they probably would have tried the door that led to the stairwell at the back of the building. The alarm system didn’t appear to have been tampered with either.
I met up with Velasquez around the front of the building.
“The body’s been taken to the station house. I canvassed everyone I could find, but no one heard or saw anything.”
“No one heard any arguments? Did you talk to the people in the room immediately below?”
“They checked out early this morning, a man and a woman traveling together. Canadians, named Bouchard. I talked to the hotel manager. He said they seemed like honeymooners.”
Canadians came down often, even with the threat of civil war looming. Their dollar went a long way and a nice vacation could be had for cheap.
I sent Velasquez back to the station to write everything up and start cataloguing the evidence.
Willy Reinhold lived in one of those ugly luxury condos from the ’10s that have all been subdivided into tiny apartments. There was no lock on the front door of the building–presumably the electric lock mechanism had stopped working ages ago–no one in the building would have had anything worth stealing anyways. I knocked on his door.
There was no response for a long time. I was about to knock again and I heard a rustling sound inside, and then muffled footsteps that grew steadily louder. The door opened.
A young man wrapped in a dirty sheet answered the door.
“What is it?”
I showed him my badge.
“What is this about?” he asked, his eyes opening widening.
“Were you working the night shift at the Smith House front desk last night?”
“Yeah, 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. What’s this about?”
“What can you tell me about the movements last night of s guest at the hotel, an Irving Peck.”
“Peck, yeah he was there last night. He checked in that morning, but didn’t come back until 9:45.”
“Did he leave the hotel again that night?”
“No, I didn’t see him leave. And the alarm was armed so he couldn’t have taken the back door without me knowing.”
“What happens when the back door gets opened?”
“Silent alarm. We see a light go on at the desk. It stays on until we reset the system.”
“Did anyone come in to see him?”
“The only time I was away from the desk was when I took bathroom breaks. I took four total, but taking a leak doesn’t take long. So it’s possible someone came in during those times, but unlikely. I can usually hear the total doors open from the bathroom. What’s this about?”
“Can I come inside?” I asked.
He showed me in, pointed to an ancient threadbare couch and I sat down. An old transistor radio was set up next to it, and across from that, a small cot. The kitchenette looked barely functional, with a hotplate and a rusted out sink.
“You pick up anything on that radio?”
“Sometimes. I like the Lake Report, when it’s on. Lately they’ve had trouble getting consistent power for their transmitter, and the signal goes in and out. I don’t really get to travel, so it’s nice to hear about goings on around the Lake, and news from New York and Montreal. My dream is to go to Canada one day. I hear things are better there.”
“Irving Peck was murdered in his room last night.”
At first what I’d
said hadn’t registered. His expression didn’t change, and then slowly, he started to wince, and he held onto his belly as if it suddenly hurt.
“Why? How?”
“I can’t discuss the particulars, but I need you to tell me if you noticed anything out of the ordinary.”
He seemed to be searching for something as he looked side to side. “No, nothing.”
“No strangers, no weird noises, unusual complaints from other guests? And you’re sure you were only away from the desk for a few minutes all night?”
“One hundred percent.”
I looked at him, waiting for anything he might add, but he stayed silent. The sun was beginning to poke through his blinds. I didn’t envy him, working the graveyard shift at the hotel, and waking up to the harsh light of day in such a squalid apartment.
“How long have you worked at the hotel?” I asked.
“Just two weeks.”
“Hell of a start,” I said.
It wouldn’t be long before word got out that Peck was dead. The mayor would know by now, and she’d have to decide how to proceed with the negotiations. They might have to be put on hold, but any delay in making a plan for Burlington’s defence would leave us vulnerable. Nora would have known that too, so if she killed him, it would have had to be a crime of passion. If she had wanted him dead, she would have known that using her pencil to do it would have been difficult and incriminating, especially if she hadn’t taken the pencil with her afterwards. She would also have known that regardless as to her own opinion on how to conduct the defensive preparations, killing a key partner would slow things down. If it had been a crime of passion, which was the only conceivable scenario in which she could have done it, she wouldn’t have snuck into the hotel, which, if Reinhold was telling the truth, was the only way she could have gotten in.
Something wasn’t right, but for the time-being, I’d have to arrest Nora, for her own protection as much as anything else.
Arriving at the station house, I realized my instincts were right. There was Chief, and Molly McHale, standing on the front steps, trying to calm a mob of farmers who were crying out for blood.
Death Across the Lake Page 2