“People come. People go.”
“Girls?”
“Girls, boys, women, men. I don’t notice.”
“I guess you’re not supposed to notice.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means this place looks as if it runs a call-girl service.”
“This is an expensive hotel, Officer. We cater to a lot of businessmen on expenses. We look after them. Valet parking, twenty-four-hour room service, anything they want to order up. If our customers want a girl in their room, we don’t make a habit of complaining about it. The company that owns the hotel also owns an escort service. Everything is honest, and everything is discreet.”
This kind of operation was something new in the ken of Theophile O’Doull. He was trying to be cool and worldly, but he felt like a yokel just in from the farm.
“Everything is discreet,” O’Doull repeated. “I suppose that means you are not going to tell me if you did see a woman go up or come down the elevator.” The woman who phoned the desk had to have been in the room.
The clerk answered the ringing phone, then scribbled a number on a piece of paper. He motioned to the woman who had been sitting in the lobby chair. She came over, took the note, and disappeared in the direction of the elevators. Peabody didn’t look O’Doull in the eyes.
“Did you send a woman up to the penthouse last night, Mr. Peabody?”
“No.”
“If you’re lying, I’ll have this place closed. You’ll be charged with keeping a common bawdy house.” It was a desperado tactic, O’Doull knew. He had no idea what the Florida morals statute said.
“No,” the clerk repeated. “I’m being level, Officer. For sure, I don’t know all the girls. If a lady walked off the elevator, I might not know her. I can’t remember.”
O’Doull guessed he was lying. “I want to go up to the room,” he said.
There was a slight sheen of dampness on Peabody’s forehead. “You can’t,” he said. “I want a search warrant.”
“If we come back with a search warrant, we’ll tear the place apart room by room and take you in for questioning, Peabody.” O’Doull tried to imitate the voice of a made-for-TV-movie cop.
The clerk’s voice dropped. “Look, Detective, if I send you up there, my nuts are on the chopping block, and you’ll be putting yours up there beside them. The boss sent a guest up to the penthouse. He’s a vip.”
“Just a minute,” O’Doull said. “You mean your boss is letting someone use the same suite where two people were killed not twenty-four hours ago? Did anyone pause to clean up the blood?”
“This is a hotel. Empty rooms lose money. It’s spic and span. The cleaning lady went through it. You fellows left a mess.”
O’Doull muttered a soft profanity. He hoped the cleaning woman had not wiped the phone.
“What about Mr. Escarlata’s personal effects?” he asked.
“What about them?” Peabody said. “You guys have them.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” O’Doull said. “Is there a woman up there now?”
“Yeah.” Peabody narrowed his eyes and grinned darkly at O’Doull. “Maybe you better decide to wait until tomorrow. The man ain’t going to let anyone in unless I phone ahead.”
“He’ll be in bed.”
“Yeah,” said the clerk, “he’ll be in bed.”
Okay, O’Doull thought. That lessened the chance of the man further smudging the living-room phone. “I’ll be back. I’m going to call headquarters.”
“Pay phone’s around the corner.”
There were two coin phones and two house phones. The switchboard operator put him through to the penthouse. O’Doull knew there was another phone in the bedroom.
The man who answered conveyed his irritation in two words. “Hello. Yes.”
“It’s Mr. Peabody at the desk, sir. Would you care for any refreshments? Compliments of the management, of course.” He affected a high voice, similar to Peabody’s.
“Send up a cold pitcher of margaritas, and a couple of good cigars. Good cigars. Bering Coronas in the aluminum casings.”
O’Doull waited until Peabody’s back was turned, then slipped into the stairwell. He took the elevator from the second floor to the top.
A heavy man in a robe opened the door. He looked puzzled. “Are you room service?”
O’Doull gently shouldered his way in, flashed his RCMP badge quickly and before the man could focus on it, announced he was O’Doull from the police. “I won’t be long.” He went to the living-room phone and dusted it with print powder.
“What’s going on?”
“There was a murder here last night,” O’Doull said.
The man’s eyes popped; his jaw dropped.
O’Doull found seven possibles, and lifted them from the phone. He was looking for finger and thumb impressions around the earpiece or mouthpiece, where one would normally grasp a dangling phone to return it to the hook. There were two prints from the earpiece.
“Have you used this phone?” O’Doull asked.
“No.”
“What about whoever’s in the bedroom with you?”
“Got here before I did.” O’Doull made for the bedroom. “Please don’t go in there, Officer.” O’Doull opened the door. “I am telling you not to go in there.” O’Doull went in.
The two women did not bother to cover themselves. O’Doull saw one of them hide something under the mattress. A rubber dildo, he thought, and a short leather strap. He was smiling bravely.
“Have either of you used the phone in the other room?”
Both of them shook their heads. One was dark, possibly Latin, and wore black stockings hooked to a garter belt. The other was blonde and flat-chested, and wore nothing.
O’Doull, feeling silly, peeked under the bed, as if he might find a murderer hiding there. Or, he told himself, an overlooked weapon.
“There’s just the two of us,” the blonde said. “Ain’t nobody under the bed, Officer. You busting us or something?”
“You could use a bust, Cherrie,” said the dark-haired woman.
O’Doull was about to leave the bedroom, when he turned around. “Do you girls work this motel regularly?” he asked. “The hotel, the street out front?”
The Latin woman shook her head. “I work up in Lauderdale. Cherrie called me for tonight. She needed an extra.”
“Yeah, this is my territory,” Cherrie said. “You’re on the murder team, huh? I split right out of the hotel when the cops came by last night.”
“Where were you before that?”
“Fourteenth floor. For a couple of hours. Eighth floor after midnight for an hour, hour and a half. I wasn’t nowhere near the floor, if that’s what you’re asking, and I didn’t see nothing.”
“At two a.m., where were you?”
“Lobby. Cocktail lounge.”
“See anyone come down in the elevator? A woman?”
She looked at him for a long time. “I ain’t going to court. I ain’t keen on giving evidence, you know.”
“No court. This is just for me. It’s important.”
The women’s trick came to the bedroom door, interrupting. “Look, Officer, I’ve just phoned the desk. They tell me you don’t have a search warrant. Get out of here, or I’ll have you reported in ten seconds.” He was red and shaking.
O’Doull stood his ground. He stilled his nervousness and smiled at the man. “I don’t think you want to do that, sir,” he said. “After all, if I did have a search warrant, I might have to seize the evidence.” He reached under the mattress. His right hand pulled out the strap and dildo. The man opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything. He backed away from the door.
O’Doull’s left hand had found something else, small, cylindrical, soft, slightly damp. He pulled it out. A string dangled from it.
“Did you put this in here?” he asked the women.
They shook their heads. They were both giggling.
“What is it?” Too late, he knew the answer. He was blushing.
“Tampon,” Cherrie said. “It looks a little used.”
“Right, right,” O’Doull said. “Of course.” He slipped it into an envelope.
“You asked me if I saw a lady in the lobby around two o’clock,” Cherrie said. “I did notice someone walk out the front door about ten or fifteen minutes before the police came. Not a regular. A real good-looker, I hate to say. I always look the competition up and down pretty good. She was high-class.”
O’Doull felt a little knot of unhappiness. “Blonde?” he asked.
“Yeah. About my height. Short hair. She wasn’t dressed up or nothing, and I thought that was weird. Just jeans and a shirt, no heels, no makeup even. Didn’t see her eyes. I think she took a taxi. She had a traveling bag with her.”
“Would you recognize a photograph of her?”
“Yeah, maybe. If she’s trying to work out of here, she better clear it with a few of us.”
He arranged to meet the prostitute back at the hotel the next evening, before she went on shift.
***
It was two a.m. Twenty-four hours since the murders.
O’Doull was watching a whodunit on the late show. At the end, annoyed, he flicked the set off. He had guessed wrong. The murderer had turned out to be the woman, the mistress of the rich industrialist.
The murderer is always the person you don’t want to be the murderer, he thought. That’s the way they construct these damn movies. They set you up.
For about the tenth time in the last hour and a half, he studied the photograph.
Marianne Larochelle, smiling at him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“You’re good,” she said. “How did you know where to find me?”
“I knew the hotel was full of stewardesses, and people on the run like the comfort of familiar surroundings.” He smiled. “It was cyanide trioxide, wasn’t it? Paralyzes the heart muscles, then disappears without a trace.”
“You are good.” Her .357 Magnum was pointed at his gut.
“You sprinkled it into his bag of pot. All it took was one toke.” He moved closer to her, his eyes looking deeply into hers. “You won’t kill me,” he said.
The gun fell to the floor. She was in his arms. He felt her hands tug at his zipper and her warm fingers curl around his cock. . . .
But it was O’Doull’s own hand. He withdrew it, lay sweating on the bed, counting slowly backwards from a thousand. Then he got under a cold shower.
Before going down for breakfast, he called Meyers’s home number.
“I didn’t wake you,” he said.
“Of course not. It’s my practice to fall asleep every night exactly at midnight, and to wake at six o’clock. A disciplined, regular routine. A precise order of habit patterns gives a continuity to life, Theo.”
“I’ll have to try it.”
“Do you need a ride to your plane?” Meyers asked.
“Not yet. Are you sure Marianne Larochelle is on the ship?”
There was a silence. “What do you have in mind, Theo?”
“I have in mind she’s not. Still here, or back in Canada.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’m just covering the bases.”
“Maybe you’re on to something, O’Doull. The dame who called the desk at the hotel — could be her. And she was laying Escarlata. Maybe she couldn’t get enough of it. I hear he was quite a cocksman. Anyway, we’ll find out when the ship pulls in. If you’ve got some theory, you should talk to Detective Braithwaite about it.”
“I don’t think he’s interested in theories. They clutter up his simple case.”
“What’s your theory?”
“Assuming for the moment that she’s involved, I would guess she would hang around here, lying low, waiting for the heat to die.”
“If she’s doing that, she’s picked the perfect part of the world. There are five hundred hotels in Miami Beach alone, maybe another two thousand apartment hotels. And they’re all empty in April.”
O’Doull stopped off at the police station and gave the fingerprint lifts to one of the officers working on the file.
Braithwaite scowled at him when he walked into the homicide office.
“Look, O’Doull, I know what you’ve been up to. My phone has been burning off the hook over the business at the hotel last night. I’m up to my armpits in shit over it.”
“The guy in the hotel room,” O’Doull said. “He complained?”
“He’s a circuit court judge down from Tallahassee. He was there sawing off a quiet piece of ass. You bust in like you own the place. No search warrant. No goddamn authority whatsoever. A cop with — what is it you’ve got, an Irish accent? — that’s what the state attorney’s office said. I covered as best I could, said it was some dumb rookie. Get the hell out of this country, O’Doull.”
“I’m on official business, Detective. It’s cleared with the DEA.” He hoped. “Check with my boss in Canada, or check with Jessica Flaherty.”
“I damn well will. I thought at first, okay, you can snoop around. You’re not costing the U.S. taxpayer a nickel. Who knows, maybe you’ll find out there’s someone else implicated. Instead, you’ve been running around like some cockass Sam Spade.”
“I picked a couple of things up —”
“If it’s not going to grab me, don’t tell me. Don’t give me theories. We’ve got a reputation for unsolved crimes around here we’d like to ignore. This one is solved. Don’t try to add to the list.”
“Dr. Benitez —”
“I’m up to here with Dr. Benitez. Everything’s the crime of the century when Benitez gets to carve up the body. He’s got some grandiose delusion he’s a two-fisted coroner out to expose lazy cops. The lazy cops around here are working triple overtime for piss-all. Don’t give me complex theories, O’Doull. It always turns out the right one is the logical one, which was the obvious one all along. If you kick a guy’s nose into his brain, you’re a candidate for heart seizure.”
“There was no blood on Kelly’s boots. Where’s the murder weapon? Dr. Benitez says it would take something as heavy as a crowbar —”
“Dr. Benitez! Don’t give me any more Dr. Benitez!”
***
O’Doull went to the airport to pick up the tape, then phoned an electronics firm and arranged to rent their laboratory facilities. “I’m working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration,” he told them.
Then he checked in with Operation Potship.
Braithwaite had contacted his boss.
“O’Doull, I warned you not to play detective,” Mitchell shouted at him. “You’re going to cause a goddamn international incident. Get back up here, before you get charged with impersonating a police officer.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming. I don’t think Larochelle is on the ship.”
“What?”
“Nobody saw her leave on the ship.”
“Theo, leave the heavy stuff to the Miami police. I want you back to help us land our fish. On the double, O’Doull.”
O’Doull made inquiries at Air Canada to find out where its stewardesses stayed at Miami, then rented a Dodge Dart and drove to a hotel near the airport. It was a hunch.
***
“I’d like to look at your check-ins Tuesday, after midnight. I’m a policeman.”
O’Doull was handed registration slips. A Mr. and Mrs. Nesbitt from Ohio checked in just after two a.m. A Mr. Schaffer at two-fifteen. A Gabrielle Hubert arrived a few minutes later. No one after that until the dawn hours. Gabrielle Hubert was from Montreal. Someone had marked “Air Canada discount” on the slip. Room 714.
<
br /> “Do you know if she’s in the room?”
“You can phone her.”
“Do it for me. Ask her if she’s planning to stay another night.”
There was no answer from the room.
O’Doull went to the bar and had a rum and soda. In an hour, he returned to the desk. “Can you try again for me?”
Again, no answer.
“Can I have a key to the room?” O’Doull asked.
“No.”
“I’m investigating a murder.”
“May I see your identification?”
***
O’Doull hid in the corner of the lobby until the clerk took a coffee break. “I’m afraid I left my key in my room,” he told the relief clerk. “Room 714. My name is Gabriel Hubert.” O’Doull crossed his fingers. The clerk gave him the key.
There was a “Do Not Disturb” card dangling from the doorknob of 714. O’Doull put his ear flat against the door and heard a soft sound of voices.
He put the key in the lock and quietly pushed the door open.
The room was empty. The bed was mussed, and a soap opera was playing on the television set. He stepped inside and closed the door. The air seemed to cloy his nostrils.
“I have a gun on you,” a voice said. “I will kill you.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
O’Doull walked straight ahead, toward the bed, past the wan-looking version of the woman whose eyes had so often peered at his through the glossy finish of a color photograph. She was standing by the bathroom doorway with a gun in her hand.
“My name is Theophile O’Doull,” he said. “I am a policeman.” He put a hand into his inside jacket pocket.
“Don’t,” she said faintly.
“I am going to put my wallet on the bed, open to my badge and to my identification. Then I will back away and you can look at it. I don’t have a gun.”
He went to the window, and turned to watch her approach the bed. She looked drawn, fragile, and the green of her eyes was subsumed in the darkness of hugely dilated pupils.
High Crimes Page 20