Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

  "Green glass," I said.

  "Like the ring."

  I nodded. He took the piece of glass from me, held it to the light, dropped it back in my palm. "We don't know she wore the ring to the hotel," he reminded me. "We just said so for the sake of argument."

  "I know."

  "Maybe she left it at the apartment. Maybe someone took it from there."

  "Who?"

  "The boyfriend. Let's say he didn't kill her, let's say it was an EDP like I said from the beginning-"

  "You really use that expression?"

  "You get so you use the expressions they want you to use, you know how it works. Let's say the psycho killed her and the boyfriend's worried he'll be tied into it. So he goes to the apartment, he's got a key, and he takes the ring. Maybe he bought her other presents and he took them, too. He would've taken the fur, too, but it was in the hotel. Why isn't that theory just as good as the killer yanking the ring off her finger?"

  Because it wasn't a psycho, I thought. Because a psycho killer wouldn't be sending men in lumber jackets to warn me off, wouldn't be passing messages to me through Danny Boy Bell. Because a psycho wouldn't have worried about handwriting or fingerprints or towels.

  Unless he was some sort of Jack the Ripper type, a psycho who planned and took precautions. But that wasn't it, that couldn't be it, and the ring had to be significant. I dropped the piece of glass back into my pocket. It meant something, it had to mean something.

  Durkin's phone rang. He picked it up, said "Joe Durkin" and "Yeah, right, right." He listened, grunting acknowledgment from time to time, darting a pointed look in my direction, making notes on a memo pad.

  I went over to the coffee machine and got us both coffee. I couldn't remember what he took in his coffee, then remembered how bad the coffee was out of that machine and added cream and sugar to both cups.

  He was still on the phone when I got back to the desk. He took the coffee, nodded his thanks, sipped it, lit a fresh cigarette to go with it. I drank some of my own coffee and made my way through Kim's file, hoping something I saw might bridge a gap for me. I thought of my conversation with Donna. What was wrong with the word sparkle? Hadn't the ring sparkled on Kim's finger? I remembered how it had looked with the light striking it. Or was I just fabricating the memory to reinforce my own theory? And did I even have a theory? I had a missing ring and no hard evidence that the ring had even existed. A poem, a suicide note, and my own remark about eight million stories in the Emerald City. Had the ring triggered that subconsciously? Or was I just identifying with the crew on the Yellow Brick Road, wishing I had a brain and a heart and a dose of courage?

  Durkin said, "Yeah, it's a pisser, all right. Don't go 'way, okay? I'll be right out."

  He hung up, looked at me. His expression was a curious one, self-satisfaction mixed with something that might have been pity.

  He said, "The Powhattan Motel, you know where Queens Boulevard cuts the Long Island Expressway? It's just past the intersection. I don't know just where, Elmhurst or Rego Park. Right about where they run into each other."

  "So?"

  "One of those adult motels, waterbeds in some of the rooms, X-rated movies on the teevee. They get cheaters, the hot-sheet trade, take a room for two hours. They'll turn a room five, six times a night if they get the volume, and a lot of it's cash, they can skim it. Very profitable, motels like that."

  "What's the point?"

  "Guy drove up, rented a room a couple of hours ago. Well, that business, you make up the room soon as the customer leaves it. Manager noticed the car was gone, went to the room. Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the door. He knocks, no answer, he knocks again, still no answer. He opens the door and guess what he finds?"

  I waited.

  "Cop named Lennie Garfein responded to the call, first thing that struck him was the similarity to what we had at the Galaxy Downtowner. That was him on the phone. We won't know until we get the medical evidence, direction of thrust, nature of wounds, all that, but it sure as hell sounds identical. Killer even took a shower, took the towels with him when he left."

  "Was it-"

  "Was it what?"

  It wasn't Donna. I'd just spoken to her. Fran, Ruby, Mary Lou-

  "Was it one of Chance's women?"

  "Hell," he said, "how do I know who Chance's women are? You think all I do is keep tabs on pimps?"

  "Who was it?"

  "Not one of anybody's women," he said. He crushed out his cigarette, started to help himself to a fresh one, changed his mind and pushed it back into the pack. "Not a woman," he said.

  "Not-"

  "Not who?"

  "Not Calderуn. Octavio Calderуn, the room clerk."

  He let out a bark of laughter. "Jesus, what a mind you got," he said. "You really want things to make sense. No, not a woman, and not your boy Calderуn either. This was a transsexual hooker off the Long Island City stroll. Preoperative, from what Garfein said. Means the tits are there, the silicone implants, but she's still got her male genitals. You hear me? Her male genitals. Jesus, what a world. Of course maybe she got the operation tonight. Maybe that was surgery there, with a machete."

  I couldn't react. I sat there, numb. Durkin got to his feet, put a hand on my shoulder. "I got a car downstairs. I'm gonna run out there, take a look at what they got. You want to tag along?"

  Chapter 28

  The body was still there, sprawled full-length on the king-size bed. It had bled white, leaving the skin with the trans-lucence of old china. Only the genitalia, hacked almost beyond recognition, identified the victim as male. The face was that of a woman. So was the smooth and hairless skin, the slender but full-breasted body.

  "She'd fool you," Garfein said. "See, she had the preliminary surgery. The breast implants, the Adam's apple, the cheekbones. And of course the hormone shots all along. That keeps down the beard and the body hair, makes the skin nice and feminine. Look at the wound in the left breast there. You can see the silicone sac. See?"

  Blood all over, and the smell of fresh death in the air. Not the stale reek of a late-found corpse, not the stench of decomposition, but the horrible odor of a slaughterhouse, the raw throat-catching smell of fresh blood. I felt not so much nauseated as overpowered, oppressed by the warmth and density of the air.

  "What was lucky is I recognized her," Garfein was saying. "That way I knew right off she was a pross and that made the connection in my mind with that case of yours, Joe. Was the one you caught as bloody as this?"

  "Same thing," Durkin said.

  I said, "You recognized her?"

  "Oh, right away. I did a hitch not that long ago with the Pussy Posse over in Long Island City. They still got a stroll there, they've had street prostitution in that same location for forty or fifty years, but now you're getting a lot of middle-class people moving in there, converting lofts for residential use, buying up the old brownstones and converting them back from rooming houses to nice homes. They sign the lease in the daytime and then they move in and they look at what's around them and they aren't happy, and the pressure comes down to clean up the street." He pointed at the figure on the bed. "I must have arrested her, oh, say three times."

  "You know her name?"

  "Which name do you want? They've all got more than one. Her street name was Cookie. That was the name that came to me when I saw her. Then I called in to the station house at Fiftieth and Vernon and had somebody pull her file. She was calling herself Sara but back when she made her bar mitzvah the name they wrote down was Mark Blaustein."

  "She had a bar mitzvah?"

  "Who knows? I wasn't invited. But she's a nice Jewish girl from Floral Park is the point I'm making. A nice Jewish girl who used to be a nice Jewish boy."

  "Sara Blaustein?"

  "Sara Bluestone a/k/a Sara Blue. A/k/a Cookie. Notice the hands and feet? They're on the large side for a girl. That's one way you can tell a transsexual. Of course it's not foolproof, you get girls with big hands and boys with small ones. She'd fool yo
u, wouldn't she?"

  I nodded.

  "She would have had the rest of the surgery soon. Probably already had herself scheduled for the operation. Law says they have to live as a woman for a year before Medicaid'll pick up the tab. Of course they all got Medicaid, they all got welfare. They'll turn ten or twenty tricks a night, all quickie blow jobs in the johns' cars for ten or twenty bucks a pop, they'll bring in a couple of hundred dollars a night seven nights a week, all of it tax free, and they got Medicaid and welfare and the ones with kids get ADC and half the pimps are on SSI."

  He and Durkin batted that ball around a little. Meanwhile the technical people were busy around us, measuring things, taking photographs, dusting for prints. We got out of their way and stood together in the motel parking lot.

  Durkin said, "You know what we got, don't you? We got us Jack the fucking Ripper."

  "I know it," Garfein said.

  "You get anything with the other guests? She musta made some noise."

  "You kidding? Cheaters? 'I didn't see nothin', I didn't hear nothin', I gotta go now.' Even if she did some screaming, in a job like this everybody'd figure it was a new way to have fun. Assuming they weren't too busy having their own fun to notice."

  "First he checks into a decent midtown hotel and phones up a fancy call girl. Then he picks up a TV streetwalker and drags her to a cheater's motel. You figure the cock and balls came as a shock to him?"

  Garfein shrugged. "Maybe. You know, half your street prostitutes are guys in drag. Some sections it's more than half."

  "The West Side docks it's a lot more than half."

  "I've heard that," Garfein said. "You talk to the johns, some of 'em'll admit they prefer if it's a guy. They say a guy gives better head. Of course there's nothing queer about them, see, because they're just receiving it."

  "Well, go figure a john," Durkin said.

  "Whether he knew or not, I don't think it put him off much. He went and did his number all the same."

  "Figure he had sex with her?"

  "Hard to tell unless there's traces on the sheets. He doesn't figure as her first trick of the evening."

  "He took a shower?"

  Garfein shrugged, showed his hands palms up. "Go know," he said. "The manager says there's towels missing. When they make up the room they put out two bath towels and two hand towels, and both of the bath towels are missing."

  "He took towels from the Galaxy."

  "Then he probably took 'em here, but who knows in a dump like this? I mean who knows if they always remember to make up the room right. Same with the shower. I don't figure they gave it a scrub after the last party left."

  "Maybe you'll find something."

  "Maybe."

  "Fingerprints, something. You see any skin under her nails?"

  "No. But that's not to say the lab boys won't." A muscle worked in his jaw. "I'll say one thing. Thank God I'm not a medical examiner or a technician. It's bad enough being a cop."

  "Amen to that," Durkin said.

  I said, "If he picked her up on the street, somebody might have seen her get into the car."

  "A couple of guys are out there now trying to take statements. We might get something. If anybody saw anything, and if they remember, and if they feel like talking."

  "Lots of ifs," Durkin said.

  "The manager here must have seen him," I said. "What does he remember?"

  "Not a whole lot. Let's go talk to him some more."

  * * *

  The manager had a night worker's sallow complexion and a pair of red-rimmed eyes. There was alcohol on his breath but he didn't have a drinker's way about him, and I guessed he'd tried to fortify himself with liquor after discovering the body. It only made him vague and ineffectual. "This is a decent place," he insisted, and the statement was so palpably absurd no one responded to it. I suppose he meant murder wasn't a daily occurrence.

  He never saw Cookie. The man who had presumably killed her had come in alone, filled out the card, paid cash. This was not unusual. It was common practice for the woman to wait in the car while the man checked in. The car had not stopped directly in front of the office, so he hadn't seen it while the man was checking in. In fact he hadn't really seen the car at all.

  "You saw it was missing," Garfein reminded him. "That's how you knew the room was empty."

  "Except it wasn't. I opened the door and-"

  "You thought it was empty because the car was gone. How'd you know it was gone if you never saw it?"

  "The parking space was empty. There's a space in front of each unit, the spaces are numbered same as the units. I looked out, that space was empty, that meant his car was gone."

  "They always park in the proper spaces?"

  "They're supposed to."

  "Lots of things people are supposed to do. Pay their taxes, don't spit on the sidewalk, cross only at corners. A guy's in a hurry to dip his wick, what does he care about a number on a parking space? You got a look at the car."

  "I-"

  "You looked once, maybe twice, and the car was parked in the space. Then you looked later and it wasn't and that's when you decided they were gone. Isn't that what happened?"

  "I guess so."

  "Describe the car."

  "I didn't really look at it. I looked to see that it was there, that's all."

  "What color was it?"

  "Dark."

  "Terrific. Two door? Four door?"

  "I didn't notice."

  "New? Old? What make?"

  "It was a late-model car," he said. "American. Not a foreign car. As far as the make, when I was a kid they all looked different. Now every car's the same."

  "He's right," Durkin said.

  "Except American Motors," he said. "A Gremlin, a Pacer, those you can tell. The rest all look the same."

  "And this wasn't a Gremlin or a Pacer."

  "No."

  "Was it a sedan? A hatchback?"

  "I'll tell you the truth," the man said. "All I noticed is it was a car. It says on the card, the make and model, the plate number."

  "You're talking about the registration card?"

  "Yeah. They have to fill all that in."

  The card was on the desk, a sheet of clear acetate over it to preserve prints until the lab boys had their shot at it. Name: Martin Albert Ricone. Address: 211 Gilford Way. City: Fort Smith, Arkansas. Make of Auto: Chevrolet. Year: 1980. Model: Sedan. Color: Black. License No.: LJK-914. Signature: M. A. RICONE.

  "Looks like the same hand," I told Durkin. "But who can tell with printing?"

  "The experts can say. Same as they can tell you if he had the same light touch with the machete. Guy likes forts, you notice? Fort Wayne, Indiana and Fort Smith, Arkansas."

  "A subtle pattern begins to emerge," Garfein said.

  "Ricone," Durkin said. "Must be Italian."

  "M. A. Ricone sounds like the guy who invented the radio."

  "That's Marconi," Durkin said.

  "Well, that's close. This guy's Macaroni. Stuck a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni."

  "Stuck a feather up his ass," Durkin said.

  "Maybe he stuck it up Cookie's ass and maybe it wasn't a feather. Martin Albert Ricone, that's a fancy alias. What did he use last time?"

  "Charles Owen Jones," I said.

  "Oh, he likes middle names. He's a cute fucker, isn't he?"

  "Very cute," Durkin said.

  "The cute ones, the really cute ones, usually everything means something. Like Jones is slang, it means a habit. You know, like a heroin jones. Like a junkie says he's got a hundred-dollar jones, that's what his habit costs him per day."

  "I'm really glad you explained that for me," Durkin said.

  "Just trying to be helpful."

  " 'Cause I only got fourteen years in, I never had any contact yet with smack addicts."

  "So be a smart fuck," Garfein said.

  "The license plate go anywhere?"

  "It's gonna go the same place as the name and address. I got a call
in to Arkansas Motor Vehicles but it's a waste of time. A place like this, even the legitimate guests make up the plate number. They don't park in front of the window when they sign in so our guy here can't check. Not that he would anyway, would you?"

  "There's no law says I have to check," the man said.

  "They use false names, too. Funny our boy used Jones at the Galaxy and Ricone here. They must get a lot of Joneses here, along with the usual run of Smiths and Browns. You get a lot of Smiths?"

  "There's no law says I'm supposed to check ID," the man said.

  "Or wedding rings, huh?"

  "Or wedding rings or marriage licenses or anything. Consenting adults, the hell, it's none of my business."

  "Maybe Ricone means something in Italian," Garfein suggested.

  "Now you're thinking," Durkin said. He asked the manager if he had an Italian dictionary. The man stared at him, baffled. "And they call this place a motel," he said, shaking his head. "There's probably no Gideon Bibles, either."

  "Most of the rooms have them."

  "Jesus, really? Right next to the television with the X-rated movies, right? Conveniently located near the waterbed."

  "Only two of the units have waterbeds," the poor bastard said. "There's an extra charge for a waterbed."

  "Good thing our Mr. Ricone's a cheap prick," Garfein said. "Cookie'da wound up underwater."

  "Tell me about this guy," Durkin said. "Describe him again."

  "I told you-"

  "You're gonna get to tell this again and again. How tall was he?"

  "Tall."

  "My height? Shorter? Taller?"

  "I-"

  "What was he wearing? He have a hat on? He wearing a tie?"

  "It's hard to remember."

  "He walks in the door, asks you for a room. Now he's filling out the card. Pays you in cash. What do you get for a room like that, incidentally?"

  "Twenty-eight dollars."

  "That's not such a bad deal. I suppose the porn movies are extra."

  "It's coin-operated."

  "Handy. Twenty-eight's fair, and it's a good deal for you if you can flip the room a few times a night. How'd he pay you?"

  "I told you. Cash."