Scudder - Eight Million Ways To Die Part 49

' 'Cause I didn't know what to do, man. I didn't know whether to s.h.i.+t or go blind.'

'Tell them that.'

'Yeah, I guess.'

'What did you do after you got out of here?'

'Last night? Like you said, I drove around some. Drove around the park a few times. Drove over the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge, up the Palisades Parkway. Like a Sunday drive, only a little early.' He shook his head at the memory. 'Came back, drove over to see Mary Lou. Let myself in, didn't have to bust no chain lock. She was sleepin'. I got in bed with her, woke her up, stayed with her a little. Then I went on home.'

'To your house?'

'To my house. I'm not gonna tell 'em about my house.'

'No need to. You got a little sleep at Mary Lou's.'

'I never sleep when someone else is around. I can't. But they don't have to know that.'

'No.'

'I was at my house for awhile. Then I came on into town, lookin' for you.'

'What did you do at your house?'

'Slept some. A couple hours. I don't need a whole lot of sleep, but I got what I needed.'

'Uh-huh.'

'And I was just there, you know?' He walked over to the wall, took a staring mask from the nail where it hung. He started telling me about it, the tribe, their geographical location, the purpose of the mask. I didn't pay much attention. 'Now I got fingerprints on it,' he said. 'Well, that's okay. You can tell 'em while we were waiting for them I took the mask off the wall and told you its history. I might as well tell the truth. Wouldn't want to get caught in some nasty old little white lie.' He smiled at the last phrase. 'Little black lie,' he said. 'Whyn't you make that call?'

TWENTY-THREE.

It wasn't half the ha.s.sle it might have been. I didn't know either of the cops who came out from the Twentieth, but it couldn't have gone much smoother if I had. We answered questions on the scene and went back to the station house on West Eighty-second to give our statements. The on-scene medical evidence all seemed to be consistent with what we'd reported. The cops were quick to point out that Chance should have called in as soon as he found the dead girl, but they didn't really jump on him for taking his time. Walking in on an unexpected corpse is a shock, even if you're a pimp and she's a wh.o.r.e, and this, after all, was New York, the city of the uninvolved, and what was remarkable was not that he'd called it in late but that he'd called it in at all.

I was at ease by the time we got to the station house. I'd only been anxious early on when it occurred to me that it might occur to them to frisk us. My coat was a small-time a.r.s.enal, still holding the gun and the two knives I'd taken from the kid in the alley. The knives were both illegal weapons. The gun was that and possibly more; G.o.d only knew what kind of a provenance it had. But we'd done nothing to rate a frisk, and, happily, we didn't get one.

'Wh.o.r.es'll kill themselves,' Joe Durkin said. 'It's something they do, and this one had a history. You saw the wrist scars? Those were a few years old, according to the report. What you might not know is she tried the pill route a little less than a year ago. A girlfriend took her over to St. Clare's to get her stomach pumped.'

'There was something in the note. She hoped she had enough this time, something like that.'

'Well, she got her wish.'

We were at the Slate, a Tenth Avenue steak house that draws a lot of cops from John Jay College and Midtown North. I'd been back at my hotel, changing my clothes, finding places to stow the weapons and some of the money I'd been carrying, when he called to suggest I buy him a dinner. 'I thought I'd hit you up for a meal now,' he said, 'before all your client's girls are dead and your expense account gets trimmed.'

He had the mixed grill and drank a couple of Carlsbergs with it. I ordered the chopped sirloin and drank black coffee with my meal. We talked a little about Sunny's suicide but it didn't carry us very far. He said, 'If it wasn't for the other one, the blonde, you wouldn't even think to look at it twice. All the medical evidence fits in with suicide. The bruises, that's easy. She was groggy, she didn't know what she was doing, she fell and b.u.mped into things. Same reason she was on the floor instead of the bed. There was nothing special about the bruises. Her prints were where they belonged - the bottle, the gla.s.s, the pill bottles. The note matches other samples of her handwriting. If we buy your guy's story, she was even in a locked room when he found her. Locked from inside, the chain on. You figure that for the truth?'

'His whole story sounded true to me.'

'So she killed herself. It even fits with the Dakkinen death two weeks ago. They were friends and she was depressed by what happened to her friend. You see any way it was anything but suicide?'

I shook my head. 'It's the hardest kind of suicide to stage. What do you do, stuff the pills down her throat with a funnel? Make her take them at gunpoint?'

'You can dissolve the contents, let her take them without knowing it. But they found traces of the Seconal capsules in the stomach contents. So forget that. It's suicide.'

I tried to remember the annual suicide rate in the city. I couldn't even come up with an educated guess, and Durkin was no help. I wondered what the rate was, and if it was on the rise like everything else.

Over coffee he said, 'I had a couple of clerks go through the registration cards at the Galaxy Downtowner since the first of the year. Pulling the block-printed ones. Nothing ties into the Jones registration.'

'And the other hotels?'

'Nothing that fits. A batch of people called Jones, it's a common enough name, but they're all signatures and credit cards and they look bona fide. Waste of time.'

'Sorry.'

'Why? Ninety percent of what I do is a waste of time. You were right, it was worth checking. If this had been a big case, front-page stuff, top bra.s.s putting pressure on, you can believe I'd have thought of it myself and we'd be checking every hotel in the five boroughs. How about you?'

'What about me?'

'You getting anywhere with Dakkinen?'

I had to think. 'No,' I said, finally.

'It's aggravating. I went over the file again and you know what got stuck in my throat? That desk clerk.'

'The one I talked to?'

'That was a manager, a.s.sistant manager, something like that. No, the one who checked the killer in. Now here's a guy comes in, prints his name instead of writing it, and pays cash. Those are two unusual things for a person to do, right? I mean, who pays cash in front for a hotel nowadays? I don't mean in a hot-pillow joint, I mean a decent hotel where you're going to spend sixty or eighty dollars for a room. Everything's plastic nowadays, credit cards, that's the whole business. But this guy paid cash and the desk clerk doesn't remember s.h.i.+t about him.'

'Did you check him out?'

He nodded. 'I went and talked to him last night. Well, he's this South American kid, up from one of those countries. He was in a fog when I talked to him. He was probably in a fog when the killer checked in. He probably lives his life in a fog. I don't know where his fog comes from, whether he smokes it or snorts it or what he does, but I think he probably comes by it honestly. You know the percentage of this city that's stoned all the time?'

'I know what you mean.'

'You see 'em at lunch hour. Office workers, midtown, Wall Street, I don't care what neighborhood you're talking about. They buy the f.u.c.king joints in the street and spend their lunch hour smoking 'em in the park. How does anybody get any work done?'

'I don't know.'

'And there's all these pillheads. Like this woman who killed herself. Taking all those pills all the time, and she wasn't even breaking the law. Drugs.' He sighed, shook his head, smoothed his dark hair. 'Well, what I'm gonna have is a brandy,' he said, 'if you think your client can afford it.'

I got over to St. Paul's in time for the last ten minutes of the meeting. I had coffee and a cookie and barely listened to what was being said. I didn't even have to say my name, and I ducked out during the prayer.

I went back to the hotel. There were no messages. I'd had a couple of calls, the desk man told me, but n.o.body'd left a name. I went upstairs and tried to sort out how I felt about Sunny's suicide, but all I seemed to feel so far was numb. It was tempting to beat myself up with the thought that I might have learned something if I hadn't saved her interrogation for last, might even have said or done something to forestall her suicide, but I couldn't get much mileage out of that one. I'd talked to her on the phone. She could have said something and she hadn't. And suicide, after all, was something she'd tried at least twice in the past, and very likely a time or two of which there'd been no record.

Try something long enough, sooner or later you get it right.

In the morning I had a light breakfast and went over to the bank, where I deposited some cash and bought a money order. I went to the post office and mailed it to Anita. I hadn't given a whole lot of thought to my son's orthodontia and now I could forget it altogether.