Роберт Паркер - Sixkill

“Excuse me, sir,” she said. “Are you a guest of the hotel?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I want to talk to someone in security, but I don’t know who is or isn’t, you know?”

“So you came here and sat and assumed after a while someone from security would present themselves,” she said.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Why didn’t you ask at the desk?” she said.

“Been told by a lawyer,” I said, “that I’m not supposed to talk with you.”

“Really? What lawyer?”

“Never got his name,” I said. “Hotel Counsel.”

She shrugged.

“Why do you want to talk with someone from security?” she said.

“I’m a detective,” I said. “Working on the Dawn Lopata case.”

“Who you work for,” she said.

The polished public self was beginning to wear away, revealing the presence of an actual person.

“I’m private,” I said. “Right now I’m working for Cone, Oakes, and Baldwin.”

“The law firm?”

“Yes. They’re defending Jumbo Nelson.”

“Pig,” she said.

“Agreed,” I said. “But is he a guilty pig? I’d like to talk to the first people into the room after he called down.”

“I was one,” she said.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Zoë,” she said. “Zoë Foy.”

“Sit down, Zoë,” I said. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Against the rules to sit with a guest,” she said. “The big Indian let me in. It’s a suite. Jumbo is there, in the living room, sipping some champagne.”

“Dressed?” I said.

“Wearing some kind of velour sweat suit, ’bout size one hundred.”

“Shoes?”

“The stupid-looking flip-flop slippers the hotel provides,” she said. “Me and Arnie — Elmont, the other security person — go right past them into the master bedroom and she’s on the bed, fully clothed, lying on her back, with her hands at her sides.”

“Bed made?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Rumpled, but the spread was still on.”

“Was she alive?” I said.

She shook her head.

“When I was on the job in Quincy,” she said. “I had some EMT training. Me and Arnie could see right away she was cooked. But I tried resuscitating her, until the ambulance arrived.”

“No luck?”

“Nope.”

“They took her to Boston City?” I said.

She smiled faintly.

“Boston Medical Center,” she said.

“I’m old school,” I said. “Anything else you saw that matters?”

“Fatso looked a little worried,” she said. “The Indian didn’t look anything. Nobody looked, you know, like, sad that this kid had died.”

“You think they knew she was dead?”

“She didn’t look alive,” Zoë said.

“Anything else?” I said.

She shook her head. I took my card from a shirt pocket and gave it to her.

“If you or Arnie have any recollections of interest,” I said, “give me a call.”

“The pig did it, you know,” Zoë said.

“You sure?” I said.

“Creepy bastard,” Zoë said.

“Be nice if we could hang it on him,” I said. “But maybe he didn’t.”

She shrugged.

“Idle question?” I said.

“Sure.”

“How come you were willing to talk with me after I told you Hotel Counsel said no?”

Zoë smiled.

“Fuck him,” she said.

The ER doctor who had worked on Dawn Lopata when they brought her in was a young guy named Cristalli. I talked with him in an examining room near the triage desk.

“She was dead when she got here,” he said. “We tried, why wouldn’t we? But she was unresponsive.”

“Which is medical speak for dead,” I said.

“Just like discomfort, ” he said, “is medical speak for pain.”

“You have a thought about what killed her?” I said.

“I’m not the ME,” he said. “But we see a lot of death from trauma coming through here, and I’d say she was strangled.”

“You have a theory as to how?”

“Ligature,” he said.

“How long before she would have lost consciousness?” I said.

“Ten, fifteen seconds,” he said.

“And death?”

“Minutes,” Dr. Cristalli said.

“So you’d need to keep the pressure on even after the vic loses consciousness,” I said.

“If it’s death you’re after,” he said.

“So can it happen accidentally?” I said.

“Sure. We regularly get people who strangle themselves playing choking games, usually masturbatory.”

“You can tell?” I said.

“That it was masturbatory?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s usually pretty obvious at the death scene,” Dr. Cristalli said.

“It is?” I said. “Like how... Never mind.”

“Never mind?” Cristalli said.

“I can guess, and it’s all I want to do,” I said.

“Anyway,” Cristalli said. “In this case, EMTs told me there was no sign of it.”

“She was fully dressed,” I said. “Lying on her back on the bed.”

“That’s what they told me,” he said.

“Presumably she’d been having sex,” I said. “Odd that she’d be fully dressed.”

“I didn’t check,” Cristalli said. “Once it was clear that she wasn’t coming back, she became a problem for the ME.”

“So you don’t know if she was having sex or not,” I said.

“Nope,” he said. “But there are a couple things about that, and I admit I wouldn’t have registered it. One, she wasn’t wearing a bra.”

“Not everyone does,” I said.

“Nurses insist that she would have.”

“Well-endowed?” I said.

“Excessively, I would say, but it is, I suppose, a matter of personal preference.”

“What’s the other thing?” I said.

“Her underpants were on backward.”

“Backward,” I said. “I’m not sure I could tell.”

“That’s what they told me,” he said.

I nodded. We were quiet. Outside the exam room, a stretcher came in and stopped at the desk.

“Somebody dressed her,” I said.

“The thought occurred,” he said.

Zebulon Sixkill V

The deal was, Pat Calhoun said, “I take care of the money. You take care of the football.”

Zebulon nodded.

“Well,” Pat said. “You’re not taking care of the football no more.”

They were sitting in the red-leather front seat of Pat’s silver Mercedes in a parking lot in Garden Grove.

Zebulon was silent.

“Looking back, I realize,” Pat said, “that I’m at fault. I promised your grandfather I’d look after you, and... hell, I guess I trusted you too much.”

Zebulon shrugged.

“You stopped running your sprints. You stopped pumping your iron. You weren’t focused on the game. Hell, Harmon says you forgot half the plays; it’s the same offense you ran in last year.”

Zebulon nodded. Pat shook his head.

“Too much booze, too much dope, too many prom queens.”

“Just Lucy,” Zebulon said.

“Sure,” Pat said. “Too much fucking.”

“Don’t talk about Lucy,” Zebulon said.

“Right, sorry,” Pat said. “Anyway, you’re out of shape, you’re off the team, and I am not paying your way anymore.”

“How do I pay tuition?” Zebulon said.

“Ain’t that a good question,” Pat said. “How you gonna eat, for crissake?”

“Need a job,” Zebulon said.

“You do, and because I feel guilty, like I let your grandfather down, I’m gonna give you one. I own a club in Hollywood. They can use a bouncer. Big, tough guy like you. Good-looking don’t hurt with the ladies. Don’t know what they’re paying, but I’ll see to it you get enough to keep you going.”