Lawrence Block - Eight Million Ways to Die

"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."

"I mean what kind of bills? What'd he give you, a pair of fifteens?"

"A pair of-"

"He give you a twenty and a ten?"

"I think it was two twenties."

"And you gave him twelve bucks back? Wait, there must have been tax, right?"

"It's twenty-nine forty with the tax."

"And he gave you forty bucks and you gave him the change."

Something registered. "He gave me two twenties and forty cents in change," the man said. "And I gave him a ten and a one."

"See? You remember the transaction."

"Yeah, I do. Sort of."

"Now tell me what he looked like. He white?"

"Yeah, sure. White."

"Heavy? Thin?"

"Thin but not too thin. On the thin side."

"Beard?"

"No."

"Moustache?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

"There was something about him, though, something that stuck in your memory."

"What?"

"That's what we're trying to get, John. That what they call you? John?"

"Mostly it's Jack."

"Okay, Jack. You're doin' fine now. What about his hair?"

"I didn't pay attention to his hair."

"Sure you did. He bent over to sign in and you saw the top of his head, remember?"

"I don't-"

"Full head of hair?"

"I don't-"

"They'll sit him down with one of our artists," Durkin said, "and he'll come up with something. And when this fucking psycho ripper steps on his cock one of these days, when we catch him in the act or on his way out the door, he'll look as much like the police artist's sketch as I look like Sara fucking Blaustein. She looked like a woman, didn't she?"

"Mostly she looked dead."

"I know. Meat in a butcher's window." We were in his car, driving over the bumpy surface of the Queensboro Bridge. The sky was starting to lighten up already. I was beyond tiredness by now, with the ragged edges of my emotions perilously close to the surface. I could feel my own vulnerability; the smallest thing could nudge me to tears or laughter.

"You gotta wonder what it would be like," he said.

"What?"

"Picking up somebody who looked like that. On the street or in a bar, whatever. Then you get her someplace and she takes her clothes off and surprise. I mean, how do you react?"

"I don't know."

" 'Course if she already had the operation, you could go with her and never know. Her hands didn't look so big to me. There's women with big hands and men with little hands, far as that goes."

"Uh-huh."

"She had a couple rings on, speaking of her hands. You happen to notice?"

"I noticed."

"One on each hand, she had."

"So?"

"So he didn't take 'em."

"Why would he take her rings?"

"You were saying he took Dakkinen's."

I didn't say anything.

Gently he said, "Matt, you don't still think Dakkinen got killed for a reason?"

I felt rage swelling up within me, bulging like an aneurysm in a blood vessel. I sat there trying to will it away.

"And don't tell me about the towels. He's a ripper, he's a cute fucking psycho who makes plans and plays by his own private rules. He's not the first case like that to come along."

"I got warned off the case, Joe. I got very professionally warned off the case."

"So? She got killed by a psycho and there could still be something about her life that some friends of hers don't want to come out in the open. Maybe she had a boyfriend and he's a married guy, just like you figured, and even if what she died of was scarlet fucking fever he wouldn't want you poking around in the ashes."

I gave myself the Miranda warning. You have the right to remain silent, I told myself, and exercised the right.

"Unless you figure Dakkinen and Blaustein are tied together. Long-lost sisters, say. Excuse me, brother and sister. Or maybe they were brothers, maybe Dakkinen had her operation a few years ago. Tall for a girl, wasn't she?"

"Maybe Cookie was a smokescreen," I said.

"How's that?"

I went on talking in spite of myself. "Maybe he killed her to take the heat off," I said. "Make it look like a train of random murders. To hide his motive for killing Dakkinen."

"To take the heat off. What heat, for Christ's sake?"

"I don't know."

"There's been no fucking heat. There will be now. Nothing turns the fucking press on like a series of random killings. The readers eat it up, they pour it on their corn flakes. Anything gives 'em a chance to run a sidebar on the original Jack the Ripper, those editors go crazy for it. You talk about heat, there'll be enough heat now to scorch his ass for him."

"I suppose."

"You know what you are, Scudder? You're stubborn."

"Maybe."

"Your problem is you work private and you only carry one case at a time. I got so much shit on my desk it's a pleasure when I get to let go of something, but with you it's just the opposite. You want to hang onto it as long as you can."

"Is that what it is?"

"I don't know. It sounds like it." He took one hand off the wheel, tapped me on the forearm. "I don't mean to bust balls," he said. "I see something like that, somebody chopped up like that, I try to clamp a lid on it and it comes out in other directions. You did a lot of good work."

"Did I?"

"No question. There were things we missed. It might give us a little jump on the psycho, some of the stuff you came up with. Who knows?"

Not I. All I knew was how tired I was.

He fell silent as we drove across town. In front of my hotel he braked to a stop and said, "What Garfein said there. Maybe Ricone means something in Italian."

"It won't be hard to check."

"Oh, of course not. Everything should be that easy to run down. No, we'll check, and you know what we'll find? It'll turn out it means Jones."

I went upstairs and got out of my clothes and into bed. Ten minutes later I got up again. I felt unclean and my scalp itched. I stood under a too-hot shower and scrubbed myself raw. I got out of the shower, told myself it didn't make any sense to shave before going to bed, then lathered up and shaved anyway. When I was done I put a robe on and sat down on the edge of my bed, then moved to the chair.

They tell you not to let yourself get too hungry, too angry, too lonely or too tired. Any of the four can put you off balance and turn you in the direction of a drink. It seemed to me that I'd touched all four bases, I'd boxed that particular compass in the course of the day and night. Oddly enough, I didn't feel the urge for a drink.

I got the gun from my coat pocket, I started to return it to the dresser drawer, then changed my mind and sat in the chair again, turning the gun in my hands.

When was the last time I'd fired a gun?

I didn't really have to think very hard. It had been that night in Washington Heights when I chased two holdup men into the street, shot them down and killed that little girl in the process. In the time I remained on the force after that incident, I never had occasion to draw my service revolver, let alone discharge it. And I certainly hadn't fired a gun since I left the force.