Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy

Elizabeth came in and shut the window. The air in the room seemed unnaturally still and quiet and warm. “What about the balcony?” she asked. “Any way to tell if anyone was on it?”

“Not much point to it, since the lock would have kept him in the cold anyway,” said Mistretta, “but they checked it. There wasn’t anything much. No prints on the railings, no rope marks, nothing on the glass except the usual smudges and a couple of spots where the maid had given it a quick swipe with a dustrag.”

Elizabeth said, “Wait a minute. Let’s go take a look.”

Mistretta shrugged and followed her back to the Senator’s room. Hart appeared to be unaware of them; he was now in the bathroom, kneeling beside the bathtub and studying the drain.

Elizabeth went directly to the Senator’s window, walked out to the balcony, and looked back into the lighted room. There was a thin film of dust over the whole surface of the glass, dappled with lighter dots where fingers had touched it. But in two places about two and a half feet apart, there were clean spots, where someone had brushed a cloth in a circular motion. She came back inside.

“Joe, the whole window is covered with prints and smudges and dust, except those two places. The one we were in before doesn’t have any clean spots.”

The telephone rang, and it startled her. “Hello?” she said, far too loud.

“Mike Lang here.”

“Yes, Mike,” said Elizabeth.

“I think it’s going to be a long night. The poison turned out to be curare, of all things. It’s in the glass where he soaked his dentures, in the dentures, and no place else. No container anywhere, either, and the Polident box is clean.”

“So it is murder,” said Elizabeth.

“I hate to pin it down that tight, but I’m damned if I see any other explanation. He couldn’t have carried curare in without a container, and a man doesn’t kill himself with his own false teeth. At least not if he’s got any sense of dignity.”

“No. But curare? Are you sure? It’s not exactly the American murderer’s favorite form of poison, is it?”

“Of course I’m sure. And I don’t have anything else to tell you that’ll make it seem sensible. But at this point I’d be willing to listen to anything anybody else has.”

“I think there’s a chance somebody came in from the balcony,” said Elizabeth. “We’re not sure yet, but it looks as though somebody had both hands on the glass, about chest high.”

“You mean they got prints on it?” asked Lang. “Terrific!”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “That’s just it. Somebody wiped the glass off. Nobody who works for a hotel would wipe two spots on a six-by-eight-foot window. They’d wash it or forget it. And no guest would wipe the outside of a window for any reason.”

“Is Mistretta with you?”

“Yes, he’s right here.”

“Then let me talk to him.”

Elizabeth handed the phone to Joe, who listened intently for a few seconds and then said, “Yeah, it’s possible she’s right, but we’re still looking it over.”

He listened again, then said, “The police didn’t think so. No. Too obvious, I guess. The window latch was the first thing they went for after the corpse was moved. They said no indication of forced entry.”

He was silent for a moment. “Yeah, that too. Of course. We’ll keep you posted.”

Mistretta hung up and chuckled. “That’s something, isn’t it?” he said to Elizabeth. “We earn our pay on this one all right. Which do you want to work on first? Proving a man came in through the locked fourth-floor window because there are no fingerprints, or figuring out how he arrived at the idea of using curare on the old guy’s false teeth when he got here? I don’t suppose the MO file will help much on this one, unless it was a South American pygmy we’re looking for.” He shook his head and the false bravado began to fade.

Elizabeth wasn’t looking at him, though. She was standing before the window with both hands in front of her. “Pygmies don’t live in South America,” she muttered absently, staring at her reflection.

“I suppose we’d better get the forensics people back up here,” he said, picking up the telephone again.

Elizabeth didn’t turn, just said, “Yes. I’d like to be here when they come.” She’d never noticed that before, she thought. When you press your palms against a flat surface, the tips of your fingers are just exactly shoulder height. If you allowed for shoe soles, five foot ten? Six feet? They’d measure it, though. You could always count on them to measure.

Hart came into the room, bringing with him his notepad, still scribbling on it. He said, “I heard a phone ring. Was it the lab report?”

“That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “It was curare that was put into the glass where he soaked his dentures, believe it or not. Mixed with his Polident.”

“What’s the report on the rest of his stuff? Any curare or containers for it?” He seemed to Elizabeth to be hiding his surprise at the poison and it annoyed her a little. How could he not be surprised?

“No,” she said tonelessly.

“Then I’d say we have only a few things we can check on,” he said. “One is that somebody close enough to him to get into his luggage put poison on one of the Polident tablets and only one. Maybe his assistant or whoever packed his bags. Another is that somebody tampered with them between Washington and here.” He hesitated for a moment, but Elizabeth wasn’t going to help him, since he hadn’t had the decency to be surprised. Then he said, “But I’d say the least unlikely thing is that somebody came in through the window.”

“The forensics people are on their way up now to check the window out,” said Mistretta. “Elizabeth figured it out a little while ago.”

“Good thinking, Elizabeth,” he said, with apparent sincerity.

Elizabeth wasn’t ready to accept the compliment. Patronizing bastards, all of them. She was past that part of it anyway, thinking about the killer. He had to be athletic, or at least fit, to be able to go from any other room to this one. No matter how it was done he still had to get from one balcony to another in the cold and dark. That probably meant he wasn’t over forty. He was between five foot nine and six feet tall. And he was sneaky. God, he was sneaky.

9

There was something clean about the sun in Las Vegas. Even in February there was a searing, blinding white light that made you feel as if you were being sterilized, even cauterized, so there wasn’t a germ that could stick to you. Everything extraneous would be burned off your skin, desiccated and sucked dry, its empty husk blown clattering away in the hot wind out of the desert. Even the air itself felt like that—a breeze that carried with it tiny abrasive particles of ground-up quartz and topaz too small to see. You could feel them buffing and polishing away at you.

He rolled over on his stomach. Better be careful the first time out. Getting a sunburn on top of all those scrapes and bruises would be about the limit of what he could endure. He could already feel the sun gradually heating up his back and shoulders, breathing its energy into them so that moment by moment the temperature of his skin rose in infinitesimal gradients. In a few more minutes, he decided, he’d go back to his room and get cleaned up, then take a nice long nap before dinner. Your body heals faster while you sleep, he thought. There was no reason to think about anything at all until Friday night. Friday was payday.

The soft electronic female voices were alternating on the public address system: “Telephone for Mr. Harrison Rand. Harrison Rand, telephone. Telephone for Princess Karina. Princess Karina, telephone,” a steady murmur going out across the swimming pool from nowhere in particular, the volume just high enough to flicker across the corner of your consciousness. There was no more urgency to it than the constant whir and click of the slot machines in the casino. This, he thought, was the only place he knew of where clock time didn’t matter. You measured time against the size of your bankroll—unless you were lying on a chaise longue next to the swimming pool, he remembered. Then the sun would damned well remind you what time it was if you weren’t careful. Enough for today.