Scudder - Eight Million Ways To Die Part 25

'It was cold that night. Say he had a coat, he'd put that on over whatever else he was wearing.' He drew on his cigarette. 'Or maybe he wasn't wearing any clothes when he did the number on her. The h.e.l.l, she was in her birthday suit, maybe he didn't want to feel overdressed. Then all he'd have to do afterward was take a shower. There was a nice beautiful bathroom there and he had all the time in the world so why not use it?'

'Were the towels used?'

He looked at me. The gray eyes were still unreadable, but I sensed a little more respect in his manner. 'I don't remember any soiled towels,' he said.

'I don't suppose they're something you'd notice, not with a scene like that in the same room.'

'They ought to be inventoried, though.' He thumbed through the file. 'You know what they do, they take pictures of everything, and everything that might turn out to be evidence gets bagged and labeled and inventoried. Then it goes down to the warehouse, and when it's time to prepare a case n.o.body can find it.' He closed the file for a moment, leaned forward. 'You want to hear something? Two, three weeks ago I get a call from my sister. She and her husband live over in Brooklyn. The Midwood section. You familiar with the area?'

'I used to be.'

'Well, it was probably nicer when you knew it. It's not so bad. I mean, the whole city's a cesspool, so it's not so bad in comparison. Why she called, they came home and found out there'd been a burglary. Somebody broke in, took a portable teevee, a typewriter, some jewelry. She called me to find out how to report it, who to call and everything. First thing I asked her is has she got insurance. No, she says, they didn't figure it was worth it. I told her to forget it. Don't report it, I told her. You'd just be wasting your time.

'So she says how are they gonna catch the guys if she doesn't report it? So I explain how n.o.body's got the time to investigate a burglary anymore. You fill out a report and it goes in a file, but you don't run around looking to see who did it. Catching a burglar in the act is one thing, but investigating, h.e.l.l, it's low priority, n.o.body's got time for it. She says okay, she can understand that, but suppose they happen to recover the goods? If she never reported the theft in the first place, how will the stuff get returned to her? And then I had to tell her just how f.u.c.ked up the whole system is. We got warehouses full of stolen goods we recovered, and we got files full of reports people filled out, stuff lost to burglars, and we can't get the s.h.i.t back to the rightful owners. I went on and on, I won't bore you with it, but I don't think she really wound up believing me. Because you don't want to believe it's that bad.'

He found a sheet in the file, frowned at it. He read, 'One bath towel, white. One hand towel, white. Two wash cloths, white. Doesn't say used or unused.' He drew out a sheaf of glossies and went rapidly through them. I looked over his shoulder at interior shots of the room where Kim Dakkinen had died. She was in some but not all of the pictures; the photographer had doc.u.mented the murder scene by shooting virtually every inch of the hotel room.

A shot of the bathroom showed a towel rack with unused linen on it.

'No dirty towels,' he said.

'He took them along.'

'Huh?'

'He had to wash up. Even if he just threw a topcoat over his b.l.o.o.d.y clothes. And there aren't enough towels there. There ought to be at least two of everything. A double room in a cla.s.s hotel, they give you more than one bath towel and one hand towel.'

'Why would he take 'em along?'

'Maybe to wrap the machete in.'

'He had to have a case for it in the first place, some kind of a bag to get it into the hotel. Why couldn't he take it out the same way?'

I agreed that he could have.

'And why wrap it in the dirty towels? Say you took a shower and dried yourself off and you wanted to wrap a machete before you put it in your suitcase. There's clean towels there. Wouldn't you wrap it in a clean one instead of sticking a wet towel in your bag?'

'You're right.'

'It's a waste of time worrying about it,' he said, tapping the photo against the top of his desk. 'But I shoulda noticed the missing towels. That's something I should have thought of.'

We went through the file together. The medical report held few surprises. Death was attributed to ma.s.sive hemorrhaging from multiple wounds resulting in excessive loss of blood. I guess you could call it that.

I read through witness interrogation reports, made my way through all the other forms and sc.r.a.ps of paper that wind up in a homicide victim's file. I had trouble paying attention. My head was developing a dull ache and my mind was spinning its wheels. Somewhere along the way Durkin let me go through the rest of the file on my own. He lit a fresh cigarette and went back to what he'd been typing earlier.

When I'd had as much as I could handle I closed the file and gave it back to him. He returned it to the cabinet, detouring on the way back to make a stop at the coffee machine.

'I got 'em both with cream and sugar,' he said, setting mine before me. 'Maybe that's not how you like it.'

'It's fine,' I said.

'Now you know what we know,' he said. I told him I appreciated it. He said, 'Listen, you saved us some time and aggravation with the tip about the pimp. We owed you one. If you can turn a buck for yourself, why not?'

'Where do you go from here?'

He shrugged. 'We proceed in normal fashion with our investigation. We run down leads and a.s.semble evidence until such time as we have something to present to the district attorney's office.'

'That sounds like a recording.'

'Does it?'

'What happens next, Joe?'

'Aw, Jesus,' he said. 'The coffee's terrible, isn't it?'

'It's okay.'

'I used to think it was the cups. Then one day I brought my own cup, you know, so I was drinking it out of china instead of Styrofoam. Not fancy china, just, you know, an ordinary china cup like they give you in a coffee shop. You know what I mean.'

'Sure.'

'It tasted just as bad out of a real cup. And the second day after I brought the cup I was writing out an arrest report on some sc.u.mbag and I knocked the f.u.c.king cup off the desk and broke it. You got someplace you gotta be?'

'No.'

'Then let's go downstairs,' he said. 'Let's go around the corner.'

FOURTEEN.

He took me around the corner and a block and a half south on Tenth Avenue to a tavern that belonged at the end of somebody's qualification. I didn't catch the name and I'm not sure if it had one. They could have called it Last Stop Before Detox. Two old men in thrift-shop suits sat together at the bar, drinking in silence. A Hispanic in his forties stood at the far end of the bar, sipping an eight-ounce gla.s.s of red wine and reading the paper. The bartender, a rawboned man in a tee shirt and jeans, was watching something on a small black and white television set. He had the volume turned way down.

Durkin and I took a table and I went to the bar to get our drinks, a double vodka for him, ginger ale for myself. I carried them back to our table. His eyes registered my ginger ale without comment.

It could have been a medium-strength scotch and soda. The color was about right.

He drank some of his vodka and said, 'Aw, Jesus, that helps. It really helps.'

I didn't say anything.

'What you were asking before. Where do we go from here. Can't you answer that yourself?'

'Probably.'

'I told my own sister to buy a new teevee and a new typewriter and hang some more locks on the door. But don't bother calling the cops. Where do we go with Dakkinen? We don't go anywhere.'

'That's what I figured.'