Mystery: Family Ties: Mystery and Suspense (26 page)

“They could have,” he pointed out. “I don’t understand why it would make you concerned.”

“Because it didn’t look like any dog collar I ever saw before,” she said. “And I could tell her boyfriend was doing all he could do to keep himself from laughing.”

“So long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses,” He commented. Giselle failed to see the humor in his observations.

Later that evening they ate in the kitchen and chatted about the bills, bills and more bills. The hotel was finally getting into the profitability zone, but there was so much that needed to be done. The nine-hole golf courses needed constant work and the hedge maze left over from the Hollywood owner had to be trimmed every month in the growing season or the privet shrubs, which made it up, would grow out of control. Privet was a notoriously invasive plant species, not as bad as bamboo, but close.

The next morning, Alanza Crompton was busy cleaning the hallway outside Kathleen and Damien’s room with the tank vacuum cleaner when she noticed the door open to the room again. She walked over and pulled it open.

Alanza had lived in in the small town for the past fifteen years, ever since her husband had brought her North from Ecuador. Her husband was just out of school and backpacking across the Andes when he wondered into a small town on the border with Bolivia. He was knocked over by the gorgeous
senorita
he saw at the town well getting water for her family. He knew just enough Spanish to find out her name, family and was she promised to anyone. He discovered her family was well-known in town and devout Catholics who took care of the local church and never missed a service. It took another day to visit the parish priest and offer to make a substantial donation to the upkeep of the bell tower if he could arrange a meeting between her family and him. The priest, a Father Gustavo, realized the
nordeamericano
had enough time and money to travel by himself through the hills and little Alanza had just turned eighteen. Two weeks later, Tom Crompton had left Ecuador with a new bride and a mission in life. His parent were a little irritated to find themselves with a daughter-in-law who didn’t speak a word of English, but Alanza was raised to be obedient and soon learned enough English to make herself understood. Tom took over his father’s maintenance company and Alanza helped him run it. At the time, there were still small colonies of Portuguese fishermen living on the coast of Maine and his wife’s Spanish was close enough to their language to help them get the contracts to work on shipping boats. When the fishing business slowed down, they turned to hotel cleaning and provided a quality service. Alanza was filling in for a local high school kid who couldn’t be bothered to come into work that day when she saw the open door.

Alanza first knocked on the door to let the occupant know she was there. Most of the guests at the hotel were very particular about their personal space. Alanza had come of age in a big family that didn’t have time for private zones of influence and couldn’t understand why everyone in
el norte
made such a big deal out of it. But she wanted her husband’s business to do well since it supported them and their rapidly growing family. The two of them had already produced four children and another one was soon to be on the way.

“Hello?” Alanza said at the door. She then made the same announcement in three other languages she heard around the hotel from time to time. Deciding the guest had merely forgotten to lock up, she pulled the door open and went inside. Nothing could be heard in the room so she decided to look around and go ahead and vacuum it if no one was there. She dragged her industrial vacuum canister in the room with her, and went to the other side of the bed to plug it in.

In the process, Alanza almost tripped over the dead body of Kathleen Evans.

This time there could be no mistaking the wail which poured through the hotel. It pierced through the walls, passageway and even the hidden room no one had discovered where the former Hollywood director used to keep his extra set of women’s clothes (long since removed).

Alanza would later tell the state troopers in broken English and Spanish (through her husband and teenage daughter translating) that the bed didn’t look like it had even been slept in and the body had scared the life out of her. Her husband gave his wife a week off to recuperate and baby number five was on the way when she returned.

Chapter 2.

The scream alerted James who was in the process of flaying some salmon he’s laid out on the kitchen counter. He didn’t like to do the cooking himself, but there were times when it had to be done. James raced down to the source of the chilling scream which had surged through the hotel and found Alanza in the room recently rented to Kathleen Evans and her boyfriend. It took him ten seconds to find what was causing Alanza to scream: a dead body. The dead body of Kathleen. He took Alanza out of the room, careful not to disturb a thing and brought her into the kitchen. Alanza was talking rapid fire in Ecuadorian Spanish, which James did not understand. He sat her down on the stool in the kitchen and calmly poured her a glass of water which he handed to her. Alanza had a few sips of the water down and it seemed to calm her.

The next thing James did was to pull out his cell phone and call the number of the nearest state trooper barracks. He calmly told the nice lady on the other end of the phone line there had been a murder in his hotel and would they please send a trooper over to investigate quietly as he had a business to run and adverse publicity might wipe him out. The next thing he did was call Alanza’s husband and hand the phone to her. She began talking rapidly in Spanish and, finished, handed the phone back to him.

“Jesus Christ, Jim,” the man on the other end said. “My wife is scared shitless. She just told me there was a dead lady in the room she was cleaning. What the hell is going on in there?”

“I’m not sure,” James said to him. “One of our guests seems to have met with an accident and I’ve called the police. I’m guessing a heart attack.” Of course, he was lying, the woman had died from a violent assault, and the signs were everywhere.

Then James poured a shot of whisky for himself and downed it. He thought for a moment and downed another shot.

Seconds later her boyfriend Damien ran into the kitchen, looking terrified. He saw the bottle of whisky and grabbed it, drinking straight from the bottle. James had no doubt why he needed the whisky and didn’t say a word. Damien collapsed on a kitchen stool next to Alanza and began weeping.

While this was all taking place, James heard a door open in the foyer. Thinking this a little odd, he walked into the entrance to the kitchen and noticed a wooden door open which he had assumed to be a panel. Somehow the combinations of running and sounds had triggered a hidden lock mechanism, which he fingered carefully. This was the secret room, although no more than a closet, he had been told was in the hotel, although no one had ever found it since the Hollywood director had left years ago. The hidden closet was empty; the director had taken his private set of women’s clothes made especially for him when he left. Deciding the room might have some use later, James went to shut it when he noticed an envelope sticking in the wall. He grabbed the envelope and looked at it. Inside it were a series of black and white Polaroid photographs from the 1960s. James thumbed through them until he recognized two famous actors wrestling in a room which used to be decorated down in the basement. They weren’t wearing anything and were covered in oil. Deciding the envelope would have great value, he slipped it in his pocket before shutting the hidden door.

“I’m making the assumption you’ve seen the body,” James said to Damien.

“Jesus Christ, why did I come here?” he was saying to himself, hardly aware James was listening. Damien was in his late twenties and didn’t fit the profile of someone who could kill an attractive young woman he’d spent the weekend with.

“You and Kathleen pretty tight?” James asked the man. “I’m just asking you because the police are going to want to know. I just phoned them and they’re on the way.”

“Not as close as I wanted to be with her,” he replied, still shaking. “We’d been going out together and I thought this trip would be a good getaway for her. Oh, Jesus, I’ll be the prime suspect,” Damien buried his face in his hands.

“Did anyone have a grudge against her?” James asked again. “It’s the same question the state troopers are going to be asking.”

“She had a shit of an ex-husband,” Damien said to him. “She divorced the creep years ago and she told me he was still following her around. But I can’t see him doing this. It doesn’t make sense.”

Damien started to babble away and James listened. There wasn’t anything else he could do. Kathleen was gone and there was nothing they could do to bring her back. From what James could understand, they had worked in the same building when she’d divorced her muscle head husband Dave when she’d made one too many trips to the hospital to be treated for a “fall”. Her ex-husband claimed to be a fitness instructor, but the only conditioning he ever did was to clean-out her bank account.

Kathleen had been featured on countless European fashion magazines. The one with names you can’t pronounce unless you’ve taken four years of college level French. These were the type of magazines with clear coat on them ten feet thick which glisten it the sunlight and cast mirror reflections. The sort of magazines given their own sections at the few places which still sold imported ones because they weren’t the standard size. She had traveled all over Europe doing fashion shoots in some of the most exclusive settings imaginable. James learned from his stuttering friend that she was smart and saved most of her money as she realized her days as a top fashion model had an expiration date. She put everything into a mutual fund that was earning her a slight income after she returned from overseas.

And then she met her future ex-husband.

From what Kathleen had told him, Dave had swept her off her feet when she met him at a fund raiser for a local politician. Every date he took her on was with a chauffeured limo and he met her at the door of her apartment with a bottle of Champaign each time. His ruse worked and they were married in six months. A few months into the marriage, she discovered he had a drinking problem and things started to go downhill from there. The money began disappearing from their joint account and soon it was all gone. He claimed he needed it to keep his fitness center running, but Kathleen found strange fund transfers listed on the account when she was able to go on line and look at it. She could never prove a thing, but Kathleen felt he’d made some bad gambling bets and was trying to pay off the bookies.

When the divorce was finalized, he was out on a three-day drinking trip with some of his drinking buddies. Dave found out Kathleen wasn’t kidding when he tried to pull money out of the account and discovered his bank card was declined. He was furious and tried to call her, but she wouldn’t answer the phone. She took out a restraining order against him when he kept trying to show up at the new apartment she moved to after the divorce.

James heard a car pull up into the parking lot and left the kitchen to go see who it was. He didn’t have to guess. The state trooper barracks was very close to Castine and he didn’t think it would take them long to respond. A murder was a crime that didn’t happen often where they were located and the troopers would be there quickly. He walked to the front door and saw a familiar face climbing out of the cruiser. The man didn’t wear a uniform.

Ashford raised a hand in greeting when he saw James. He’d known the man and his wife for a long time. He’d advised them against buying the hotel when it went up for sale years ago, but they wouldn’t listen to reason. The couple was just climbing out from the mountain of debt they’d taken upon themselves upon purchasing the place. Ashford remembered when the place was owned by the Hollywood director. As a young trooper, he’d been called out there on a number of occasions when the parties went out of control. He remembered doing a slow burn in the parking lot while a famous actor ripped up the lawn with a motorcycle while the owner was in one of the hot tubs with some women flown from California for the party. He couldn’t get a search warrant that night, but, oh, if he had been able to….Ashford had run into the director months later at a film premiere in Augusta and pulled him aside to let the man know that he had a search warrant all ready for him with the date left blank. The parties continued at a much lower pace.

“So what happened, Jim?” Ashford wearing his best rumpled suit, asked the hotel owner. “There was something about a dead body that came into the barracks. A cruiser with a technician is on the way. Care to tell me what happened?”

“I wish I knew,” James informed him from the door. “I was cutting up a salmon in the kitchen when I heard Alanza screaming her head off. I found her and called her husband because she was white as a sheet. She picked that moment to forget her English, so he had to translate. He told me she had discovered a body in a guest’s room. I went in to check and sure enough, there she was: dead. Doesn’t look good, either.”

“It never does,” Ashford told him. “Show me the room, we’ll have the crime scene unit here in a minute and they can work their magic.”

They walked down the hallway to the open door and James took Ashford into the room. All the way he was silent. Ashford was thinking about the time he’d caught Jim and Giselle in a parked car behind a church when they were in their twenties. He saw a Camaro bouncing around in the back parking lot and pulled up to check on it. He was still a trooper back in those days and shined the light inside only to find two people practicing page four hundred and twelve of
The Joy of Sex, Special Edition
. After advising Jim to practice breathing through his ears, he informed the couple that the mood was right, the time was right, but the place was not right. He waited in the lot until they had left and went about his patrol. Ashford bent a rule and never noted the incident on his patrol report. The three of them never mentioned the incident again, although one drunk night at the bar James told Ashford that he was thinking about getting a tongue pierce.