No Stone Unturned (5 page)

The chain-link fence rattled in the cool Sunday breeze. There were plenty of cars inside, most of them junkers Phil used for spare parts. But front and center sat a brand-new, gray Lincoln Continental, its four canted headlights gazing back at me from either side of a sparkling billet-and-chrome-wire grille.

“Looking for something?” a voice startled me from behind.

I hadn’t been expecting to find anyone there on a Sunday, but here was a kid in grimy coveralls and a crew cut, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

“Was that Lincoln towed in here yesterday?” I asked, motioning over my shoulder.

The kid nodded. “It yours?”

“No, I’m from the paper. Ellie Stone.” I extended a hand, but the kid chuckled, holding me off with a display of his dirty mitts.

“Billy Jenkins,” he said. “Whose car is it, then?”

“I would guess it belongs to Judge Shaw,” I answered, looking back through the fence. “Hey, Billy, do you think I could take a quick look under the chassis? I won’t touch anything.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Oil leak.”

Billy laughed again, pulling a key ring from his belt. “She’s brand new! But if you don’t touch, I don’t see the harm.”

He unlocked the gate, and I knelt down carefully to look. Too dark. Billy shoved a flashlight under my nose. The ground under the car was oily enough, but none of it was fresh. I stood up, brushed off my knees, and handed the light back to Billy the kid.

“Do you know where it was towed from?” I asked.

“Ought to,” he grinned. “Hooked her up myself. We got a call from the Mohawk Motel yesterday morning. Someone left the car out back, blocking the trash cans. Jean Trent was spitting mad.” He giggled like an idiot, then he blew his nose into the oily rag. “The garbage truck couldn’t get in, now she’s got to wait till next Saturday to have her trash collected.”

“Was it locked?” I asked.

“What, the garbage?”

I rolled my eyes. “The car.”

“Well, yeah, of course,” and now it was Billy’s turn to roll his eyes. “Look at her,” he said, admiring the Lincoln. “Not a finer car in the city.”

A forty-foot-high wooden Indian rose from the shoulder of Route 40, pointing a tired arm down a long, unpaved drive to the Mohawk Motel. The motel sat stubbornly on a patch of dirt amid the pines, surrounded by encroaching weeds and brush, fighting a losing battle against Nature’s onslaught. After twenty years perched atop a gentle hill two miles north of the New Holland city limits, it had forged its own niche in the county: a discreet if seedy trysting spot. Its very survival depended on the itches adulterers had to scratch. The proprietress, Jean Trent, was a salt-and-pepper widow who asked few questions of her guests, demanding only that they pay for the room in advance. I knew the procedure; I had visited the Mohawk a couple of times with a junior editor. He lived at home with his parents, and we both feared discovery at my apartment in town.

I pulled into the graveled parking area and stopped in front of the registration office. There were no other cars in sight. The Mohawk Motel was a ten-unit, cinderblock alcazar of peeling paint and mildewed carpets. Lined up along a thirty-yard walk of crumbling concrete, the cells were identical: a double bed for the main event, a blaring television to cover the din of the rut, and a small bathroom for hosing off afterward. There was a phone booth next to the office door, just to the right of the metal-and-glass Dr Pepper machine. I nodded to myself, fingering the bottle cap in my coat pocket.

Jean Trent emerged from the office, eyeing me suspiciously. People usually came to the Mohawk for a room, not to take in the sights.

“You looking for something?” she asked, her voice gravelly from decades of cigarettes and drink. Her faded skin, stretched tight over her cheeks, sagged into gray jowls and a wrinkled neck. She might have been a looker once upon a time, but the bloom was long since off the rose.

“I’m from the paper,” I said, walking toward her.

She nodded guardedly and repeated her question.

“I’d like to ask you about the car that was towed yesterday,” I explained.

Now she was annoyed. “Was that yours?”

I shook my head. “I think it belongs to a girl who stayed here Friday night. Pretty blonde, about twenty-one . . .”

“I forget my guests as soon as they pay for their room. Long as they don’t make no trouble, they’re no concern of mine.”

“This girl was murdered that night,” I said to no great effect.

Jean Trent uttered an ambiguous “Oh,” and scratched her neck.

I showed her the photo I’d stashed in my purse. “Is this the girl?” I asked.

Jean Trent studied the picture at arm’s length. “Yeah, that’s her all right. You weren’t kidding about her being dead.”

She handed the photo back and looked me up and down. Then she said she knew me.

“I thought you forget your guests once they’ve paid.”

She grinned a naughty smile at me. “Well, that’s the official line, you understand. You came in here a couple of times with a handsome young fellow. A suit-and-tie type, wasn’t he?” I said nothing, and she just kept grinning. Then her smile disappeared. “You didn’t come here with that dead girl, did you? Some kind of perverted orgy?”

“Never met her.”

Jean cursed the cold, pulling her windbreaker tight, then motioned for me to follow her inside. The office was as spartan as the accommodations, just fake wood paneling and a flat green carpet. Her rooms were through a door behind the desk, but she didn’t take me that far.

“Want some coffee?” she asked, pouring herself a cup from the urn sitting on the curling Textolite surface.

I declined, sensing she was about to volunteer some information she deemed important, and I didn’t want to sidetrack her with details about how many lumps and creams.

“Weird night, Friday,” she said, raising her cup to my health. “Could’ve sworn it was a full moon.”

“Strange?” I asked. “Besides murder?”

She slurped. “They catch the guy?”

“I wouldn’t be here if they had.”

“The girl arrived alone about half past eight Friday, and I put her in number four,” she announced suddenly, the niceties over.

“Any other units occupied that night?”

“It’s not exactly my high season, but there was a trucker in number eight.”

“Where was he from?”

“Who knows? You know those big diesels; license plates from every state in the Union . . .”

“Didn’t he register?”

“He just paid for the room and disappeared into number eight. He was gone by morning; the key in the drop-off box. I don’t make out a receipt unless someone asks. Otherwise I got to pay tax.”

Could be the truck driver, I thought. Probably strong enough to snap her neck. But why? Fred Peruso, whose opinion I trusted, said no rape had taken place. Had Jordan Shaw gone to the motel to meet the mysterious trucker? It didn’t seem likely; they surely came from different sides of the tracks. And then, too, why bother to take two rooms at the Mohawk? Jean Trent wasn’t judging anyone.

“You think he did it?” asked Jean, lighting a mentholated cigarette.

“I can tell you don’t,” I said, playing along. “All right, what else?”

“About a quarter after nine, a car pulls in,” she said, rising to the bait like a hungry trout. “That’s when I notice the girl came on foot. Or so I thought. You say that was her car out by the garbage cans?” I nodded. “Well, this other car pulls in, and a guy slips into number four, nice as you please. I wait a few secs to see if the girl’s going to scream, and of course she don’t. I was kind of expecting a fellow to show up, if you know what I mean.”

She sucked half the cigarette into her lungs. The ash grew before my eyes.

“What kind of car was it?”

“I don’t know cars,” she waved. “And I told you I don’t pay no mind to my guests, long as they behave.”

“You remembered me well enough.”

She looked me up and down again, the same dissolute grin emerging from behind the smoke.

“I don’t often see a girl like you here,” she said. “Or like that girl Friday night, for that matter. You two don’t quite fit the profile of my regular clientele.”

“Did you notice anything at all about the car?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation away from myself and my association with her motel. I may be a modern thinker, with broad ideas on sex, but, in the light of day at least, I like to pretend to be a
nice girl
.

“Average, light color. I told you I don’t know cars.”

“Did you see the license plates?”

She shook her head, looking at the light. “Couldn’t see. Didn’t try.”

“So then what?”

“Like I told you, I didn’t pay no attention. I don’t know how long the fellow was there. When I looked outside a couple of hours later, the car was gone.”

I waited, sure she had something else to tell me.

“I was watching the late show,” she continued, “’cause I don’t sleep much. I didn’t budge again till after midnight when I heard another car pull into the lot. So I go to the window, thinking it’s the same guy come back for more. Maybe he went out to get some liquor or something. But this time a different guy gets out and ducks into number four, thank you very much.”

“Notice anything about him?”

“It was too dark. But I could see he was taller. And the car was different. And I didn’t notice no license plate or color this time, neither.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Do you think I got nothing to do but spy on my guests? I didn’t hear no scream, so I went back to my movie.”

“Was that the end of it?” I asked.

“What, are you in a hurry? After my movie, I get up for a smoke. I take a look out the window to see the rain, ’cause it was really coming down just then, and I see another guy come out of number four. He jumps into his car and drives away. By now I figure the blonde’s turning tricks in my motel, and I don’t like that. The cops would close me down if I let stuff like that go on. But then, like I told you, she was gone in the morning.”

“You’re sure this was a different man?”

“Positive. And his car was a darker color.”

Didn’t match the bartender’s description of the foreigner’s car, but what about the second one? Jean hadn’t noticed the color.

My witness settled down into a chair behind the counter and took a sip of her coffee. I knew her story was over.

“Will you show me around the place?”

We left the office, me first, while Jean Trent locked the door behind her. I hadn’t seen much to steal, but she wasn’t taking chances, even if we weren’t going far. The first thing I wanted to know about was the soda machine. Did folks drink a lot of Dr Pepper? What did she do with the empties? Wasn’t there a receptacle for the bottle caps? Jean shrugged her shoulders and said folks drank whatever soda was there; the distributor drove down from Gloversville every Thursday to stock the machine and take away the cash and the empties; no, this particular machine didn’t seem to have a slot for the bottle caps, and folks just threw them into the garbage can.

“What garbage can?” I asked.

Jean made a double take to the left of the machine. “Can you beat that?” she said. “Someone stole my damn garbage can!”

Nothing remained of the receptacle that had once swallowed Dr Pepper bottle tops except a rusted ring on the concrete.

“I’m gonna kill that Julio,” she said.

“Who’s Julio?” I asked. “Garbage can thief?”

“Real clever, missy. He’s my handyman. Just a kid, really, who helps me out.”

“Where is he now? Maybe he saw something the other night.”

Jean Trent waved a hand and set off for number 4. “He wasn’t here Friday.”

The room looked as I had expected: dingy, flat carpet, worn from door to bed and bed to bathroom. If my memory served, I had spent a Friday afternoon in that very room after the
Republic
’s Christmas party a year before. The junior editor.

“What did this look like Saturday morning?” I asked. “Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Rumpled sheets are par for the course around here,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “She had a good roll Friday night, I can tell you that. I’ve been cleaning up after fornicators for twenty years. Julio calls me the Love Detective.”

“Just where is this Julio?” I said, since she’d brought him up again. “I’d like to ask him a few questions.”

“Most days he shines shoes and sweeps up hair at Pirfo’s barbershop downstreet,” she said. “But it’s Sunday. Probably in church.” She smirked. Then she returned to the state of number 4 on Saturday morning. “Covers were pulled back to the foot of the bed, sheets torn loose, not taut like when I put them on. And there were more than a few hairs—short ones, if you catch my drift—some dark, some light. You might say the room smelled of sex.”

I cleared my throat. The Love Detective, indeed.

“You want to know something else about your pretty blonde?” she asked coyly. I was listening. “You remember I said I thought she was turning tricks in here? Well, Saturday morning, I figured out that she only slept with the first guy.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “Peeping through the window?”

Jean swore at me. “I don’t peep through no windows, see? So if you want to know how I know, cut the crap.”