The Ninth Man (7 page)

He took another long drag on the cigarillo, then stubbed it out in the ashtray, half-smoked. He let the smoke from his last drag out slowly, so that it curled up from the entire width of his mouth, as though his tongue were on fire.

“Arthur was responsible for my getting this shop, actually,” he said, looking into the ashtray. “About six years ago, my parents died, and I went back to Missouri to clear up their affairs. My father had a small business there, and I remained in Missouri for nearly three years. Arthur and I kept in close contact, of course.

“Then, about three years ago, he went through some sort of trauma—he never would discuss it with me—and pleaded with me to come back here. Which I did. I sold my father’s business and bought this shop. I’m very glad I did, really.”

“You didn’t live together, though?”

“Only for the shortest of times, shortly after we first met, but our lifestyles were really just too different, and it never would have worked out. We got along much better by not living together.

“He carried my name in his wallet on one of those ‘In case of emergency, call…’ cards. I carried his. And one bright Tuesday morning, I got a call from the police with the request that I come to the morgue.”

Again, I could see his eyes water, and he turned his head away quickly to wipe at them with a thumb and index finger, as if trying to pinch them off at the source.

Finally, he took another deep breath and turned to me again, trying to smile and failing.

“I’d never seen a dead body before—my parents died in a plane crash at sea, and their bodies were never recovered—let alone been to a morgue. Dreadful, dreadful place. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a Sunday outing with the wife and kiddies.”

He gave me a quick, very weak smile.

“I pride myself on being a man of considerable composure, but I’m afraid I behaved rather badly. From the attitude of the police when they contacted me, I assumed the worst—that he’d been murdered by one of those cretins he was so pathetically attracted to, and I was angry with him for being so stupid. Silly, but I didn’t even consider it being his heart at first. I’m afraid I said some things I shouldn’t have.

“Then they showed me the body—his face, anyway—and there was not a mark on him. He was very pale, of course, and his lips were a very strange shade of blue. I suppose that’s how all corpses must look. I knew then it had been his heart, but unfortunately, things said cannot be unsaid.

“There was a very nice young man there who took me into his office after I’d made the identification and gave me some coffee. He was very kind. Then some other men asked me some questions, then thanked me for coming down and told me I could go home. Which I did.”

“Do you remember exactly what they asked you?”

“Whether Arthur had been on drugs—I assured them he was not. Then they asked if he might have had any knowledge of poisons or any reason to take his own life, and I told them, as I told you, that was ridiculous.” He paused, momentarily pensive. “And then they asked about those
other
men. I had no idea why they would even mention them. It was a heart attack, after all.”

I was relieved to realize he so obviously wanted to believe his heart attack theory that the can of worms I’d nearly opened earlier had been set aside. I didn’t see any reason to contradict him.

“Did the police say who had found his body?”

Bell nodded. “The paperboy, apparently. He’d come to collect and found the front door open just a bit and had looked in and seen Arthur—”

“The front door was open?” I interrupted then cursed myself mentally for having done so. But having jumped in, I figured I might as well finish it. “Was that something he did very often—leave his door ajar?”

Bell looked both surprised and thoughtful.

“No. No, it isn’t. Not at all. I mentioned that fact, but the police didn’t seem to think it significant.”

Sirens were wailing somewhere in the back of my head, but they were too far away to guess what they were trying to tell me.

“Did you have a chance to go through his things?”

He nodded.

“Was anything at all missing?”

Bell shook his head.

“No. I took the responsibility of disposing of all his things after the funeral. The furniture and larger articles were sold at auction, the rest sent off to his family in Ohio. I knew everything Arthur had, and it was all there.” Suddenly, his brows came together, and his face took on a blank look. “Except…”

I’ve never taken pauses well.

“Except?” I prodded.

Bell was obviously concentrating, his eyes focused on a spot somewhere in space.

“Photos. There were some photos missing from his photo album. It was in the living room, which I thought a bit strange, and as I was packing it away, I couldn’t resist looking through it—for old times’ sake, as it were—and there were three or four photos missing.”

“How could you tell?”

“Arthur was very meticulous about certain things,” he said. “His album was full—photos on every page, all neatly arranged chronologically with little captions underneath. Once, long ago, I’d commented on that, and he said he liked to hold on to his past.

“And yet, when I looked that last time, there were two or three pages in a row with photos missing, and the captions had been scrawled out. That was most unusual, now that I think of it.”

The sirens in my head were very loud now.

“Did you happen to keep the album?”

He shook his head.

“No. The family demanded they get everything that wasn’t sold. Not very nice people, I’m afraid. They insisted on a complete inventory both before and after the sale, and an exact accounting of every penny.”

“Do you have any idea of what the missing photos might have been?”

This time, I didn’t mind the pause. Bell traced the outline of his lower lip with thumb and index finger, opening and closing the gap between them time and again. Finally, he shook his head.

“No, I’m sorry. I can’t. They were from the period when I was back in Missouri, but that’s all I can say for sure. Probably of people I didn’t know, anyway.”

A tiny buzz—this one not in my head—signaled the opening of the shop door. Bell rose and smoothed his tie against the front of his shirt with his palm.

“I’m afraid I have a customer. Is there anything else you’d like to know at the moment?”

“No,” I answered, also getting up. I reached into my shirt pocket for my card. “You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Bell.” I handed him the card, which he slipped into his jacket pocket.

“I’m not quite sure how,” Bell said, motioning for me to precede him from the alcove office. “I’m afraid I rambled far more than I intended.”

The customer, a paunchy little man in a very expensive-looking jumpsuit, smiled and waved at Bell, who nodded and smiled in return. Walking with me to the door, Bell turned and offered me his hand, once again the efficient businessman. I took it, and just before releasing my hand, his grip tightened momentarily.

“Tell me, Mr. Hardesty, what have you learned?”

Once again our eyes locked.

“Something, Mr. Bell,” I said. “Something very important. I just wish I knew what it was.”

Chapter 4

Damn it, why do I always expect things to be easier than
they inevitably turn out to be? (Well, what the hell do I expect—a printed program?) I carried on this internal bitch fight all the way downtown and to the front door of the El Cordoba Hotel.

It was a grimy, narrow building six stories high with a four-story, equally grimy double-faced sign—the kind they always use in detective B-movies to illuminate otherwise-dark street-facing rooms. The recessed entry was littered with torn newspapers, used paper cups, and the assorted windblown trash that adds to any downtown’s charm. In one corner near the door, a small brown paper bag was molded around an empty wine bottle. A real classy joint, the El Cordoba. It was the kind of place where the management’s experience with dead guests was, you could tell, considerably higher than, say, at the Waldorf.

The lobby furnishings consisted of four overstuffed chairs and a sofa, all bolted to the chipped linoleum tile floor; two artificial palms that had seen better days; and three large blown-up photos of the city taken around 1947. A small glass panel in a closed fire door showed a long, murky corridor with doors set at monotonously regular intervals. An elevator somewhere behind the door whirred and ground noisily on its way up or down.

The “front desk” was a window with dirty glass that ended about four inches above a small ledge. As I’d halfway expected, no one was in the tiny room behind the window. A badly smudged card taped to the wall to the left of the window and just above a small black button commanded: “Ring Bell.”

I rang bell.

A not-unattractive guy of about thirty, wearing a black formfitting T-shirt that looked three sizes too small and with more muscles than anybody has a right to have, appeared from somewhere out of my line of sight. His massive arms, from where they first became visible at the edge of his sleeves down to his wrists, were covered with tattoos.

You name it, he had it—black leopard with bright red claw-marks; “U.S.M.C.;” “Born to Raise Hell;” the guy was a walking billboard for a tattoo parlor. I could only imagine what lay beneath the T-shirt.

“Help you?” he asked through the small circle cut in the center of the window.

“Is the manager here?”

His eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“The day manager is,” he said, flexing his muscles and expanding his already awesome pecs. “You’re lookin’ at him. What you need?”

“Some information.”

He snorted like someone who’d heard that line once or twice before.

“Library’s three blocks down and to the left.”

“Yeah, I know, but my card’s expired. I’m looking for some information on one of your guests—”

“We got lots of guests,” he said impatiently.

“Yeah, well, this one’s dead. Died here, as a matter of fact. Room four-fourteen. Name was Bobby McDermott.”

Again the muscle flexing, and I was reminded of a gorilla guarding his home territory.

“You a cop?” he asked, eyes narrowed. “You’re a cop, you show me your badge.”

“No, I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator.”

“You a fag?”

“Unless that’s an invitation, I can’t see what my sex life has to do with what we’re talking about.”

“Bobby was a fag,” he said, sounding almost sad. The fact he’d called him “Bobby” wasn’t lost on me.

“Yeah, I know. So what?” I watched his reaction and saw him loosen up a bit.

“You don’t care he was a fag?”

“Look, I wasn’t paying his rent. I don’t give a shit what he did in bed, or with whom.” I let that sink in a minute then said, “You knew Bobby pretty well?”

He eyed me intently for a few seconds then said, sounding defensive, “Bobby was a good guy.”

Feeling fairly confident that all the hairpins were by now pretty well dropped, I said, “Yeah, so I understand.

“Look, I think you and I and Bobby have a lot in common…” I let that one soak in a second, too. “…so whatever you tell me will stay in the family, so to speak. I just want to know a little more about the circumstances of his death. It might really help a lot of people.”

I reached into my billfold and pulled out a ten, but when I started to push it through the slot at the bottom of the window, he waved it back and shook his head.

“Bobby was a good guy,” he repeated. “We wasn’t exactly pals, but I helped him out with a room a couple of times, and he…” The hulk of a manager lowered his eyes and actually blushed. “…he helped me out some, too, if you know what I mean.”

I knew.

“Was the room in Bobby’s name that night?”

He shook his head.

“Huh-uh. Some other guy’s.”

“Did he and Bobby come in together?”

“I dunno. I’m the day manager; I get off at six, six-thirty. Bobby, he come in around ten, from what I hear. Night manager’s on then. It was me who found Bobby next morning when I was making my morning check. I didn’t even know he was in the hotel.”

“Whose name was the room registered in?”

The hulk retreated to the dark recesses of his mind while his right hand scraped slowly under his nose, exposing the word
LOVE
tattooed on his knuckles.

“Kane…? Kearn…? I looked it up, should remember it.” He was talking to himself more than to me. A quick, unconscious flexing of every muscle in his upper torso announced his mind’s return. “I’ll look it up for you. Just a second.”

He bent over nearly out of sight then straightened back up holding a loose fistful of index cards. Tamping them straight on his side of the ledge, he began sorting through them with efficiency.

“Kano,” he said, stopping at one of the cards. “B. Kano. Baltimore, Maryland.”

“Can I see it?”

He shrugged. “Sure,” he said and slid it through the slot.

Other than the night manager’s almost totally illegible scrawl indicating the room number (414) and the price ($15), the only non-printed words on the registration form were “B. Kano, Baltimore, Maryland” in nondescript block letters.

“Did the police ask to see this?”

“Sure, but they didn’t make any big deal of it. Most of the people stay in a dump like this use fake names. ‘B. Kano’s’ got more class than ‘John Smith,’ though.”

“Yeah,” I said. But I made a mental note of the name “B. Kano” anyway, just in case.

“What time’s the night manager get in?”

“’Bout six. But if you’re plannin’ to talk to him about this Kano guy, you can save yourself a trip.”

“Why’s that?”

He took the card I’d slid back to him and tapped at the night manager’s scrawl.

“Ernie drinks a little,” he said. “He’s got real nice handwriting when he’s sober, but I can tell from this shit he was blotto. And when Ernie’s shit-faced, a herd of elephants could come through the door, and he couldn’t tell you what color they were.”

“Any chance Bobby might have signed in as B. Kano?”

He shook his head.

“Could be, but I don’t think so. If Bobby’d wanted a room, he’da set it up with me earlier. Ernie, he’s married and got six kids. He don’t make no freebie arrangements with guys. And on freebies nobody signs no cards.”