Eight Million Ways to Die (Matthew Scudder #5)

"You think so too?"

"What I think is I got a living to make."

"Jesus," he said. "Who doesn't?"

I'd said the right thing. I wasn't a threat now. I was just a guy going through the motions and trying to turn a dollar. He sighed, slapped the top of his desk, got up and crossed the room to a bank of filing cabinets. He was a chunkily built, bandy-legged man with his sleeves rolled up and his collar open, and he walked with the rolling gait of a sailor. He brought back a manila accordion file, dropped into his chair, found a photograph in the files and pitched it onto the desk.

"Here," he said. "Feast your eyes."

It was a five-by-seven black and white glossy of Kim, but if I hadn't known that I don't see how I could have recognized her. I looked at the picture, fought off a wave of nausea, and made myself go on looking at it.

"Really did a job on her," I said.

"He got her sixty-six times with what the doc thinks was probably a machete or something like it. How'd you like the job of counting? I don't know how they do that work. I swear it's a worse job than the one I got."

"All that blood."

"Be grateful you're seeing it in black and white. It was worse in color."

"I can imagine."

"He hit arteries. You do that, you get spurting, you get blood all over the room. I never saw so much blood."

"He must have gotten blood all over himself."

"No way to avoid it."

"Then how did he get out of there without anybody noticing?"

"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 hell, 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 nobody 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 nobody'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, hell, it's low priority, nobody'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 fucked 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 shit 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 documented 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 bloody clothes. And there aren't enough towels there. There ought to be at least two of everything. A double room in a class 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 massive 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 scraps 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 assemble 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 scumbag and I knocked the fucking 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."

Chapter 14

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 glass 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."

"We know who killed her."

"Chance?" He nodded. "I thought his alibi looked pretty good."

"Oh, it's gilt-edged. It's bottled in bond. So what? He still could have done it. The people he says he was with are people who would lie for him."

"You think they were lying?"

"No, but I wouldn't swear they weren't. Anyway, he could have hired it. We already talked about that."

"Right."

"If he did it he's clear. We're not going to be able to put a dent in that alibi. If he hired it we're not gonna find out who he hired. Unless we get lucky. That happens sometimes, you know. Things fall in your lap. One guy says something in a gin joint and somebody with a grudge passes it on, and all of a sudden we know something we didn't know before. But even if that happens, we'll be a long way from putting a case together. Meanwhile, we don't figure to kill ourselves over it."

What he was saying was no surprise but there was something deadening about the words. I picked up my ginger ale and looked at it.

He said, "Half the job is knowing the odds. Working the cases where you got a chance, letting the others flap in the breeze. You know the murder rate in this town?"

"I know it keeps going higher."

"Tell me about it. It's up every year. All crimes are up every year, except we're starting to get a statistical drop in some of the less serious ones because people aren't bothering to report them. Like my sister's burglary. You got mugged coming home and all that happened was he took your money? Well, shit, why make a federal case out of it, right? Be grateful you're alive. Go home and say a prayer of thanks."

"With Kim Dakkinen-"

"Screw Kim Dakkinen," he said. "Some dumb little bitch comes fifteen hundred miles to peddle her ass and give the money to a nigger pimp, who cares if somebody chopped her up? I mean why didn't she stay in fucking Minnesota?"

"Wisconsin."