Eight Million Ways to Die (Matthew Scudder #5)

I went over to St. Paul's. The speaker told a horrible story in a chatty matter-of-fact fashion. Both his parents had died of alcoholism, his father of acute pancreatitis, his mother of suicide committed while drunk. Two brothers and a sister had died of the disease. A third brother was in a state hospital with a wet brain.

"After I was sober a few months," he said, "I started hearing how alcohol kills brain cells, and I got worried about how much brain damage I might have. So I went to my sponsor and told him what was on my mind. 'Well,' he said, 'maybe you've had some brain damage. It's possible. But let me ask you this. Are you able to remember where the meetings are from one day to the next? Can you find your way to them without any trouble?' 'Yeah,' I told him, 'I can manage that all right.' 'Well then,' he said, 'you got all the brain cells you need for the time being.' "

I left on the break.

There was another message from Durkin at the hotel desk. I called right back and he was out again. I left my name and number and went upstairs. I was having another look at Donna's poem when the phone rang.

It was Durkin. He said, "Hey, Matt. I just wanted to say I hope I didn't give you the wrong impression last night."

"About what?"

"Oh, things in general," he said. "Once in a while the whole business gets to me, you know what I mean? I have the need to break out, drink too much, run off at the mouth. I don't make a habit of it but once in awhile I have to do it."

"Sure."

"Most of the time I love the job, but there's things that get to you, things you try not to look at, and every now and then I have to get all that shit out of my system. I hope I didn't get out of line there toward the end."

I assured him that he'd done nothing wrong. I wondered how clearly he recalled the previous evening. He'd been drunk enough to be in a blackout, but not everybody has blackouts. Maybe he was just a little vague, and uncertain how I'd taken his outbursts.

I thought of what Billie's landlady had told him. "Forget it," I said. "It could happen to a bishop."

"Hey, I got to remember that one. It could happen to a bishop. And probably does."

"Probably."

"You getting anywhere with your investigation? Coming up with anything?"

"It's hard to tell."

"I know what you mean. If there's anything I can do for you-"

"Matter of fact, there is."

"Oh?"

"I went over to the Galaxy Downtowner," I said. "Talked to an assistant manager. He showed me the registration card Mr. Jones signed."

"The famous Mr. Jones."

"There was no signature on it. The name was handprinted."

"Figures."

"I asked if I could go through the cards for the past few months and see if there were any other hand-printed signatures, and how they compared to Jones's printing. He couldn't authorize it."

"You should have slipped him a few bucks."

"I tried. He didn't even know what I was getting at. But you could have him pull the printed cards. He wouldn't do it for me because I've got no official standing, but he'd hop to it if a cop made the request."

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he asked if I thought it was going to lead anywhere.

"It might," I said.

"You think whoever did it stayed at the hotel before? Under some other name?"

"It's possible."

"But not his own name, or he would have signed it in script instead of being cute. So what we'd wind up with, assuming we got very lucky and there was a card to be found and we actually came up with it, what we'd have is another alias for the same son of a bitch, and we wouldn't be any closer'n we are now to knowing who he is."

"There's another thing you could do, while you were at it."

"What's that?"

"Have other hotels in the area check their registrations for, oh, the past six months or a year."

"Check 'em for what? Printed registrations? Come on, Matt. You know the man-hours you're talking about?"

"Not printed registrations. Have them check for guests named Jones. I'm talking about hotels like the Galaxy Downtowner, modern hotels in that price range. Most of them'll be like the Galaxy and have their registrations on computer. They can pull their Jones registrations in five or ten minutes, but not unless someone with a tin shield asks 'em to."

"And then what have you got?"

"You pull the appropriate cards, look for a guest named Jones, probably with the first initial C or the initials CO, and you compare printing and see if you find him anywhere. If you come up with anything you see where it leads. I don't have to tell you what to do with a lead."

He was silent again. "I don't know," he said at length. "It sounds pretty thin."

"Maybe it is."

"I'll tell you what I think it is. I think it's a waste of time."

"It's not a waste of all that much time. And it's not that thin. Joe, you'd do it if the case wasn't already closed in your mind."

"I don't know about that."

"Of course you would. You think it's a hired killer or a lunatic. If it's a hired killer you want to close it out and if it's a lunatic you want to wait until he does it again."

"I wouldn't go that far."

"You went that far last night."

"Last night was last night, for Christ's sake. I already explained about last night."

"It wasn't a hired killer," I said. "And it wasn't a lunatic just picking her out of the blue."

"You sound like you're sure of it."

"Reasonably sure."

"Why?"

"No hired hitman goes crazy that way. What did he hit her, sixty times with a machete?"

"I think it was sixty-six."

"Sixty-six, then."

"And it wasn't necessarily a machete. Something like a machete."

"He had her strip. Then he butchered her like that, he got so much blood on the walls that they had to paint the room. When did you ever hear of a professional hit like that?"

"Who knows what kind of animal a pimp hires? Maybe he tells the guy to make it ugly, do a real job on her, make an example out of her. Who knows what goes through his mind?"

"And then he hires me to look into it."

"I admit it sounds weird, Matt, but-"

"It can't be a crazy, either. It was somebody who went crazy, but it's not a psycho getting his kicks."

"How do you know that?"

"He's too careful. Printing his name when he signed in. Carrying the dirty towels away with him. This is a guy who took the trouble to avoid leaving a shred of physical evidence."

"I thought he used the towels to wrap the machete."

"Why would he do that? After he washed the machete he'd put it back in the case the way he brought it. Or, if he wanted to wrap it in towels, he'd use clean towels. He wouldn't carry away the towels he washed up with unless he wanted to keep them from being found. But towels can hold things- a hair, a bloodstain- and he knew he might be a suspect because he knew something linked him to Kim."

"We don't know for sure the towels were dirty, Matt. We don't know he took a shower."

"He chopped her up and put blood all over the walls. You think he got out of there without washing up?"

"I guess not."

"Would you take wet towels home for a souvenir? He had a reason."

"Okay." A pause. "A psycho might not want to leave evidence. You're saying he's someone who knew her, who had a reason to kill her. You can't be sure of that."

"Why did he have her come to the hotel?"

"Because that's where he was waiting. Him and his little machete."

"Why didn't he take his little machete to her place on Thirty-seventh Street?"

"Instead of having her make house calls?"

"Right. I spent the day talking to hookers. They aren't nuts about outcalls because of the travel time. They'll do them, but they usually invite the caller to come to their place instead, tell him how much more comfortable it is. She probably would have done that but he wasn't having any."

"Well, he already paid for the room. Wanted to get his money's worth."

"Why wouldn't he just as soon go to her place?"

He thought about it. "She had a doorman," he said. "Maybe he didn't want to walk past the doorman."

"Instead he had to walk through a whole hotel lobby and sign a registration card and speak to a desk clerk. Maybe he didn't want to pass that doorman because the doorman had seen him before. Otherwise a doorman's a lot less of a challenge than an entire hotel."

"That's pretty iffy, Matt."

"I can't help it. Somebody did a whole batch of things that don't make sense unless he knew the girl and had a personal reason for wanting her dead. He may be emotionally disturbed. Perfectly levelheaded people don't generally go batshit with a machete. But he's more than a psycho picking women at random."

"How do you figure it? A boyfriend?"

"Something like that."

"She splits with the pimp, tells the boyfriend she's free, and he panics?"

"I was thinking along those lines, yes."

"And goes crazy with a machete? How does that mesh with your profile of a guy who decides he'd rather stay home with his wife?"

"I don't know."

"Do you know for sure she had a boyfriend?"

"No," I admitted.

"These registration cards. Charles O. Jones and all his aliases, if he ever had any. You think they're gonna lead anywhere?"

"They could."

"That's not what I asked you, Matt."

"Then the answer's no. I don't think they're going to lead to anything."

"But you still think it's worth doing."

"I'd have gone through the cards myself at the Galaxy Downtowner," I reminded him. "On my own time, if the guy would have let me."

"I suppose we could run the cards."

"Thanks, Joe."

"I suppose we can run the other check, too. First-class commercial hotels in the area, their Jones registrations for the past six months or whatever. That what you wanted?"

"That's right."

"The autopsy showed semen in her throat and esophagus. You happen to notice that?"

"I saw it in the file last night."

"First he had her blow him, then he chopped her up with his boy scout hatchet. And you figure it was a boyfriend."

"The semen could have been from an earlier contact. She was a hooker, she had a lot of contacts."

"I suppose," he said. "You know, they can type semen now. It's not like a fingerprint, more like a blood type. Makes useful circumstantial evidence. But you're right, with her lifestyle it doesn't rule a guy out if the semen type's not a match."

"And it doesn't rule him in if it is."

"No, but it'd fucking well give him a headache. I wish she'd scratched him, got some skin under her nails. That always helps."

"You can't have everything."

"For sure. If she blew him, you'd think she could have wound up with a hair or two between her teeth. Whole trouble is she's too ladylike."