And the other smells, less wholesome, at my hotel. The desk clerk wasn’t on duty, so I peered at the mail slots behind his desk and saw a slip of paper wedged into mine. Leaning over the counter, I plucked it out, unfolded it and held it under the single bulb hanging from the ceiling.
MR. FREY: I DROPPED UP TO SEE YOU ABOUT SOMETHING IMPORTANT, BUT YOU WEREN’T HOME. I’LL BE BACK LATER TO WAIT FOR YOU. BEN LUTZ. P.S. IF I SHOULD MISS YOU AGAIN AND YOU SHOULD HAPPEN TO SEE BECKY BEFORE YOU SEE ME, PLEASE DON’T TELL HER I WAS HERE. B.
More meaningless intrigue? I shrugged and decided I’d wait up with a cigarette or two to see if Ben came back. I dropped the note on my dresser and groped for the light cord. I thought I’d left the room locked but wasn’t sure. Anyway, if the desk clerk had opened it for Becky, he could have opened it for Ben, too. On went the light, swinging back and forth because I’d given the chain a hearty yank, and shoving shadows back and forth across the room.
Ben had returned, all right. Ben was lying on my bed, but not waiting for me or anyone. Ben was stretched out on his back in a sopping mess of blood. The bedspread was full of blood and the cheap patterned rug on the floor. If that much blood had been taken from three men and not just one, all much bigger than Ben, they would have been dead. But I reached for his pulse automatically and verified what I already knew before reaction could set in and leave me feeling a little sick. Then I gagged and realized what I hadn’t realized before. The place smelled like a slaughterhouse. Still gagging but getting a cigarette lit I went down to the desk and picked up the phone and dialed the operator and asked for police. The sleepy-eyed desk clerk appeared from somewhere in back and said, “I’ll have to bill you for that call.”
“I want to talk to you,” I mumbled, “so don’t go away.” Then I heard three buzzes before a voice answered:
“Desk. Sergeant Iole.”
“This is Gideon Frey calling.” I gave him the Surf Avenue address. “There’s a murdered man in my room.”
I could almost see Sergeant Iole’s ears prick up. “Don’t touch anything. Just wait right there for us, Mr. Frey. A dead man?”
“Murdered,” I said, “unless he stuck a knife in his own back.”
There was a click. Sergeant Iole and his boys, or maybe just his boys, were on the way.
“Did you say… a dead man?” the desk clerk demanded.
“Yeah. Listen, someone gave you a note for me earlier tonight.”
The clerk examined the mail slot and then shrugged.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “Did he come here alone?”
“All alone. Is he… the dead man?”
“Did he go out and then come back?”
“He went out, all right. I didn’t see him come back.”
“I didn’t see you when I came in,” I pointed out.
“Well, I might have gone in back for a while, but I didn’t hear anyone.”
“Listen, friend, a man’s been murdered tonight. Understand what that means?”
“I didn’t see him come back. I didn’t see anyone else come in. Murdered, right here in this hotel?”
I looked around at the paint peeling on the walls, at the stained, frayed rug, at the dirty counter top and the desk clerk with a thick stubble of beard on his face and bloodshot eyes and liquor on his breath. “Yeah,” I said. “Murder at the Waldorf-Astoria.” Then I went back to my room to wait for the cops.
The slaughterhouse smell was still there. Through the thin yellow shade, red neon glared on and off, on and off. I’d pulled the light switch mechanically when I went down to the desk, so the room was alternately bathed in lurid crimson and darkness. In the crimson light the blood on the bed was a pool of gleaming ebony black and Ben Lutz’s gaunt features stared straight up at the ceiling, the eyes wide but showing only a crescent of pupil where they had rolled up, the lips slack and pulled away from the teeth as if Ben had been on the point of screaming.
I sat there in the beat-up chair and stared at the body, thinking maybe it would convince me to leave cop business to cops. But Bert had been killed first and now Ben. Next time it could be Sheila or Karen or me and I still wasn’t sure why. I knew this much: it had something to do with the manufacture of home brew at Tolliver’s Funland, probably on a large scale since a lot of people seemed to be involved. But I thought that stuff was strictly of historical interest.
Then I got to thinking. Damn Allison Tolliver and Gregory Tolliver and the Long Island Railroad and points in between. If I hadn’t gone out to Port Washington today Ben Lutz would have found me at Funland. He’d be alive right now. Hell. If they were gunning for him they were gunning for him. If not tonight, tomorrow. Hell again, and damnation. Ben had left a note for me. Something important, he’d written, and signed his death warrant. Score another point for Gideon Frey. If I hadn’t acted like a big wheel for Ben, rolling along on the highway of no-shift cock-and-bull, he might still be alive.
The cops stalked in civilly enough, and each man went about his job as if he’d been trained precisely for it in a carbon copy of my third-rate hotel room. Shorty examined the corpse and vicinity. Freckles probed about the room for anything untoward. I could have told him he’d chalk up a big fat zero for the side of the law but decided to let him find out for himself.
An older man with the three stripes of sergeant on his sleeve questioned me routinely. The fourth cop was Billy Drake. Good old pretty boy had been notified since Homicide was horning in on his territory.
His job was a little different from all the others. He stood guard over nothing in particular and stared in the mirror. He frowned at himself, then let a smile curl his lips. He straightened his tie and tried the smile again, but saw my reflection watching him and flushed an angry, not an embarrassed, scarlet.
“Drake,” the sergeant said. “You go find a phone and call for a man from the M.E.’s office. It looks like murder, all right.” He turned a lined face on me and let me see how too much murder and too much crime and too much depravity had hooded his eyes and made the lips thin and cynical. “Did you know the dead man, Mr. Frey?”
“Casually. His name is Ben Lutz. Owns a bar a couple of blocks down on Surf Avenue.”
The sergeant merely grunted, but I was wrong about Freckles. He chalked up more than a big fat zero. He found Ben Lutz’s note to me on the dresser, read it, scratched sandy-colored hair and gave the note to his sergeant.
“You know the deceased casually, eh, Frey? See this?” The sergeant offered me the note, but I waved it away.
“Of course I saw it. How do you think it got here? It was waiting for me at the desk when I came in.”
“Then how come the dead man was here in the room?”
“He must have come back a second tune.”
“We’ll check with the desk clerk.”
“He didn’t see him come back, sergeant.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Hell,” I said. “It’s just a note.”
“In which Lutz said he wanted to see you about something important. Now he’s dead. What did you mean when you said you knew the deceased casually?”
“I had a beer in his bar every now and then. We…”
“Hey, wait a minute! Aren’t you the guy who said Bert Archer didn’t like steam baths? You turned up the day he was murdered. It must be pretty dangerous for people to talk to you, Frey. They get killed.”
I was about to invoke the famous Fifth Amendment because the sour sergeant had his own ideas on everything, when Billy Drake came back, peeked into the mirror and straightened his tie again. “A man’s on his way from the M.E., sarge. I also took the liberty to call the dead man’s wife.”