“Pass with care!” he said with a stifled giggle.
Charlie Freeman nodded.
“Thanks, buddy. And listen, they ever get around to tearing this place down, give me a call. Maybe I can fix you up with a job as a street sign.”
The fourth floor of the hotel consisted of a single corridor running the length of the building. Room 412 was halfway along on the right. Charlie Freeman knocked perfunctorily, then unlocked the door and stood looking around. The air was hot and stale. Greasy light filtered in through the window. The bed was unmade, and there was a pile of clothes on the floor, a T-shirt, jeans, a pair of basketball shoes. On a shelf above the sink lay a toothbrush and a comb. There was a book beside the bed. Freeman picked it up and flipped through several pages. Poetry, it looked like.
In the corner of the room, half hidden by the folds of the drape, was a wastebasket. Freeman poured the jumble of paper coils and twists out on to the table. Half the stuff was wrapping. Untwisting the rest, he finally found a till receipt for a suit, shirt, tie and shoes, dated two days previously. He bundled up the wrappings, clothes and book in a blue plastic tote bag he found in the closet. Down in the lobby, the guy at the desk was gazing up at the ceiling with a beatific smile.
“Seeing as Mr. Hayley won’t be coming back here for some considerable time, if ever, I’m taking his personal belongings for safekeeping,” Freeman told him. “You need my John Hancock anywhere?”
The bald man transferred his gray eyes to Freeman’s face. They were as blank as if he had never seen him before. Then he winked conspiratorially.
“Walk don’t walk!” he breathed.
Freeman started to say something, then shook his head and walked out. An elderly black, his skin tough as an alligator hide, was standing on the sidewalk holding a sign that read GOD HATES GAY PRIDE.
“Seek ye the Lord,” he told Charlie Freeman in a voice devoid of all conviction.
Freeman unlocked his truck and slung the tote bag on the passenger seat.
“I already found Him,” he said. “And I got bad news for you, gramps. He’s a switch-hitter Hisself”
Singing along in a penetrating baritone to Reba’s “The Greatest Man I Never Knew,” he drove up Peachtree as far as the ornate fantasia of the Fox Theater, then swung right on the avenue which had once divided north Atlanta from south, white from black. The sun showed pale in the sky, high behind a veil of haze. Must have been in the mid-nineties, easy.
The A-1 Motel was four blocks along, a fifties sprawl of two-story rooms and cabins surrounding a large parking lot. Charlie Freeman pulled in and killed both the engine and Reba McEntire, who was instantly replaced by a barrage of thrash rock from a trio of baseball-capped dudes taking their ethnic briefcase for a stroll. Freeman picked a large manila envelope out of the file lying on the floor and heaved himself out of the truck.
“We’re full,” called a male voice as he entered the reception area. The sound of sports commentary rumbled in the background.
“Sign says there’s vacancies,” shouted Freeman.
“It’s broke.”
Charlie Freeman looked around at the bulging walls, the fake antebellum furniture, the cases of plastic flowers, the green globs of goop circulating in a huge lava lamp. A man appeared in the open doorway behind the counter. He was wearing a Braves cap, a T-shirt and shorts. His face was pudgy and pugnacious, the skin riddled with broken veins.
“We’re full,” he said, as if for the first time.
“You the manager?”
The man’s glaucous gray eyes curled up the way slugs do when you salt them.
“This about the fire code? I told the guy already, we’re going to upgrade same time we do the roof, right? Damn, all we’re trying to do here is turn a buck and promote tourism.”
Charlie Freeman laid his ID on the counter and extracted two glossy six-by-eights from the manila envelope.
“I’d just like for you to take a gander at these pictures, tell me if you ever saw either of these individuals, then I’ll let you get back to the game.”
The manager picked up the photographs.
“Damn, looks like they had a rough night,” he remarked lightly. “I seen this one here. He in some sort of trouble?”
“He’s dead,” said Freeman.
The manager’s eyes widened.
“Dead? Damn.”
“When did he check in?”
The manager tapped at a computer keyboard.
“He was in 118, right?” he murmured. “Arrived the tenth.”
“Name?”
“John Flaxman.”
“Address?”
“Didn’t give none. But I got some scoop on his girlfriend, if that’s any use to you.”
Charlie Freeman tucked one of the photos back in the envelope and slipped the other into his jacket pocket.
“Can’t hurt,” he said.
“She come by this morning, said her friend had left but she wanted to keep the room for a while and pay with a card. Gloria Glasser’s the name, 2344 East 19th, Hopkinsville, Kentucky.”
He handed a smudgy carbon copy of the credit card imprint to Freeman, who studied it briefly.
“Thanks now,” he said, handing it back. “Appreciate it.”
He walked along the line of cabins to 118 and rapped at the door. It opened almost immediately. The face that appeared was young, pale and drawn. Seventeen, maybe eighteen at the most.
“Gloria Glasser?” he said.
A momentary delay, a sudden obliquity of her gaze, confirmed Freeman’s suspicions.
“Uh huh?”
“I’m from the police, ma’am. You called in about a Dale Watson?”
“You heard something?”
Her whole face was transformed.
“I come in?” said Freeman.
The room inside was a shade classier than the one at the Central Hotel, but a whole lot sadder. The other had just been a single guy’s flop. Here something was missing, something which had been found and then lost again. The sense of that loss was as thick as the tobacco fumes in the air.
The girl closed the door and lit another cigarette.
“Want one?” she asked Freeman.
“Thank you kindly.”
She gave him a light from the tip of her own, just like they’d been best buddies for years. Cute little thing, thought Freeman, even if her name wasn’t Gloria.
“So how can we help you?” he asked brightly.
“You said you had news,” the girl replied, her manner hardening up.
Freeman shook his head.
“You asked. I didn’t say nothing.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed.
“How do I know you’re who you say? Show me your badge.”
Freeman did so.
“How about you?” he asked.
“Ain’t no law that says I have to show you ID,” she retorted with a defiance as thin and hard as enamel.
“That so? But there is a law against using a credit card that ain’t yours.”
“Who says it ain’t mine?”
There was real apprehension in her voice now. Freeman gave her the eye.
“Honey, Gloria Glasser’s held that card since 1988, it said on the printout. You’d still’ve been in grade school then. Am I right?”
The girl bit her lip.
“It’s my mom’s. It’s OK, she’ll pay the bill.”
“And you are?”
“Cindy.”
“OK, Cindy. I’ve already got a pile of work right now, ’sides which it goes against my nature to be ugly to a young lady. So you just answer my questions fully and frankly, I could overlook this little credit card matter. Deal?”
She glanced at him once or twice, then nodded.
“OK I sit down?” asked Freeman, doing so.
The girl perched on the edge of a chair covered in a heavy crimson acrylic weave.