“I’m Detective Martinson,” Martinson said. He shook the man’s hand.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way not to turn my hotel into a three-ring circus.”
“Well,” Martinson said, “no. What’s your name?”
“Howard Rutger.”
“And you’re the manager?” Martinson flipped open a notebook.
“I’m the General Manager.”
“General Manager. You reported the crime?
“That’s right.”
“Found the victim?”
“No, that was Mrs. Lopez, one of our housekeepers.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s in my office. Would you like to speak with her?”
“Is she alone?”
“One of our other housekeepers is with her.”
“Where’s your office?”
“Right through that door behind the desk,” Rutger said.
“If you could ask the other maid to come out of there, I’d appreciate it. Explain that a detective is going to interview her, and the detective’ll be along shortly. Could you do that?”
The CSU rolled up, represented by Carl Burns and Shug Petrie. Another detective from the Beach Bureau, Lili Acevedo, walked a few steps behind them.
“Second floor,” Martinson said to Burns. He and Petrie proceeded straight through to the stairs, and Martinson said to Acevedo, “A maid found a body in a room up there. Go and see if she can remember what she saw.”
Pink was the pastel theme of this operation. The lobby’s walls were pink stucco. Pink neon alerted weary travelers of the hotel’s existence, and the housekeepers wore pink uniforms. A woman dressed in the regulation smock walked out of Rutger’s office with a balled-up tissue in her fist.
Rutger had taken a call. The top of his head reflected the lobby’s pink interior.
Martinson said, “Can you get somebody to cover for you?”
He pushed a button that sent the caller to some Muzak’d limbo. The phone chirped again, then a third line started ringing. Rutger caught the attention of a passing bellman. “Arturo,” he said, “get on these phones. We are not interested in speaking to any newspaper or television station at this time. Do you understand that?”
Arturo rushed behind the desk to put everybody on hold. He said hello to the first caller when a fourth line started chirping.
“I can do this,” Rutger said. He extended his arms, making his hands into stop signs, then touched two fingers to his forehead. “I can do this.”
He turned to Martinson. “Do you realize what’s happening here? I’m fielding calls from fishwrappers that don’t normally cover anything more serious than some bimbo jumping agencies. This is going to kill my season.”
“What do you know about the victim?” Martinson asked.
“His name was Manfred Pfiser.” Rutger blew out a sigh and squared his shoulders. “He was a businessman from the Netherlands.”
“Remember when he checked in, off hand?”
“One day last weekend.” Rutger’s features pinched, his eyebrows closing in. His nose wrinkled like he was getting a whiff of sour milk. “I’d have to look it up.”
“Was he traveling alone?”
“Yes,” Rutger exhaled. “He always traveled alone.”
“So you knew the guy.”
“He’s been a frequent guest,” Rutger said. He pursed his lips.
“Can you think of any reason why anybody would want to hurt him?”
“None.”
“What sort of company did he keep?”
Rutger said, “I think I’m drawing an inference here, and I think I’m resenting it.”
“I wasn’t implying anything, Mr. Rutger, I’m asking if you knew who his friends were. If you don’t think I know fifty percent of the visitors to Miami Beach are gay, then you’ve got a poor understanding of my knowledge of my jurisdiction, and I resent that. Was he a homosexual?”
“The sexual orientation of my guests is the least of my concerns.”
“That’s a very progressive attitude. You think you could answer my question?”
Martinson saw a reporter homing in on him, Jason something or other. He worked for a weekly that concentrated mostly on restaurant critiques, but he was their police blotter guy. They’d spoken once or twice before.
“Hey, Arnie,” Jason whatever his name was said. Arnie. As if they were cousins.
Jason was wearing faded dungarees and a white golf shirt, shoes that looked like moccasins without socks. Martinson remembered when these guys dressed like they wanted to be taken seriously.
“I’ve got nothing for you,” Martinson said. “Call the Bureau this afternoon.”
“C’mon Arnie,” Jason persisted. “Give me a little piece of something.”
“I said call in later today. I’m talking to this man.” Martinson turned his back.
Rutger said, “Mr. Pfiser was often in the company of young men.” He snapped off the glasses and let them hang from their chain. “Beautiful, young men. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.” The two fingers were back at his forehead, massaging. “You know what else is going to get killed? My business. At the peak of our peak season.”
The phone lines had not stopped bleeping. Arturo stonewalled them in the order they came in.
“Media frenzy,” Rutger said, tilting his chin toward the desk. “Psycho Killer Strikes on South Beach.”
“Would you know how involved the victim was in the scene?”
Rutger composed himself. He looked left and he looked right and he shot a tight-lipped smile at two guys walking through the door. Sand clung to their ankles.
“Manfred Pfiser was a raging queen so desperately out of control I’m surprised he lived as long as he did. How’s that?”
“Fairly substantial. Now, who was on duty last night?”
As an up-to-the-minute example of the evolutionary process, Arnie Martinson might’ve been considered tall, had he lived five hundred years ago. Though he hadn’t begun to think of himself as short until very recently, there was no denying it: He was shrinking. His last physical proved it, when the wizened Doctor Eusasky extended the measuring stick attached to his scale and gave him the news. Sixty-eight inches. Five feet, eight inches. When he joined the Miami Beach PD, he was five-nine. This was the ineluctable effect of gravity on the body. People got shorter as they got older. Arnie had watched this happen to his father.
And he was getting fat by anybody’s standards. He was always stocky, but that extra weight used to make him feel strong. For most of his life, he carried it well through the chest and shoulders, maybe not so well around the gut, but the distribution seemed to shift right around the time he started to think of himself as short. He was not short enough, however, to duck under the tape denoting this new, expanded crime scene without some unintentional grunts escaping his throat, so the new, expanded Martinson lifted the tape up over his shoulder.
Simms had himself posted opposite the elevators, and another patrolman was standing outside the room. Arnie cleared another yellow obstacle and walked onto the scene as Burns was completing a chalk outline around the body.
The victim was lying in the center of the floor, a middle-aged white male with white hair taking a goofy, surprised expression into the next world. His lifeless hands were stained black with fingerprint ink.
Manfred Pfiser had taken a single bullet to the back of the head at very close range. The powder marks provided an impression of the barrel on his whitening skin. Entering at the base of the skull, the bullet struck the jawbone and sent shattered bone fragments tearing through the flesh, creating massive exit trauma. Burns focused his Nikon and snapped a nice, tight close-up of the fatal wound.
Shug Petrie reminded Martinson of the guys the Department was top-heavy with when he was just starting out, old boys from Kendall and Homestead whose daddies knew judges or somebody in the mayor’s office who could get their son a job. Petrie was a throwback, a relic of a bygone day, holding out until he could swat mosquitoes and spit tobacco juice outside his trailer while drawing the pension on his twenty-five years of faithful service. He was a tremendous pain in the ass, a cop Martinson exchanged as few words with as he could, but he was a competent, patient technician.