A sour puff of air-conditioning and old cigarette smoke rolled out into the parking lot. It smelled like a year's worth of dry cleaning from a Holiday Inn. I leaned into the now familiar hallway, tapped the door politely with the tire iron, and called out cheerfully, "Hello? Anybody home?"
If anybody was, he kept it to himself.
The light switch did what it was supposed to do. The walls glistened at me like a giant throat. Going in, I felt like a tongue depressor.
"Open sesame," I said to the door at the end of the hall. It seemed like an appropriate password for the Spice Rack. All it took was that and the second of Nana's keys. I was back at the scene of the crime.
The lights for the main room were all the way across the room behind the bar, Nana had said, so I left the door open behind me until I found it. The first switch I hit turned on the overheads, rather than the dancers' spots. I went back and closed the door to the parking lot, locking it from inside.
Without the pink stage lights, the Spice Rack looked like the kind of place they show high school kids in the films that teach them how to avoid syphilis. The lurid red paint on the walls was patched and peeling, the chairs tattooed with cigarette burns. A couple of county-fair prize five-ounce cockroaches scurried across the stage where Amber had been laid out on Friday night.
I had no idea how long I might have. I gave only ten minutes to the main room; the cops had been over it pretty thoroughly. The bathrooms, which might have figured prominently in the same syphilis film, took about four minutes each. Except for a small packet of coke taped behind the toilet in the ladies' room-some blitzed-out dancer's forgotten stash-I found nothing of interest. I put the coke back; now that I'd seen the club in the daytime, I figured the poor girl would need it if she ever got her memory back.
None of Nana's keys fit the lock on Tiny's private office, but then I hadn't figured they would. That was one of the reasons I'd brought the tire iron.
It wasn't a particularly deft approach, but it didn't have to be. The locks were terrific, and Tiny had so much faith in them that he'd forgotten all about the door jamb. The wood was old and rotten, and the nails that held the boards to the loose plaster of the wall might as well have been staples. A couple of good pulls on the iron, and the door frame kissed the wall good-bye. It was a pretty rough kiss. It carried the door with it, back out into the corridor.
I felt the odd thrill I always feel when I break into someone's inner sanctum. People have so many secrets, and they hide them so clumsily. I tried once to explain my reaction to Eleanor, and she said I should seek psychiatric help. Maybe someday I will. In the meantime I'll just grit my teeth and enjoy breaking and entering.
The office wasn't much. A computer sat on top of one of those old gray metal desks that people always think are secure, and the remainder of the decor consisted of a faded, greasy cloth couch that might once have been brown, a small rug, and a sliding door that I guessed led to Tiny's closet. The desk was locked and the closet wasn't, and I've always liked going through people's closets, so I started there.
Tiny had lots of white clothes. They hung neatly, with four pairs of surprisingly small white shoes lined up beneath them. I started with the shoes: all empty. Wondering whether Tiny kept so many changes of clothing in the club because he was likely to get bled on in the course of an evening, I sank my arms up to the elbows in their white folds and looked for pockets. There were a great many pockets, so many that you would have thought Tiny kept things in them. He didn't. The closet was a total bust. I didn't even learn the name of Tiny's tailor.
The part of the couch that wasn't dirt and grease was couch, pure and simple. It didn't do anything cute, like explode into a bed, and there was nothing underneath the cushions or in the folds beneath them. I pulled the whole thing out from the wall and winced. Tiny didn't have dust rats; he had dust giant sloths. The dust was just dust.
The desk popped open as if it had yearned for years to be searched. In it I found my first two surprises.
The first was a phone book. There were no names in it, only numbers, but I have a good memory for numbers. I found Nana's and Toby's. Then I got very interested because I was looking at mine. It was penciled in at the bottom of the last full page, obviously a recent addition. Just for the hell of it, I wrote down the other numbers in the book, using a pad on Tiny's desk that had a bright yellow butterfly at the top of it. I put the phone book back and tried the second drawer. It was double-locked, and it took me a good eight seconds to snap it open.
There was surprise number two, a trove of porno magazines thicker than the Manhattan Yellow Pages, hanging in Pendaflex folders. Someone in Tiny's position, I would have thought, would have been as fascinated by pornography as a man on a low-cholesterol diet is by a nice piece of steamed fish. There they were, though, a prurient testament to the art of the four-color printer. As porno went, these were pretty innocent. No hard-core action, just an undergraduate gynecologist's primer on immature female genitalia, except that the mature girls featured in Teenage House Party and Young Whippersnappers had clearly lied about their age.
No wonder Tiny was so sweet to the girls, I thought. What he really liked was pictures. A "voyer," Saffron would call him. And no wonder he'd fastened on Amber. Before the drugs raddled her body and fried her eyes, she could have made the cover of Young Whippersnappers.
And so what? I wasn't checking into Tiny's sexual predilections. Or, if I was, it was only a peripheral concern. And while I was certainly interested in Amber, I wasn't betting that any long-ago porno photographer had killed her. Nor did I think that sex had been involved in any way. The Saturday papers had said that the preliminary autopsy showed no evidence of sexual molestation, only extreme physical violence with massive trauma to the head. Amber's murder was hatred pure and simple. The only lust involved was bloodlust.
I sat on the couch and thought. I was missing something, and I knew it. Even given the porn, Tiny couldn't be this clean. I rifled the calendar on the wall and flipped through the papers on the desk. Nothing. I could barely work my own computer, so I certainly couldn't pry into Tiny's. Nevertheless, all my instincts told me I'd missed something. I listened to my watch tick.
"Well, stupid," I said out loud. "You haven't looked under the rug."
I peeled it back and found myself staring at the same dreary 1950s linoleum that covered the floor of the Spice Rack. Talk about wax buildup. It was thicker than Amber's mascara had been. Except for one perfect square, three tiles long on each side. The wax outlining that square was chipped and broken.
I got onto my hands and knees. To one side of the square, halfway down, was a tiny slit about a quarter of an inch long, wider at the bottom than at the top. It went right down through the linoleum. It looked a hell of a lot like a keyhole.
So, okay. The key, whatever it was, was either on Tiny or it was here. If Tiny had it, there was nothing I could do, so I chose to believe it was here. If it was here, it wasn't very big.
First I reopened the closet and went through the shoes again, shaking each one to check for a false heel. Nobody really has false heels, and Tiny was no exception. Then I ran my hands down the seams and linings of his clothes. No deal. Then I took the desk apart a second time. When I'd finished that, I spread the couch all over the office and put it back together again.
I looked down at it. For all its grease, it looked inviting. It was just the spot for a bout of concentration. I sank back into it and thought about hiding places. My watch told me I'd been in the club for forty-three minutes. I'd allowed myself forty-five.