The other elevator, to Settles’s right, was on its way down. It, too, had paused at three and Settles decided to ask its passenger or passengers if they knew what the trouble was on the fourth floor.
The doors of the right-hand elevator opened and a very short, very heavy man came out. He wore a giveaway cap advertising Copenhagen snuff, thick tinted glasses and dark blue coveralls that had “Francis” stitched in red above the left breast pocket. In his right hand he carried a large black toolbox that looked old and battered.
“What happened to the other elevator?” Settles asked.
The man stopped, looked up at Settles, then up at the floor indicator numbers and back at Settles. “Beats me.”
“Where’d you get on?”
“Three.”
“You’re not the elevator repair guy, are you?”
The short man turned his back on Settles. An arc of two-inch-high red letters spelled out “Francis the Plumber” across the coveralls. Below the name was a phone number. The man turned to face Settles again.
“I’m Francis and there was a backed-up toilet in three twenty-two and it’s Saturday and I’m on double time. So if somebody wants me to stand around talking about busted elevators, somebody’s gonna get charged for it.”
“Wait here,” Settles said.
“Why?”
Settles brought out his badge and showed it to the plumber. “Because I said to.”
After hurrying to the shallow alcove where the house phones were, Settles snatched one up and tapped three numbers. After two rings a man’s voice answered with a hello.
“Mr. Adair?” Settles said.
“This is Vines.”
“Settles again-down in the lobby. Has Soldier Sloan showed up yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Would you go take a look at the elevator on the fourth floor-the car on your right-and then come down and tell me what’s wrong with it?”
“Come down to the lobby and tell you?”
“Please.”
“All right,” Vines said and hung up.
Settles hurried back to the elevators, where Francis the Plumber had failed to wait. The detective turned and trotted across the lobby to the hotel entrance. He went through it just in time to see a pink Ford van make a right turn out of the parking lot. On the side of the van was a large magnetic stick-on sign that advertised “Francis the Plumber” in big black letters. Beneath them, in smaller ones, was the slogan “Nite or Day.”
Embarrassed and irritated by his own vanity, Ivy Settles fumbled his glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. But by then, even with the glasses, it was impossible to read the license plate of the pink Ford van.
Chapter 24
The elevators were down the corridor and around a corner from Kelly Vines’s fourth-floor room. When he reached them he found Soldier Sloan lying face-up and half out of the right elevator, whose two automatic doors were gently nudging the old man’s waist every three or four seconds.
It was obvious to Vines that Sloan was dead. Those too-green eyes had lost their glitter and stared up without blinking at the corridor’s vanilla ceiling. Vines knelt to put a hand to the old man’s neck, feeling for the pulse he knew he wouldn’t find.
If there was a cause of death, Vines couldn’t see it. There were no visible wounds or blood, but he did find Sloan’s position peculiar. It was as if the old man had turned to face the rear of the elevator, then fell backward, sprawling halfway through the open doors.
Vines explored the dead man’s pockets almost without thinking of the consequences other than to remind himself he was no longer an officer of the court. He left the watch pocket until last because he was confident of what he would find there.
In the other pockets he found a comb, a Montblanc fountain pen and an ostrichskin wallet, well worn, that contained $550 in fifty-dollar bills. In the other pockets he found a car’s ignition key attached to a Mercedes emblem that didn’t necessarily mean anything; a small pocketknife with a gold case that Vines thought was probably fourteen carat; a handkerchief of Irish linen; and a small combination address book and pocket diary. The address section was almost filled with names and phone numbers, but very few addresses. The diary section was blank and the page for that June Saturday, the twenty-fifth, had been torn out.
In Sloan’s watch pocket, as expected, Vines found a folded-up thousand-dollar bill, issued in 1934 and bearing the engraved portrait of Grover Cleveland and the signature of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury. On the back of the old bill was some fancy engraving to discourage counterfeiters.
The torn-out diary page was also in the watch pocket, folded up, like the thousand-dollar bill, into the size of a postage stamp. Vines carefully unfolded it, noticing that most of it was for a diary and about an inch at the bottom for a “memo.” At the top of the page were initials and numbers reading, “KV 431” and “JA 433,” which Vines immediately deciphered as being his and Jack Adair’s initials and room numbers.
At the bottom of the page in the space reserved for the memo was another entry that read: “C JA O RE DV.” Vines could make nothing out of this and put everything back where he had found it, including the torn-out diary page and the thousand-dollar bill, both of them carefully refolded. After that he rose and went to tell Ivy Settles that Soldier Sloan was dead.
Settles, the first policeman to reach Soldier Sloan’s body, watched as the Holiday Inn’s young assistant manager used a key to turn off the elevator so its two doors would stay open and stop nudging the dead man’s waist. Settles knelt beside Sloan, checked for vital signs and looked up at Vines, who, like Adair, was now leaning against the wall opposite the elevators. “He’s dead,” Settles said. “Just like you said.”
Because Vines could think of nothing to add to this, he said nothing. Chief Sid Fork arrived a few minutes later, nodded at Vines and Adair, glanced at the dead Soldier Sloan and began questioning Settles. He was still questioning him when the two homicide specialists, Wade Bryant and Joe Huff, arrived and joined the interrogation of Ivy Settles.
The bald, black and professorial Huff asked an occasional question as he used his Minolta to take photographs of the dead man. When he had taken enough, he interrupted Wade Bryant and said, “Let’s turn him over.”
Once Soldier Sloan lay on his stomach, the saucer-sized bloodstain on the back of his muted plaid jacket was visible. With the help of Bryant, Huff removed the jacket and took some pictures of a bloodstain the size of a dinner plate on the back of Sloan’s pale yellow shirt.
Out of curiosity, Kelly Vines asked, “What d’you guys do for a coroner?”
“Because we’re ninety-two miles from the county seat, they named Dr. Joe Emory assistant deputy coroner,” Huff said, pulling out Sloan’s shirt tails and pushing the shirt itself up toward the dead man’s armpits. “The fancy title doesn’t mean much because the county pays Joe on a piecework basis.”
“He likes doing autopsies?”
“He likes the money,” Huff said.
Once the shirt was up around Sloan’s armpits, the small puncture wound was visible. The wound itself hadn’t really bled much and had the diameter, in Huff’s words, “of a fat ice pick.”
As he rose, Huff added, “He died quick anyway,” and aimed his Minolta at Sloan’s bare back.
“If the angle was right and the guy knew what he was doing,” the still kneeling Wade Bryant said, “then he probably didn’t feel much of anything.”
“He felt it,” Huff said. “He felt it enough to turn around, see who’d done it and keel over backward.”
The assistant hotel manager edged over to Fork. “Couldn’t you guys at least pull him out of the elevator, Sid? We’re going to need it.”
“No, you’re not,” Fork said.