The three men reading newspapers and magazines weren’t the old sad duffers you saw in most second-rate hotels. They were middleaged in good clothes. They were most likely salesmen of various types.
While I waited for the desk clerk to get off the phone, two more men came in. They each toted a suitcase, they each smoked cigars, they each exuded the kind of back-slapping good will that could drive me out of a room in less than two minutes. They, too, were wearing their fezzes.
When he got off the phone, the clerk saw his two new customers. He smiled at them and said, “Just a minute, boys.”
He was done arguing with me. He had work to do. “What do you need, McCain?”
I asked what room Pauline was staying in. He checked and told me and then he turned to his friends. He let me get all the way to the elevator before he started talking about me. I got whispered about a lot in this town. Sometimes I wanted to kill somebody, I got so tired of it. But where would I start, when so many people had it in for me? As the elevator reached the first floor from the fourth, I looked back at the desk. The clerk was leaning over and nodding in my direction as he spoke. The two customers were staring at me and shaking their heads. It was probably a mercy that I couldn’t hear what was being said.
The narrow hall was a fault of various eras. The wallpaper and the carpeting were as dusty as ones you’d find in a hot-sheet hotel. The paintings were garish and lurid even though they were nature scenes. Probably local art. The odors were oldest of all. There were windows at either end of the hall, closed now for the air conditioning. But decades of smoking, drinking, screwing, and being sick in various ways tattooed the air forever. In the thirties, a man masquerading as a doctor had butchered a woman up here by giving her what he called an abortion. There was such outrage that a mob stormed the police station and overpowered the night officers. They got all the way back to the cells before two Highway Patrol cars pulled up. They went in with sawed-off shotguns and said they’d kill anybody who didn’t leave the building immediately. Funny how persuasive a sawed-off can be.
Before I knocked, I leaned against the door. Voices. Pauline’s I recognized, not the man’s. I’d brought my gun. Somebody was killing people. I had no doubt they wouldn’t mind adding me to the list.
The voices halted with my first knock. After a pause, Pauline said: “Who is it?”
“McCain.”
The man cursed.
“I can’t talk to you now. You need to come back.”
“When?”
“Later.”
“We need to talk now. You could be in a lot of danger.”
The man’s whisper was violent. Instructions.
“I’m fine. I just want to go back to sleep. You woke me up.”
“You must talk in your sleep.”
“What?”
“I said you must talk in your sleep. I heard you talking in there just a minute ago.”
More whispered instructions.
“That was the TV. You need to come back later.” She had begun pleading now.
“All right. But we really need to talk.”
I walked away. I made my steps decisive. I was walking away, I was walking down the stairs, I was leaving the hotel.
I went back immediately and flattened myself against the west side of the door.
They started talking again, this time without the whispers. The male voice was familiar now. So was the word he used three times. “Letter.”
This went on for ten minutes. I heard somebody coming up the stairs. I eased on over to the room next to Pauline’s and bent over as if I was letting myself in. The fat salesman with the two big leather bags was out of breath. The cigarette tucked into the left corner of his mouth didn’t help his breathing. He just nodded as he started to pass me. He couldn’t wave with his hands full, and speaking was a bitch with a smoke dangling from your lips.
He was apparently so eager to get into his room that he didn’t check back on me. He got the door open, dragged the suitcases inside and vanished.
I took up my previous position.
A few minutes later, Pauline’s door opened, and I moved. I shoved him so hard and so fast that he stumbled back three or four feet before his legs folded and he landed on the floor. I kicked the door shut behind me.
“You bastard,” David Raines said.
“This is getting so crazy. I don’t live like this. I just want to go home and see my folks is all.” Pauline’s voice had risen a few octaves and was splashed with tears of hysteria. It was also sloppy with liquor. Her slurring got worse by the minute.
She wore a man’s blue dress shirt that reached to the hem of her blue shorts. She had a glass of whiskey in her hand, no doubt poured from the bottle of Old Granddad on top of the bureau.
Raines got to his feet. The white golf shirt and tan slacks suggested a fun day on the links. But his eyes suggested the opposite. He couldn’t decide whether to be mad or scared.
“Don’t answer any of his questions, Pauline.”
“I wish you’d both get out of here. I wish Cliffie would leave me alone. I wish I could get on a bus and go home. I didn’t have nothing to do with any of this. Not one thing.” She said all this while waggling her drink at us. I was surprised it didn’t fly out of her hand, especially since her eyes had started closing every thirty seconds or so.
Raines’ contempt was like an attacking animal. “You just screwed your brains out and got drunk and got fatter, isn’t that right, Pauline? You didn’t know about any of this. That’s why you were always sneaking around when Davenport and I were talking. You knew damned well what was going on. And you wanted to cash in on it. Roy would get the final payment and then he’d take you to Europe. That was the plan, right?”
“Don’t tell me no more lies, David. You’re just trying to hurt my feelings since I don’t know where the letter is.” She was much drunker than I’d realized. She was slurring her words and putting a hand on the back of a chair for balance.
He walked over to the bureau, picked up the other glass. As he poured himself a shot, he said, “He was going to dump you. Kill you if necessary. He had it all planned out.”
“I don’t believe you.” Which sounded like “I don’ b’lief ya.”
The contempt was back. “I could give a damn what you believe or don’t believe. Remember the night you wanted me to go to bed with you? You think I’d let a pig like you anywhere near me?”
The alcohol seemed to protect her from the insult. She just took a deep drink from her glass and shrugged. But then she had her vengeance, as if that last drink had given her courage: “You want to know about the letter, McCain? I’ll tell you about the letter.”
“Shut up!” He started toward her, but I grabbed a handful of shirt and yanked him back. Before he could swing on me, I had my gun out. Her threat and the appearance of my weapon made everything much more serious.
I looked at her. I remembered the night she’d followed me in the yellow VW. She’d mentioned the letter but gave the impression she didn’t know what was in it. I also remembered feeling that she hadn’t told me everything. Now, with any luck, she’d tell me what she knew.
First I had to deal with Raines.”Get over there and sit down, Raines. And shut up.”
“Teach you to insult me, you pig,” Pauline said. “And for your information, I wasn’t trying to get you into bed. I was trying to get you to lay down before you puked all over the new carpeting the way you did that other night.”
Such a lovely couple. “Tell me about the letter, Pauline. Now.”
“I need a drink first.” She held up her glass. It was only about a quarter full. For most people that would have been fine. For an alcoholic, it was running dangerously low. She teetered her way to the bureau, clanked herself some more of the magic elixir, and then wobbled over and sat on the edge of the emerald-green armchair. She gaped at me and said, “What was I sayin’, McCain?”
“The letter.”
“You’re going to believe this bitch? She’s so drunk, she can’t even remember what she was talking about.”