Shade of Pale (16 page)

Bobby squatted in front of the glowing stack of power amps, adjusting levels, and laughed with fiendish delight. “You know what's so great about this song?” he asked.

Cathy humored Bobby. Stoned now, and afraid to think about the pictures on the computer, she acted contrite. The terrible memory faded as if it had happened years ago.

“I don't know.”

“Everything. Keith Reid's lyrics, Gary Brooker's vocal, the Bach organ piece ‘Sleeper Awake' that Matthew Fisher plays on the Hammond B-3, the gothic production, all of it, it's magic!

“And listen to the drums. Man, I love the way he rides the cymbals. I think that's B. J. Wilson. I saw these guys once in concert and it was the best show I ever saw. You can't imagine.”

He slipped the CD into the changer and pushed a button.

He stood and shook his fist at the wall separating them from the horrendous band next door. Their muffled onslaught continued.

“Get ready for some real music, you assholes!”

Without warning the massive speakers quaked with the sound of the organ playing the opening strains of “Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procol Harum. The room shook. The sound flared out of the huge speakers like a jet engine, rattling their teeth at concert hall volume. It completely dwarfed the noise coming from next door.

The sound slammed into their ears as if they were standing in front of the band onstage.

The organ swirled, ponderous and grand, the magnificent cymbals splashed along, and the incandescent production swept them away.

Bobby's eyes swelled with moisture as the big, beautiful chorus boomed forth across the room.

This is the best part
, thought Bobby.
To be high like this, listening to this song on this sound system, man, this is what it's all about!

Bobby held onto the chair, letting the music wash over him. His fingers dug into the armrest. The wonderful gothic production throbbed inside his head.

A whiter shade of pale.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Detectives Jones and Panelli made their way through the street scene in front of the Star Hotel. The hookers and drug dealers hooted at them as they passed. Even though both officers were in street clothes, these people could smell a cop.

A tall man wearing a filthy Mexican blanket spit at them. “Hey, man, you ain't got nothin' on me! Get off my street! I'll give you my disease! I'll give you AIDS!”

In an alley across the street O'Connor pretended to drink wine from a paper bag. The shouting had captured his attention, and he watched as the tough old cop reacted to the situation.

O'Connor had been tailing Jones for several days.

The man in the Mexican blanket spit again and nearly hit George on the arm. George spun around and confronted the deranged street person. The tall man stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the malevolent gleam in George's eyes. The man had obviously mistaken George for one of the city's civilized, rule-abiding cops. The person who glared back at him now was as dangerous and violent as anyone else on the street at that moment.

George stuck out a big hand and put the index finger squarely in the spitter's face. The man who had initiated the sequence now felt that he had made a major mistake. The sneer melted from his lips and he didn't move; he did not make any gestures or quick movements that could have been construed as even remotely threatening. In George's mind, that would have given him due cause to kick some ass. The man in the Mexican blanket must have sensed it. The old cop with the crew-cut had an attitude he could smell.

“Did you spit at me, chump?”

The spitter in the Mexican blanket was now mute.

“I asked you a question!”

Still no response.

“All right, tough guy, let's see some ID. Now!” George stepped toward him, whipping out a set of handcuffs like magic.

Panelli knew this game; it was the old “good cop/bad cop” routine. He'd played it with George before. Panelli said, “Aw, come on, man. Let him go; he's just a bum.”

Jones bristled. “He spit at me. This piece of shit spit at me! Nobody spits at me. I oughta kick his ass.”

“Take it easy; this guy ain't worth it.”

“Fuck you, Panelli! I'm gonna bust him.”

The tall man in the Mexican blanket reacted predictably, starting his pleading right on cue. “Hey, man, come on. I wasn't doin' nothin'.”

“Shut up, scumbag!” Jones yelled in his face, loud enough for everyone else on the street to notice and start to drift away.

Panelli, working from the classic script, said, “Let him go; he's not worth taking downtown. Look; he's sorry, aren't you, fella?”

The Mexican nodded vigorously.

George shook his head. “Let's just beat the shit out of him, OK? Nobody will care; when he gets out of the hospital maybe he'll show some respect for the law.”

“Nah, let's just let him go.”

Jones looked the Mexican blanket man up and down. “You spit on me again, you son of a bitch, and I'll break your ugly face.”

The tall man stopped talking, abruptly breaking off his pleas. He turned and shuffled away gratefully under George's glare.

O'Connor slid back into the shadows. The old cop was good, he thought, tough, direct. O'Connor took note.

Mrs. Willis said he was special
.

George looked at Panelli and smiled. “Nothing like a little street theater,” he said.

The lobby of the Star Hotel was worn and shabby and smelled of stale cigar smoke. The clerk still read his paper and did the same thing to them that he did to everybody: ignored them completely. He was nearly sixty, George guessed, and about as sociable as a leper. George took out his wallet and put his badge in the man's face.

The man put down his paper. “OK, you got my attention. So, what do you want? I already talked to your boy here.”

George smiled. Panelli rankled at being called “your boy” but kept silent.

“So now you can talk to me.”

The clerk was older than George, more grizzled, unflinching, and obviously a veteran of many police interrogations. He kept his cool, used as few words as possible, and met George's gaze with a blank one of his own. “The girl came in like she always does; some guy was with her … I guess. I never saw 'em. I was out takin' a piss.”

“That's all?”

“That's all.”

“What did he look like?”

“I just told you, I wasn't here when they came in.”

“What about when the guy came back out?”

“I don't remember.”

“Did you see anyone leave the building?”

“Yeah, I saw lots of people leave, but I didn't really take notice of any of 'em. It's like I told your partner.”

Panelli looked up, aware that he'd been promoted from “your boy” to “your partner.”

The clerk said, “I don't know anything. Guys come in here all the time; they're all scum. I try not to look at 'em. They make me sick.”

George nodded, acting as if everything the old clerk said made total sense. “Did you see anyone different that night?”

“I don't remember.”

George put his badge away. He looked around the lobby and whistled. “Just as nice as the Helmsley,” he said sarcastically. Then, turning back to the clerk, he said sternly, “OK, let's take a look at the room.”

The clerk wearily picked up the key and led them up the stairs. They were the same stairs that the strangler had followed Dolly Devane up a few nights before.

Her room proved to be as drab and run-down as the lobby. The police lab team had been over it, and there were still traces of gray fingerprint powder here and there. They'd found nothing.

“The lab report said she was strangled again after she died. The first time he used his hands; the second time he used a rope. You find that curious?”

Panelli grunted. “Yeah. We're dealing with a real sicko.”

As George looked around the room, he reviewed some things in the trace evidence report that had caught his eye. Speaking aloud to Panelli, George took stock.

“Christ, this rug is filthy. According to the lab, there were enough particles of foreign matter on this carpet to fill a shopping bag. They must hardly ever clean this place. With the lack of vacuuming and the frequency of visitors, it's no wonder the lab boys turned up this weird list of shit.”

Looking at the rug now, its tired, threadbare pattern nearly invisible, he wondered what else they would find. A brown stain marked the spot where Dolly fell off the chair.

George squatted and examined it.

He pulled out a small notebook in which he had copied the particles from the trace evidence report.

“Listen to this. Cigarette butts, five, with and without lipstick traces, French fries, eighteen different kinds of hair, automobile oil, empty condom packets, traces of marijuana, coffee, traces of talc, bread crumbs, paper fibers, gum, beach sand, and popcorn.”

“Popcorn?”

“Yeah. Why does that one leap out? There was enough trace evidence on this rug to qualify it as a city street,” George said. The popcorn, however, had caught his eye.

“Did she go to the movies a lot?” George asked.

The clerk, not realizing he was being asked a question, started to leave.

“Hey!” George shouted. “I asked you a question. Did she go to the movies a lot?”

The clerk turned and shrugged. “What am I? Her mother? You think I know these people? Shit. You think I care what goes on in their miserable lives? I don't know and I don't wanna know.”

The clerk asked Jones and Panelli to close the door when they were through and went back to his post.

George checked the hallway outside the door carefully. The lab boys had gone over the room, but they would have probably stopped at the door unless they had reason to continue.

George got down on all fours with a penlight and checked the floor in the hallway, from the door to the steps. His mind worked like a computer as he crawled, cataloging minute garbage.

Panelli wandered out into the hall and watched.

George cleared his throat and began to tell Panelli what was going through his mind. “The report said that this victim, like the others, had been strangled first, then placed in a sitting position in a chair.”

Panelli nodded. “Yeah. Strange, isn't it? I wonder why he did that.”

“The killer sat them down and then did something in front of them. He needed an audience. Why? What was he doing?”

“The guy's a psycho,” Panelli snorted. “What other reason do you need?”

“Well, it's buggin' me. Try to put yourself in the scene, OK? There's the victim, freshly killed, sitting in the chair. OK, what else happened?”

“He probably whacked off,” Panelli said.

“First he kills 'em; then he sits 'em up.”

“Scary shit, man.”

George looked up. “If he whacked off, the trace evidence would have showed semen.”

“Maybe he used a towel or something.”

George crept along the dirty carpet of the second-floor landing. The lab boys hadn't gone this far out the door, and George wanted to see what he could find out past the threshold.

His eyes locked on something gray and small and easy to miss on the filthy floor. He picked it up and held it to the light. It was a portion of a ticket stub. It had been ripped in half, then ripped a second time. He put the stub in an envelope and put it in his pocket.

“What's that?” Panelli asked.

“Nothin',” he replied.

They went back to the room.

George sat in the chair that Dolly had sat in after she died and looked out at the rest of the small room. It was quiet now. Outside the window the dirty wind swirled grit against the glass.

“The lab boys didn't move any furniture, so it's still the way the killer left it.”

Across the room, another chair faced George. It was the only other piece of furniture in the room, except for the bed and a nightstand.

“I wonder what she faced,” George muttered. “I wonder what her corpse witnessed.”

“Well, the killer probably sat in front of her on this chair,” Panelli replied, sitting down to face George. “Feels a little creepy, sitting in the same place the killer sat.”

George nodded. “Maybe he sat there and did something in front of the dead girl. Maybe that's why he killed her. He killed her so he could sit her down and do something in front of her. But what?”

“I still say he jerked off.”

“No semen. I don't think that's it.”

“Maybe he used a rubber and took it with him.”

“That's possible.”

George sat there waiting for his mind to answer. That was the way he got most of his insights. He just sat there until a light-bulb lit up and an answer popped into his head—not exactly police procedure, but it worked for him.

But don't call me a psychic
.

He looked around the room, at the yellowed curtains, the peeling wallpaper, and wondered what the Star Hotel had been like years ago when it was new.

He daydreamed about who might have stayed here when this neighborhood hadn't yet gone to the mongrels. Maybe it had been full of happy, well-heeled people. That was before the invasion, George thought, the invasion of unhappy, desperate people. Where did they come from?

The lightbulb flickered on—lonely psychotic people, the world was full of them.

Maybe he sat there and talked to her, for Christ sake. Maybe he just needed somebody to talk to
. George visualized the killer sitting there in the chair and talking to the victim. It made bizarre sense. Dead people are good listeners, never interrupting or talking back.

What could you tell a dead whore?

Then another lightbulb lit in George's mind.
Maybe he took her picture
.

That made even more sense. That would explain placing the body in the chair and posing it. It even explained the second strangulation with the rope—it was a photographic prop.