Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) (14 page)

“What? What?”

Somebody was in my room shaking me.

“What? What?”

“Get up, Tracy.”

“Who is it?” It was just starting to get light and I couldn’t focus my eyes yet real well.

“Snapp. Get up. Something’s happened.”

“What? What?”

“Get your pants on and come downstairs to the kitchen,” he said. He left the room even before I had my feet on the floor.

Down in the kitchen, I found Snapp standing in front of the stainless-steel table along the right side of the wall. The door to one of the dumbwaiters was open.

He pointed to the opening. “In here,” he said.

I came over closer and saw a pair of feet dangling only about eighteen inches above the floor of the dumbwaiter shaft.

I turned to Snapp. “It’s Scott,” he said. “The TV guy.”

“Dead?” I said. I still wasn’t functioning real well. What the hell did I think? He was alive and working on a new form of exercise?

“Deader than Kelso’s nuts,” Snapp said.

I pulled the stainless-steel table away from the way, leaned in, and looked up the shaft.

“He’s dead,” Snapp said. “You can feel him. He’s colder than a freshwater clam.”

“You got a flashlight?” I said.

He slapped one into my hand like a relay-team baton. I climbed up into the opening of the shaft. The knees of my trousers got wet from something. For a moment I thought it was blood, but my hands felt water. There was a plastic bowl, the kind margarine is packaged in, in the corner of the dumbwaiter shaft. I got to my feet and shined the light upward.

Jack Scott’s face was only about a foot from mine. His eyes were open and so was his mouth. His body stank in the long narrow shaft that rose four stories above this basement.

I leaned against the wall for a better look and saw that the dumbwaiter rope had been twisted once around his throat and his head was bent off to the side as if his neck had been broken.

“We ought to take him down, I guess,” Snapp said. “I didn’t want to do it, though, until you got here.”

“Why me?”

“You’re a private detective. I didn’t want to go destroying no clues or nothing. Should we take him down now?”

“Leave him. Let’s call the police,” I said.

“I just did. He’ll be here any minute.”

I climbed out of the dumbwaiter. “What the hell’s this water?” I said.

Snapp shrugged. “Old building. Sometimes you get a leaky pipe. Or maybe rain from that storm.”

I said, “I wonder what happened to him. What the hell’s he doing in the dumbwaiter?”

“Happens once in a while,” he said.

“This is pretty common for you?” I said. “People get hanged in your dumbwaiter all the time?”

“Np,” he said. He had taken a large wad of paper towels and was wiping up the water from the bottom of the shaft. He stuffed the towels into the plastic container and dumped the bundle into a plastic garbage bag. “No, what I mean is sometimes people get drunk and decide they’s Tarzan and start trying to climb the ropes. That’s why I closed off all those doors in the rooms upstairs.” He shook his head. “Never had one get hanged before,” he said.

“How’d you find him anyway?”

“I was up, starting to get breakfast ready.” He pointed to a large steel bowl filled with a couple of dozen eggs. “And I saw a little dribble of water coming out from under the door. So I opened the door—I didn’t bother to lock them down here because
I
ain’t gonna play Tarzan—and I saw his freaking feet right in front of me, swinging back and forth. Then I climbed in, like you did.” He brushed his knees. “Got wet just like you did too. I felt him. Cold and stiff.”

“I’d better tell the others,” I said.

“Guess so.”

Birnbaum was wearing a sweatsuit and his face was soaked with perspiration when he answered my soft knock on the door. The sofa behind him had been opened into a bed. It was rumpled, unmade, and his barbells were in the middle of the floor.

He called, “Come in. What gets you up at this hour?” he said as he hoisted a heavy barbell over his head.

“You’d better put that damn thing down before I tell you.”

He set the weight softly on the bed pillows he had placed on the floor to muffle the sound of the heavy weights dropping onto the carpet.

“Jack Scott’s dead,” I said.

He stared at me, blankly, no expression on his face. “Say what?” he finally said.

“There’s been an accident. Jack Scott’s dead. Come on.”

Birnbaum looked inside the dusty dumbwaiter shaft too.

“It’s Jack, all right.”

“We know that,” I said. “What we don’t know is what the hell he’s doing there.”

“What the Christ do I know?” Birnbaum snapped. “I’m sorry, Tracy. I’m just shocked. I don’t know…it’s just too much…I don’t know. Have you told Pamela?”

I shook my head. “I was waiting for a volunteer,” I said.

“I guess it’s my job,” he said.

I followed him up to the suite the Scotts had shared on the level above the main floor. Pamela Scott had been sleeping: her hair was tousled and her face not made up. She wore a heavy chenille bathrobe when she opened the door.

“Hello, Biff.” She nodded to me. “Jack’s already gone, I guess.”

When there was no response, she hesitated, then said, “What is it? What is it?”

Birnbaum took her arm and led her toward the sofa. I followed as he sat her down and said, “There’s been an accident.”

“Accident? What?” She looked at Birnbaum, then at me, then back at Birnbaum. “Jack?” she said, her voice rising in pitch.

Birnbaum nodded. “There’s been an accident, Pamela. Jack’s dead.”

She screamed, a long keening shriek, then slipped back out of Birnbaum’s arms and fell onto the sofa. I noticed her skin looked blotchy.

“She’s fainted,” Birnbaum told me, quite unnecessarily.

I walked to the refrigerator, but the ice tray was empty. I found a can of frozen orange juice and wrapped it in a napkin from atop the dresser and touched the cold compress to Pamela Scott’s temples, one side after the other.

“Maybe I should get the doctor,” Birnbaum said.

“No. You stay here. You’re a friend. I’ll get Ramona,” I said.

I ran up the two flights of stairs to McCue’s room, just as I began to realize I’d better check McCue and make sure he had not had an accident too.

The suite’s door was locked from the inside and I pounded on it. Arden Harden stuck his head out the door on the far end of the hall, nearest the stairs, and shouted, “What the hell is that racket? Quiet it down there, Tracy. I’m trying to sleep.”

“Get back inside that room before I step on you,” I snapped, and kept pounding.

A few seconds later, Ramona, who had obviously dressed quickly in the clothes she had been wearing the night before, answered.

“Oh…Trace,” she said.

“Is Tony all right?”

“Yes, of course. He’s still sleeping.”

“All right. Can you come downstairs? We need you.”

“What’s happened?”

“Jack Scott’s died. And his wife just fainted.”

“Oh, dear. Let’s go.”

She followed me down the hallway. As we passed the door to Harden’s room, it opened a crack and I could see the little writer watching us as we went by.

Pamela Scott had been revived. She sat on the bed with Birnbaum, who had his arm around her shoulder. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

Ramona Dedley shooed him off the bed and helped the woman lie down, covered her with a light blanket, and took her pulse. She nodded and said, “You’ve just got to rest for a while. I’ll bring a sedative down from my room.”

“I’ll be all right, Doctor,” Pamela said.

“I’m awfully sorry,” Ramona said. “I’m just so sorry.”

“I know. Thank you for your kindness,” Mrs. Scott said as she turned her face away, toward the window, and lay unmoving.

I walked back out into the living room and picked up the can of orange juice. Its cardboard sides were softer now and I put it back into the freezer.

Birnbaum came over and we stood at the window, looking out over the front entrance to the hotel. “I guess we should tell the others,” he said.

“What did Mrs. Scott say?” I asked.

“She said she went to bed and her husband wasn’t back. She didn’t hear him come in, but sometimes he sleeps on the couch when he comes in late so he doesn’t wake her up.”

“But the couch wasn’t opened, so Scott was someplace else last night,” I said.

“I guess so. Or maybe he just didn’t sleep. Maybe he was here writing letters or something.” I followed him over to the dumbwaiter door and noticed that the screw used to lock the door had been removed. Birnbaum pulled the door open and we leaned over, looking inside. All I saw were the ropes in front of me, then peering down, Scott’s body only eight feet below me, hanging from the rope. I wondered why the hell Scott had opened the door in the first place. It didn’t make any sense.

“We’ve got to go down and take that body down,” I said softly to Birnbaum, “before she looks into this shaft.”

“Yeah,” he said.

Behind us, there was a whoop outside, and through the window we saw a black-and-white car with a panel of red-and-blue roof lights roaring into the grounds at high speed.

“Good,” Birnbaum said. “The cops can take the body down.”

The cop wasn’t just a cop. He was the duly elected sheriff of Cawonga County. His name was Len Tillis, he was big and fat and very deferential to Clyde Snapp, and while he may have been a genius at winning the hearts of the voters in an election, he didn’t have a brain in his head about evidence because he clambered into the kitchen dumbwaiter without even so much as taking a picture, struggled to unwrap the heavy rope from around Scott’s neck, and then passed the body out to Snapp, who laid it on the stainless-steel food-preparation table, where it looked like a Thanksgiving turkey awaiting cooking.

“That’s Jack Scott, all right. I seen him on television,” Tillis said, wiping the dust from his hands onto his uniform. “He looks different.”

“He’s dead now,” I said.

“Sure is,” Sheriff Tillis said. “So you found the body, Mr. Snapp?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you think it got there?”

“Don’t know.”

“You have any ideas?” The sheriff looked at Birnbaum and me, and we both shook our heads.

“Well, it sure as hell ain’t no murder,” the sheriff said, “and it’s a damn funny way to commit suicide. I guess some kind of accident.”

“It’s a damn funny accident too,” I said, but Sheriff Tillis didn’t respond and I got the feeling that this was as far as he had ever gone in an investigation of a sudden death. I felt sorry for him.

“Sheriff,” I said.

“Aaaay-p. What’s your name?”

“Devlin Tracy.”

“He’s a private detective from New York City,” Snapp said.

“A gumshoe, huh?” Sheriff Tillis said. “Don’t imagine this is much of a job for you.” He hooked his thumbs into his belt, although his stomach was so big that I hadn’t thought anything else, even thumbs, could fit there.

“Don’t imagine,” I said.

“He came here to protect some people,” Snapp said.

“You didn’t do much of a job, Tracy,” the sheriff said.

I nodded at the corpse. “He wasn’t the one I was supposed to protect. Can I make a suggestion, Sheriff?”

“Just as long as it don’t involve breaking no law. I know how you private dicks are, you know.”

“It doesn’t. I just wanted to tell you that Mr. Birnbaum and I talked to Scott’s wife upstairs and she didn’t know if he had come back to the room last night or not. We have a hotel full of people and they’re going to have to be told about the death. Why don’t you make arrangements to move the body and then question them? See who saw Scott last. See if he was roaring drunk or something. That might answer your question on how he died.”

“I don’t need you to tell me how to run my investigation, Shamus,” the sheriff said. He had been watching too much television.

“You could listen to him, Len,” said Snapp. “He’s a pretty bright fella.”

“I’ll do it my way. I wanna question the people who are staying here,” Sheriff Tillis said. “But first I’ll have somebody remove this body to the hospital.”

“Good plan, Sheriff,” I said. “Much better than mine.” Snapp winked at me and I glanced at my watch. It seemed as if I’d been up half a day already, but it was only just past seven-thirty A.M.

I told Birnbaum, “You ought to let everybody know what’s going on.”

“Let’s get them down to the dining room. We can tell them all at once,” Birnbaum said. He shook his head. “Then I’ve got to figure out what to do with this film.”

“Don’t we believe anymore in ‘the show must go on’?” I asked.

“I believe in it. I don’t know if the investors do.”

Ramona Dedley came into the kitchen. She stopped short, just for a moment, when she saw Scott’s body, then walked over to it.

“I’m really sorry, Mrs. Scott,” Sheriff Tillis said. He took his hat off and held it in his hands.

Ramona felt around Scott’s throat and lifted his head slightly.

“Broken neck,” she said.

“You don’t have to do this, Mrs. Scott,” the sheriff said. He touched her on the shoulder. “We’ll do all this at the hospital.”

“I’d say he’s been dead at least eight hours. There’s some rigor in the body and a lot of pooling in the lower extremities.”

“Really, little lady. You ought to go up and lie down. We’ll see to your husband’s remains.”

Ramona turned as if she saw him for the first time. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Sheriff Len Tillis at your service, Mrs. Scott. If there’s anything we can do…”

“Yes. Stop calling me Mrs. Scott. She’s asleep upstairs under sedation. I’m Doctor Ramona Dedley.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a woman.”

“With that kind of perception, you’ll have no trouble at all figuring out what happened here,” she said. “I’m going to get dressed,” she told me. “If you need me, just call.”

“We’re going to have everybody meet in the dining room right away so we can break the news,” I said.

“If you see anybody, tell them to meet us in the dining room,” Birnbaum said.

She nodded and left the room.

“A doctor. I’ll be damned,” Sheriff Tillis said.

“Len, you are a giant old fool,” Clyde Snapp said. He was cleaning his nails with a pocketknife. “Didn’t you ever hear of a lady doctor?”

“Aaay-p. Sure I heard of them, Mr. Snapp. I just never met any of them, and pretty ones at that. I’m going to call for the ambulance.” He pronounced it am-byoo-LANCE.

“Yeah. Do that,” Birnbaum said, and started upstairs.

I followed him a minute or so later and met Arden Harden coming down the steps to the main floor.

“What the hell’s going on here? I heard sirens,” he said.

“Jack Scott’s dead,” I said.

Harden said, “Really?”

I nodded and he turned and started back up the stairs at a trot.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to call my agent.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I always call my agent when something happens,” he said. “Have to see what my rights are, I guess.”

“Get back to the dining room right away. There’s a meeting,” I said.

“Soon as I call my agent,” he called back.

I walked upstairs slowly, opened McCue’s unlocked door, and went into the bedroom, where he was sprawled out, naked, on top of the sheets.

I shook him. “Hey, bare-ass, wake up.”

He fought to open one eye, then fought an even greater battle to focus it. “Trace. Is it cocktail hour already?”

“There’s an emergency. Get some clothes on and get down to the dining room right away.”

“What? What emergency?”

“Just hurry downstairs,” I said. I didn’t feel much like talking to him now and I thought it’d be easier to get him downstairs if I didn’t tell him what was going on.

That took care of the third floor. McCue was getting up and Harden knew about it. I was the only other person staying on that floor.

I walked down a level and saw Birnbaum coming out of Tami Fluffs room. “I got them all on the way,” Birnbaum said. “Will you get Quine and Dahlia downstairs?” he asked. “I want to change.”

I could understand that. He probably had a special Mets jacket suitable for funerals.

On the first floor of bedrooms, next to the Scotts’ suite, Quine finally answered my pounding on the door. The silly nit was wearing a long nightshirt and a flannel cap. There was something different about his face, and it took me a moment to realize he wasn’t wearing his false teeth. Why would someone wear false teeth that made him look like a horse? If you were going to wear a plate, why not wear one that made you look human?

“Err, err, err, err…” Quine started. That didn’t bother me; I had trouble speaking English in the morning too. “What is it, old man? Humph, grumph, err, err, err, err.”

He sounded like a volcano giving its first-warning rumbles before erupting. Something smelled bad and I realized it was his cologne.

“Jack Scott,” I said. “He’s had an accident. Birnbaum has called a meeting right away in the dining room.”

“Accident, eh? Had one myself yesterday. Hope his wasn’t as bad as that. Cut my leg up real bad.”

“His was worse. He’s dead,” I said.

“Dead, eh? Humph, grumph, err, err, err. Be there as soon as I don my trousers. And call my agent.”

“Just hurry up,” I said.

I pounded on Dahlia Codwell’s door but got no answer. The door was locked, so I pounded some more. Maybe she was in the shower, I thought, and couldn’t hear me. I went into the dining room and poured myself a drink. Actually, I had gone in for coffee, but I figured it was going to be a long day of dealing with these looneytoons and a drink might start it off better.

As I stood at the bar, the hotel’s guests started drifting in.

Harden said to me, as if he thought I would care, “It’s okay. Everything’s all right.”

“You brought him back to life?”

“No, but my contract is with the production company, not with him personally. If we make the movie, I stay.”

“I’ll rest a lot easier now,” I said. “I was really worried about that.”

When Quine came in, I couldn’t tell if he had called his agent or the wardrobe department because he was wearing jodhpurs and a white shirt with an ascot.

Tami must have heard about the death because she had on a black dress, presumably suitable for mourning, because its hemline dropped all the way to midthigh.

Birnbaum was still dressed in his sweatsuit but his eyes were sparkling now and he seemed full of energy. Whatever he drank, I’d like to get some of it.

Ramona and Sheila came in together.

They scattered themselves at tables with coffee and watched Birnbaum, who paced back and forth at the side of the room. Behind him, the windows overlooked the grounds leading to the lake.

“Where’s Dahlia?” he asked me.

“I’ll try again.” I walked up the flight of steps and pounded on her door again. It opened with a fast pull.

Dahlia was wearing a bathrobe but was fully made up. Maybe she slept in her makeup. Maybe everyone did.

“Were you doing all that damned pounding on my door a few minutes ago?” she growled in her husky voice.

“Yes.”

“What the hell for? I need some sleep, or hadn’t you morons noticed?”

I watched her face carefully as I said, “Jack Scott is dead.”

“Dead?” She looked truly surprised and shocked. Then she threw an arm up, the back of her wrist to her forehead, and I wondered why people did that. What kind of gesture was that anyway? It didn’t exist anywhere except on a stage. But I thought she was really surprised, except that’s the trouble in dealing with actors: you never know when they’re lying.

“Yes. An accident. Please come down to the dining room. Birnbaum’s called a meeting.”

“As soon as I call my agent,” she said.

“Why not let your agent wait ten minutes while you find out what happened, so you really have something to tell him?” I suggested.

“I’ll think about it while I’m putting my clothes on.”

“Hurry up. They’re waiting for you.”

“Don’t think I want you pounding on my door all the time,” she said. “This was an exceptional occasion.”

“Don’t hold your breath, lady,” I said. I didn’t really mind. She was a boozer, and it isn’t really uncommon for boozers to be nasty when they first wake up.

I told Birnbaum that she would be down in a minute.

“Where’s McCue?” he asked.

“Should be on his way down.”

McCue came pouring through the dining-room doors. “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest…

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum…Good morning, my children. Why the long faces?”

“There’s been a tragedy,” Birnbaum said, dropping the corners of his mouth, trying to look sad.

“Can’t be an important tragedy,” McCue said. “I feel fine.”

“Shut up, you self-centered hambone,” Harden yelled out. “Jack Scott’s dead.”

“How could you tell?” McCue asked.

“Please,” Birnbaum implored. “Will you sit down, Tony? We have to talk about this.”

McCue walked over to me near the bar. I scooped some ice cubes into a glass and handed it to him along with the bottle of gin.

Dahlia Codwell walked in through the door, paused for a moment, then called out, “Oh, God. It’s so awful.” Then she fainted. I wondered if her agent had told her to do that.