Kill Your Darlings (4 page)

Mae didn’t scream or faint.

She just dropped to her knees and cried.

I think maybe I cried, too.

Heroes aren’t supposed to get drunk and drown in the bathtub, you know. But mine had.

Apparently.

When Mae got up off her knees, she became more than a little unglued; she wanted me to help her haul Roscoe Kane out of the bathtub and onto one of the beds, but I made her leave him where he was. She got a little angry.

“You heartless son of a bitch!” she said. “How can you... leave him there like that! You bastard!”

And I held on to her arms, loosely, so she could pound small hard fists into my chest. It hurt a bit, but she seemed to need to do it. And the pain distracted me, which was nice. The physical pain, I mean; it got my attention, pushing the emotional pain momentarily away.

Then she looked at my face—she told me later she saw tears streaked there and it made her sorry for pummeling me—and she was in my arms, crying, body heaving with sobs, holding on to me, holding on for dear life.

“We have to leave him as he is,” I said, finally, quietly. “We can’t touch anything.”

She drew back from me, her eyes wide, a look of sudden, sharp curiosity giving her that Joan Crawford ’40s movie star presence again.

“Why?” That came out in three or four breathy syllables; it was an accusation and a question and a threat, all at once.

“Look, Mae. Mr. Kane... Roscoe... he’s dead. It isn’t going to hurt him any to stay put.”

“You bastard.” Softly; knowing I was right, but not liking it, or me, at the moment.

“Roscoe didn’t die of natural causes, Mae. He drowned. An accidental death, probably, but one that’s going to require some care and caution. We have to call the desk, now, and get the manager up here.”

She sighed, nodded, and the theatrics—which I think were not false theatrics, but quite genuine theatrics, if that makes any sense to you, the affected melodrama that becomes real if a person makes enough of a habit of it—sort of drained out of her and she sat in her coat on the edge of one of the room’s two double beds with her shoulders slumped; and she looked old. She kept her back to the open doorway to the bathroom.

The manager came up within minutes—well, actually, the assistant manager, or
an
assistant manager. I never quite got that straight. But I did manage to gather he’d only had this position of responsibility a few weeks. He was younger than me, and dark, and had an Indian accent and a blazer with a hotel crest; he was immaculately groomed and very polite, like Andy Kaufman doing his foreign-man routine.

He was also a little thrown by all this.

“I have never had a dead guest in my hotel before,” he said. As if Roscoe Kane had checked in that way.

“Well, you’ve got one now. Don’t you think you should call the police and get somebody from the coroner’s office over here?”

“It’s very late.”

“The cops are open twenty-four hours. Somebody’ll come.”

“If a guest dies of natural causes, we’re to phone a certain funeral home. It is written on my calendar.”

“That’s nice; that way you’ll know what day it is when your guests drop dead.”

He gave me a look that said my humor eluded him; it eluded me, actually. I was lapsing into talking like Gat Garson, I suddenly realized. I felt embarrassed.

“Look,” I said, “a drowning is not a natural death.” We were standing just outside the bathroom where Roscoe still bathed. Mae was on the far double bed, sitting, staring at a draped window. She didn’t seem to be listening, but I kept my voice down just the same. “And,” I added, “I think this may be something other than just an accidental drowning.”

The brown eyes in the brown face were so alert it was uncomfortable meeting them. The earnestness there was disconcerting.

Very softly, I said, “This may be murder.”

Without asking for an explanation, he said, “I’ll call the police.”

I touched his arm, stopping him, as he was already on the move.

“Just tell them we need somebody from the coroner’s office,” I whispered. “Don’t say murder. That’s premature.”

He nodded curtly and went to the phone.

A heavyset man in a brown baggy suit arrived in forty-five minutes; I’d had room service bring up some gin and Mae was pretty much sedated by now, and lying on the turned-down bed in her coat, not asleep, but not awake. I’d offered her my room, so she wouldn’t have to share the suite with her late husband, still soaking in the tub, but she wouldn’t hear it. She wouldn’t let me turn on the radio or TV, either. The gin she was agreeable to.

The man from the coroner’s office with his brown baggy suit and his brown baggy eyes and his brown bag took a look at the scene and without asking a question said, “Drowned in the tub,
eh.” He was alone in the bathroom, the assistant manager and I standing just outside listening as his voice echoed in there. He gestured at the bottle on the floor without picking it up. “Drank himself to a stupor, drowned in the tub.”

And he walked out of the bathroom and said, “Who are you?”

I gave him my name and said I was a friend of the deceased, and that I’d found the body in the presence of the deceased’s wife. The man from the coroner’s office glanced over at her and an expression that tried to be world-weary betrayed his cynicism. When he said, “I don’t want to bother her with questions,” it came more out of wanting to get out of here quickly than compassion for the widow.

He said, “Did the deceased drink heavily?”

“Yes. I spent most of the evening with him, and he drank heavily, yes.”

“I mean, did he drink heavily in general?”

I told him yes, and repeated the story about the near tragedy with the burning cigarette that Mae had recounted to me earlier.

The man from the coroner’s office nodded and said, “Well, why don’t you let the hotel man, here, call the funeral home and get that poor guy out of the tub.”

“Are you going to take any pictures?” I asked.

He looked at me like I’d asked him to dance.

“What the hell for,” he said. Not a question; just some words strung together that weren’t looking for an answer, and in fact he pushed by me and went over to be by himself and started filling out some official papers on a clipboard from his brown doctor bag.

“Didn’t you notice anything funny in that bathroom?” I asked him.

“Oh sure. Lot of laughs in there.”

“The floor’s bone dry.”

“So? He drowned by passing out in the tub; he wouldn’t have been splashing around.”

“There’s only one towel hanging in that bathroom.”

“So?”

“Normally, there’d be at least two; I’m in a single room and there were four towels provided.”

He thought that over.

I went on: “If somebody had held him down in that tub, and drowned him, there would’ve been lots of splashing around. And a very wet floor that would need mopping up.”

“And leaving sopping wet towels behind would’ve been a dead giveaway, so the murderer ditched them.”

“Could be.”

“Hey, pal. I ain’t Quincy. This guy passed out in the tub, okay?” He went back to his form-filling. But as he did, he asked the assistant manager, who’d been patiently listening to all this, “Do you see anything in the lack of towels?”

The assistant manager said, “Sometimes we run short of clean towels. If the guest sleeps in and keeps a do-not-disturb sign on his door—the maid may be short of towels by the time she gets around to doing the room. Perhaps leaving only one. Particularly if a guest, like Mr. Kane, is the room’s sole occupant. Such things happen in a hotel.”

The man from the coroner’s office looked up from his paperwork and his expression said, “See?”

I turned to the assistant manager. “Is there a closet around here, with a laundry hamper?”

That seemed a ridiculous question to him, but politeness was his way, so he said, “Most certainly.”

“Where?”

“Just across and down several doors.”

I went out, by myself, and found a numberless door ajar just down the hall and opened it and found a closet with a big hamper with three wet, sopped towels on the top. I didn’t touch anything; just went quickly back.

The man from the coroner’s office came with me reluctantly, sighing the way only a big man sighs, and examined the sopping towels, with his hands.

“Watch it!” I said. “Should you be touching those?”

He looked at me like I was a four-year-old. A stupid one. “Yeah, right, these wet towels pick up the prints of killers like an X ray. Why don’t you give this a rest, and me a break?”

He walked back across the hall to room 714 and I followed him in, not knowing whether to feel angry or idiotic. I settled for a little of both.

“You’re not calling the police in, then,” I said.

“No.” An unfriendly smile and a shake of the head.

“This could be a murder.”

“This is an accident. You’re giving me a real major pain in the ass, pal. What’s your part in this, anyway?”

“I found the body.”

“Yeah, yeah. Who are you? Just a friend of the family?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, go sit with the wife. Be supportive. Leave me do my job.”

“Sir. I think you may be blowing this.” I couldn’t quite get indignant; I wasn’t sure I was right.

“I know my job. Leave me do my job. What do you do for a living, pal, that makes you such an expert?”

Great.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“What, a reporter?”

“Mystery writer,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“Mystery writer.”

He gave me a big-city smile that said I was the most pathetic thing he’d seen all day, in a day full of seeing pathetic things and feeling superior to all of them.

Part of me wanted to punch him, but part of me also thought maybe his attitude was right on target. My hero had drunk himself senseless and drowned in the tub. Maybe I ought to grow up and accept that sorry fact.

I took one more try.

“Listen,” I said. “I used to be a cop. Please don’t write me off as a kook. Hear me out.”

“Why, you got something new to say?”

“Come with me.”

I walked him into the bathroom; Roscoe hadn’t moved.

“That empty bottle of Scotch,” I said, pointing to it. “I was with Mr. Kane until maybe forty minutes before his wife and I found the body. And you’re saying during that time he supposedly drank this whole bottle of Scotch and passed out and drowned? I just don’t believe it. And where’s the glass? Roscoe Kane didn’t drink out of a bottle.”

“You brought me in here for this twaddle? A drunk who doesn’t drink out of a bottle? You think forty minutes isn’t time enough to drink some Scotch and drown and die?”

“A
whole bottle
?”

“Who says it was a full bottle? He had it in his room and ’d been nursing it all day, probably; he just killed it here in the tub. And it killed him.”

I didn’t have anything to counter that with. I found myself looking at Roscoe, nude, old, skinny, dead. I looked at him through a watery haze, not all of it in the tub.

The man from the coroner’s office put a hand on my shoulder; it was a gesture that was meant to be conciliatory, but it was too firm a hand, the impatience in the man getting the best of him. I shook it off.

He raised his two hands in a gesture that sought a truce, and then pointed toward Roscoe Kane. “Come look at something,” he said.

I went closer to the tub; looked where the fat stubby finger was pointing.

“Do you see any bruises?” he said. “Look at his shoulders, where he’d have likely been held down. Take a close look.”

I did.

“No bruises,” he said.

“Suppose he
had
passed out or fell asleep in the tub or something, but with his head up out of the water—and somebody held him under; even if he woke up during that, it’d be over fairly quick.”

“Sure, but he’d be bruised.”

“Not necessarily. He’s skinny. Frail. It wouldn’t take much to hold him under and...”

“Listen—what was your name? Mallory?—you could be right. One in a hundred is about your odds. But there’s just not enough to go on. He has a history of drinking; a past, recent accident where he drank himself to sleep and almost died because of it. The evidence here indicates no struggle; it, in point of fact, indicates he passed out and died. Now. Let it go.”

Suddenly I felt he was right; I felt embarrassed. I nodded, said, “Yeah, yeah. You’re probably right. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

That was when the ambulance guys from the funeral home arrived with a stretcher and a body bag. I helped them dry Roscoe Kane off before they put him in and zipped him up and wheeled him out. I told them we’d call tomorrow and give them the particulars.

So Roscoe Kane was gone, and soon so was the man from the coroner’s office. Mae was asleep. Fitfully so, but asleep.

I thought about sleeping on the other bed, so she wouldn’t be alone when she woke up; but decided just to leave a note, with my room number, if she wanted me and my help. I was, at this point, intruding.

So I got out of there.

Back in my room, in bed, I kept going over the scene of the... crime? Accident? I couldn’t make up my mind.

Roscoe Kane had never attended a Bouchercon, or any fan gathering before, for that matter; and I was the one who’d convinced him to come to this one. Me. I brought him here. All but put him in that damn tub. Tom, who was the current president of the Private Eye Writers of America, had asked me to get Kane to the ’con, so that the PWA could surprise him with their annual Life Achievement Award.

“We’re a young organization,” Tom had told me over the phone a few months back, “and we need the sort of publicity we can stir up by having a Roscoe Kane on hand. Kane may not be a household word these days, but a man who sold that many books—but who has
never
been honored for his work, in fact who has been pilloried for it—will make good fodder for the media. We can get ink, we can get on the tube, we can build some recognition for our group, and some credibility. I need
you to make sure Kane is there in person, Mal... otherwise we’re dead in the water.”

I’d made sure Kane was here, all right. Dead in the water.