Stakeout (2013) (2 page)

At any rate, I went over the conversation we just had to see if I’d gotten anything out of it besides milk.

Alice seemed to be gently ridiculing my stakeout. Which I was reluctant to admit, since my stakeout was the only thing that pleased me about the job. And there she was, asking me what I expected to accomplish. When I said ID’ing the woman, she asked me what I expected to accomplish if the woman didn’t show up. I said the only way to find out is to ask him, and I said the client doesn’t want to ask him. And what did she say then? I couldn’t remember, exactly. Whatever it was it bothered me. It bothered me because it was one of those how-can-he-be-so-dumb comments. She was waiting for the penny to drop and me to make the obvious conclusion. All I had to do was figure out what Alice was trying to tell me.

Okay, if the woman never shows up I won’t know who she is. Nothing wrong with that statement. Seems perfectly simple and straightforward. Let’s break it down. The woman hasn’t shown up, so I don’t know who she is. That has two parts: the woman hasn’t shown up; and I don’t know who she is. Of those two statements,
I don’t know who she is
was undoubtedly true.

That left
the woman hasn’t shown up
.

I whipped out my cell phone, called information, got the phone number of the motel. I called it, got the manager.

“Route 4 Motel.”

“Yeah. I want to rent a room.”

“That’s what we do.”

“You got two cabins with adjoining doors?”

“Not at the moment.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“They’re rented.”

“They’re all rented?”

“We only have two. One of them, both units are rented, the other one, just one.”

“The one they’re both rented—they staying together?”

“Why?”

“If they’re rented together, they’ll leave together.”

“Well, they’re not. So I can’t help you. But we’re not the only motel on the strip.”

“You’re the best.”

“Yeah, right,” the guy said, and hung up.

So. The motel had units with connecting rooms. If the husband rented one, what was to stop the woman he was seeing from renting the other?

That set up an interesting hypothesis. If the woman had entered the motel room by the elaborate ruse of using the connecting door from an adjoining unit that someone else had rented, then this meeting was more clandestine than your average, run of the mill tryst, in fact, something my client would really want to know. Because what Alice was underlining in her other not-so-veiled advice was that the only way to find out what the guy was doing was for my client to ask him. Which she wasn’t going to do. Which should have ended the discussion. So why didn’t Alice drop it?

Hell.

My client did not want me to go to her husband’s place of business, pretend I was interested in life insurance. She didn’t want to do anything that would put him wise to the fact he was being tailed. Then he might get cautious and cancel his rendezvous with the woman. I hadn’t done that, and the woman hadn’t shown up anyway. That was no longer a concern. The situation had gone to hell. It was up to me to save it.

I got out of my car, slammed the door, crossed the street. Went up the motel driveway to unit seven. I took a breath, banged on the door.

There was no answer.

I banged again.

Still nothing.

I leaned my head against the door.

It swung inward.

Just an inch, but enough to freak me out.

The door was open!

I didn’t care what motivations, rationalizations, or fear of ridicule might be in play at the moment. I knew one thing for certain. I did not want to open that door.

I whipped a handkerchief out of my pocket, used it to grip the doorknob, pushed the door open.

There was no one there. Not surprising, what with no one opening the door. Still, I had seen the guy go in. He had to be there. Unless he’d climbed out the bathroom window. Or went through the connecting door to the adjoining unit. If he did, he could have walked the hell out of there with a hat down over his eyes and I wouldn’t have known it.

What a series of depressing ideas.

That was probably what had happened.

I figured I’d better make sure.

I pushed the door closed with my hand in the handkerchief. The doorknob clicked. I wondered if that meant it was locked. I hadn’t turned the doorknob, just pushed in on it, since the door was already open. No matter. It would open from the inside.

I walked around the bed and stopped short.

The body of a man lay face up on the floor. He’d been shot once at close range. A pillow had been used to muffle the shot. There were bloody feathers adhering to the side of his head.

I took deep breaths, tried not to throw up. If you ever find a dead body, that’s a good tip. Throwing up is an amateur move. Cops can get DNA from vomit if you choose to leave, and they’ll make fun of you if you choose to stay.

I calmed myself down, got my stomach under control. Took a look at the body.

He certainly looked like the man I’d been following. Of course, that man didn’t have a hole in his head.

I hadn’t decided if I was getting out of there or not, but before I did, I wanted to make the ID. I knelt down, fished in his pocket for his wallet.

The door was kicked in, and the room filled with cops.

3

T
HEY TOOK ME TO THE
Major Crimes Unit, chained me to the wall. That’s not really as bad as it sounds. I’d been chained to one in Atlantic City, back when I started this job, just around the dawn of recorded time. They hadn’t gotten me for murder then. As a precedent, that had to be a very good sign.

A beer-bellied plainclothes cop, whose white shirt threatened to pop a button at the waist, was riding herd over me. Not that he needed to, what with me being chained and all. The guy was actually reading the
New York Post
.

The door opened and a plainclothes detective came in who looked as if he’d been sent over from central casting to play the role of a crooked cop. With my track record for judging character, I figured that probably meant he had a heart of gold.

He snapped his fingers at the fat cop, said, “Okay, Morgan, what we got?”

Morgan flipped open his notebook. “Stanley Hastings, suspicion of murder.”

“Who’d he kill?”

“Philip Marston.”

Well, that was something. With everything falling apart, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the guy turned out to be someone else entirely. But, no, that was the name my client had given me.

“Why’d he kill him?”

“I don’t know. You have to ask him.”

“How’d he kill him?”

“Shot him.”

“Where’s the gun?”

Morgan held up a plastic evidence envelope.

My mouth fell open. I hadn’t seen a gun at the crime scene, and it hadn’t occurred to me there was one.

“He have it on him?”

“No. He kicked it under the bed.”

“That’s pretty dumb.”

Morgan looked at me. “No, he’s a smart boy. Probably didn’t figure on being arrested. Thought he’d be long gone before the cops came.”

“His prints on the gun?”

Morgan shook his head. “He wiped it clean.”

I got the impression this was a routine. The bad cop knew the answers to the questions before he asked them. He and Morgan were playing a little scene in front of the suspect, to rattle him and break down his resistance.

They needn’t have bothered. I was born rattled. And my resistance was virtually nonexistent. Of course, if they never asked me a question, I wouldn’t have to answer.

The cop who wasn’t Morgan stood there looking at me. “Forgive me if I stare. Hardly ever see a killer. Leastwise, not a white one. I wonder what his bag is.” He looked at Morgan. “Is he a fag? I bet he’s a queer. I bet this was a lover’s quarrel gone bad.”

Oh, great. I not only got a bad cop, I got a homophobic racist too. And the son of a bitch still hadn’t asked me a question. He just kept dancing around, playing his little game. I sat and seethed.

I knew what he was doing. He was frustrating me. He was not letting me talk to make me want to talk. He knew before he even asked I wasn’t going to cooperate. I was an out-of-town PI, from New York City, no less, a species regarded somewhere between paramecium and pond scum. So he wanted to soften me up for an interrogation he knew would be like pulling teeth.

“Okay, you’re a private eye from New York. You tailed this guy to a motel, staked it out to see what happened. When nothing happened, you went in and found him dead.”

I looked at him in surprise. “How did you know?”

He shrugged. “Unless you shot him, that’s what happened. You gonna say you shot him?”

“Hell, no.”

“Then that’s your story. You know it, I know it. The only one who doesn’t know it is Morgan, who’s too damn dumb. So if you didn’t kill him, it’s not your gun, you didn’t even know it was there. Unless you shot him and kicked the gun under the bed. But that would be too dumb, even for Morgan.”

“Thank you,” Morgan said.

“Anyway, if you shot him we could prove you fired the gun with a paraffin test. Unless you wore gloves. You know the problem with that, Morgan?”

“If he wore gloves, where are they?”

“Right. So, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, you didn’t shoot him. In that case, someone else did. If you were on duty, as a private investigator, watching that unit from the time the guy checked in, while you may be a rather unpromising murder suspect, you sure as hell are a promising witness. You saw the murderer. The arrival and departure of the murderer will be logged into your detective’s notes. Along with a thumbnail sketch of the killer.

“So, we looked through your possessions when we brought you in here. We also obtained a warrant, and searched your car. Guess what? No notes. So, you’re either the world’s worst private detective, or you killed him.”

He took a breath. “Now, we could go on, but I’m not big on guessing games, and you’re probably not big on sitting there being insulted. What’s it gonna be? You have the right to remain silent, but that doesn’t mean you have to. What do you have to say for yourself?”

4

I
TOLD THEM EVERYTHING
.

I know, I know, that blows my image as a PI. I was supposed to hold out on the cops, follow the clues myself, solve the case ahead of them. Only in this case there seemed no reason. I’d been hired to find out if my client’s husband was cheating. Well, he wasn’t, at least, not tonight, and certainly not anymore. My client hadn’t hired me to find out who killed him. Granted, he wasn’t dead when she did, but even so. There was absolutely no reason to hold anything back, so I didn’t.

Not that the cops were the least bit grateful. On the one hand, they despised me for talking. On the other, they didn’t believe a word I said.

Bad Cop regarded me with disgust unlikely to have been equaled in the annals of the New Jersey police department.

“You just walked in and found him dead?”

“Yes.”

“You expect us to believe that?”

“It’s what
you
said I did.”

“It’s what I said your
story
would be. I didn’t say it was true.”

“I’d have to be the stupidest guy alive to shoot the guy and kick the gun under the bed.”

“What’s your point?”

“How can you not believe my story?”

“It has a few significant gaps.”

“Like what?”

“I’d say the most glaring was the arrival and departure of the killer.”

I said nothing.

He continued, “According to your story, no one had an opportunity to kill him except you.”

“Not at all.”

“What do you mean, not at all?”

“If you searched the motel room, perhaps you noticed the connecting door.”

“That was locked.”

“Of course it was locked. The killer locked it when he went out.”

“How’d the killer get the guy to open the door?”

“Maybe this meeting was part of some prearranged plan.”

“The guy planned to be killed? I tend to doubt that.”

“He didn’t plan to be killed. He planned to take part in some shady deal. He was sneaking though a connecting door to meet someone in a motel room so they wouldn’t be seen entering his.”

“Or he wouldn’t be seen entering theirs,” Morgan said.

Bad Cop looked at him in surprise. “You buy this guy’s story?”

“No. But in case it happens to be true, no reason why the dead guy’s so all-fired important. Maybe there’s a big meeting next door that this guy doesn’t want to be known to take part in, so he arranges to rent the next unit so he can be there without being seen entering. As far as I’m concerned, that makes more sense than these guys rented a unit so they could call on him.”

“Yeah, fine,” Bad Cop said. “But that’s only if we buy this guy’s story. Which there’s no reason to do.” He turned back to me. “We searched your car, and you know what we found?”

“Not much.”

“Well, we found a Gatorade bottle smelled like piss. I suppose you have some romantic idea guys on stakeout piss in ’em. But we didn’t find a gun permit.”

“I don’t have a gun permit.”

“Why don’t you have a gun permit?”

“I don’t have a gun.”

“What the hell kind of PI are you, you don’t have a gun?”

“Your basic, law-abiding type.”

“Yeah, sure. Now I’ll tell you what happened. You followed the guy to a motel where he was shacking up with a hot babe. You phoned the wife, she came racing over, burst in, shot him dead.”

“What happened to the hot babe?”

“She went home. She’s married, she doesn’t want to get involved. That leaves you with the wife. You’re freaked, you probably would have split, except she’s got a gun. She offers you a ton of money to stake out the place until the police arrive so you can swear she was never there.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“All right. Let’s ask her.”

The door opened and my client came at me like a harpy from hell. Her hair was a mess, her lipstick was smeared, her eyeliner was running down her cheek. “You son of a bitch!” she screamed, and came flying across the room, an outraged goddess swooping down to disembowel the mortal chained to the stake.