Relentless (6 page)

    There was no murder weapon in sight. Tom began a thorough examination of the room, as did I. I’d taken him along to the last seminar I’d attended. The speakers spent a good deal of time discussing the methods used by British and French detectives working what they called “the crime scene.” Previously, peace officers had spent only a brief amount of time going over the place where the victim was found. The French got down on their hands and knees with small rakelike objects, going over every inch of what they’d designated “the scene.”

    Tom took the west side of the room, I took the east. And thank God, too. That’s where I found the button I recognized immediately. The button from the sleeve of Callie’s shirtwaist blouse. I recognized it because I’d bought her that blouse with its triangular-shaped buttons for her last birthday.

    I hesitated before stooping down and picking it up. What if Tom saw me? And what if he then saw me pocket it?

    But what choice did I have?

    I glanced over my shoulder, stooped, picked it up, pocketed it.

    Thankfully, Tom was searching the closet while I did all this.

    Dick Zane from the undertaker’s came then; and then Dr. Calendar, whom I used for most of the homicides; and then a youngster from the newspaper. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a derby on his head. The smoke from his cigarette kept twisting upward to his eyes and making him tear up. It kind of spoiled the hard-boiled impression he was hoping to make.

    I held them all at bay in the hallway. It took us a good half hour to go over the room. Everybody was impatient. I didn’t care. I wanted to do my job.

    Every once in a while, I’d look at Stanton. I hated him and feared him and was jealous of him. He’d tried to destroy Callie in life but had failed; maybe he’d succeed in destroying her in death. I thought of how innocent and yielding she would have been back then; and of how cynically he’d taken her. That was the jealousy part, I guess. The hatred was for the way he’d made her part of his con games. And the fear was for what he’d dragged her into through Webley.

    The one thing I didn’t find was money. Stanton should have had a lot of it, given his friendship with Webley. But he had only a few coins.

    

    

    I spent the next hour talking with the guests on the second floor. I took half, Tom took half. They were cooperative but, if they were telling the truth, they were no help at all.

    They hadn’t heard an argument. They hadn’t heard a scuffle. They hadn’t seen Stanton enter or leave his room. They hadn’t heard him call out for help. Most of them had been in their rooms.

    I went downstairs to the staff.

    The man on the night desk said that Stanton hadn’t had any announced visitors. He said it was always possible that somebody had come in through the back door or even the fire escape. He brought the bellman over. He hadn’t seen or heard anything, either. He had been on the second floor only once, though. The last time he’d talked to Stanton was around four o’clock. Stanton was in his room, having a drink of what appeared to be bourbon. He’d asked the bellman for two fresh towels.

    The man behind the bar in the taproom hadn’t come on until six o’clock. He worked a seven-hour shift. He knew who Stanton was but hadn’t seen him all evening. He had two customers who’d been sitting there since five o’clock or so. They hadn’t seen Stanton either.

    Back upstairs, the crowd had dispersed. They were getting ready to carry the body down on a stretcher. There was a blanket over Stanton now. Blood soaked through from his wound.

    Tom was busy doing another sweep of the room. A couple of times I heard his knees crack when he bent down. He’d given up a good job with a local wheel manufacturer to become a deputy. His wife hadn’t been all that happy about his decision, seeing it as a lark rather than a real job. He was forty, and a deputy’s salary wasn’t all that much when you could hear the arthritis cracking in your limbs when you got up and down. But he had a little boy’s enthusiasm for his job, and I was glad he did.

    “Anything?” I said when he was finished.

    He shook his head.

    I hoped my sigh wasn’t audible. If he’d found another button or anything like that-

    “All right if we get him on the wagon now, Marshal?” Dick Zane said. We all like to think ill of undertaking people, but Dick was a family man, a helpful citizen who saw to it that the poor always got fed at Christmastime and whose wife did volunteer work in the hospital. “He’s starting to smell.”

    I nodded approval. The body was taken away.

    Mike Bryant, the hotel owner, came into the room. He looked pretty damned unhappy and I didn’t blame him. “Three guests have already left. Afraid to stay here.”

    “I’m sorry, Mike. I really am. We’re working as fast as we can.”

    “You get anything yet?”

    “Not yet.”

    He shook his large head. “He looked like the kind.”

    “What kind you talking about?”

    “Oh, hell, you know. Too slick by half. A ladies’ man. He took several of the local boys for a lot of money last night at poker. They weren’t happy about that. Especially when one of them started hinting he might have been cheating. But that’s what they always say when they lose. Then there was Ken Adams.”

    “What about him?”

    “Sometime yesterday, Stanton managed to meet Sylvia Adams, and sneaked her into his room last night.”

    “And Ken found out?”

    “You bet he found out. He had a big scene with Sylvia and Stanton in the room here. I promised I wouldn’t say anything to anybody about it. You know, to protect her reputation and all.”

    “Ken threatened Stanton?”

    “He more than threatened him, Lane. He pulled a gun on him. That’s when Sylvia came running downstairs and got me. I went up there with a sawed-off and got Ken calmed down. I felt sorry for him. Hell, he’s just a kid. Even with a gun in his hand he looked pretty pathetic standing next to Stanton. Stanton didn’t even look scared. He’d probably been through this kind of thing a hundred times before. With jealous husbands, I mean.”

    “So Ken put the gun away?”

    “Ken put the gun away and Sylvia took him home. It was one of those things I wish I hadn’t seen. I got a wife, too, Lane. If she ever did anything like that to me-” He shook his head. “Poor old Ken.”

    “I’ll need to talk to him.”

    “I figured you would. That’s why I told you. Maybe I should’ve told you this morning, huh?”

    I shrugged. “No way of knowing it would turn into something like this. And anyway, we don’t know that Ken had anything to do with this.”

    “I sure hope not. He’s a good lad.”

    “Yes, he is.”

    “And Sylvia seems like a good woman, as far as that goes.”

    I smiled. “She interviewed me as her ninth-grade school assignment when I first came here.”

    “Yeah, then she left school and married Ken. He wasn’t but seventeen.” He frowned. “I just hope he didn’t have anything to do with this.”

    Behind me, Tom said, “Somebody might have seen him.”

    “Seen Ken?” I said.

    Tom nodded. “Man down the hall-a drummer-said he saw somebody fitting Ken’s description here earlier in the afternoon. Maybe about four.”

    Bryant said, “But Stanton wasn’t killed till later.”

    “Anybody else see this man?” I said.

    Tom shook his head. “But there’s always the possibility Ken got here at a time when most guests were gone and hid somewhere.”

    “Such as?” Bryant said.

    “No offense, Mr. Bryant, but it wouldn’t take a lot to pick the locks on one of your doors. What if he got inside Stanton ’s room and hid in the closet? Stanton comes in and they argue and Ken stabs him?”

    “That’s possible, I suppose,” Bryant said. He glanced around the room. “A big fucking mess is what this is.” He nodded to the door. “I better get back downstairs and see if anybody else has left because they’re afraid to stay here.” He frowned. “The Chandler Arms is gonna be full up tonight-with guests who left
my
place.”

    After he’d gone, Tom said, “Sounds like we’ve got at least one good suspect.”

    “Maybe. But I’m like Bryant. I sure hope Ken didn’t do this. He’s a good young man. Somebody like Stanton comes to town-”

    I was doing what Bryant had been doing. I was putting myself in Ken Adams’s place. Imagining what it would be like to walk in on your wife and another man in a hotel room-all that terrible rush of terror and rage and impotence-in a moment like that-

    But maybe that was Ken Adams’s best argument.

    In the moment of fury itself, you might do something crazy. But after eighteen, twenty hours had passed? There was a good chance that you’d brought some perspective to the situation. You’d still be angry, of course-hell, maybe you’d even told your wife to get out-but you’d be in much better control of your impulses. It was at least an even chance that you would have ruled out violence.

    “We’ll have to sort through all this,” I said to Tom. “I don’t want to accuse anybody of anything yet.”

    
Least of all my wife,
I thought.

    “I agree,” Tom said. “That’s why I only mentioned it to you and Bryant.” He sounded defensive.

    “Good man.”

    He relaxed. He can work his jaw pretty hard when he’s upset. “I probably shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

    “If that’s the worst thing you ever do, Tom, you’ll have led a perfect life. You should hear about some of the things I’ve said I shouldn’t have.”

    

    

    I went back to the office. I’d learned at my last peace officer seminar to start a file on every major crime. List the name of the victim, the circumstances, the weapon, the names of the people interviewed, names that I’d written on a small tablet, as had Tom. I two-finger-typed all this on four sheets of paper, slapped a label reading DAVID STANTON on it, and then set it on my desk.

    I then wrote out a telegram to the Chicago police department asking for any information on David Stanton under that name or various aliases. I wrote a similar telegram to the Royalton Hotel. I’d have to wait till morning to send these.

    I was still at my desk when the door opened and Trent Webley came in. “Evening, Marshal.” He seemed quiet, sober.

    “Evening, Trent.”

    “My dad’s still over in his office. He’s wondering if you’d stop over and see him.”

    “He could always stop over here.”

    He shrugged. “He’s got a lot of work to do.”

    “So do I, Trent.”

    I didn’t like the idea of being summoned. But then I decided I was being pissy for no particularly good reason. His office was two blocks away. I was still sound enough of limb to survive a trek as long as that.

    I stood up. Grabbed my hat.

    

    

    At this end of Center Street you wouldn’t have known there’d been a murder. This was the section where the bank and the pharmacy and the general store and the other Main Street businesses were located. The windows were dark, the hitching posts empty, the lamplight properly sedate.

    Trent had a key to let him into the bank. We went up a flight of stairs that ran adjacent to the bank on the first floor. The second-floor hallway was dark except for the yellow outline of a door at the far end. I could hear typewriter keys being punched at about the same rate I was capable of. While most typewriter users were female secretaries, the executive class couldn’t help but try their luck, too. At about ten words a minute.

    He had one of those inner sanctums. There was an outer office and a larger inner office and in the center of that office yet another office, like Chinese boxes. It was in this that Paul sat, pecking away at a Royal.

    His office had the air of a judge’s chamber, walnut wainscoting, a vast Persian rug, heavy dark furnishing, glassed-in bookcases filled with tomes that portended great and eternal knowledge.

    He typed for a few more minutes to show me who was in charge, then turned in his tall executive chair, lifted a lighted cigar from an ashtray, and said, “Sit down and have one of my Cubans.”

    “No, thanks. I need to get back. It’s a busy night.”

    “So I’ve been told.”

    “Your friend Stanton got himself murdered. But I’m sure you already know about that.”

    He smirked. “He was hardly my friend, Marshal. He just did me a few favors.”

    “Why did you want to see me, Paul?”

    ‘To tell you that it isn’t too late.”

    “Isn’t too late for what?”

    “For telling the county attorney that you’ve decided to drop the charges against Trent.”

    “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

    But I didn’t sound as determined as I had earlier today. And he obviously heard a hint of wavering in my voice.

    He leaned forward on his elbows. “This is distasteful to me, Marshal. You probably don’t believe that. You probably think I enjoy pushing people around. And sometimes I do. I admit that. But not you. You’ve refused to go on my informal payroll, but you’ve given me plenty of room and I appreciate that. But as I said, I have my son to consider and my family name.”

    “What’s this all mean, Paul, in plain English?”

    “In plain English, Marshal, it means that your wife was in Stanton ’s hotel room tonight. I can produce two witnesses who saw her there. And when she left, she appeared to have blood on her clothes.”

    “I see.”

    “Maybe you don’t see, Marshal,” he said in his quiet way. “She was in his room. And I’ve got all kinds of information that establishes she was not only married to him once, but did everything she could to get away from him. She hated him.”