Crime Machine

31

BY THE TIME CARDINAL GOT OUT of the shower in the morning, Donna was gone.

After the morning meeting, he checked his phone messages and returned a few calls. Even though he had something of a mental block about responding to e-mail, he spent the time while he was waiting for Mendelsohn answering as many as he could. Of course, Mendelsohn couldn’t call to explain why he was so late; his cellphone was on the bottom of Trout Lake.

At ten o’clock, he called the Highlands. No answer in Mendelsohn’s room. The FBI man struck Cardinal as a little eccentric, a bit of a klutz, but also completely reliable. Not the sort who says nine a.m. when he means ten-thirty or eleven. Cardinal grabbed his coat and drove to the Highlands and parked next to Mendelsohn’s Alero. A maintenance man was pushing a snow blower, blasting geysers of white into the blue of the sky.

Young Mr. Dee was not happy to see Cardinal again. Across the front desk, he radiated clouds of Scope-scented dismay.

“I need to visit one of your guests,” Cardinal said.

“Certainly, Detective. What name?”

“Mendelsohn.”

The manager checked his computer and got the room number and dialed it. He kept the phone clamped between his ear and shoulder and continued typing away at something the whole time. He put down the phone. “I’m sorry, Mr. Mendelsohn must have stepped out.” He pointed toward the house phones. “Would you like to leave a message?”

“I need to see his room.”

“Oh, I don’t think we can …” He scanned Cardinal’s face and whatever he saw there changed his mind. “I’ll look after it.”

In the elevator, he said, “Please tell me this investigation will be over soon.”

“It won’t.”

He led Cardinal down the second-floor corridor to room 218 and rapped smartly on the door. “Weird thing is, our bookings for the next two months are actually up, year over year.”

“I wouldn’t have thought a double murder was great publicity.”

“Me either.” He rapped again.

“Open it.”

“Please—we’re not going to have that discussion again, are we?”

“No,” Cardinal said. “We’re not.”

The manager took out his pass card and opened the door. He took up the same position as last time, back against the door, holding it open. “Sounds like he’s in the shower.”

The mirrors, the windows, even the TV screen, were fogged with steam.

“Mendelsohn?” Cardinal stepped farther into the room and stopped.

Mendelsohn was on the floor between the toilet and the sink, in a half-curled position. Blood had formed a pool above his head in the shape of a thought cloud in a comic book. Cardinal placed a hand on his shoulder. Dead some time.

He knelt down to get a better look. There was a dark hole above Mendelsohn’s right eyebrow and an exit wound at the back of the skull that had taken a good chunk of bone and brain with it before it hit the wall above the toilet. Another entry wound below the Highlands logo on his bathrobe seemed to have produced no exit wound that Cardinal could see. That one would explain the hole through the bathroom door. It was about waist-high if you were standing, but if you were sitting on the toilet, as Mendelsohn clearly had been, it was about level with your right lung. That was like him, to get himself murdered while he’s about to take a dump.

Cardinal called it in. It was only when he got off his cell that he remembered Mr. Dee, paler than before, but still at his post by the doorway.

“We’re going to need your security tapes again.”

“That’s going to be a problem.”

“Why?”

“In response to the last incident, we’re having an expert do a thorough review of our security system. The cameras have been down the past three days.”

“Fabulous.”

“This is going to be another loud, messy business, isn’t it?”

“You might be in for a few cancellations.”

While he was waiting, Cardinal turned off the shower and stood in the bathroom trying to picture how it had all transpired. Mendelsohn must have turned on the water to let it get hot before showering. Then he’d sat down on the toilet.

The bullet that had caught him in the chest, after passing through the door, was telling Cardinal something. He spoke, barely above a whisper. “You’re in the hallway and listening at the door and you hear the shower running. Somehow you get past the lock and step inside. The shower is running, the door is closed. Why do you shoot straight through the door? Why did you aim straight for the seated position?”

Gloved, Cardinal stepped out and pulled the bathroom door shut. There was barely an eighth of an inch clearance, and even that was obscured by the deep pile of the carpet.

He opened the door again, avoiding the sight of Mendelsohn. “No. You knew he was sitting down. The door must have been open.”

He turned to look at the folding closet doors that faced the bathroom. Mirrored from floor to ceiling. The door on the left was closed flat and reflected Cardinal’s image and Mendelsohn’s lower legs curled on the floor. The other door was ajar. Cardinal could see the shoulder of Mendelsohn’s trench coat in the space between the two doors. The angled mirror on the right reflected the bed and part of a nightstand.

“You were under the bed,” Cardinal said. He went to stand beside it. The closet door now reflected the toilet and Mendelsohn’s bare feet.

“He leaves the door open to let some of the steam out. Then he decides to use the toilet. He sits down, but no—he’s not comfortable with the door open—so he pushes it closed.

“You come out from under the bed. You stand outside the bathroom door and fire once. Did you use a silencer? You fire once and hear him fall. While he’s still on the floor, you open the door—he wouldn’t have locked it—and you put one in his skull.”

Cardinal went back to the bed. Mendelsohn slept in the other one and used this one as a desk. Papers were stacked in eight neat piles. Cardinal stood over them, scanning the headings. He tried to judge if any one pile was messier than the others, but the arrangements gave no clue.

Ident arrived with their cases of equipment. Cardinal asked them to pay particular attention to the space under the bed. “I’m taking this,” he said, holding up a tiny notebook by the corners. He had just removed it from Mendelsohn’s coat pocket.

Arsenault dusted it, but it wasn’t of a texture that would hold prints. He stuck a tented number card in the coat pocket and photographed it and then he stuck an evidence tag onto the notebook with the same number, the time and his signature. He handed it to Cardinal. “You’re responsible for getting it to the evidence room.”

The hotel lobby was already full of reporters. There was Nick Stoltz from The Algonquin Lode, Brian Murtaugh from the local cable station, even Grace Legault from the CBC. Donna was beside her, looking at Cardinal with expectation but nothing more.

They clamoured around him. Do you have a positive ID? Do you have any suspects? Is it the same killer?

“We have a deceased middle-aged male, not local, obviously the victim of foul play. I can’t give you anything more right now.”

Donna didn’t throw any questions at him. He had been dreading she would say something like, “Is it true he was with the FBI?”—something that would drive the others into a frenzy, and also raise suspicions that she might have a special contact inside the investigation.

In the parking lot, the snow glare made his eyes water. He got into his car and started it. His cellphone rang and he had to slot the shift back in park to answer.

“Mendelsohn had an interesting contact.” It was Donna’s voice. She was standing beneath the hotel marquee looking out toward the parking lot but not at him.

“How’d you know it was Mendelsohn?” Cardinal said.

“I didn’t. Thank you for confirming.”

“Where’d you get the name?” Cardinal said, angry at himself now.

“Come on—I do have more than one source, you know.”

“Do you use the same technique with all of them?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”

“All right. Okay, I’m sorry. Who’s this contact?”

“A guy who works in New York Homicide. He and Mendelsohn worked together on something a couple of years ago. His name’s Stuart Nathan—he’s probably a lieutenant by now. Does this mean I’m not going to see you later?”

“Well, it means I’m looking at long hours.”

“Call me when you can,” she said, and clicked off.

Cardinal drove by the entrance on his way out of the lot. They didn’t wave to each other.

Back at his desk, Cardinal called the New York field office and spoke to the special agent in charge, Wesley Walker. Chouinard had already informed him of Mendelsohn’s death, and Cardinal assured him they would do everything possible to catch his killer. He asked for a complete copy of the file Mendelsohn had brought with him.

“You don’t have it? Mendelsohn made a complete copy just before he left—we don’t let the originals out of the office.”

“We have his copy. But here’s my thinking: Mendelsohn couldn’t have had any enemies from up here. Whoever killed your man likely knew he was going to connect our murders up here with his other cases.”

“How would this person know? You’re saying he was recognized by someone from a previous case?”

“We’ve had a lot of press on this one, a lot of coverage. I just did a quick check, and there are pictures of Mendelsohn with me on two local news sites. Whoever killed him didn’t take the whole file, because that would give the motive away—he probably took some specific thing. And if we figure out what that was, it may lead us right to him.”

“You make big leaps. You and Agent Mendelsohn must’ve got along well.”

“I liked him.”

“You’ll have the file as soon as possible.”

Cardinal hung up and started leafing through Mendelsohn’s notebook, a catch-all item in which Buy new socks appeared next to Run Divyris US database, and Check Canuck military weapons was under Fix bathroom sink. On the last page he had written, Interview fur biz old-timers.