Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 120, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 733 & 734, September/October 2002

Dead and Presumed Missing by John H. Dirckx

John Dirckx is a medical doctor, but he rarely employs significant medical details and clues in his mysteries, nor does he often set his stories in hospitals or other medical facilities. Instead, the Ohio author writes primarily a type of police procedural, with a series character who is African-American and cases that involve all layers of society. Detective Auburn’s latest case takes him to the self-enclosed world of a big hotel.

“Good morning! This is Kitty Partridge in the Supercool Ninety-Two traffic chopper. We’re live and aloft over the Interstate, just east of downtown. Traffic is moving smoothly through the area, with only the usual rush-hour pileups at the exits. There’s a small truck tipped over in the median just west of the Heron Pike interchange, so if you’re east-bound there, be alert for workers on the left shoulder, and watch for possible stoppages as they right the truck and tow it into the fast lane.”

Halfway through her transmission, and without dropping a syllable, Kitty Partridge reached for the camcorder with her right hand and jogged her pilot’s elbow with her left. Then, using hand signals, she drew his attention to something almost directly below, and asked him to circle to the left and hover.

Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn was just getting settled into his desk chair for his morning session at the computer when Lieutenant Savage appeared in the doorway. “Think you can find the Moreland Building?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Is it missing?”

“Stamaty’s got a possible homicide over there. Kestrel’s already on his way in the evidence van, but you can probably beat him on foot at this time of the morning.”

“ID on the victim?”

“None yet. Asian. Blunt injuries.”

“Where in the building?”

“The roof.”

It took Auburn less than five minutes to reach the Moreland Building, a squat and sooty limestone structure that was stuffed with law offices, insurance agencies, stock brokerages, and collection agencies. The elevator got him to the fourth floor. There, Patrolman Fritz Dollinger met him and conducted him to an enclosed iron staircase that led up to the roof. When they stepped out into the bright and breezy May morning, Auburn saw that Kestrel, the evidence technician, had beat him after all.

A low stone parapet surrounded the tar and gravel roof on all sides. Much of the space was taken up by air-conditioning equipment, the elevator cabin, and the base of a soaring radio tower. In the middle of an open stretch, the body of a man lay on its back with arms outstretched, and Kestrel was squatting over it and conferring with Nick Stamaty, the coroner’s investigator.

Auburn nodded to the others and inspected the body. An Asian or Near-Eastern male, between forty and fifty, slightly built, wearing black trousers with a broad satin stripe down the outside of each leg, a starched white shirt, black cutaway vest, black bowtie — the standard uniform of a bartender, banquet server, or blackjack dealer. The clothes were dusty and tom. The man’s neck was bent at an unnatural angle and a livid crease ran down the right side of his face.

“Who found him?” asked Auburn.

“Traffic helicopter spotted him,” said Stamaty. “He was twisted up like a pretzel when I got here. I took a whole roll of pictures before I moved him.”

Kestrel, the evidence technician, sniffed a couple of times to signify his disapproval of Stamaty’s moving the body before he’d arrived on the scene to take his own pictures.

“How long’s he been dead?” Auburn asked Stamaty.

“Unofficially, six hours tops.”

Auburn looked at his watch. “No ID on him yet?”

“Not unless his name is Benjamin Franklin.”

“Wallet full of cash?”

“No wallet, but something like twelve grand in big bills.” Stamaty raised the lid of his field kit to show two clear plastic bags full of currency. “The bags were taped to his chest. This was all he had in his pockets.” He handed over a key to a locker at the Amtrak station on Delaware Avenue.

Auburn surveyed his surroundings. The Moreland Building was flanked by taller buildings on either side, and people were watching them from some of the windows in one of the buildings. Something grabbed him in the pit of the stomach when he looked up to the top of the radio tower, silhouetted against the limitless blue reaches of the morning sky. “Do you think he jumped from up there?”

“Not from the top. Possibly from that lowest platform. Something bashed him in the face while his heart was still beating. Could have been that bottom strut. But I’m not climbing up there to find out.”

Kestrel sniffed again. If anybody had to climb up there, it would probably be him. “Why would a guy with all that money on him commit suicide?” Kestrel asked.

“Maybe the money wasn’t on him when he jumped,” suggested Stamaty, who dabbled in psychology and enjoyed baiting the police with conundrums. “They say when somebody shoots himself in Monte Carlo, the cops stuff his pockets with thousand-franc notes so they can sign it out as an unsolved murder and avoid the bad publicity for the gambling casinos.”

“This isn’t Monte Carlo,” said Auburn, “and the cash wasn’t in his pockets. I think we’ve got ourselves a bag man here, who worked in a bar or a restaurant downtown. He got on somebody’s wrong side. They wasted him and grabbed his wallet, but missed the jackpot.”

“How’d he get up here, Sergeant?” asked Dollinger. “I was first on the scene, and it took the building super twenty minutes to track down a key to the roof.”

“Why not from one of those windows?” Auburn pointed to the nearer of the adjacent buildings, the Skyliner Hotel, which stood about five stories taller than the Moreland Building. This side of the hotel was mostly blank brick wall, but three windows, probably in a stairwell, stood in a vertical row directly above where the body lay. “Bet you something like twelve grand in big bills he’s a waiter or a bartender in there.”

“Want me to check?” asked Dollinger.

“I’ll come with you. I want to look at those windows from inside.” He turned back to Stamaty. “Lieutenant Savage says we haven’t got any missing person report on anybody who fits this description,” he said, “and neither does the sheriff. Has he got any scars or tattoos?”

“Or other distinguishing marks? I didn’t see any, but then I didn’t do a full examination with our audience steadily growing up there in the grandstand.”

Auburn talked briefly to the building superintendent, a portly individual in a maroon blazer, breathless and speechless with agitation. Access to the roof was strictly limited to maintenance personnel. As far as the super knew, nobody had been up there since the last elevator inspection in March. He assured Auburn that the dead man didn’t work in his building.

Auburn and Dollinger took the elevator to street level and stepped next door to the Skyliner Dorina Hotel, arguably the most upscale hotel in town. It had started life in the nineteenth century with a different name. The wiring and plumbing had been redone in the sixties to conform to code, but most of the original mahogany, marble, and wrought iron was still in evidence.

The liveried doorman gave Dollinger’s uniform a quasi-military salute. The lobby was thronged with people milling around an ornamental pool with a fountain that splashed and sparkled under a crystal chandelier. The elevator had buttons for nine floors, but the top two contained executive suites and could only be accessed with a pass card. They started out on the fifth floor to get their bearings and found that the window overlooking the roof of the Moreland Building was directly opposite the elevators. On the fifth and sixth floors the windows had spindly-legged antique tables in front of them, apparently for the purpose of concealing the accumulation of dust, dead flies, candy wrappers, and cigarette butts on the window sills.

But on the seventh floor there was no table, and a mere glance at the window sill showed that its coating of dust had recently been disturbed by something dragged across it. The window was securely latched. “This has to be it,” said Dollinger. “There aren’t any windows facing this way on the floors above.”

Kestrel was still working about forty feet below. They tried to attract his attention, but the sun was in his eyes, and they didn’t dare to touch the window, much less open it.

“I’ll go,” said Dollinger.

Auburn paced the long corridor, which smelled faintly of carpet deodorizer and stale food. No sound came from behind any of the recessed doors. A couple of trays with soiled dishes and silverware rested on the floor outside the first room to the left of the elevator, from whose knob hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign. An ugly and useless side table stood ten yards down the hall from the elevator under a tarnished mirror.

As Auburn was straightening his tie, the elevator door opened and a maid stepped off pushing a wheeled utility cart full of clean linen and supplies. Statuesque despite her shapeless smock, she stood half a head taller than Auburn, and he didn’t need to read her nametag to recognize Queena Dezwart.

Auburn showed identification. Years earlier, when he was a beat cop, he’d questioned her about some pilfered supplies at the Chalfont Hospital, but they both pretended they’d never met before.

“Can you tell me how many people are staying on this floor right now?”

She pulled a folded printout from her pocket and ran a polished thumbnail down the list. “There’s only two rooms occupied. Seven-oh-one and Seven-oh-nine.”

“You mean there’s nobody in any of these other rooms?”

“Is something wrong?”

Auburn pointed out the window and down. “Don’t touch anything there.”

“May the Lord have mercy! He dead?”

“Yes, ma’am. Looks like he jumped or fell from this window. Recognize him?”

“I don’t think so. That table’s supposed to be here in front of the window. And the window’s supposed to be locked.”

“It is locked. Did you shut it this morning?”

“Me? Man, you was here when I got here. Maybe you locked it?” Her bantering tone of mock indignation and her total command of the situation took Auburn back ten years to their last encounter.

“I need to look around here,” said Auburn. “Have you got a passkey to all these rooms that are supposed to be empty?”

She looked at him as if he’d asked her to lend him fifty dollars. “Mmm-hmm. And I got my work to do, too.”

“Two rooms.”

“Only one for now. This one says ‘Do not disturb.’ In other words, ‘Queena, keep out.’”

Auburn knocked at Room 701. There was a longish delay, during which Queena Dezwart shoved her cart in the direction of Room 709, let herself in, blocked the door open, and pulled back the curtains.

At length the door of Room 701 swung slowly open to reveal a stout and rumpled man, still in his pajamas, scowling up at Auburn from the seat of a platform-style motorized invalid chair. Auburn showed identification with one hand and took charge of the door with the other.

“Sorry to bother you so early,” he said. (It was a quarter past nine.) “I’m investigating an accident that may have happened here outside your room. Did you hear anything unusual during the night?”

The controls of the chair were mounted on a straight handlebar. The man manipulated these and the wheelchair rolled back away from the door with an electric whine. “Come on in.”

The room was dark except for a sliver of daylight where the curtains didn’t meet.

The covers were heaped in a tangle at the foot of the bed where the tenant had evidently thrown them moments before. An open briefcase full of papers stood on the lowboy before the window.

“What is it you’re looking for?” He rubbed his eyes, scratched his head, and put on a bedside light. Auburn guessed his age at about forty. His legs, shriveled and lifeless in bulky knitted wraps, were like two Christmas stockings dangling from a mantelpiece.

“We think somebody jumped or fell from the window across the hall last night. I was wondering if you heard anything.” He got out a three-by-five-inch file card and a pen.

“There’s always noise in a hotel. Usually I can tune it out pretty good.” He rubbed his eyes again. He was gradually waking up. “There was some commotion out there in the middle of the night. I thought they were probably putting an extra bed in one of the rooms.”

“Did you hear voices?”

“No voices.”

“What time would this have been?”

“I watched TV until about one o’clock. I was just falling asleep when I heard them moving stuff out there. After that I slept okay until a garbage truck down in the alley woke me up around half-past six this morning.”

“Your name, sir?”

“Billings. Chaz.” He proffered a damp, pudgy hand.

“Staying here by yourself, Mr. Billings?”

“Sure. I sell fiberglass products for an outfit in Boston. Mostly to contractors and government agencies. I’m on the road most of the time. You say somebody fell out the window?”

“That’s the way it looks. He may have had a little help.”

“Criminy. Dead?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Criminy.”

In the corridor Kestrel was taking pictures of the window and its environs. “That table up the hall belongs here in front of the window,” Auburn told him. “Probably ought to be dusted for prints.” Kestrel nodded abstractedly to signify his comprehension.

Patrolman Dollinger was standing next to Queena Dezwart’s utility cart outside the open door of Room 709. His efforts to interview Ms. Dezwart, who was at work inside the room, seemed to be eliciting mostly chaff and back talk.

Auburn pressed the elevator button on his way to Room 709. He stuck his head in the doorway and got a good view of battered luggage and personal articles suggesting an elderly couple before Queena stopped in her tracks and fixed him with a quizzical stare. “We’ll be leaving now, ma’am,” he told her. “Officer Kestrel, the evidence technician, is working there by the window. When he’s finished, he’ll want you to let him have a look around in the empty guest rooms, storerooms, and so on.” He hustled Dollinger into the elevator.

At the reception desk they had to wait while a clerk mollified a couple of complaining guests. The woman was doing most of the talking. Nothing seemed to be quite right. The room was too hot; a huge stain on the carpet was obviously blood; noisy machinery on the other side of the wall had kept them awake half the night; and before dawn they’d been awakened all over again by the noise of trash collection in the alley.

The clerk gave bland assurances of his deep regret and promised to make ample reparation. “What room are you in again, ma’am?”

She shrugged as if the question were just another indignity. “Seven-oh-nine,” said her husband.

Auburn and Dollinger exchanged glances.

The man behind the counter proved to be the hotel manager. At least, his nametag identified him as Travis Marth and according to the sign on the wall behind him, that was the name of the manager.

With an elaborate show of not noticing Dollinger’s uniform, or even Dollinger, he glanced inquiringly at Auburn.

Auburn showed identification. “Do you have a security officer on duty?”

Marth’s eyebrows went up a millimeter or two. “Problem?”

“Possibly. I won’t need to bother you with it if you have a house detective.”

The phrase seemed to amuse Marth slightly. “Our concierges are trained in CPR and tae kwan do,” he said. “We don’t employ security guards. What’s the flap?”

“The body of a man was found on the roof of the Moreland Building this morning. We have reason to believe he fell from the window opposite the elevator on the seventh floor of the hotel.”

Marth made a rapid survey of the lobby. “Rosie, take the desk,” he called through an open doorway behind him.

He led Auburn and Dollinger out of the lobby into a side corridor. “Is this somebody who was staying in the hotel?”

“We don’t have an ID yet,” said Auburn. “It’s a man probably in his forties, Asian, dressed like a server or a bartender. We thought he might be an employee. Is anybody missing?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Can we ask you to take a look at him — see if you know him?”

The manager consulted his watch. “Where is he?”

“Still on the roof next door.”

Marth led them to the alley by way of a loading dock, and from there into the Moreland Building through a fire exit. He avoided making eye contact with either of them as they rode up in the elevator.

On the roof he stopped ten feet from the body, leaned forward as if over a railing, and shook his head. “Nobody I know.”

“Do any of your staff wear uniforms like that?”

“No. Not with that shiny stuff.” He was already starting for the stairs.

“I’ll walk back with you,” said Auburn. “Now that you’ve seen him, do you think he was a guest?”

Marth spread his hands wide. “It’s possible. As of seven A.M. our census was a hundred and thirty-one. That’s paying guests. God knows how many freebooters we’ve got on board. Plus we’re running an Islamic wedding reception, a jewelry auction, and a cat show.”

They had an elevator to themselves. As it clanked its way down to the street level of the Moreland Building, Marth became expansive. “You asked about a house detective. Believe me, Officer, they only exist in Sam Spade murder mysteries and Hitchcock movies. We don’t need any cops. Our room rates are based on the assumption that the guest is going to steal the towels, the bedsheets, and the works out of the toilet.”

“Still, you must have some sticky times — thefts, people missing...”

“Tell me about it.” As they left the elevator Marth headed for the street entrance instead of the alley, evidently because Dollinger wasn’t with them this time. “Believe me, in a hotel people and things are never what they seem.” (Auburn was to remember that remark more than once during the course of the investigation.) “Ships that pass in the night. Everybody’s a transient, nobody really lives here.” They were back in the lobby of the hotel now. “Do you need me anymore?”

“Not right now. Can I eventually get a printout of everybody that’s staying in the hotel? Including people that left since yesterday morning?”

Marth exhaled slowly through compressed lips. “I guess so. Were you planning to... interview some of these people?”

“Probably just the ones on the seventh floor. According to the maid, only two rooms are occupied up there.”

The manager had resumed his place behind the counter. He touched keys at a computer and nodded. “We use that floor mostly as a reserve. The rooms are smaller and they’re overdue for remodeling.”

“I’m going back up there to touch base with our evidence technician,” said Auburn. “We’ll try not to be too conspicuous. If you hear of anybody missing, anything suspicious going on, I’d appreciate it if you’d call me at one of these numbers.” He handed Marth a card and went to the elevators.

Kestrel was still puttering with camera and specimen envelopes at the seventh-story window. “There isn’t much doubt that he went through here,” he said, “but this should cinch it. The sand-plaster finish has been flaking off onto the windowsill, and I think it’ll match some of that dust on his clothes.”

“Did you check out that table under the mirror?”

“I did. It’s been handled recently by somebody wearing gloves. I’ve got pictures.” He didn’t need to say “good pictures” because all his pictures were good.

“Where’s the maid?”

“Beats me.”

“Are you through with this window?”

“Sure am.”

Auburn unlatched and opened the window, called discreetly to Dollinger on the roof below, and beckoned him to return to the hotel. While waiting, he explored the entire seventh floor, trying every door. Only two rooms were unlocked. One of these was a small enclosure next to Room 709 where a pop machine and an icemaker were producing the clatter that had disturbed the guests in that room during the night. The other was a storage and work room, where Queena Dezwart was taking a coffee break.

“That door says ‘Staff Only,’” she informed him. “You work here now?”

“Temporarily. Part time. Did you notice a stain on the carpet in Seven-oh-nine this morning?”

“I been noticing a stain on the carpet in Seven-oh-nine for the past six months.” She took a bite of pineapple danish and washed it down with coffee from a polystyrene cup. “It’s rusty water that leaked out of the ice machine next door.”

“How about letting me have your passkey for about ten minutes while I check all these empty rooms?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Just because you’re a model citizen and you want to see justice done.”

She handed over a magnetic pass-card attached to about two feet of fine brass chain. Dollinger arrived in time to help him with the search. They looked into every room except the two that were occupied, but found nothing of interest. They had returned the key to the maid and were waiting for the elevator when the door opened and the man from 709 got off.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Auburn. “I believe you’re in Seven-oh-nine?”

“That’s right.” He was thin and stooped, well past retirement age. “Place is noisier than a boiler room. They going to move us?”

“Well, Mr.—”

“Dwayle. Arthur Dwayle.” There were pouches under his eyes, and the rest of his face drooped like an empty backpack. The movements of his mouth when he spoke reminded Auburn of a horse eating an apple.

“That’ll be up to the hotel management, Mr. Dwayle. We’re investigating something that happened during the night. Did you or your wife hear any kind of commotion out here in the hall?”

“In the hall, no. All we heard was the racket of those vending machines next door. And a garbage truck this morning, before it was light.” He looked up and down the empty corridor. “What happened out here?”

“Apparently a man dropped from this window onto the roof of the building next door.”

“Holy smoke! When was that?”

“Probably around one or two this morning.”

“Hey, maybe I do know something about that. That window was open when we went down to breakfast this morning. I shut it myself.”

Auburn made a note on a file card. “Did you happen to look out?”

“If I did, I didn’t notice anything out there.” Dwayle moved toward the window and peered down. “Holy smoke! The guy’s still down there. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Traveling for pleasure, Mr. Dwayle?”

With difficulty Dwayle tore his eyes away from the corpse on the roof of the Moreland Building. “Yes and no. I’m in town for a convention. Club I belong to. American Society of Pen and Pencil Collectors. Eastern Division. I’m secretary-treasurer.”

“Is your convention being held here in the hotel?”

“No, across town. Wife’s supposed to be meeting me here for lunch, but...” He shrugged, looked at his watch, smiled briefly, and then refolded his face on the original creases.

Down in the lobby, the level of activity was mounting as the noon hour approached. In an alcove at the rear, a man in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano whose satiny finish shone under the lights like asphalt after a rain. Chaz Billings, looking businesslike in a suit and silk tie, piloted his wheelchair skillfully around the fountain and out to the sidewalk.

Auburn and Dollinger took a tour of the lower level of the hotel, where the meeting rooms, dining room, and bar were situated. Big easels bore printed notices about the jewelry auction and the cat show and handwritten signs in Arabic and English for the wedding reception.

“Excuse me, are you chaps investigating a theft?”

The questioner was tall and thin, fortyish, with a long pink nose that seemed to be twitching with anxiety.

“Actually we’re not, sir,” said Dollinger. “Is something missing?”

“Camera. Somebody snatched it yesterday while I was having breakfast in there.” He nodded toward the dining room.

“Have you reported it to the management?” asked Auburn.

“Oh, sure. I reported it right after it happened. I just came back in today to check with them about it.”

“Are you staying in the hotel?”

“No, I work next door. I’m on my lunch hour.”

“Where exactly do you work, sir?”

“Ostroff Publishing, in the Moreland Building. We do specialty law reports.”

“Your name, sir?”

“Lance Holgarn.”

“You say somebody stole your camera yesterday morning in the dining room. Were you eating by yourself?”

“Yes. I put it down on the chair next to mine, and somebody must have snatched it while I was sitting right there, because—”

“Did it have any identification on it?”

“The case did, sure. My name and address.”

“We’ll keep our eyes open, Mr. Holgarn,” said Auburn, in what he hoped was a tone of polite dismissal. “But professional thieves are always operating in public places like this, and the chances are that your camera is a hundred miles from here by now. Without the case.” Since it was liver and onions day in the canteen at headquarters, Auburn had no trouble persuading Dollinger to eat lunch in the hotel dining room. The place was already half full. There were a few tourists, including a couple with two whining children strapped into highchairs, but most of the diners had the look of sales reps or people attending conferences or conventions. As they waited for a hostess to seat them, snatches of conversation came to Auburn’s ears.

“Once you burst that bubble...”

“Tell that to Lou Connors...”

“...hard enough to sell an intangible...”

“This guy’s a health nut...”

“...integrate some low-frequency variables...”

And then, at his elbow: “Smoking or non?” The hostess led them to a table half hidden in a recess, where Dollinger’s uniform wouldn’t be seen by the majority of the diners.

Sometimes it helped Auburn to bounce questions off Dollinger’s hard-headed and literal sense of reality, and sometimes it didn’t. “Fritz,” he asked, “why did he go through that particular window?”

“Because he was on that particular floor.”

“But why was he on that particular floor? He wasn’t staying in any of the rooms there. If he was dead before he went through the window, I can’t see somebody taking his body there from some other floor. Especially since there’s no service elevator.”

“Guest of a guest?”

Auburn mused. “The guy in the wheelchair might have pulled it off, in the middle of the night, if he had enough time. Or the elderly couple could have pulled it off, especially working together.”

“I noticed the old gent was pretty quick to tell us he shut the window,” said Dollinger. “Thus leaving open the possibility of suicide.”

“And also explaining why we might find his fingerprints on the window.”

The service was fast and the food decent. It was barely twelve-thirty when they left the dining room and made their way to the alley again, since that was the shortest way back to headquarters. As they crossed the loading platform, a kitchen employee was dumping garbage from one container to another.

Dollinger stopped dead in his tracks. “Sergeant, I just saw that guy’s camera! If I didn’t, I’ll never eat another piece of pecan pie as long as I live!”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Where’d you see it?”

“Right there in that mess of garbage. You can still see it. Hold it, sir.”

The kitchen employee had a patch over one eye, and apparently he knew only two words of English, “yes” and “no,” which he employed volubly, alternately, and irrelevantly.

At length they found someone in the kitchen who understood English, and who even pretended to understand their interest in the garbage. Dollinger dexterously retrieved the camera with a borrowed broom. Its case was missing and it was smeared with gravy and salad dressing, but it appeared to be undamaged, and to contain a roll of film of which only one frame had been exposed. The batch of garbage containing the camera had come from a public receptacle in the dining room itself, which was little used and was emptied only every two or three days.

They cleaned up the camera with a borrowed towel. “You going to take it back in to the desk or call the guy?” asked Dollinger.

“Neither.”

“Hey, I found it. Maybe there’s a reward.”

“We don’t even know if this is the camera Holgarn lost. Say it is. Why did he have his camera with him at breakfast? He’s not a traveler — he works next door. And why would a thief throw the camera in the trash and keep the case?”

“And, for that matter, who turns off the light when you shut the refrigerator? Were you thinking that the camera might have something to do with the guy on the roof?”

They came to the end of the alley and started along Fourth. The sidewalks teemed with shoppers, downtown workers on their lunch hour, and people out to enjoy the spring weather.

“If we turn it in,” said Auburn, “we’ll probably never know that. Sometimes cameras have things in them other than film.”

“You could get Sergeant Kestrel to open it in the darkroom. And then if there’s film in it, he could develop it.”

“I wonder what Froid would have to say about that.”

“What’s Freud got to do with it?”

“Not Freud. Froid — as in Mort D. The city prosecutor. Things like this make him nervous. If it were up to him, we’d all have the Miranda warning tattooed on the palms of our left hands.”

At headquarters they reported in to Lieutenant Savage without mentioning the camera. Since there was still no ID on the dead man, Savage assigned Dollinger to canvass the neighborhood of the hotel to see if anyone matching his description was missing, or if he could find an establishment where workers wore that type of uniform.

Auburn drove to the Amtrak station on Delaware to check out the locker whose key had been found on the body. The cache of stolen goods he found in that locker was one of the more memorable finds of his career. Stuffed into two large suitcases he discovered, besides clothing, toiletries, and other personal articles, an incredible horde of watches, cameras, and jewelry. There were stolen driver’s licenses, credit cards, and magnetic door passes from a dozen hotels. There were more than a hundred keys, a set of lock picks, and burglar’s tools. There wasn’t much cash, probably less than a thousand dollars, and it was all in Canadian currency. He found no drugs or firearms, but the two long-bladed steel knives in leather sheaths hadn’t been designed to whittle sticks or cut twine.

He shut the materials away in the locker and went to a phone to call Savage. “I think you’d better send Kestrel and Dollinger down here with a van, Lieutenant. As in moving.”

At three o’clock that afternoon, Auburn was called to a meeting in Savage’s office. Lieutenant Dunbar of the Robbery Division was also present.

“We still haven’t got an ID on him,” said Savage, “but he’s shaping up as a world-class professional thief, specializing in hotel work. Probably went in for a little smuggling, too. Anyway, his suitcases have false bottom panels, and he had a pair of shoes with hollow heels. Kestrel found some women’s clothes — a reversible raincoat and a reversible beret — and we thought for a while maybe he had a female accomplice. Then we found the wigs, and realized he was just a reversible guy.”

“Is there a chance one of those photo IDs was really his? I mean, they were all—”

“Please don’t say it, Cy,” interrupted Dunbar, who, like Auburn, was African-American. “Please don’t tell us all Asians look the same to you.”

“They’re still checking,” said Savage, “but the chances are very much against his having left any clue to his true identity in that cache. Stamaty brought over a set of his prints and we’re waiting now to run them through the FBI’s computer. If we draw a blank there we’ll let the Mounties have a look at them, since he’s apparently been operating up there, too.”

“Is the autopsy finished?” asked Auburn.

“Cause of death was brain and spinal cord injury. No certainty whether or not he was dead before he fell. Drug screen pending.”

Dunbar squirmed in his chair, which, like all the other seats in Savage’s office, was of unpadded wood. “So did he just try to knock off the wrong room at the wrong time,” he asked, “or did he fall foul of a business rival?”

“If the killer was a guest,” observed Auburn, “he could have checked out before the body was even found. How long do you think it would take to interview every guest in that hotel?”

“And how about getting a search warrant for every room in that hotel?” asked Dunbar. “If you remember your constitutional law...”

Savage ran a hand through his hair. “Those are the kind of questions I like to file away with the one about which tie I’m going to wear for my funeral,” he said. “Cy, I want you to go back over to the hotel and get that printout of all the guests that were checked in as of this time yesterday. Better try to get a list of the hotel staff, too.”

“Okay. What about these other activities they’ve got going on over there — a wedding reception, a jewelry liquidation...”

“He had all kinds of jewelry squirreled away in that locker,” said Dunbar. “My guys are trying to trace it right now. Is the jewelry for the auction on the premises overnight?”

“You’ve got me, Lieutenant, but I can—”

“Let’s let Cy concentrate on the homicide investigation, Howie,” said Savage. “When your guys are through cataloguing all the souvenirs in those suitcases, they can go over to the hotel and see if the auction people are missing anything.”

Before returning to the hotel, Auburn went to the forensic lab on the top floor to touch base with Kestrel. The camera had contained nothing but film. Auburn took one look at the print Kestrel had made of the single exposure on the film and started wondering all over again what Mort D. Froid was going to say about the whole proceedings.

The picture was a flash snapshot showing Mrs. Arthur Dwayle, the complaining tenant of Room 709, seated in earnest conversation with a younger but still middle-aged man on a sofa in the lower lounge of the Skyliner Hotel. Ten feet behind them, the man who now lay in the morgue, apparently dressed just as Auburn had last seen him, was doing something behind a chest-high partition, possibly watering or pruning the ornamental foliage that grew along its planter top.

When Auburn arrived back in the hotel lobby at four-fifteen, Travis Marth was still at the counter. Auburn considered showing him the photo but decided against it. Instead, he asked him to ring Room 709.

“I’ll see if they’re in. If you’ll step into the hall there, it’ll be the first phone on the left. Wait till it rings.”

Arthur Dwayle answered the phone. No, his wife wasn’t in. That woman had always been incapable of managing time. Or money. But he loved her dearly.

Auburn hung up, paused to remind Marth about the printout of hotel guests, and stepped next door to the Moreland Building.

He found Ostroff Publishing tucked away in a far corner of the top floor, and Lance Holgarn tucked away in the remotest corner of the suite, a cramped and stuffy office full of books and papers.

“I think we found your camera,” announced Auburn. “But we couldn’t tell whose it was, because the case is missing. So we went ahead and had the film developed. Is this the picture you took?”

Holgarn swallowed air. “I’m not sure.”

“You mean you’re not sure whether or not I’m going to arrest you if you admit taking the picture. I need some answers, Mr. Holgarn. Who are these people, and what do they mean to you? Start with the man at the back.”

“I don’t know his name.” He took out a big cotton handkerchief that was less than dazzlingly white and mopped his face and under his chin. “I swear I never knew his name. I never even knew what he looked like until yesterday.”

“Then why did you take his picture, and then throw away the camera and claim it was stolen?”

“I didn’t throw away the camera. He stole it. Or somebody working with him.”

Auburn was losing patience. That air-conditioning equipment on the roof should have been turned on a week ago, and there was nowhere to sit in Holgarn’s office except behind the desk. Standing up to interview somebody who was sitting down always made him feel like a teenager applying for a summer job.

“How about making some sense, Mr. Holgarn? I’m investigating a murder. If you can’t give me some straight answers right here and now, we’ll take a walk over to headquarters and—”

Holgarn eyed the photograph lying on his desk. “Was he the one that...”

“You tell me.”

“Okay.” He pulled himself together and made a decision. “First of all, I didn’t kill anybody. A couple of years ago a man phoned me here and told me he knew something that could get me fired and maybe worse. He said he’d keep quiet if I’d put ten twenty-dollar bills in an envelope and leave it in the planter in the lower lounge at the hotel at seven o’clock the next morning. Which I did.”

“What did he have on you?”

“I don’t have to tell you that.” On this point, at least, Holgarn was quite positive, as if the stacks and bundles of law reports with which his office was lined constituted a bulwark of case law behind which he felt invulnerable.

“How much have you paid him since then?”

“A couple thousand. Every few months he’d call again. This last time, I decided to hide out down there and catch him on film when he came to get the cash.”

“And?”

“And I did. He couldn’t have seen me when I shot the picture, but I’m sure he noticed the flash. He must have trailed me to the dining room and stolen the camera practically out from under my nose while I was eating breakfast.”

“Who are the other people in the picture?”

Holgarn studied the picture briefly and shrugged. “No clue.”

“And you don’t know who was blackmailing you, either? Couldn’t you guess who it was, from what he knew about you?”

“No, sir.”

“How did he sound on the phone? Foreign accent?”

“Yes, foreign. Maybe Indian. I don’t mean—”

“I know. Where were you last night?”

“Home.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Sure, if I have to. Where’s my camera?”

“At headquarters. You’ll get it back eventually if you can identify it.”

Auburn left Holgarn his card and returned to the hotel lobby.

“Don’t you ever eat or sleep?” he asked Marth.

“Sure, on the second Tuesday of each month. I’ve got your printout.” He handed Auburn several sheets of computer paper.

“Thanks. This ought to help. Any chance I could also get a list of the people working in the hotel?”

“Regular employees of Dorina, yes. Extra banquet servers and contract workers — you’d have to do your own digging.”

“The regular payroll will do for a start. What can you tell me about this jewelry auction you’ve got going on downstairs?”

“Been going on all week.” He picked up a brochure from a stack lying on the counter and handed it to Auburn. “You can have all of these you want. Today was the last day. I hope. They had their own security, but all those sparklers made me nervous.”

“I can imagine. Since you haven’t got a house detective.”

“Excuse me, were you looking for me?” The voice was like that of an elderly woman imitating a child of five. “I’m Grace Dwayle.”

“Yes, ma’am. Got a minute?” He put the brochure in his pocket and led her to a quiet corner of the lobby.

Seen up close, she had a dowdy and dissipated look. Auburn was reminded of the ancient gag line, “Her eyes were as red as rubies; her pearls looked like teeth.” Her clothes would have seemed funky on a woman half her age. Her perfume smelled like candy — the kind you buy in a five-pound bag around Easter for ninety-nine cents.

“I talked to your husband earlier today. I understand you had a noisy night.”

“Did we ever?” She rolled her eyes in the direction of the reception desk, as if Travis Marth had assigned them to the room beside the vending machines with malice aforethought.

“Did you hear anything going on out in the hall?”

“That man jumping out the window, you mean? No, we didn’t hear any of that. But the window was open this morning. Arthur closed it.”

He handed her the picture that Holgarn had taken. “What can you tell me about those people in the picture with you?” he asked.

She took one look at the picture and glowered. “Hey, are you really the heat, or are you a private eye? That brain-dead bag of bones I’m married to—”

“I’m the heat, ma’am.” He showed identification. “And I’m investigating the murder of the gentleman at the back of the picture.”

“You’re not wearing a ring.” Now she was five again. “Are you married?”

“Not so far.”

“Well, if you were, don’t you think, once in a while, you might want to have a little conversation or do a little business that you wouldn’t want your wife to know about?”

“I might.”

“Well, then.”

“Well what?”

“Yesterday I met somebody downstairs that I knew a long time ago. Somebody Arthur doesn’t know about. We sat down to talk for a minute, and the next thing we knew, here comes this busybody hanging around, pruning the plants or something, before eight o’clock in the morning—”

“The man at the back of the picture?”

“Yes. And then on top of that, some nitwit walks in with a camera and takes a picture of us sitting there.”

“Did you know him? The nitwit, I mean.”

“No. But he was just too much. I followed him to the dining room and grabbed his camera and threw it in the trash.”

“He could prosecute you for that.”

“He’d have to prove I did it first. It would be your word against mine. And obviously somebody found the camera, because they developed the picture.”

“What’s the name of the man you were talking to?”

“You know, I’ve been trying to remember that...”

“I thought you said you knew him.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Is he staying in the hotel?”

“I really couldn’t say. You don’t suppose I could have that picture, do you? As a souvenir?”

“I think I’ll hold on to it for a while. Maybe I can find somebody else who knows the man’s name.”

Their parting was distinctly unfriendly.

As he walked back to headquarters, he tried to make some sense out of the data he had so far. The murdered man was a professional thief who periodically hit the Skyliner Dorina Hotel. His thieving yielded portable articles of considerable value but probably not much cash.

Holgarn worked next door and sometimes breakfasted at the hotel. Somehow the thief learned something to Holgarn’s discredit and decided to pick up some pocket money at no risk to himself. His victim didn’t know his identity. Even if he were apprehended collecting a payoff, he could claim he’d found it by accident.

After reporting to Savage, Auburn sat down at his desk with some preliminary background material from Records, a report from Kestrel, and the printout of hotel guests. Chaz Billings and the Dwayles had clean slates. However, there didn’t seem to be any such organization as the American Society of Pen and Pencil Collectors, much less an eastern division of it, and the Chamber of Commerce had no information on any such convention in the area. Although Holgarn had no criminal convictions, he’d completed ten counseling sessions for spousal abuse seven years earlier, in compliance with a court order. If the dead blackmailer knew something worse than that about him, it hadn’t yet come to the attention of the authorities.

The uniform worn by the dead man had been manufactured in California, but the firm had outlets nationwide. The dust on it matched the dust from the window sill on the seventh floor of the hotel. Whoever had moved the table away from that window had been wearing gloves of leather or an excellent imitation.

Auburn turned his attention to the printout of yesterday’s census at the Skyliner Dorina. Almost his first glance turned up an oddity. The names of the Dwayles didn’t appear. Instead, Room 709 was booked in the name of Guenther Rainz, and so was a suite on the floor above. The name seemed familiar.

From his pocket Auburn pulled the brochure about the jewelry auction that had been going on all week at the hotel and examined it carefully for the first time. Not only was Guenther Rainz the name of the auctioneer, it was evident from his picture that he was the man Grace Dwayle had been talking to when Holgarn snapped his shutter.

The auction brochures had been printed on blanks supplied by the Skyliner Dorina. As Auburn ran his eye over the list of in-house phone numbers on the back, his ideas suddenly began to crystallize. He picked up his desk phone and dialed room service.

It was nearly 5:30 when he made yet another trip on foot to the hotel. The tide of vehicular and pedestrian traffic was in full flood as people going home from work jostled and eddied around people coming downtown for early dinner and theater dates.

No one was behind the reception desk as he crossed the lobby. The piano player looked tired.

His knock on the door of Room 701 interrupted Chaz Billings’s dinner. Auburn urged his host to continue with his meal and, without asking for permission, sat down in the armchair at the foot of the bed.

“Since I talked to you this morning, Mr. Billings, it’s been confirmed that the man whose body was found on the roof next door did go through the window out here in the hall. And that a table that’s supposed to be in front of the window was moved out of the way by somebody wearing leather gloves.”

Billings shook his head as if to express shock and disapproval that such evil could exist in the world. “Have you got any leads so far?”

“One or two. Most travelers don’t carry leather gloves around with them at this time of year. But you probably do, for those times when you have to propel your chair by hand — for example, when you don’t want to use the motor because of the noise it makes.”

“It’s not that noisy.” As if to demonstrate the point, Billings touched the controls and rolled back in a tight arc from the table where he was eating so that he faced Auburn.

“The dead man was a professional criminal,” Auburn continued, “and he seems to have had a professional’s knack for spotting other people’s criminal operations, and a flair for exploiting them to his own advantage. By all indications, he was killed in one of the rooms on this level, to which he’d gained access by posing as a waiter.

“This morning there were two trays on the floor outside your room, Mr. Billings. But according to room service, they only brought you one last night. The dead man brought the other one with him, didn’t he?”

Billings studied him in silence.

“Of course,” continued Auburn, “you’re going to tell me it was self-defense, but you have the right to remain silent—”

With a touch of his hand on the joystick, Billings sent the wheelchair hurtling straight at Auburn, closing the distance between them in less than a second. Auburn’s ankles were pinned firmly and painfully against the front of his chair and his arms were so encumbered that it was virtually impossible for him to draw his weapon.

Billings picked up an order book with a heavy aluminum case and swung it at his head with obvious homicidal intent. At the crucial moment Auburn’s pager went off, insistently audible above the whine of the wheelchair motor and the growl of its straining clutch. This distracted his assailant just enough that Auburn was able to duck the blow, but he knew the next time that metal case struck it would probably inflict a wound just like the one the dead man had sustained before he went through the window.

While talking with Billings moments before, he’d automatically noted the disposition of the controls on the arms of the wheelchair. The joystick was on the operator’s right, a mechanical brake on the left. Below and in front of the joystick, within a couple of inches of Auburn’s trapped left hand, was a heavy-duty toggle switch.

Even as he prepared to dodge another swing of the metal case, he threw the switch and strained against the bar that imprisoned his legs. The whine of the motor died and the chair rolled back just sufficiently for Auburn to free his right hand and unholster his service revolver. The second blow never fell, but Billings narrowly escaped being shot through the chest at point-blank range by a man who was angry and in pain.

Auburn used Billings’s phone to answer his page.

“Did you ever get any dinner, Cy?” was the first thing Savage asked.

“I’m looking at some dessert right now,” Auburn replied truthfully.

“I don’t know how much this is going to help,” said Savage, “but the dead man was an illegal alien named Amin Rajeev Sirkash. Back in the seventies he came to the States as an exchange student and got a degree in political science. Four years ago he came back with a political delegation as an interpreter, and just vanished into the underbrush.”

“And became a thief, smuggler, and blackmailer,” said Auburn. “He should have stopped short of armed robbery.”

When Savage arrived at Room 701 with a warrant and two uniformed officers, he found Billings, one wrist handcuffed to the spokes of his wheelchair, watching in mute rage while Auburn finished the dinner he’d ordered for himself from room service.

They discovered nothing incriminating among Billings’s effects until they turned their attention to the wheelchair. On a shelf behind the motor, two storage batteries were perched side by side, each conspicuously labeled “Explosion Hazard — Wear Eye Protection” in English, Spanish, and French. The switch Auburn had thrown was supposed to divert the motor feed from one battery to the other.

When they investigated the battery that had no juice, they found it to be a dummy crammed with precious stones, mostly unmounted. They also found the knife that Sirkash had used when, grossly underestimating the danger of such an enterprise, he had tried to rob Billings.

Questioned as to whether his presence in the hotel had any connection with the jewel auction going on there, Billings preserved a stolid silence. Auburn wasn’t altogether disappointed that Lieutenant Dunbar was going to have to explore that avenue.

Down in the lobby, evening had brought a new swirl and throb of activity, and a young woman in a lavender gown had taken over at the piano. The indefatigable Marth was back at his post. Scarcely a head was turned as a uniformed officer pushed Billings’s wheelchair to the desk and Savage checked him out of the hotel.

As he made his way around the fountain pool, Auburn ran into the Dwayles.

“You can keep your old picture now,” said Grace. “I got fired.” Her pouting demeanor was obviously put on, her words meant to tease and mystify.

Auburn asked the expected question.

“You know what a shill is, don’t you?” she countered. “Arthur and I used to have a grocery store. Since we retired, things get dull and the kitty gets hungry. Sometimes I do a little work for Guenther Rainz.”

“The guy in the picture with you. The guy you used to know.”

“You’re a bright boy. I go to auctions and act like some dotty old dowager with more money than I know what to do with. When things aren’t moving, he tips me the wink and I start bidding. By the time the auction’s over, all the other bidders in the room hate my guts, but if they ever dreamed Guenther and I were in cahoots, they’d string us both up on the spot.

“He’s the one that made me go after that camera and ditch it. And when I told him you got the picture anyway, he gave me my walking papers.”

Auburn didn’t care to explain the picture to Savage. And he cringed at the thought of the mischief this formidable and amoral harpy might get into if deprived of her relatively harmless role as a booster at jewelry auctions.

He gave her the picture.