Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 10

Milo and I walked through the old wing and into the loggia. At the end of the passageway, Alicia Bogomil smoked and harassed a potted palm with ash-flicks.

He asked her about the Birkenhaars.

She said, “No idea, never met them.”

“You have a key to the bungalows?”

She dipped into a pocket. “Got a master. Something off about these people?”

“They requested The Numbers, presented false passports, and paid with a bogus credit card.”

“That’s pretty criminal,” said Bogomil. “You think they could’ve been stalking Miss Mars? Was there a burglary?”

“So far we can’t verify anything was taken. The front-desk guy who checked them in didn’t seem to know much about them, either.”

“Who’s that?”

“Max Bretter.”

“Max,” she said, “is an okay guy but a drooling green chimp could walk right by and he wouldn’t notice. I’ll find out who he was working with that day and let you know if it’s an improvement.”

“Thanks, Alicia. Could I borrow that key?”

“Sure.”

“Where’ll you be so I can return it?”

“Don’t bother, keep it,” she said. “There’s a drawerful of masters in the security office. Which is basically a closet on the first floor of The Can.”

“Really,” said Milo. “Tight system.”

“Worse than that, Loo, you probably won’t even need a key, the bungalows have crappy old locks, a hairpin’ll do the trick.”

“Wonderful,” said Milo.

“Yeah, we ain’t Fort Knox, I told DeGraw he should beef up.” She made angular motions with one hand, spoke like a robot: “Words. Hit. Wall. Bounce. Off. These suspects, they bring their own wheels?”

“Bretter didn’t know.”

“I’m asking because if they used one of the drivers who hangs around, there’s a specific guy who might be able to help you. Leon Creech, he did MP work in the military back in the day, likes to think he’s sharp-eyed.”

“He’s not?”

“Well you know,” she said. “He’s kind of old. He used to drive Miss Mars back when she wanted to be driven, so that could be a bonus.”

“Any idea where he took her?”

“Never saw any shopping bags but she’d bring dessert back for the staff, so dinner. Sweet woman, whoever did this should be strung up by the you-know-whats.”

I said, “Why’d she stop going out?”

“She didn’t look depressed if that’s what you mean,” said Bogomil. “Maybe she just got tired, you know? Anyway, Leon liked Miss Mars so if he saw something hinky about your suspects he’ll tell you.”

“Where can we find him?”

“He used to be here regularly,” she said. “Lately, he comes and goes because there isn’t much business. But I did see him a couple days ago. That’s why I’m thinking maybe he drove your suspects.”

“Does he work for a company?”

“Uh-uh, independent, drives an old-school Town Car, got to be thirty years old but he keeps it up nice. I’ll go see if I can find a number for him.”

“Big help, Alicia. You want that recommendation, it’s yours.”

She grinned. “Who knows, maybe I’ll take you up on it, Loo.”

As we approached Cinco, Milo gloved up. No hairpin required, the door was unlocked.

“Hundred-year-old woman with doors that can be opened by a kid,” he said. “For all we know she left hers open. Guess she felt safe.”

I followed him inside. The layout was similar to Thalia’s but on a smaller scale, with half a chipped Formica counter in lieu of a kitchenette, no fireplace, cheap-looking furniture from the seventies, and a low, dim bedroom barely able to accommodate a queen bed.

The feel of a budget summer rental gone stale. But the smell was anything but stale: acetone after-bite augmented by fake pine essence.

Some whiz-bang, industrial-strength deodorizer/cleanser favored by the hospitality industry, who knew what toxins were bouncing around.

The bed was stripped. The toilet was banded with one of those paper things that’s meant to imply hygiene. Milo opened the pull-out sofa; nothing inside. He searched drawers and cabinets. “Nada. No prints other than Thalia’s and Refugia’s in her room and they zapped this place, but let’s see if anything comes up.”

He made the call to the lab. No availability until later today.

“What a dump,” he said. “My eyes are watering, let’s get outta here.”

The walk to Uno was brief and I said so.

He said, “The better to stalk, murder, and rob you, Red Riding Hood? Let’s say she was the target. How would these alleged Austrians know her?”

I said, “One or all of them could’ve had a personal connection to Thalia.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, except she said she had no family.”

“She might not have wanted to acknowledge a black-sheep relative. And if one or more showed up, that could’ve worried her enough to call me.”

“You, not us, because we’da told her to get a security system and a noisy dog or just move the hell out.”

“Or,” I said, “she wanted reassurance that there was nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, she was wrong.”

“Nasty kin,” he said. “If it’s the Birkens, could be one, two, or three of them.”

“Teamwork would’ve made it easy,” I said. “Whoever wasn’t smothering her could look for the money.”

“Someone that frail, not a chance in hell she could defend herself. Too bad she didn’t put a name on whoever worried her.”

“She probably intended to,” I said. “We were just beginning.”

No uniform stood guard at Uno but the yellow tape hadn’t been disturbed. Milo yanked it free, tried the door to the screen porch, found it locked and used the master key. Ungraced by Thalia, the peacock chair looked shabby, the cane splintering and stained.

Milo unlocked the bungalow door and stood on the threshold. Thalia’s furniture and lamps were wrapped in thick plastic tarps secured by duct tape.

I said, “If there’s time, we could check her reading material.”

“Why?”

“It could tell us something about her.”

“Sure, do it. I’m gonna start here, with a recheck of the cabinets, her fridge, all that good stuff.”

Thalia’s taste in reading was mostly nonfiction. Travel, fashion, landscaping, food and wine, music, biographies of historical figures with an emphasis on presidents and notable women.

Several additional shelves were given over to city accounting and zoning manuals, volumes on real estate law, curling copies of a magazine aimed at landlords called Apartment Age. Below that was a small fiction section. Several of the classics but mostly a collection of crime novels from the forties and fifties. Not just Chandler and the other usual suspects. The authors Thalia had read — Horace McCoy, David Goodis, Jonathan Latimer, Fredric Brown — suggested a depth of interest in the genre.

Or memories rooted in that period?

Either way, she seemed to have no taste for real-life evil; not a single volume of true crime.

Perhaps her concerns about an actual psychopath had been recent.

Or nonexistent.

I’d read the spine of every book, was standing near the bookcase unable to conjure the merest what-if, when Milo charged in breathing audibly.

“Nothing.”

He began searching behind and under nightstands, flipping corners of rugs, peering under the canopy bed, checking the carved posts to see if they rotated, lifting the mattress.

Emptying drawer after drawer only to snuffle and proceed to the next futile step.

Some cops toss a room with the abandon of deranged adolescents. My friend’s grooming may come across as hastily assembled but he puts things back exactly as he found them.

Considerate detective. The dead get most of his respect.

His industriousness spurred me to reexamine the books, removing each volume, fanning it open and shaking to dislodge anything secreted between pages.

No hidden treasure but as I neared the end of the mystery section I spotted handwriting on the title page of a small leather-bound book.

Small because it was the original edition — a cheap paperback, still bearing its lurid covers behind panels of tooled black morocco.

Robber’s Destiny by a writer named Alden Smithee.

The inscription was blue block letters, ink laid down unevenly by an unsteady hand.

I’d read a lot of pulp fiction, keeping busy between sets when I worked my way through college playing guitar in pickup wedding bands. All had been borrowed from an old, rheumatic sax player. Stan something, a recovered alcoholic who sidestepped the other musicians’ methods of killing time — smoking weed and emptying airline vodka bottles.

I’d come to enjoy the fist-in-the-face syntax, overwrought plots evoking the late-late-night TV movies my father watched when his own booze addiction got in the way of sleep.

But I’d never seen this one or heard of the author. I ran my gloved finger over the leather. Robust and pebbly, bordered in still-bright gold. Someone taking the time to give a dime novel a fancy re-bind.

I began paging through the tough, urgent prose and the anything-but-subtle story line took shape: jewel heist gone bad, the usual noir combo of seduction, betrayal, and violent death.

Did the inscription have anything to do with Thalia? For all I knew, she’d picked the book up in a secondhand store.

I had a third go at every other book in her collection. No additional leather or inscriptions.

Midget. Easy to see someone her size acquiring the moniker.

If so, who was Monark?

I showed the message to Milo, who was rubbing his back and looking ready to spit.

He said, “A king who can’t spell? When was it published?”

I turned to the copyright page. “ ’Fifty-three. Probably not long after she moved here.”

“Yeah, well, I was hoping for something more recent. Let’s try to find that driver, Creech.”

As we neared The Can, Alicia Bogomil hurried toward us waving a bright-green Post-it. “No address on Leon but here’s his number, he’s listed.”

Milo gave her a quick hug that made both of them blush.

DMV gave up Leon Creech’s address on Wooster Street just south of Olympic, and when Milo phoned, Creech answered.

“Alicia told me. I was wondering if you folks would call. Seeing as I knew Miss Thalia pretty darn well.”

“We’d appreciate talking to you, Mr. Creech. Could we drop by your home right now?”

“Why not? I’m not going anywhere. You over at the hotel?”

“We are.”

“Twenty-three minutes on a good day,” said Leon Creech. “Longer if people are driving like idjuts.”