Murder on a Hot Tin Roof

Chapter 13

AS WE WERE HEADING ACROSS THE lobby toward the police station exit, Abby pulled me to a stop in the middle of the floor. “Hold on a second, Paige,” she said. “I want to talk to that cute officer at the front desk again. I just got a cover assignment from

True Police magazine, so I really do need a new model, you dig? And he would be perfect for the job. I want to see if I can get him to pose for me in uniform.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “And after that, you can see how long it takes you to get him

out of uniform.”

I thought my snippy remark would make her angry, but it didn’t. She gave me a cunning wink and replied, “Just one of the perks of my occupation.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t need me to help you plan your perking. Go ahead, Ab. Talk to Officer Longface as long as you want. I’m going home.”

“Okay,” she chirped, obviously glad to be getting rid of me. “See you later, gator.”

I was glad to get rid of her, too. Trying to conduct a serious murder investigation with Abby in tow was like standing under a palm tree during a thunderstorm, waiting for the coconuts to break off and fall on your head.

It was calmer and quieter outside than in. The streets and sidewalks were practically deserted. It was late Sunday morning on a holiday weekend, and much too hot to be out on the move. I turned right at the corner and began the two-block trek to Seventh Avenue, wondering if I could make it that far without a camel and a canteen.

I did. And when I found myself at the corner of Seventh and Christopher-at the wide-open entrance to Stewart’s Cafeteria-I staggered inside to get a glass of iced tea. And to read my morning paper. And to see if Blackie and Blondie were there. And to check out the clientele and the chicken run for suspicious-looking characters.

Blackie was there, but Blondie wasn’t. I wished it were the other way around. (Blondie had been the talkative one, if you recall, and Blackie’s lips had been sealed tighter than a pharaoh’s tomb.) I nodded to the ebony-haired busboy (there certainly wasn’t any point in questioning him again!), bought an enormous glass of iced tea at the counter, and then carried it toward the bleachers-the chairs and tables near the row of windows that looked out on the now-vacant sidewalk where, according to Abby, the chickens usually liked to strut.

There were three customers sitting in that area of the cafeteria. All of them were male. Two were together at the table nearest the door, chowing down on bacon and eggs (sunny-side-up, if you must know). The third man was sitting sideways at the very last table in the back, nibbling on a piece of toast and staring out the window in a trance. I couldn’t see his face full-on, but one peep at his pudgy, pug-nosed profile, and his thick, slicked-back blond hair, and I knew who he was.

“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Sinclair!” I said, approaching Willy’s table with a big smile on my face. (And it wasn’t a fake smile, either. For some reason I didn’t fully understand, I was genuinely glad to see the strange, funny-looking fellow.) “Remember me?” I asked. “I met you yesterday at the… uh… at the…” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. At the bloodbath? At the slashing? At the scene of your neighbor’s hideous murder? Nothing seemed acceptable. I finally gave up and asked, “May I join you?”

Willy had turned his head toward me, but he was still in a trance. His enormous blue eyes were looking straight through me, and his mind was someplace else entirely. He took a tiny bite of his toast and chewed it vigorously, but he seemed totally unaware of his actions. Setting my tea down on his table, and my newspaper and purse down on an extra chair, I took the seat directly across from him and leaned my face so close to his I could have counted all his freckles.

“Hello, Willy?” I said, peering smack into his distant eyes. “Are you okay?”

The nearness of my voice (not to mention my nose) must have jarred his sleeping senses, because he came to in a start and focused on the first thing that came into his sight-my looming kisser.

“Eeeeeek!” he shrieked, looking shocked and horrified-as if he’d just seen a ghost. (I guess my makeup had worn off.) “What are you doing? Get away from me! Shoo!”

“Sorry, Willy,” I said, backing off in a flash. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was just trying to get your attention.”

“You sure succeeded!” he cried, voice still shrill and trembling. “Mercy me! I almost fainted dead away.” His Southern accent was more noticeable now than it had been yesterday.

“You were lost in another world,” I explained, “and you didn’t respond when I spoke to you. I got a little nervous.”

“Yes, but

I’m the nervous one now!” he squealed, throwing his hands up in the air. His piece of toast flew out of his fingers and thwacked against the wall behind him.

“I can see that,” I said, smiling.

Willy leaned over, picked the toast up from the floor, and daintily dropped it on his empty plate. “Well, I’ve got a lot on my mind, you know! The police think

I killed Gray! You should have seen how they treated me yesterday. They gave me a really hard time after you left.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, checking his face and arms for scratches and bruises. He was clean as a whistle. “They didn’t hit you, did they?”

“No, this time they just pummeled me with questions and accusations. For hours and hours and hours. I was so scared and exhausted when they left, I curled up in a ball on the carpet and cried myself into a coma.” He gave me a shamefaced smile, then dabbed the perspiration off his upper lip with his napkin. “And I stayed there all night long, honey. I didn’t get up off the floor until six thirty this morning, when Flannagan phoned and started pounding me with questions again.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Humpf! You name it, he asked it. First yesterday, and then again this morning. How long had I known Gray? Did we spend much time together? Am I a homo? Was Gray a homo? Had we been screwing each other? Was I jealous of his other boyfriends? Did we hang out at the same bars? Did we eat at the same restaurants? Was I obsessed with him? Was he getting sick of me? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? What did I want from him? Did I want him dead? Did I kill him for revenge or just for fun? Did I enjoy gashing his throat, and stabbing him in the gut, and watching his blood spill out on the floor?”

I hated to admit it, but these were the same questions I wanted to ask Willy-except I would have phrased them in a gentler way, and omitted the last three altogether. (Which compels me to make yet another admission: As much as I’ve always prided myself on not jumping to hasty conclusions, I had already made up my mind that this whimsical little potbellied man was no murderer.)

“Sounds pretty rough, Willy,” I said, reaching across the table to touch his stubby, freckled hand. I felt very sorry for him-both for the way he’d been treated by the police and for the way he would always be treated by society. “But you can’t really blame Flannagan for asking so many questions,” I added. “It’s his job, after all. He’s the one who has to track down the killer.”

“Yes, but he’s convinced

I’m the killer, so how much tracking do you think he’s going to do? I’ll tell you how much! None! He’s just going to hammer me with relentless gibes and interrogations until I cave in and confess to a crime I didn’t-and never, ever, ever would-commit.” He paused for a few seconds while he gnawed one pinkie nail to the nub. “You want to know what he was grilling me about at six thirty this morning, honey? My blood type, of all things! Can you believe it?! What does that have to do with anything? He even demanded the name of my doctor so he could get positive proof.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked. “Do you even know what your blood type is?”

“I sure do, honey,” he proudly pronounced. “I donated to the big Red Cross blood drive last month, and they gave me the best grade of all-an A.”

I SAT AND TALKED TO WILLY FOR ANOTHER half-hour or so, trying to steady his frazzled nerves and dig up some new leads at the the same time. I failed at both endeavors. Willy remained as jumpy as a jackrabbit, and I was left as clueless as a Keystone Cop. Aside from his incriminating blood type (which, in the interest of preserving Willy’s shaky sanity, I chose not to explain the importance of just then), he didn’t give me any new information at all. (I’m talking zilch. Zero. Or, as Abby would say,

bupkes.)

I asked Willy if he’d ever met any of Gray’s friends or relatives-specifically his girlfriend, Cupcake, or his Actors Studio cohort, Binky, or a persistent fellow named Randy, or somebody calling herself Aunt Doobie-but Willy swore he’d never even heard those names, let alone met the people they belonged to. He also insisted that-in spite of his own enormous crush on “the gorgeous golden-skinned god next door”-he had no firsthand (or any

other-hand) knowledge of Gray’s true sexual proclivities.

After all was said and done, I concluded from our brief but intimate interview that Willy hadn’t known Gray very well at all.

Hoping the newspaper would offer a new clue or two, I opened the copy of the

Daily Mirror I’d bought that morning, and scanned the pages for news of Gray’s murder. The story appeared on page seven, under the headline BROADWAY ACTOR SLAIN, and I read it quickly. The article was, like its headline, short and to the point, revealing nothing that I didn’t already know. The two women who discovered the body were mentioned but not, thank God, by name. I passed the paper over to Willy and he read the story, too, much more slowly than I had, chewing on his nails the whole time. We didn’t have much to say after that.

Willy and I left the cafeteria together, but parted company outside, on the abandoned chicken-run sidewalk, after exchanging phone numbers and promising to keep each other posted on any new developments in the case. Willy went home to “wash out a few underthings” and to make himself a “monster mint julep,” while I scooted over to Sheridan Square to catch a subway train uptown.

It was time to pay a call on Aunt Doobie.

THE MAYFLOWER HOTEL WAS ON CENTRAL Park West at 61st Street. I walked the block and a half from the Columbus Circle subway stop to the entrance of the hotel with my nerves tied up in knots. Was Aunt Doobie still a registered guest? Would she be in her room? How could I get her to talk about Gray? If she was really his aunt, she would probably be mourning his death. Should I give her my real name and tell her why I came? What would I do if she had already checked out? How would I ever find her again?

I ventured into the rather drab and narrow lobby, hurried past the news and candy counter, then made a beeline for the elevators on the right. Both cars were open and attended by uniformed operators. I stepped into the first one and asked to be taken to the ninth floor-where, I assumed, room 96 would be located.

“Sí, señorita,” said the skinny young Puerto Rican operator. He pulled the elevator door closed and then yanked and latched the metal gate across the door. Slowly cranking the brass control lever to the right, he turned and gave me a sly wink as the elevator began its jerky ascent. Then, turning back around to face the door, he mumbled something that sounded like “cute chicky” under his breath, and released a series of soft, nearly inaudible clucking sounds.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! The cocky little fellow was coming on to me! Had flirting with strangers become a national epidemic, or had he just caught the bug from Abby?

The elevator boy lurched his lever farther to the right, sending us into a much swifter ascent, and then, when we reached the ninth floor, he brought the car to a stop so suddenly my stomach did a somersault and sank like lead to my toes. He was showing off, I realized. He had been driving fast just to impress me. And when he gave me another wink and opened the gate and the door to let me out, I saw that he’d overshot the landing by a good eight inches. I had to step down to exit the elevator. (I’ve met some smooth operators in my day, but this character wasn’t one of them.)

Still feeling a bit woozy from the stomach-turning touchdown, I stumbled along the dimly lit, red-carpeted hallway to my right, looking for the door marked 96. I found it quickly, but didn’t knock right away. I just stood there like a dope, taking a few deep breaths and staring at the room number as if it were an indecipherable algebra equation. Finally, after several more moments of nervous hesitation, I raised my hand and rapped my knuckles on the door.

No answer.

I knocked again.

Still no answer. I put my ear to the jamb and listened for noises inside the room, but all I could hear was the thumping of my own heart. I tapped on the door again and again, but there was no response at all. Finally accepting the evidence that nobody, not even Aunt Doobie, was there, I groaned and turned back toward the elevators. But right before I walked away, just for fun (okay, spite), I gave the door one last knock. A really loud one this time.

To my enormous, eye-popping surprise, the door flew open and an exceptionally good-looking man with a towel wrapped around his waist started yelling his head off at me. “Shut up, already!” he roared. “Stop that goddamn knocking and get lost! I’m trying to get some sleep in here!” His brown eyes were blazing and his bare chest was heaving. With his dark wavy hair falling down over his forehead and his lips pulled back in a toothy snarl, he looked like a cross between Dean Martin and a rabid Great Dane.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, sir!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I must’ve made a mistake. I thought this was my Aunt Doobie’s room.”

Was it my imagination, or did his eyes grow fiercer when I mentioned my dear auntie’s name? Did he know who Aunt Doobie was? Was he related to her in some way? Was he, perchance, Uncle Doobie?

“You’re nuts,” he growled. “Do I look like somebody’s aunt?”

I had to admit that he didn’t. There was nothing at all aunt-like about his broad shoulders and brawny biceps.

“You’d better go down to the desk and get the

right room number,” he said, pulling his shoulders straighter, and his towel tighter around his hips. “There’s no Aunt Doobie here.”

“But this is room ninety-six, isn’t it?” I asked, doing my best to look and act like an anxious niece. “That’s what it says on the door. And that’s where I was told to come. My cousin Gray said Aunt Doobie was expecting me.” (If the first bell doesn’t ring loud enough, try a gong.)

“Gray?” he muttered.

“Yes,

Gray,” I stressed, studying his face for a reaction. “Gray Gordon.”

If the name meant anything to him, he showed no sign. “Look, I don’t care who told you to come here,” he said, glowering, “but whoever it was made a mistake. This is

my room, not your aunt’s. And I booked it so I could get some sleep. So will you please get the hell out of here and go bother somebody else? I’m going back to bed.”

To emphasize the import of his words, he stepped back from the door and then closed it, like a book, in my face.