TWENTY
A Windowless Room on 42nd Street
IT WAS AFTER 2:00 in the morning when Calvino quietly unlocked the door to his room at the guesthouse and slipped inside. Before he found the light switch on the wall, an old, foul smell mugged him in the dark. He kicked the door closed behind him and moved to the side. Like most flophouses at night, the room floated in near darkness, black enough for any occupant to qualify as legally blind. He reached inside his jacket, pulled out the Walther and crouched low, listening and waiting for his eyes adjust. Nothing moved. He heard pipes rumbling in the ceiling. He inched forward, staying low, until he reached the chair in front of the window.
Slowly he rose to his feet, leaned forward and pushed back the curtains. Light from the outside filtered through, revealing Rob’s body, slumped to one side in the chair. Defying gravity, caught in one of those stop-action controlled falls, he looked pinned in place like a collector’s butterfly. Calvino felt for a pulse on his neck. The skin felt clammy. Pulling his hand away, he holstered the Walther.
Calvino made his way back to the door and switched on the light. The first thing he saw was how blood had pooled on the floor around the legs of the chair. A pillow with a black burn mark partially covered a gun. Crawling around in the dark, Calvino had managed to track through blood, staining his pant knees and cuffs. Bits of stuffing from the pillow hung from the entry wound in the side of Rob’s head, making it look a little like a burrow hole used as a bird’s nest. The pillow would have muffled the sound of the shot.
Calvino went into the bathroom, took off his trousers and washed the blood and brains from them. He put them back on and walked back into the bedroom.
Suicide? When the world lost its power to enchant, and imaginary and real enemies merged on a dark brick wall, killing oneself floated to the top of the option list. But just because suicide was an option didn’t mean someone like Rob would have acted on it. Calvino searched the room again. The kid had been depressed and talked about Mya dumping him. Young men have killed themselves over rejected love from the beginning of time. Rob was a perfect candidate for a suicide verdict. Only it didn’t wash with Calvino. He asked himself, when did anyone ever put a pillow against his own head before blowing out his brains? And who ever tossed his own room before killing himself? The sheets had been stripped from the twin beds and thrown on the floor. The mattresses were pulled off the beds and cut open, the springs and stuffing spilling out like the guts of an animal hit by a speeding truck. Someone had been looking for something.
Calvino walked to the chair and had a closer look at the body. Rob’s right hand hung lifeless above the gun. The hand of the deceased and the weapon used to inflict death matched in the perfect suicide arc; it looked like the gun had dropped on the floor after the shot had been fired. The last image he had of Rob was of him miming suicide by gun.
“What’s happened here, Rob?” Calvino muttered, sitting on the edge of the bed with no mattress. He ran a hand through his hair. A man’s fist doesn’t turn into a gun. Dreams are dreams, play is play, and dead is dead. Calvino pulled out his cell phone. Colonel Pratt came on the line. There was a lot of background noise.
“I’m looking at a body with a bullet wound in the head,” said Calvino. “It’s the kid.”
“Hold on,” said Colonel Pratt.
The Colonel walked outside the bar and kept on walking until the noise streaming from the club was swallowed up by the night.
“Are you okay?”
First, control the situation by establishing the caller is safe. Even with Calvino, the police training automatically took over.
“I was out when it happened.”
“It must be connected with what happened in Chinatown,” said Pratt.
“Whoever it was knew what they were doing. They made it look like suicide. Anyone profiling Rob would buy the suicide theory.”
Calvino sounded frustrated, angry and desperate.
“That’s what thugs like that do, Vincent. I’m sorry about the kid. He got involved with people he should have avoided. And once he took that step, he was a dead man walking. Rob knew the score. Be honest with yourself. You saw this coming.”
Colonel Pratt had put the words as clearly as a man could, words that described Rob’s world and his short-lived place in it. Hard words, and only a few of them had been needed because the truth boiled free of the frills.
“I shouldn’t have gone out.”
“Sooner or later it would have happened. Head toward my hotel. Phone me when you’re about to arrive. I’ll go outside and meet you. That way it will look like we’ve come in together. Half an hour.”
As Calvino started to put the cell phone into his jacket pocket, his hand found the book inside. Pulling out the Chekhov biography, he recalled the playwright’s famous gun rule—show a loaded gun on the stage, and there’s no choice but to use it later in the play. Did the rule apply to a gun made from a fist? As in Chekhov’s time, the rich didn’t need to search their dreams for hints on how to steal and exploit. They did it with eyes wide open.
He slipped the book back into his pocket and quickly packed his clothes in his suitcase. He removed the visible evidence that he’d ever been in the room. No one would be dusting for fingerprints. No Burmese CSI investigators would be arriving to search with a fine-tooth comb for hair, skin or saliva. The death scene would get the usual procedure—the what-you-see-is-what-you-get system of
investigation—and what the police would see would depend on who paid them to see or not to see. Someone would dream the death, and the dream would be the report that had the weight to close the case.
Calvino took a final look at the
body. How would he explain what happened to Alan Osborne? He thought that was likely the one person who would comprehend the situation—understand the ties between players in the visible world and criminal gangs. Those worlds were so tight that a razor blade couldn’t be slipped between them.
It was late, and he passed no one on the stairs as he descended to the lobby. Whoever had shot the bullet into Rob’s brain had known what they were doing. In the bookstore he’d heard about Yadanar’s pledge to protect Rob. Nothing was going to happen to him. Promise. She might have told him where Rob was staying, thinking he would send someone to watch over him. But Calvino had no evidence she’d said anything, or if she had, that Yadanar had a reason to have Rob killed. Other than Mya, the only other people who knew Rob’s location were Colonel Pratt and Jack Saxon. Neither the Colonel nor Saxon would have told anyone. Calvino felt an aching feeling that he’d overlooked something; he suffered from the worst of all anxieties—the possibility of another that he had overlooked. The prospect haunted him as he walked towards the guesthouse.
Arriving at the lobby, Calvino walked to the reception desk. The old lady refused to look up from her novel. He cleared his throat. She ignored him. Her steadfast refusal to give him even a sideways glance surprised him. They had spoken more than once. It was small talk, granted, but they’d made enough of a connection for her behavior now to seem odd. Calvino was pretty sure that out of the corner of her eye she had seen him as he approached. Her faced was twisted in frightened mask, capturing the expression of someone who desperately wanted to crawl out of her skin, but there was no other skin to crawl into. She was attempting to pretend that Calvino had never arrived at the guesthouse.
“Still reading The Toll-Gate?” he said. “I thought you’d have finished it by now.”