Valley of Lights

SEVEN

I hit paydirt with my twelfth residential motel, just as I was starting to get weary and to believe that I was taking a long shot that would get me nowhere. Most of the desk monkeys so far had known me already, which meant that I didn't have to show my badge and make it official, thereby risking the trouble that this might cause if word ever got back; but the young man behind the counter at the Sunset Beach Motor Court didn't know me, and I didn't know him. He was tall and skinny and wore glasses and had the air of somebody with an education who hadn't been able to make any good use of it. He was two or three years too old for this job to be any kind of a stop-gap.

I said, 'I'd like to see your registration cards for the last couple of days.' I showed him my ID as I said it. He seemed to shrink back nervously, as if I was suddenly giving off heat.

'Uh, listen,' he said, 'let me get the regular manager in on this one. I'm just relief…'

'No, you listen,' I said patiently. 'I'll start again. I want to see your registrations for the last couple of days. I'm looking for a white male, alone and without luggage, five-eleven, medium build, dark hair. He's kind of pale and wasted-looking, as if he's been lying around in the dark for a long time.' Which, of course, he had; I was describing the body in the business suit that I'd last seen slumped in a Paradise chair with urine stains down its pants, the one that had suddenly upped and walked out of County General within moments of Gilbert Mercado hitting the concrete. One of my details seemed to strike a spark with the clerk, and I said, 'You've seen him?'

'Kind of white like a slug?' he said.

'And probably no car. Is he in now?'

'No. He went out.'

'When did he arrive?'

He moved down the counter to an indexed carousel. 'Mid-evening,' he said, starting to check through, 'the night before last. Right at the end of my shift.' He pulled out a card, and passed it down the counter to me. 'He paid cash in advance. I saw a gold American Express card in his wallet, but he didn't use it.'

For the simple reason that it had been stolen, I was thinking. He'd taken it, along with most of the rest of a surgery chief's clothing, from a locker in the scrub facility right next to the Operating Rooms. According to the surgeon, he'd have about two hundred and fifty dollars in cash on him. When I heard that, I knew I'd taken up the wrong profession.

Bodysnatching, huh?

The card told me nothing; utterly anonymous handwriting, a name I'd never heard of, an out-of-state address that was probably false. I said, 'Let's go and take a look at his room, shall we?'

'Hey,' he began, 'I don't know,' but I said quietly, 'Come on. This could be serious,' and that swayed him.

We went out into the afternoon heat, which struck like a physical blow after the air-conditioned chill of the reception block. The Sunset Beach had been designed around a Hawaiian theme; I could remember when it had been the Waikiki Royal and, I think, the Honolulu before that. A couple of big transplanted palms, higher than the roof line, leaned over a kidney-shaped pool with a scattering of white metal tables and chairs around its edge; from the more expensive rooms you could walk straight out onto the green carpet, while the rest of them looked down from two sides.

'I assumed his bags were in the car,' the clerk said as we stepped through an iron gate to cross the pool enclosure. 'But if he didn't actually have a car…'

'Did he go out yesterday morning?'

'I don't know, I wasn't here. I saw him coming back, though. He was kind of weaving across under the lights, as if he'd been drinking.'

'Did you smell drink on him?'

'No sir. I wasn't going to get close enough to find out.'

The room was up on the second floor, reached by an outside balcony with a bamboo rail. The curtains were drawn, and there was a Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the doorknob. We ignored it.

I wasn't sure what I was going to find; at first it looked as if I was going to find nothing. The room didn't even look occupied, the bed unslept in. It had a deep-pile carpet and a color TV, quite a step up from the Paradise; I thought that perhaps he simply lived as well as he could on whatever money came his way, no saving and no planning, just taking it one day at a time.

There were no windows in the bathroom, but an extractor fan started to whirr as I turned on the light. Again everything was clean and untouched-looking but here there was a faint, sour smell of vomit in the air that the fan couldn't quite clear. No marks or stains on the toilet bowl.

From behind me the clerk said, puzzled, 'There are no towels here. There should be a full set.'

I looked around, and he was right. The little guest soaps were still in their wrappings, but the towel rail was empty. 'Maybe he used them,' I said.

'For what?'

But I didn't answer. I got down on my hands and knees to take a closer look at the wall behind the toilet. This was plain white plaster, not tile, and as such it wouldn't be easy to wipe clean; and there, sure enough, I found some faint red-brown splashes. Blood splashes, I'd have bet on it. They were so slight that you'd have to be looking in order even to notice them.

The tall skinny clerk was watching me, curious. Getting back to my feet, I said, 'Listen to me. I'm going to wait here until he gets back. I don't want anybody else to know about this, and I want you to keep out of his way. You're nervous, and it's going to show.'

'You're absolutely right I'm nervous. What did he do?'

'Credit card fraud,' I said, and saw him relax as surely as if someone had let some of the air out of him. Credit card fraud's a commonplace in the motel business, and suddenly wouldn't seem like any big mystery.

'So that's why he paid cash?' the clerk said. 'Because he knew you were after him?'

'That,' I conceded, 'and a few other things.'

He went back to his work, and I went down to the pool. There were plenty of tropical-style bushes around, but this wasn't amateur night; instead of skulking and drawing attention to myself, I picked out a lounger and angled it so that I'd be able to keep an eye on the target room without having to turn my head. Then, with a can of Doctor Pepper from the dispenser under the arch and a magazine that someone else had left lying around, I stretched out like any resident with an afternoon on his hands and nowhere in particular to go.

I was there for quite a while. I may even have dozed off at one point, because suddenly the sky was darkening and the pool area was floodlit and there was somebody in the water swimming circuits with strong, even strokes. It was some blond guy with a deep tan. Not the one I was looking for.

He came by about fifteen minutes later.

I heard the iron gate behind me, but I didn't turn. Moments later he was walking past, not ten feet away – closer than I'd have liked, but it gave me the chance for a good look at his back. The four hundred dollar jacket made me certain that this was him, even without having seen his face; it was right for the description, and wrong for someone so much in need of a haircut.

He went under the arch, and didn't reappear for a while. Two girls came out to join the blond guy, bringing with them a big radio which they set down by the poolside. They didn't get in, just sat and splashed their feet in the water. After a couple of minutes, I saw movement on the stairway up to the balcony; he was ascending now, and I realised what he'd been doing when I saw the flash of white under his arm as he turned to enter his room. He'd been into the laundry to get his towels from the washing machine. Must have been quite a job, getting the blood out of them.

I didn't want to be here when he came back, because I was sure that he'd know me. I left the court and went across the street to where I could lean on someone else's car and pretend that it was mine and that I was waiting for somebody. He came out after about ten minutes, and didn't even look my way. The guy whose car I was leaning on had left his door open and his keys in the ignition, so before I left it I took them out and hid them under his seat. Do people think we've got nothing better to do than to look for stolen vehicles?

I stayed with him, but well back. Now that I knew where he was basing himself, it would be better to lose him than to risk being recognised. He was taking his time; sometimes he'd stop before crossing the street, even if the light said Walk and there was no traffic around, and he'd kind of sniff the air as if he could read the currents in it. He reminded me of some kind of animal. It made my flesh go all crawly.

We were on Van Buren now, and he seemed to be looking at bars. He'd weigh one up, maybe take a look inside, and then walk on. It was still early, so there wasn't likely to be much business around; but when he came to a place that I knew to be a gay bar, he went inside and didn't come out again.

It was while I was waiting, as the evening traffic became more heavy and the sound of one of our sirens cut through the rumble from three or four blocks away, that a hooker propositioned me. It was that kind of area, and I'd probably taken up a position on her turf which made it a reasonable enough mistake. I looked at her; she was an undernourished-looking black girl in a skimpy blue dress that looked as if it had been made out of somebody's sleeve. Her body was about as appealing as a bag of razor blades, but she had a nice smile. I thought of Loretta, a thought that came so sharply that it almost hurt; and I said thanks for the offer, but tonight I've got other plans, at which she glanced across at the gay bar and rolled her eyes heavenward before she walked away. If she wanted to consider me a lost cause, then that was fine. Just as long as she left me alone.

He came out of the bar after about half an hour, and he was by himself. I got a really good look at him under the streetlights. His face was no longer slack and indifferent, the empty vessel that I'd already seen, but it still looked wrong somehow; after being as good as dead for so long, life seemed to be out of place there. He set off briskly, and with a sense of purpose this time; when he turned the corner and headed north, I had to run across the traffic against a light to keep up.

My guess was that he'd been directed along to another place, having failed to find the action that he was looking for. Whatever that action might be. I tracked him to a small club, another gay venue where a neon sign in the solitary window said CERVEZA BUD and a handwritten notice below that said Under Mew Management; No Chains, Studs or Leathers. I remembered the club from the old days, when some of the boys had concocted a bogus call to send a motorcycle rookie in there to speak to the bartender. The mythology was that half the clientele had fainted on the spot as the rookie strode in wearing the complete Erik Estrada rig.

I couldn't go in after him. He might see me, or somebody might know me. But I was starting to get an idea of what all this might be about, and so I found a doorway and settled down to wait. I was half-tempted to go back and get my car, but I didn't want to chance missing anything.

As it happened I'd have had plenty of time, because he was inside for more than an hour. The evening was starting to move and I counted about fifty people, all male, going in before he finally emerged; and then, when he came out, he was no longer alone.

His companion was short, hardly standing taller than his shoulder, and he didn't look happy. I'd have placed him around my own age, but he was someone who worked to stay young; he wore a checked shirt, tight designer jeans, and his thinning hair was in a close, almost military crop. The corpse put an arm around his shoulder and was talking to him from the door onwards, speaking quietly and earnestly and obviously working hard to persuade; but whatever he was saying it wasn't having any effect, because the short guy was already trying to pull away. I moved out of my doorway and set out unnoticed to cross the street ahead of them, and as I squeezed by a panel truck to make the sidewalk I heard sharp words and something that was almost, but not quite, a scuffle. When they were back in my line of sight, the short guy was already disappearing back into the club and the corpse was alone again.

He seemed unfazed. He started towards me, not seeing me yet because I was in shadow. He was looking at the ground, thinking.

I said, 'You're looking lonely.'

That stopped him. He probably couldn't see much more of me than a sketchy shape in the darkness, but he picked up the lead quickly; he said, 'A lonely guy can always use a friend.'

'Got a car?' I said, thinking that if a Vice team were suddenly to appear out of the darkness around us, my whole life and career would instantly have the value of four drops of dog piss on a rainy road.

'I got better than a car,' he said smoothly. 'I've got a motel room less than two blocks away.'

Jeez, what a con man. It was five blocks at least. I said, 'Okay, I'll drive us over.'

'Can't we walk?'

'Walk?' I said. 'Are you kidding me?'

I couldn't get used to hearing his voice. It was like hearing a dead man speak. What made it so strange was that he sounded normal, just like everybody else. All that I wanted to do right now was to get him off the street somehow so that I could prise the story behind the Paradise mystery out of him. I didn't plan to let him slip through my hands like Mercado had.

I led the way around the back of the club, through an open gate in a chain link fence which gave into a yard full of rusting old refrigerators stacked three-deep. A single spotlight shone down from a corner pole, throwing long shadows onto the cinderblock wall that was the back of the club building. Aluminum vents turned on the roof, echoing tinnily with a ghost of the Tina Turner music that was playing inside.

I heard him stop behind me.

'Where is it?' he said.

I was starting to turn, but he was faster. I saw something drop in front of my eyes and reached up in a reflexive gesture to brush it away, and that was what saved me; my fingers were hooked under the noose as he jerked it tight around my neck and my knuckles crushed hard against my throat. He pulled on it again, probably hoping to black me out anyway. It wasn't as thin as piano wire, but it was fine enough to bite into my palm and cause as much concentrated pain as anything I can remember.

I slammed back with my free elbow, but he was expecting this and he caught it; what he wasn't expecting was for me to use his own grip to jerk him forward while I stuck my leg in the way. He went sprawling and hit the garbage-strewn ground like a sack, and when he turned over it was to find that he was facing the empty black eye of my Colt. The noose drew off easily without his weight on the other end of it, and I threw it to one side.

He stared right past the gun, as if it didn't worry him. He was looking at me.

He said, 'You're the cop.'

'Yeah,' I said, stretching the fingers on my other hand. It felt as if it would glow in the dark. 'Now explain to me how you can know that.'

'I told you,' he said. 'I don't like questions.'

' You told me?'

His face went slack for a moment, as if he realised too late that he'd made a serious slip; but then he smiled, and shrugged it off. He made as if to rise from the floor, but I kicked his hand from under him. Nothing fierce, just enough to drop him back.

I said, 'Tell me something. How can you live with what you did to that child?'

I hadn't known what response this would provoke. What I got was the return of the smile, spreading wider this time.

I said, 'I know it's not feeding. Because you throw up what you eat.'

The smile died at that. 'You think you know so much,' he said, and I recognised the tone of someone who believed himself to be ultimately untouchable.

'I know there's some kind of trick going on here,' I said, 'and you're going to tell me what it is.'

'Even if I did,' he said, 'you could never prove anything.'

And less than one second later he was gone, leaving me with a look of mocking triumph slowly fading from the face of an empty corpse.