“Well, maybe it
Wicke wasn't only a complainer; he was a whiner. His voice had the power to set Jack's teeth on edge.
“Then what?” Rebecca asked.
“Well, the shouting part didn't last long. Almost right away, the shooting started.”
“Those two slugs came through the wall?” Jack asked, pointing to the holes.
“Not right then. Maybe a minute later. And what the hell is this joint made of, anyway, if the walls can't stop a bullet?”
“It was a.357 Magnum,” Jack said. “Nothing'll stop that.”
“Walls like tissue paper,” Wicke said, not wanting to hear anything that might contribute to the hotel's exoneration. He went to the telephone that stood on a nightstand by the bed, and he put his hand on the receiver. “As soon as the shooting started, I scrambled over here, dialed the hotel operator, told her to get the cops. They were a
“We do our best,” Jack said.
“So I put the phone down and hesitated, not sure what to do, just stood listening to them screaming and shooting over there, and then I realized I might be in the line of fire, so I started toward the bathroom, figuring to hole up in there until it all blew over, and then all of a sudden, Jesus, I was in the line of fire. The first shot came through the wall and missed my face by maybe six inches. The second one was even closer. I dropped to the floor and hugged the carpet, but those were the last two shots — and just a few seconds later, there wasn't any more screaming, either.”
“Then what?” Jack asked.
“Then I waited for the cops.”
“You didn't go into the hall?”
“Why would I?”
“To see what happened.”
“Are you crazy? How was I to know who might be out there in the hall? Maybe one of them with a gun was still out there.”
“So you didn't see anyone. Or hear anything important, like a name?”
“I already told you. No.”
Jack couldn't think of anything more to ask. He looked at Rebecca, and she seemed stymied, too. Another dead end.
They got up from their chairs, and Burt Wicke — still fidgety, still whining — said, “This has been a rotten trip from the beginning, absolutely rotten. First, I have to make the entire flight from Chicago sitting next to a little old lady from Peoria who wouldn't shut up. Boring old bitch. And the plane hit turbulence like you wouldn't believe. Then yesterday, two deals fall through, and I find out my hotel has rats, an
“Rats?” Jack asked.
“Huh?”
“You said the hotel has rats.”
“Well, it does.”
“You've seen them?” Rebecca asked.
“It's a disgrace,” Wicke said. “A place like this, with such an almighty reputation, but crawling with rats.”
“Have you seen them?” Rebecca repeated.
Wicke cocked his head, frowned. “Why're you so interested in rats? That's got nothing to do with the murders.”
“Have you seen them?” Rebecca repeated in a harsher voice.
“Not exactly. But I heard them. In the walls.”
“You heard rats in the walls?”
“Well, in the heating system, actually. They sounded close, like they were right here in these walls, but you know how those hollow metal heating ducts can carry sound. The rats might've been on another floor, even in another wing, but they sure sounded close. I got up on the desk there and put my ear to the vent, and I swear they couldn't've been inches away. Squeaking. A funny sort of squeaking. Chittering, twittering sounds. Maybe half a dozen rats, by the sound of it. I could hear their claws scraping on metal… a scratchy, rattly noise that gave me the creeps. I complained, but the management here doesn't bother attending to complaints. From the way they treat their guests, you'd never know this was supposed to be one of the finest hotels in the city.”
Jack figured Burt Wicke had lodged an unreasonable number of vociferous, petty complaints prior to hearing the rats. By that time, the management had tagged him as either a hopeless neurotic or a grifter who was trying to establish excuses for not paying his bill.
Having paced to the window, Wicke looked up at the winter sky, down at the street far below. “And now it's snowing. On top of everything else, the weather's got to turn rotten. It isn't fair.”
The man no longer reminded Jack of a toad. Now he seemed like a six-foot-tall, fat, hairy, stumpy-legged baby.
Rebecca said, “When did you hear the rats?”
“This morning. Just after I finished breakfast, I called down to the front desk to tell them how terrible their room service food was. After a highly unsatisfactory conversation with the clerk on duty, I put the phone down — and that's the very moment when I heard the rats. After I'd listened to them a while and was positively sure they were rats, I called the manager himself to complain about
“Do you remember the exact time when you heard the rats?”
“Not to the minute. But it must've been around eight-thirty.”
Jack glanced at Rebecca. “About one hour before the killing started next door.”
She looked troubled. She said, “Weirder and weirder.”
XI
In the death suite, the three ravaged bodies still lay where they had fallen.
The lab men hadn't finished their work. In the parlor, one of them was vacuuming the carpet around the corpse. The sweepings would be analyzed later.
Jack and Rebecca went to the nearest heating vent, a one-foot-by-eight-inch rectangular plate mounted on the wall, a few inches below the ceiling. Jack pulled a chair under it, stood on the chair, and examined the grille.
He said, “The end of the duct has an inward-bent flange all the way around it. The screws go through the edges of the grille and through the flange.”
“From here,” Rebecca said, “I see the heads of two screws.”
“That's all there are. But anything trying to get out of the duct would have to remove at least one of those screws to loosen the grille.”
“And no rat is that smart,” she said.
“Even if it was a smart rat, like no other rat God ever put on this earth, a regular Albert Einstein of the rat kingdom, it still couldn't do the job. From inside the duct, it'd be dealing with the pointed, threaded end of the screw. It couldn't grip and turn the damned thing with only its paws.”
“Not with its teeth, either.”
“No. The job would require fingers.”
The duct, of course, was much too small for a manor even a child — to crawl through it.
