Settles hurried back to the elevators, where Francis the Plumber had failed to wait. The detective turned and trotted across the lobby to the hotel entrance. He went through it just in time to see a pink Ford van make a right turn out of the parking lot. On the side of the van was a large magnetic stick-on sign that advertised “Francis the Plumber” in big black letters. Beneath them, in smaller ones, was the slogan “Nite or Day.”
Embarrassed and irritated by his own vanity, Ivy Settles fumbled his glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. But by then, even with the glasses, it was impossible to read the license plate of the pink Ford van.
Chapter 24
The elevators were down the corridor and around a corner from Kelly Vines’s fourth-floor room. When he reached them he found Soldier Sloan lying face-up and half out of the right elevator, whose two automatic doors were gently nudging the old man’s waist every three or four seconds.
It was obvious to Vines that Sloan was dead. Those too-green eyes had lost their glitter and stared up without blinking at the corridor’s vanilla ceiling. Vines knelt to put a hand to the old man’s neck, feeling for the pulse he knew he wouldn’t find.
If there was a cause of death, Vines couldn’t see it. There were no visible wounds or blood, but he did find Sloan’s position peculiar. It was as if the old man had turned to face the rear of the elevator, then fell backward, sprawling halfway through the open doors.
Vines explored the dead man’s pockets almost without thinking of the consequences other than to remind himself he was no longer an officer of the court. He left the watch pocket until last because he was confident of what he would find there.
In the other pockets he found a comb, a Montblanc fountain pen and an ostrichskin wallet, well worn, that contained $550 in fifty-dollar bills. In the other pockets he found a car’s ignition key attached to a Mercedes emblem that didn’t necessarily mean anything; a small pocketknife with a gold case that Vines thought was probably fourteen carat; a handkerchief of Irish linen; and a small combination address book and pocket diary. The address section was almost filled with names and phone numbers, but very few addresses. The diary section was blank and the page for that June Saturday, the twenty-fifth, had been torn out.
In Sloan’s watch pocket, as expected, Vines found a folded-up thousand-dollar bill, issued in 1934 and bearing the engraved portrait of Grover Cleveland and the signature of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury. On the back of the old bill was some fancy engraving to discourage counterfeiters.
The torn-out diary page was also in the watch pocket, folded up, like the thousand-dollar bill, into the size of a postage stamp. Vines carefully unfolded it, noticing that most of it was for a diary and about an inch at the bottom for a “memo.” At the top of the page were initials and numbers reading, “KV 431” and “JA 433,” which Vines immediately deciphered as being his and Jack Adair’s initials and room numbers.
At the bottom of the page in the space reserved for the memo was another entry that read: “C JA O RE DV.” Vines could make nothing out of this and put everything back where he had found it, including the torn-out diary page and the thousand-dollar bill, both of them carefully refolded. After that he rose and went to tell Ivy Settles that Soldier Sloan was dead.
Settles, the first policeman to reach Soldier Sloan’s body, watched as the Holiday Inn’s young assistant manager used a key to turn off the elevator so its two doors would stay open and stop nudging the dead man’s waist. Settles knelt beside Sloan, checked for vital signs and looked up at Vines, who, like Adair, was now leaning against the wall opposite the elevators. “He’s dead,” Settles said. “Just like you said.”
Because Vines could think of nothing to add to this, he said nothing. Chief Sid Fork arrived a few minutes later, nodded at Vines and Adair, glanced at the dead Soldier Sloan and began questioning Settles. He was still questioning him when the two homicide specialists, Wade Bryant and Joe Huff, arrived and joined the interrogation of Ivy Settles.
The bald, black and professorial Huff asked an occasional question as he used his Minolta to take photographs of the dead man. When he had taken enough, he interrupted Wade Bryant and said, “Let’s turn him over.”
Once Soldier Sloan lay on his stomach, the saucer-sized bloodstain on the back of his muted plaid jacket was visible. With the help of Bryant, Huff removed the jacket and took some pictures of a bloodstain the size of a dinner plate on the back of Sloan’s pale yellow shirt.
Out of curiosity, Kelly Vines asked, “What d’you guys do for a coroner?”
“Because we’re ninety-two miles from the county seat, they named Dr. Joe Emory assistant deputy coroner,” Huff said, pulling out Sloan’s shirt tails and pushing the shirt itself up toward the dead man’s armpits. “The fancy title doesn’t mean much because the county pays Joe on a piecework basis.”
“He likes doing autopsies?”
“He likes the money,” Huff said.
Once the shirt was up around Sloan’s armpits, the small puncture wound was visible. The wound itself hadn’t really bled much and had the diameter, in Huff’s words, “of a fat ice pick.”
As he rose, Huff added, “He died quick anyway,” and aimed his Minolta at Sloan’s bare back.
“If the angle was right and the guy knew what he was doing,” the still kneeling Wade Bryant said, “then he probably didn’t feel much of anything.”
“He felt it,” Huff said. “He felt it enough to turn around, see who’d done it and keel over backward.”
The assistant hotel manager edged over to Fork. “Couldn’t you guys at least pull him out of the elevator, Sid? We’re going to need it.”
“No, you’re not,” Fork said.
“So when can we start using it?”
“In an hour or two.”
“Well, shit,” said the assistant manager and headed for the stairs. Bryant gave the dead Sloan a final close look and rose. “While we’re waiting for Doc Emory, Chief, I thought maybe Ivy here could tell us some more about his new pal, Francis the Plumber.”
“I already told you,” Settles said.
“We’d like to hear it again,” Bryant said, looking for support to Huff, who was adjusting his Minolta. The black detective looked up just long enough to nod and went back to his camera.
“One more time, Ivy,” the chief of police said.
Settles gave Fork a reproachful look and said, “He was about forty and short and fat-five-one and maybe two hundred and ten. Wore dark blue coveralls with Francis the Plumber across the back in red letters-and a phone number I don’t remember. He carried an old beat-up black toolbox. Had tinted prescription glasses, the kind that go from real light gray to real dark gray depending on the light. Had a gimme cap from Copenhagen snuff. Had a thin nasty mouth. Drove a pink Ford van with a stick-on ‘Francis the Plumber’ magnet sign on one side-maybe both sides, but I don’t know that for a fact. And no, I didn’t get the license number this time either.”
“You forgot his nose,” Huff said, still working on his camera.
“Yeah. Right. The nose. Well, it was kind of squashed up, like I told you, and had this one big nostril and this regular size one and they both looked about a mile deep. They were also hairy. He had a regular forest growing in there and most of it was gray.”
“Tell us again why you let him skip, Ivy,” said Wade Bryant, whose increasingly sly tone matched his too-tall-elf looks.
“I didn’t let him. I showed him my shield and told him to stay put while I went and called Vines here. The guy was a plumber and possibly-just possibly-a solid citizen. What you two guys would’ve done, of course, is make him kiss the floor right off. With all your experience you know for a fact that plumbers are automatic suspects.” Settles paused, glared at Bryant, and added, “Oh, yeah. One more thing.”
“What?” Bryant said.
“I watched Soldier’s elevator all the way up. I mean I watched its numbers light up. It stopped at three on the way up and the other elevator, the one the plumber rode, stopped at three on the way down. So I’d say the plumber got on Soldier’s elevator at three, killed him on the way up to four, got out, took the stairs back down to three and
