did.'
'I didn't know we were in court.'
'We're not. But you come in here asking a favor—'
I shrugged. 'I can't tell you my client's name. He has an interest in seeing her killer caught. That's all.'
'And he thinks that'll happen faster if he hires you.'
'Evidently.'
'You think so too?'
'What I think is I got a living to make.'
'Jesus,' he said. 'Who doesn't?'
I'd said the right thing. I wasn't a threat now. I was just a guy going through the motions and trying to turn a dollar. He sighed, slapped the top of his desk, got up and crossed the room to a bank of filing cabinets.
He was a chunkily built, bandy-legged man with his sleeves rolled up and his collar open, and he walked with the rolling gait of a sailor. He brought back a manila accordion file, dropped into his chair, found a photograph in the files and pitched it onto the desk.
'Here,' he said. 'Feast your eyes.'
It was a five-by-seven black and white glossy of Kim, but if I hadn't known that I don't see how I could have recognized her. I looked at the picture, fought off a wave of nausea, and made myself go on looking at it.
'Really did a job on her,' I said.
'He got her sixty-six times with what the doc thinks was probably a machete or something like it. How'd you like the job of counting? I don't know how they do that work. I swear it's a worse job than the one I got.'
'All that blood.'
'Be grateful you're seeing it in black and white. It was worse in color.'
'I can imagine.'
'He hit arteries. You do that, you get spurting, you get blood all over the room. I never saw so much blood.'
'He must have gotten blood all over himself.'
'No way to avoid it.'
'Then how did he get out of there without anybody noticing?'
'It was cold that night. Say he had a coat, he'd put that on over whatever else he was wearing.' He drew on his cigarette. 'Or maybe he wasn't wearing any clothes when he did the number on her. The hell, she was in her birthday suit, maybe he didn't want to feel overdressed. Then all he'd have to do afterward was take a shower. There was a nice beautiful bathroom there and he had all the time in the world so why not use it?'
'Were the towels used?'
He looked at me. The gray eyes were still unreadable, but I sensed a little more respect in his manner. 'I don't remember any soiled towels,'
he said.
'I don't suppose they're something you'd notice, not with a scene like that in the same room.'
'They ought to be inventoried, though.' He thumbed through the file. 'You know what they do, they take pictures of everything, and everything that might turn out to be evidence gets bagged and labeled and inventoried. Then it goes down to the warehouse, and when it's time to prepare a case nobody can find it.' He closed the file for a moment, leaned forward. 'You want to hear something? Two, three weeks ago I get a call from my sister. She and her husband live over in Brooklyn.
The Midwood section. You familiar with the area?'
'I used to be.'
'Well, it was probably nicer when you knew it. It's not so bad. I mean, the whole city's a cesspool, so it's not so bad in comparison. Why she called, they came home and found out there'd been a burglary.
Somebody broke in, took a portable teevee, a typewriter, some jewelry. She called me to find out how to report it, who to call and everything. First thing I asked her is has she got insurance. No, she says, they didn't figure it was worth it. I told her to forget it. Don't report it, I told her. You'd just be wasting your time.
'So she says how are they gonna catch the guys if she doesn't report it? So I explain how nobody's got the time to investigate a burglary anymore. You fill out a report and it goes in a file, but you don't run around looking to see who did it. Catching a burglar in the act is one thing, but investigating, hell, it's low priority, nobody's got time for it. She says okay, she can understand that, but suppose they happen to recover the goods? If she never reported the theft in the first place, how will the stuff get returned to her?
And then I had to tell her just how fucked up the whole system is.
We got warehouses full of stolen goods we recovered, and we got files full of reports people filled out, stuff lost to burglars, and we can't get the shit back to the rightful owners. I went on and on, I won't bore you with it, but I don't think she really wound up believing me. Because you don't want to believe it's that bad.'
He found a sheet in the file, frowned at it. He read, 'One bath towel, white. One hand towel, white. Two wash cloths, white. Doesn't say used or unused.' He drew out a sheaf of glossies and went rapidly through them. I looked over his shoulder at interior shots of the room where Kim Dakkinen had died.
She was in some but not all of the pictures; the photographer had documented the murder scene by shooting virtually every inch of the hotel room.
