A shot of the bathroom showed a towel rack with unused linen on it.
'No dirty towels,' he said.
'He took them along.'
'Huh?'
'He had to wash up. Even if he just threw a topcoat over his bloody clothes. And there aren't enough towels there. There ought to be at least two of everything. A double room in a class hotel, they give you more than one bath towel and one hand towel.'
'Why would he take 'em along?'
'Maybe to wrap the machete in.'
'He had to have a case for it in the first place, some kind of a bag to get it into the hotel. Why couldn't he take it out the same way?'
I agreed that he could have.
'And why wrap it in the dirty towels? Say you took a shower and dried yourself off and you wanted to wrap a machete before you put it in your suitcase. There's clean towels there. Wouldn't you wrap it in a clean one instead of sticking a wet towel in your bag?'
'You're right.'
'It's a waste of time worrying about it,' he said, tapping the photo against the top of his desk. 'But I shoulda noticed the missing towels.
That's something I should have thought of.'
We went through the file together. The medical report held few surprises. Death was attributed to massive hemorrhaging from multiple wounds resulting in excessive loss of blood. I guess you could call it that.
I read through witness interrogation reports, made my way through all the other forms and scraps of paper that wind up in a homicide victim's file. I had trouble paying attention. My head was developing a dull ache and my mind was spinning its wheels. Somewhere along the way Durkin let me go through the rest of the file on my own. He lit a fresh cigarette and went back to what he'd been typing earlier.
When I'd had as much as I could handle I closed the file and gave it back to him. He returned it to the cabinet, detouring on the way back to make a stop at the coffee machine.
'I got 'em both with cream and sugar,' he said, setting mine before me. 'Maybe that's not how you like it.'
'It's fine,' I said.
'Now you know what we know,' he said. I told him I appreciated it. He said, 'Listen, you saved us some time and aggravation with the tip about the pimp. We owed you one. If you can turn a buck for yourself, why not?'
'Where do you go from here?'
He shrugged. 'We proceed in normal fashion with our investigation. We run down leads and assemble evidence until such time as we have something to present to the district attorney's office.'
'That sounds like a recording.'
'Does it?'
'What happens next, Joe?'
'Aw, Jesus,' he said. 'The coffee's terrible, isn't it?'
'It's okay.'
'I used to think it was the cups. Then one day I brought my own cup, you know, so I was drinking it out
of china instead of Styrofoam. Not fancy china, just, you know, an ordinary china cup like they give you in a coffee shop. You know what I mean.'
'Sure.'
'It tasted just as bad out of a real cup. And the second day after I brought the cup I was writing out an arrest report on some scumbag and I knocked the fucking cup off the desk and broke it. You got someplace you gotta be?'
'No.'
'Then let's go downstairs,' he said. 'Let's go around the corner.'
Chapter 14
He took me around the corner and a block and a half south on Tenth Avenue to a tavern that belonged at the end of somebody's qualification. I didn't catch the name and I'm not sure if it had one. They could have called it Last Stop Before Detox. Two old men in thrift-shop suits sat together at the bar, drinking in silence. A Hispanic in his forties stood at the far end of the bar, sipping an eight-ounce glass of red wine and reading the paper. The bartender, a rawboned man in a tee shirt and jeans, was watching something on a small black and white television set.
He had the volume turned way down.
Durkin and I took a table and I went to the bar to get our drinks, a double vodka for him, ginger ale for myself. I carried them back to our table. His eyes registered my ginger ale without comment.
