to combat encroaching grey, but the hair stayed that shade always, and not a single root ever gave it away, not in the florescence of the squad room, not in the hot, bright Florida sunlight.
Giving the body a nonchalant once-over, Lili said, “The maid found him around ten after eleven, ran out of here screaming and tracked down her boss, who made the call. She insists she didn’t touch a thing. I took her phone number and told her to go home. The woman’s a wreck.”
“Alright,” Martinson said. “Start knocking on doors. Take this floor first.”
Acevedo repeated that same tight move and popped up on the other side of the tape.
Petrie was brushing aluminum powder on the nightstand where two bottles of Ballantine scotch sat, one empty, the other about half-full. Two eight ounce tumblers crowded between them.
“Whoever it was did some housekeeping,” Petrie said. “See the wipe marks?” He indicated the swirling trails made on the bottles, like the streaks a rag might’ve made on a window. “Same thing with the glasses.”
On the opposite side of the bed, in a drawer of the nightstand, Martinson found Pfiser’s wallet and passport. Multiple Visa cards representing many banks sat snug in their individual slots, but the wallet was empty of cash. His Dutch papers said he was born in Rotterdam in 1947, three years before Arnie Martinson. So that was how long the guy had been alive. Martinson wanted to find out how long he’d been dead.
Burns said, “I thought somebody notified the Medical Examiner.”
Martinson said, “I did. Where is this guy?”
“On vacation,” Petrie said. “You’re getting Leviticus, mon.” He was mocking the doctor’s Caribbean accent. Arnie felt sorry for Burns, having to work so closely with this asshole.
A gold Rolex sat on the dresser, keeping imperfect time. The drawers were stocked with boxer shorts and those see-through kind of socks that went up to the knee. Pfiser was not bashful about spending money on clothes. The man liked his silk.
Martinson opened the closet door. Every one of the hotel’s theft-proof hangers was holding something, a suit, a shirt, a tailored jacket or a pair of trousers. Two suitcases sat on the floor, one housing a few days laundry, and an overpowering male scent puffed out of the bag as Arnie flipped it open, sweat mixed with a thick cologne long gone sour.
He pulled down a carry-on bag and undid the latches. It was empty except for some traces of white powder. Arnie touched the tip of his pinky to the powder for a taste. It was cocaine. A potent batch that numbed his tongue and deadened his teeth as he clicked them together. So let’s say the deceased was doing more than sniffing little- bitty spoonfuls out of a twenty-dollar envelope. Let’s say this dust leaked out of a big fat package.
Then let’s say the shooter knew the deceased was holding heavy.
The Assistant Medical Examiner had arrived and was squatting over the body. Dr. Leviticus Williams was a dark-skinned black man with conked, orangish hair he greased straight back. His eyeglasses were so thick they magnified his eyes and made him look like he was in some hypnotic trance. He did some poking and he did some touching and he said, “Gunshot wound to the head.”
It might have come off like a grim gag from somebody else, but Williams had almost no sense of humor. Your class clown rarely wound up in forensic medicine.
Two of Williams’s men came in bearing a collapsible gurney, dressed in hospital green. Somebody took the trouble to close Manfred’s Pfiser’s eyes for him before he got zipped into a black vinyl bag for his trip to the morgue.
Lili Acevedo was in Room 224. At first, with the almond eyes that were the exact same shade of cobalt, Lili made this French couple for a father-daughter team. The woman answered the knock, dressed in a pair of pink nylon shorts and a halter top, typical South Beach for a girl her age, with the body to show off. Through an accent like quicksand, she wished Lili a good morning. They were the last two words she attempted in English.
She was a generation younger than her boyfriend, who was in front of the bathroom mirror training a blowdryer on the salt and pepper hair he wove over the bald spot on his crown. A bathrobe was sashed tight across his pot gut, and a chain, featuring both a crucifix and a diamond-studded Star of David nestled in a thatch of black- grey chest hair. He introduced himself as Allain Marcoux, the girl as Annick Mersault, and Lili scribbled both names into a notebook, way too much alike to be clear in her head.
Acevedo had to use simple words and short phrases, but Marcoux understood and answered her questions deliberately and with some thought. The only problem was, the guy hadn’t seen a thing, was by his own admission shit-faced, a condition he illustrated by twisting a fist in front of his nose. He rolled his eyes and whistled, giving his head half a shake to unhinge the cobwebs.
Annick snuggled on the bed with her boyfriend. He had a hairy arm across her shoulders. After an unnerving round of chatter, Marcoux told Acevedo that Annick had seen a man in the hallway late last evening, leaving the hotel as they were coming in. Neither of them could recall the time, but it was after midnight. Marcoux recalled at one vague point looking up at the clock on Washington Ave., the one above the bank, and that it said 11:59. How much later it was when they got back, he couldn’t say, and Annick, when the question was put to her, turned down the corners of her mouth and blew out a puff of breath.
Acevedo said, “What does she remember about this man?”
Marcoux translated and relayed Annick’s answer. “She says he seemed like he was in a hurry to get out. She also says that yesterday afternoon, when she was returning from the beach, she saw the same man leaving the victim’s room.”
“How does she know it was the same man?”
Marcoux dealt the question.
Annick Mersault had expressive eyes and twitching, hyperactive lips. She was looking at Lili when she said, “Je m’souviens tout les beaux garcons.”
“She remembers all the handsome boys.”
Annick took her time giving Marcoux the details, and when she was finished talking, she gave him a kiss behind the ear. The little love bug. She just couldn’t help herself. She studied Marcoux’s face as he translated for Lili.
“He had dark eyes and dark hair cut short. Handsome features, about my height, and muscular.” Marcoux improvised a seated, pumped-up pose. “He stuck out because he was so pale, white like a ghost.”
Acevedo recorded the few facts Annick Mersault provided her with, skeptical about how much help she would actually be. She asked the girl through her translatorboyfriend if she would have a couple hours, perhaps later this afternoon or tomorrow, to look at some photographs and see if maybe she could identify the man she saw. If that failed, would she be willing to help a police sketch artist put together a drawing of this man?
Marcoux gave her the request and Annick lifted her head and nodded gravely. She was new enough in life to believe in a few too many things, a girl solid with the unshakeable convictions of youth. She spoke directly to Acevedo in French, knowing full well Lili couldn’t understand a word she was saying.
Marcoux handled the interpretation. “She says it would be an honor. She has a sense of justice that is,” the man groped for a word, “visceral.”
Martinson had the image of an old television commercial in his head. There wasan animated, cut-away model of a skull on the screen. The sinus areas of the skull were highlighted in blue. When sinus membranes are inflamed, a voice-over explained — here the blue parts turned to red and red lightning bolts shot off them — the sinus headache sufferer experiences pain. The commercial was for an over-the-counter medication that Arnie swore by until a few years ago, when it stopped working, and he developed headaches that were less like sinus and more like migraine.
Eusasky let him know his sinus status was unchanged, but he was concerned about the severity of these new headaches. He referred Arnie to a specialist named Boring — that was the physician’s name, Dr. Boring — and Boring ran a raft of tests on the Martinson noggin, up to and including a CAT scan that to Arnie’s immense relief revealed nothing. Dr. Boring scribbled a prescription for another kind of medicine that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.
He sensed a real monster coming on, but that feeling could be deceiving. It might turn into a migraine, or it could just be a sinus thing. He didn’t have enough experience with the migraines to differentiate between the two, at least not at their outsets.
But there was something starting behind his eyes as he stood in the first floor room directly under the room where Pfiser had been shot. He was talking to a woman named Marcy Lowenstein, and his sensitivity training was flunking him, maybe due to his fear of a headache.
