“One of them might show up at your door and offer you a bowl of thirty-year-old cereal.”
“Exactly,” Monk said and shivered.
He kept to himself the rest of the drive.
The Belmont Hotel was right in the heart of Union Square and was one of the oldest, grandest, and stodgiest places to stay in the city. It was a five-star hotel with a six-star attitude. So they probably weren’t too happy to have vehicles from the police department, the crime scene unit, and the morgue parked in front of their lobby.
Obviously, someone else had been killed. I wondered why nobody had called Monk.
I parked with the rest of the official vehicles and we went inside to find Stottlemeyer. It wasn’t hard. We just asked the concierge where we could find the corpse.
Luckily for me and for Monk, the body was in a room on the sixth floor, an even-numbered room, with only a dozen flights of stairs for us to climb. It could have been worse for Monk. The dead body could have been on the nineteenth floor. It wouldn’t have been so bad for me; I would have taken the elevator.
The sixth floor was cordoned off by police officers, but Disher was in the hallway, interviewing a maid at her cart, so he stepped away from her and cleared us to go through.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“We were just beginning to interview some of the convention’s special guests who are staying here when the hotel manager came rushing over to us,” Disher said. “A maid found a guy bludgeoned to death in one of the rooms. So we dropped what we were doing, secured the scene, and began an investigation.”
“Two Belmont guests killed in one day,” I said. “That can’t be good for business.”
“Stipe wasn’t killed here,” Monk said, “so technically his death doesn’t count in the official tally.”
“There’s an official tally?” I said.
“There is now,” Monk said. “I’m the official and I’ve just tallied. Why didn’t anybody call us?”
“I guess it never occurred to anybody that we needed an official tally,” Disher said.
“I meant why didn’t anybody call us to aid in the investigation?”
“Because this is a simple case and you were occupied on the Stipe thing.”
“But this is a murder,” Monk said.
“So is that,” Disher said.
“But this is a real murder.”
“Stipe’s murder looked real to me,” I said.
“Do you see anybody here with an elephant nose?” Monk said to me before turning to Disher. “Let’s trade.”
“No,” Disher said.
“I bet the captain will say yes.”
Monk shouldered past Disher and marched into the hotel room.
“I bet he won’t,” Disher called after him.
I turned to Disher. “How’s the Lorber case going?”
“The Special Desecration Unit has made some progress in between the Stipe shooting and this murder.”
“I know it’s not a murder, but I’m really curious why someone would bother shooting a dead person. Would you mind telling me about it later?”
“Sure, of course.” Disher smiled, clearly pleased that someone was taking an interest in what he and the Special Desecration Unit were doing. “I’d be glad to.”
“It’s a date,” I said, then immediately regretted my choice of words. “Not a date date, but an understanding that we’ll meet at some future time in a purely non-romantic way.”
“Right,” Disher said. “I knew that.”
I followed Monk into the hotel room before I could embarrass myself any further.
Stottlemeyer was at the far end of the narrow room, standing by the window and looking down at one of the two beds, where a very hairy dead man in his underwear lay tangled in the blood-spattered sheets.
A half-empty bottle of wine and two glasses were on the table. Monk was examining one of the glasses.
“There’s lipstick on the rim of this glass,” Monk said.
“Yes, Monk, I know that,” Stottlemeyer said with a weary sigh.
“Who is the victim?” Monk asked.
“The front desk says his name is John Bozadjian and that he checked in yesterday afternoon.”
“Did he pay with a credit card?”
“Yes, he did.”
“So where is it?” Monk asked.
“I would say it’s probably in his wallet,” Stottlemeyer replied.
“His wallet is missing,” Monk said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And he isn’t wearing a watch or any jewelry,” Monk said. “But he’s got tan lines on his wrists and around the base of his ring fingers that suggest that he had some.”
“Believe it or not, I noticed that too,” Stottlemeyer said. “You know how I became captain of Homicide? I’ll tell you how. By solving a lot of homicides. On my own.”
Monk cocked his head and looked at the victim. Then he cocked his entire upper body and looked again. I didn’t see how that changed his perspective, but I didn’t understand most of what Monk did.
“It looks like a robbery,” Monk said.
“Unfortunately, I see cases like this all the time,” Stottlemeyer said. “An out-of-towner picks up a hooker for a night of whoopee and she rolls him for his cash and jewelry. Usually, it ends there and we never hear about it. Most guys are too embarrassed, or too married, to report it.”
“So if the prostitute knew that the odds were her victim wasn’t going to report the theft anyway,” I asked, “what was the point of killing him?”
“The hooker probably only meant to hit him hard enough to put him out for a while. But clobbering someone on the head is a crapshoot. If you do it too lightly, they could hit you back. Do it too hard and you could put them down for good.”
“Picking up a prostitute and bringing her back to your room is such a huge risk to your health and safety in so many ways,” I said. “What are men thinking?”
Stottlemeyer gave me a
