“Sign says there’s vacancies,” shouted Freeman.
“It’s broke.”
Charlie Freeman looked around at the bulging walls, the fake antebellum furniture, the cases of plastic flowers, the green globs of goop circulating in a huge lava lamp. A man appeared in the open doorway behind the counter. He was wearing a Braves cap, a T-shirt and shorts. His face was pudgy and pugnacious, the skin riddled with broken veins.
“We’re full,” he said, as if for the first time.
“You the manager?”
The man’s glaucous gray eyes curled up the way slugs do when you salt them.
“This about the fire code? I told the guy already, we’re going to upgrade same time we do the roof, right? Damn, all we’re trying to do here is turn a buck and promote tourism.”
Charlie Freeman laid his ID on the counter and extracted two glossy six-by-eights from the manila envelope.
“I’d just like for you to take a gander at these pictures, tell me if you ever saw either of these individuals, then I’ll let you get back to the game.”
The manager picked up the photographs.
“Damn, looks like they had a rough night,” he remarked lightly. “I seen this one here. He in some sort of trouble?”
“He’s dead,” said Freeman.
The manager’s eyes widened.
“Dead? Damn.”
“When did he check in?”
The manager tapped at a computer keyboard.
“He was in 118, right?” he murmured. “Arrived the tenth.”
“Name?”
“John Flaxman.”
“Address?”
“Didn’t give none. But I got some scoop on his girlfriend, if that’s any use to you.”
Charlie Freeman tucked one of the photos back in the envelope and slipped the other into his jacket pocket.
“Can’t hurt,” he said.
“She come by this morning, said her friend had left but she wanted to keep the room for a while and pay with a card. Gloria Glasser’s the name, 2344 East 19th, Hopkinsville, Kentucky.”
He handed a smudgy carbon copy of the credit card imprint to Freeman, who studied it briefly.
“Thanks now,” he said, handing it back. “Appreciate it.”
He walked along the line of cabins to 118 and rapped at the door. It opened almost immediately. The face that appeared was young, pale and drawn. Seventeen, maybe eighteen at the most.
“Gloria Glasser?” he said.
A momentary delay, a sudden obliquity of her gaze, confirmed Freeman’s suspicions.
“Uh huh?”
“I’m from the police, ma’am. You called in about a Dale Watson?”
“You heard something?”
Her whole face was transformed.
“I come in?” said Freeman.
The room inside was a shade classier than the one at the Central Hotel, but a whole lot sadder. The other had just been a single guy’s flop. Here something was missing, something which had been found and then lost again. The sense of that loss was as thick as the tobacco fumes in the air.
The girl closed the door and lit another cigarette.
“Want one?” she asked Freeman.
“Thank you kindly.”
She gave him a light from the tip of her own, just like they’d been best buddies for years. Cute little thing, thought Freeman, even if her name wasn’t Gloria.
“So how can we help you?” he asked brightly.
“You said you had news,” the girl replied, her manner hardening up.
Freeman shook his head.
“You asked. I didn’t say nothing.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed.
“How do I know you’re who you say? Show me your badge.”
Freeman did so.
“How about you?” he asked.
“Ain’t no law that says I have to show you ID,” she retorted with a defiance as thin and hard as enamel.
“That so? But there
“Who says it ain’t mine?”
There was real apprehension in her voice now. Freeman gave her the eye.
“Honey, Gloria Glasser’s held that card since 1988, it said on the printout. You’d still’ve been in grade school then. Am I right?”
The girl bit her lip.
“It’s my mom’s. It’s OK, she’ll pay the bill.”
“And you are?”
“Cindy.”
“OK, Cindy. I’ve already got a pile of work right now, ’sides which it goes against my nature to be ugly to a young lady. So you just answer my questions fully and frankly, I could overlook this little credit card matter. Deal?”
She glanced at him once or twice, then nodded.
“OK I sit down?” asked Freeman, doing so.
The girl perched on the edge of a chair covered in a heavy crimson acrylic weave.
“Now then,” Freeman said, “why don’t you tell me about this Dale Watson?”
Disjointedly, the girl related the whole story-how she’d met this guy on the bus, how she had nowhere to stay so she’d ended up coming here with him, how he was looking for work, how he’d gone out the night before and not come back.
“And then I heard on the news about this shooting, and it was where Dale said he was going, and I got thinking maybe something happened to him.”
“He tell you what kind of job this was he was applying for?”
The girl shook her head.
“And he said his name was Dale Watson?”
“Uh huh.”
“Only he signed the register as Flaxman. John Flaxman.”
She shrugged.
“Maybe he didn’t want to use his real name.”
“And he was from St. Louis, you say?”
“That’s where the bus was coming from. But he’d been on the road a whiles, he said. Oh, and one time he mentioned Seattle.”
Like she’d said Seoul or Sydney.
“But I don’t know if he was from there. He didn’t let on too much about that kind of thing.”
Freeman eyed the girl in silence.
“You know what’s happened to him?” she asked haltingly.
“I ain’t even sure we’re talking about the same person yet,” he said, taking out the photograph and passing it to her.
