Left on St. Truth-Be-Well (8 page)

“Yeah, sure.”

He closed his eyes and felt Dale’s breath puff quietly on his face, then a brush of lips. “Good boy. Let’s go be Columbo, you think?” Dale pulled back from the kiss and started the truck.

Carson shrugged and tried to make like his heart wasn’t racing in his ears. “Columbo was old-school. Let’s make like that Don Flack guy on
CSI: New York
.”

“Eddie Cahill? You got a thing for him?”

Carson flushed. “He has nice eyes,” he muttered, because they were, in fact, a lot like Dale’s.

Dale knew it too, the bastard, because his low laughter lasted until they’d pulled out of the hotel and crossed the street. He killed the motor, and in the near dark they walked toward the lobby entrance of the Bates Parrot Hotel.

Carson had a sudden thought. “Hey, you’re gonna hafta be the one to talk to Beatrice behind the counter, okay? Man, I just took off last night, and Ivan’s the one who called and canceled the reservation. She is not going to think very kindly of me, right?”

“Wow, Carson, way to pony up.”

“So I should have slept in the bug-infested spooge, is that what you’re saying?”

They both grimaced, and Dale shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Maybe not. Yeah, I’ll talk to Bea. What are you going to do?” He smirked. “Besides sit in the truck and beat off thinking about me.”

“God, you’re an ass. I’m going to go try and find the bellboy, any bellboy. Stassy said someone was letting people into the rooms, the ones with broken locks like mine, and charging by the hour. You better believe the bellboy knows something about that, right?”

Dale’s eyes widened and he nodded. He seemed impressed, and Carson had to keep himself from wagging his tail and panting in happiness. “Absolutely. Tell you what, you go wandering the corridors, I’ll call you—wait. Gimme your cell.”

Carson pulled it out and they exchanged numbers quickly, and Carson turned to go. Then he whirled around and glared at Dale as the smart of a quick smack on the bottom stung him.

“What the hell was that for?”

Dale smiled cockily. “God, what
wasn’t
it for? Now shoo!”

Carson tried his usual snarky grin back, but when he felt his face heat, he knew what came out was a little bit shy. He turned and sauntered away and pretended his breath didn’t come short just imagining the night ahead.

He shook off the feeling as soon as he rounded the corner, and started a serious investigation of the hotel. He still had his key card, and, taking a calculated risk and counting on enough disrepair for it not be canceled yet, he rounded the short end of the L and used it to get into the stairwell so he could wander the corridors and look for the phalanx of nearly invisible workers who usually frequented a hotel. Sherri had started out as a hotel maid, but she’d been smart: she’d worked her way up to a concierge’s position before she’d broken up with him and moved to LA with her new husband to manage a Hyatt. She’d told him a good hotel probably needed one staff member to every two guests—if you counted cooks, bellboys, concierges, maintenance, cooks, waiters, busboys, the people at the gift store—a lot of people worked there, and if they were good at their jobs, you hardly saw them. They were invisible.

He figured that in a shitty hotel like this one, there still had to be at least one staff member to every six or seven people, right? If every room was like his, the place would be as resoundingly empty as…

Empty as…

Well, hell. Every footfall rang hollowly on the thin carpet between the rooms, and he fought the temptation to shout “Halloo!” down the corridor to see if it echoed. Jesus, if this was one person for every ten people, there might not be ten people in the entire place. Carson turned, took a right and then a left, and that’s when he finally heard something.

A familiar something.

A broom-closet something, if he’d ever gone into a broom closet with a person with tits.

“Oh! Oh! Oh my God! Jonathan, you’re a god!”

Carson probably would have passed right by the room, because hey, he’d handled that shit before and he wasn’t impressed, but he had an idea.

Renting the rooms out by the hour, huh?

Very carefully, he tried the handle and realized that, just like at the room he’d run from screaming, it was broken. The door swung in, and he grimaced at the sight of a very large, very saggy businessman lunging between the thighs of a very, erm, perky young thing with way too much makeup. Even as Carson grimaced, the young thing caught his eyes and held up her hand, five fingers splayed.

Carson got the idea. Five more minutes. Awesome. He nodded like he was part of the whole shebang and backed up, closing the door softly as he did. Then he slid down the wall, parked his ass on the floor, and waited. If Perky Young Thing and Saggy Old Ass had five minutes, it wouldn’t be long.

Three minutes. Saggy Old Ass was still pumping away, if the bedspring action was anything to judge, and the maid cart rounded the corner, followed by Manny the Maid—or someone just like him.

God, he was short.

Seriously. Carson was five seven, maybe, and this guy was shorter by two inches, at the least. He was short, but his shoulders were massively wide, and his swarthy face was broad, pock-scarred, and ugly.

Carson’s best friend in school had suffered horrible acne, so Carson wasn’t usually quick to judge there, but it wasn’t just the skin. It was the narrowed, hate-filled eyes and the lips curled up in a sneer. The guy was young, but he obviously hated pretty much everything that moved, and Carson wasn’t all that excited about him either.

So when he stood up and smiled at the guy, he wasn’t sure what it looked like.

It didn’t matter.

Unfriendly eyes dragged up and down his body, and whatever the maid saw, he must have really disliked it, because he gave a faint sneer and said, “No haaablo English.”

Carson raised his eyebrows. “Bullshit.”

Again, a sneer, and a head tilt that read,
Prove it, asshole!
“El naaamo no haaablo English!”

Carson reached across the cart, grabbed the guy by the scruff of the neck, and shoved him against the door…

Which popped open, and momentum took them into the room where the couple on the bed was just wrapping it up.

“Oh! Oh! Oh! That’s it, baby, come, goddammit, come!” Pretty Young Thing was getting impatient, and Saggy Old Ass was getting tired.

“Sweetheart, I don’t think I’m gonna… gonna… what in the
hell
?”

Oh Jesus. “Man, pay her the money and get the fuck out of here. She’s gone over her time already, and Jesus, she’s put out her money’s worth!”

“Who the hell are you?” the guy sputtered, and Carson kept his grip tight on Manny the Maid’s shirt collar.

“I’m the guy who’s gonna report a sexual transaction in here if you two don’t get out of—”

“Uhh!” the girl whined, and Carson grunted, reluctantly sympathetic. She had stripped blonde hair and bright blue contacts, but he could see the makeup covering the blemishes and the decided lack of chin. She wasn’t pretty, she was never going to be pretty, but maybe here in this sordid hotel room, she could pretend. God, he felt bad for her. Just did.

“But pay her first, dammit! She’s earned it!”

“Thank you,” she said with attitude, and he could see Saggy Old Ass fishing out a couple of twenties from his pocket as he pulled up his pants.

“Yeah, don’t thank me. Get a real job and make these jokers wear condoms, okay?”

“Whatever!” The real job thing apparently hurt. Well, he could sympathize.

“And here’s another tip for free,” he called after her as she shimmied her skintight pink-paisley skirt down and made to walk out of the room. “Stop having sex here. I’m pretty sure the cops are gonna shut the place down.”

“As if!” the girl said. “One of the deputies is my best customer. He loves this place. I guess his parents brought him here as a kid.”

Oh great! Dale’s dickwad brother was gonna love that. Well, good. Maybe it would get him to crawl out of Dale’s ass like the ugly flesh-eating bug he was.

“That’s lovely, sweetheart. I still wouldn’t place any bets on this place being open. Now wash up and move. Me and this guy here, we got business to take care of.”

“His name’s Jarred,” she said. “He’s my stepfather’s cousin.”

Carson wondered if his eyes really could bug out of his head like a cartoon character’s. “Well, thank you, sweetheart, that there is damned good information to know.”

“God, Gail, you are such a fucking whore, you know that?”

“Oh, you know English now, do you?”

“He was born here,” Gail said, sneering. “And I’m not giving you your cut tonight, Jarred. All you had to do was not be an asshole, and this guy wouldn’t have busted my trick. They tip more when they come, moron!”

And with that she splashed some water between her legs, patted off with a towel, and strutted out on yellow-and-pink fuck-me thongs.

Carson waited until she’d slammed the door behind her to shake Jarred against the wall a little more. “Jesus, kid, she’s so right. You can call her all the names you want, but she’s smarter than you.”

“How’s I supposed to know that?” the kid whined, and Carson snorted.

“Because, dammit, if you’re nice to people, they usually don’t want to throw you against the walls!”

“What do you want from me, anyways?”

His unattractive face was all puckered and getting greasy with tears, his breath smelled like blue cheese and athlete’s foot, and what Carson really wanted was for this interview to be over with quickly.

“The stiff in the room—spill!”

“The cops already talked to me,” he said, but he looked crafty when he said it, and Carson didn’t trust him.

“Yeah, but you gave them your no-haaabla-English schtick, and they’re dumb enough to bang girls in the hotel room, so they buy it. Now you’re gonna talk to me, and I already know you’re full of bullshit, so you’re going to tell me the truth. Where’d that asshole come from?”

Jarred looked left and right, like someone was going to be pounding down that ghost-ridden corridor ready to stop him from spilling his guts. As. If. Even the cockroaches were avoiding this place now.

“Look, I don’t know where he came from, okay? I was using the room upstairs… well, I’ve got another deal like I’ve got with Gail, so I was surprised when Bea checked you in up there. There were people in the room downstairs, and I figured she’d check you in next to them. It’s easier to clean, right? Just go from room to room? But she didn’t. And I realized that while there were supposed to be guests down there, she hadn’t been requesting service specifically for that room. There was a couple of guys down there, honeymooning like. For a while, they needed soap and shampoo and toilet paper all the fucking time, but suddenly she cuts it off. I don’t know why. I know I say something about the smell and she makes it disappear. I think maybe there’s dead rats in the plumbing or something, and the two guys, they took off, but I didn’t say a damned thing, and then the cops got here!”

Carson dropped him abruptly. “Wonderful. So all you know is that there’s rats in the plumbing and the two honeymooners disappeared. How come nobody else notices anything? Where are all the frickin’ people here? This is a resort town, dammit!”

Jarred shrugged. “Well, business ain’t been great, you know? I mean, there’s the lifers, over on the other side of the building. You saw all the decorated windows and stuff?”

Carson had—the sliding glass windows that looked onto the balcony were decorated with glass stickers and there’d been wind chimes and everything. It had been colorful, and a little bit freaky too, because Carson couldn’t imagine the sort of weird curve your life would have taken to find yourself living in a crumbling hotel on the edge of the sea. He’d been trying to imagine it, actually—ever since he’d seen those bright rainbow-y stickers and wind chimes—and was drawing a big fricking zero. He needed some more experience of the town, he guessed.

“Yeah, I saw them.”

“Well, most of us just sort of tend to those people. Sometimes there’s a convention, and Bea calls all the local talent. High school kids of her old friends. She’s sort of a pathetic old broad, but she does know how to network. When she needs help, help comes. But anyway, we take care of them and then sort of send service quick if too many people check in.”

“So where’d the lye come from?”

“Who’s lying?”

“Oh God, spare me! The fucking lye, the shit that was all over the dead body to keep it from stinking. Where do you keep that?”

Jarred’s squinty little eyes narrowed to slits. “Well, we have a fuckton of it in the maintenance shed out by the east wing. You know, big fish come up and die and rats—”

“In the plumbing, yeah. I hear you. Okay, so there was lye on the premises to keep the dead guy from getting stinky, and someone else broke the lock—wait a minute.”

Because the guy’s eyes had gotten all shifty all of a sudden.

“You broke the lock?”

“Well, those guys, they were in there all the time, and they finally went out, and I just wanted to see if they had anything good!”

Carson’s head hurt. It could have been hunger, but given all the talk about dead bodies and rats in the plumbing, he was thinking maybe not. “Okay, so the guys finally leave the room together, and you use the time to break in. There’s nothing there—”

“Not a thing! Man, it was either on them or locked in the car!”

“No shit. Stassy’s from Chicago, he fucking knows better. So you break into their room and toss the place and bail. And while you’re gone, that guy goes into the room and gets knocked on the head—”

“Naw, he was dragged,” Jarred said with 100 percent confidence.

“You think?”

“I know. I mopped up the drag marks myself!”

“Oh for fuck’s sake—” and at that point, his pocket buzzed. He jerked back, caught in the classic conundrum of either keeping the scumbag plastered to the wall or checking his pocket while said scumbag took his opportunity and ducked away.

“Man, I’ll catch you never. I didn’t kill nobody, I don’t know who did—”

“But you mopped up the drag marks, you fucking psycho! Jesus! And you did a damned fine job not talking to the cops. That was really fucking stand-up of you!”