A fist pounded on the door. Coming up out of nightmare, he thought, Vangie?
Zimmer’s tub was only half-filled with pink water because his corpse had been removed and laid beside it. Inverness crouched beside him, jerked back the wet-grayed sheet to let Dain, crowded into the doorway behind him, see the face.
“The murderer, confronted with evidence of his crimes, broke down and confessed,” said Dain in a toneless voice.
“No, nothing like that,” protested Inverness.
“I never saw the gentleman before, dead or alive.”
“I never said you did. It looks like suicide, but a couple of things bother us, that’s all.”
In the bedroom, they stood facing the window so their voices could not be heard by the busy crime-scene team; fingerprint powder covered most surfaces. Outside, the porn-house lights winked on and off in sequence.
“No note, no hesitation marks,” said Inverness. “Usually a suicide with a razor, you’ll have a couple of dozen nicks where he’s making up his mind.”
“Make up your mind. Was it suicide or not?”
“He killed himself, close as we can tell. He was shacking with a topless dancer name of Evangeline Broussard. Loud argument earlier in the evening, Broussard ran from the room just before the body was discovered. She has a juvenile package here in New Orleans. Kid stuff. She’s Cajun, from the bayou country — St. Martin’s Parish a few miles out of Breaux Bridge.”
“Why couldn’t this Broussard woman have killed him?”
Inverness gave him a quick slanting look, then looked away.
“If he’d been unconscious when he went in the tub, maybe. But he wasn’t. With him awake, no woman could have held him down while she slashed both his wrists. Damn few men could do it.”
“If it wasn’t murder, what am I doing here?”
Inverness was looking out the window again. He seemed to address the glass pane. “Chicago labels in their clothes.”
Dain cast a quick glance around the room. The aged bellboy was sitting in one of the room’s two straight-backed chairs, talking with a plainclothesman, his bony shoulder slumped, his gnarled hands clasped between his thighs.
“That’s supposed to mean something to me?” asked Dain.
Inverness nodded, moved fractionally closer to Dain. “I think it does. I think you were looking for him for a client from Chicago.”
Did Inverness know Maxton was his client and was just baiting him? That thing about Chicago labels in their clothes... But what did it matter? As organized-crime liaison, Inverness certainly would hear all the rumors flying around.
“I told you why I was here—”
“Yeah, yeah, the heart and soul of New Orleans. Get serious.”
“Okay, if I had been looking for Zimmer, his suicide would have ended any interest I might have had in either him or Broussard. If I had a client, I would not have reported to him that I was coming to New Orleans and I would not have reported to him since coming to New Orleans. That serious enough?”
“You haven’t really told me anything,” Inverness objected.
The bellhop was on his feet, about to head for the door.
“You really didn’t expect me to,” said Dain. “I’ll be in San Francisco if you have any more bright ideas about confronting me with evidence of my crimes.”
He nodded and walked out, inevitable leather-bound book under his arm. Inverness stared after him, frowning.
Through the thin walls of the bus depot ladies’ room came the echoing voice of a dispatcher calling a destination in what might as well have been Swahili. At this time of night the place was empty except for Vangie, in front of the vanity table mirror breaking the dark lenses out of a pair of cheap rhinestone-rimmed slanty sunglasses to leave just the rims. Next, from her aspirin tin she took a long-shanked locker key. Finally, she opened her wig box and reached inside.
The bellhop went arthritically down the hall. Mortality had come calling; finding the body had aged him. Dain caught up with him just after a turn in the corridor hid them from the eyes of the police guard on the door of Zimmer’s room.
“The lieutenant said you might be able to tell me where St. Martin’s Parish and a town called Breaux Bridge might be.”
The old man’s good eye gleamed at him shrewdly. “Now why would a city feller like you want to be going to a damn fool place like that?”
“Damned if I know,” admitted Dain.
Trask was lounging against a pillar a short distance from the coin lockers in the walkway to the bus loading area. He was trying unsuccessfully to look like a bored husband.
In the waiting room, a fat black woman with two kids was just stepping away from the ticket window, to be replaced by a gum-chewing hip-swinging floozie with slanty rhinestone-rimmed glasses. Straw-blonde hair was piled high on her head. She set a hatbox on the floor by her feet.
“Ah want a ticket to Lafayette? One way?”
She had a rather hoarse voice with a backcountry accent unremarkable in any southern bus depot. The clerk took her money, gave her a ticket and some change.
“Just made it,” he said. “That bus is loading in three minutes at Gate Three.”
“Ah need someone paged, too?” The blonde Vangie set the empty wig box on the counter. “She’s supposed to pick up this here hatbox? Evangeline Broussard.”
“Will do,” said the clerk.
The peroxide blonde started down the walkway to the buses, chewing her gum and swinging her hips, then sat down on a bench opposite the bank of coin lockers and directly across from Trask. She sprawled so her legs would catch his eye, then crossed them first one way and then the other, each time giving him just a tantalizing glimpse of the shadowed delights between then. Trask actually licked his lips.
The loudspeaker boomed, “Will Evangeline Broussard report to the ticket window? Ms. Evangeline Broussard to the ticket window, please. We are holding a package for you...”
Trask, electrified, forgot the peroxide blonde’s sexual endowments, lumbered some ten feet up the walkway to scan the waiting room. Vangie ran quickly and silently across the deserted walkway. In her terror she fumbled her long-shanked key, dropped it, caught it before it could hit the vinyl floor, shoved it into the correct lock with shaking hands.
Trask started to turn back toward her, but the loudspeaker boomed again.
“Ms. Evangeline Broussard to the ticket window, please.”
This swung Trask away again. Vangie jerked Zimmer’s attaché case out of the locker, eased the door shut, turned quickly away. Trask, with a snort of disgust, wheeled from the waiting room to look at the lockers he was there to guard.
The floozie blonde who’d tried to show him her snatch was walking down the sloping walkway toward the bus loading area; no one else was around. He turned regretfully away, dropping her from his mind as he leaned against his pillar again.
Dain pushed a wedge of hallway light ahead of him into his darkened hotel room, went between the beds to switch on the lamp. As he began to strip off his clothes, the balcony door opened and Maxton came through it just as Nicky, who’d been hiding in the bathroom, came around the partition beside the bed with a gun in his hand. Dain sat down on the edge of his bed.
“Terrific,” he said in a disgusted voice. “You rented the room next door just so you could get in through the balcony and wave guns around at three in the morning. Just brilliant.”
Maxton demanded, “Where is the little bitch?”
“On the run, I suppose. Zimmer killed himself tonight. She’d know that would bring you to town, so she’d run.”