“Yeah, murder can be a problem,” I said.
“I called the authorities, told them if they don’t pay for the damages I’d sue.”
“Can you tell me anything about the murdered woman?” I asked. “Her name was Vera, but that’s all I know.”
“A tramp. Said they were married. But they didn’t fool me none. Signed the register with different last names. But hell, I didn’t care. I got money up front. The woman paid. The weasel she was with just stood there with his hands in his pocket. Playing with his pecker, for all I know. He was no good. He killed her, you know.”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Did you see or hear anything suspicious that day?”
“Didn’t see a thing. But that Roberts guy did it, all right. I could tell. Those eyes of his, shifty.”
“How about letting me take a look at bungalow number 2, the murder scene?”
“All right, but we’ll have to make it snappy. My weekly mah-jongg circle meets this evening.”
“Mah-jongg?”
“Yeah, our group gets together and we play mah-jongg every Friday night.”
What the hell is mah-jongg? I wondered.
“You play mah-jongg, Mr. O’Brien?”
“Just in Vegas.”
“They don’t play mah-jongg in Vegas.”
“Oh, yeah. Must’ve been roulette.”
She gave me a funny look, then grabbed a key from a hook on the wall. We marched across the parking lot and entered the bungalow. Stepping into the living room, I glanced around. The room was clean but musty. The furniture consisted of a well-worn couch, coffee table, and two overstuffed armchairs. A couple of generic still-life prints hung on the walls.
“Sure is hot and stuffy in here,” Mrs. Hathaway said as she opened the window looking out at the parking lot. She turned and pointed to the right. “Kitchenette.” Then she nodded toward a door facing us. “That’s the bedroom,” she said in a low voice.
We both remained silent for a moment.
I noticed a telephone with a rotary dial and a long cord resting on a small end table placed close to the door.
“They say she’d been strangled with the telephone cord,” Mrs. Hathaway said.
“That’s the way it looked in the crime scene photos, but actually, there were bruises on her throat that indicated someone had strangled her with his bare hands.”
Opening the bedroom door, I slipped in quietly and surveyed the room; a double bed covered with a thin bedspread and a dressing table with a hinged mirror were the only pieces of furniture present. As Vera died, blood had seeped from her mouth onto the bedspread, but I didn’t see any stains on the bed, only in my mind.
“Everything’s almost the same,” Mrs. Hathaway said from the other room.
I turned, “What did you say, Mrs. Hathaway?” She had a solemn look on her face.
“Not much has changed since that day. New sheets and blankets. That’s about it.” She sounded a little down, like her past was catching up with her.
“Yeah, human nature hasn’t changed much either.”
The murder occurred in the forties, no credit cards in those days; everything was paid for in cash or by check. “When she registered, she didn’t happen to pay for the bungalow with a check, did she?”
She gave me one of those oh brother looks that my ex-wife had perfected during our short but memorable marriage. “Afraid not. In God we trust, all others pay cash.”
“Yeah, I guess it was a dumb question,” I said.
“Dink was the dumb one. He didn’t get a deposit for all those phone calls she made.”
“Phone calls?”
“That woman made a lot of calls, long distance. Roberts skipped, didn’t pay up. But I included the charges in my lawsuit.”
“You sued the county?” I asked.
“Yeah. At first the assholes in the DA’s office just laughed, but I collected. You’d better believe it. Dink said just let it go. But I showed him. The bastards coughed up the dough-ray-me. Took a little time, but they paid.”
“What about the phone calls? How many did she make?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions.”
“Just trying to get the facts straight. You don’t happen to know who she called, do you?”
“How could I remember names from thirty years ago?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” I turned to leave. There was nothing here that would provide any information that wasn’t already in the arrest report.
“Have the phone numbers, though.”
I turned back. “What?”
“I kept the phone bill, over a hundred dollars. Kept receipts of everything that I’d included in my lawsuit.”
My heart raced. “You kept all that stuff for almost thirty years?”
“When they paid up, Dink said I’d better keep everything. Said they might want to see the proof someday.”
“Do you have the phone bill and records somewhere here at the motor court?”
“In the tool shed out back with the rest of my junk. But I know what you’re thinking. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to dig through all that stuff. It’d take forever.”
A ten-dollar bill appeared in my hand.
“Well, maybe not that long,” she said as she reached out and snatched the sawbuck. “C’mon, you can help.”
She walked me to a corrugated tin shed standing behind bungalow number 6 at the back edge of her lot. After unlocking a rusty old padlock she yanked the door. It opened with a creak and a groan. She waved away the cobwebs and stepped in, inviting me to follow. It felt like a furnace inside, a dirty, dry oven with the only light spilling in from the open doorway.
Used cardboard cartons, which long ago had held canned goods and soaps, were stacked haphazardly, taking up most of the space. Someone, probably Dink, had built a half-assed workbench and lined it up along the west wall. Old and beat-up carpentry tools, a brace and bit, rusty saw, and a hammer with a broken handle littered the bench top.
Mrs. Hathaway plowed through the junk cluttering the area and went straight to a stack of cartons in the back. She took the top one down and handed it to me. “Put it aside, that’s not the one I’m looking for,” she said.
After moving several more she came to a carton that once held White King soap. “I think this is it,” she said, passing the box to me. “Put it on the workbench.”
She unfolded the carton flaps and pulled out one file after another. She gave each a brief glance while making a comment or two, something like, “Goddamn thieves. Should’ve sued them, too.”
I had no idea who she was referring to and didn’t care. I just wanted to get my hands on Vera’s telephone records.
Next she came to some dusty ledgers. “Hmm… old motel registers. They go way back,” she said in passing as she set them on the bench. She picked one out. “Hey look at this, 1945. That’s the year those two weirdoes stayed here, in July.” She flipped through the pages for a moment, stopping to look at an entry once or twice before she set it back on the bench.
Then she came across a big file trussed with rubber bands, crisscrossed every which way. “My insurance policy,” she said.
The file had to be six inches thick. “Big policy,” I said offhandedly.
“It’s big all right, real big.” She set the file aside and kept rummaging.
In a few minutes she found what she was looking for-a shoebox, Carl’s Shoe Stores, men’s wingtips, size 12. Dink must’ve been a big man.
“It’s all in here,” she said, moving toward the doorway with the box tucked under her arm. “Let’s go back to the office. Can’t let you take anything with you, though. Proof for my lawsuit, you know. But if you want, you can copy down the phone numbers.”
“Thanks.”
Back in the office, she opened the shoebox and unceremoniously dumped the contents on the countertop. A newspaper yellowed with age, a comb and makeup jars and cosmetic cases, and an old movie magazine spilled out. She shuffled through the junk and handed me a small bundle of receipts and bills tied with string.