I took a couple more passes through the room, looking at each of its contents, trying to figure an angle. Suppose the shot the maid and guests heard wasn’t the one that had killed Erskine? Some sort of second-shot delay gimmick, like putting a long, slow fuse on a stick of dynamite. Firecrackers, air-filled and then popped paper bags, a shot recorded on tape and played back later... I’d heard of or personally encountered all of those little tricks. The problem with something like that, though, was that the perp either had to be on the premises, which in this case wasn’t feasible, or there had to be some leftover evidence to reveal the gaffe. Battle would’ve mentioned having found the remains of a blown firecracker or anything else that obviously didn’t belong, and if there’d been a recording device he’d have replayed its tape; trained investigators don’t miss things like that. And there was nothing in the room or its furnishings that suggested any cute possibilities. Scratch the second-shot delay theory.
What else? Some other type of misdirection? I couldn’t imagine any that fit the circumstances as Battle had outlined them to me. If Erskine had been murdered, even with malice aforethought, it had to’ve been a simple, straightforward crime. Not enough time to plan anything elaborate or even clever; and homicides involving overheated passions don’t generate fancy schemes anyway. Any trickery would’ve been improvised on the spot, to take advantage of the situation as it developed, and in this case it didn’t seem likely or even possible. Scratch trickery of any kind. What you saw was all there was. So if it had been murder, the perp had gone out through that tiny bathroom window. Or managed to hide behind the door and then slip out after the cleaning woman and male guest came in — an even more unlikely prospect.
I left the room, locked the door behind me. As I started to turn back toward the lobby, I spied a maid’s cart down at the end of the wing. Sight of it prodded me into a switch of direction. When I neared the cart, a middle-aged woman in uniform came out through the open door of room 130 with an armload of dirty linen. She looked to be Latina, and tired and beaten down by her daily grind. She gave me an indifferent look that didn’t change much when I said, “Excuse me. I’d like to talk to you, please.”
“Yes?”
“About what happened here last week. The shooting.”
She rolled her eyes upward. Muttered to herself, “Ai, Dios mio. Un otro agente inquiridor con otro interrogatión. Cada vez más.”
“No tender nada un secreto, eh, señora?”
“...Habla Español,” she said, surprised.
“Si, un poquito.” She thought I was a cop, a mistake a lot of people make: I have the look and I walk the walk. I let her think it. You can’t be accused of impersonating an agente inquiridor unless you make the claim yourself; other people’s perceptions don’t count. In English I asked, “Are you the woman who found the dead man?”
“No, that was Carmelita.”
“Is she here now?”
“Sí. Upstairs.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d take me to her.”
“Como quieras,” she said and sighed, and led me up the nearest staircase to the second floor.
Carmelita was vacuuming one of the rooms back toward the front; she shut the machine off when we walked in. She was younger and thinner than my escort, but hard work and hard living had already carved the same deep lines of weariness in her brown face. Looking at the two of them put me in mind of the volatile rhetoric of too many compassionless politicians and their minions these days. Yes, sir, all those south-of-the-border immigrants, legals and illegals both, sure do have an easy time of it here in the land of plenty, stealing jobs and living the good life. Just ask them. Just spend five minutes looking at the world through their eyes.
The older woman spoke to the younger one in rapid Spanish, too fast and idiomatic for me to follow. Carmelita looked nervous and a little frightened. One kind of cynic might have said it was because she didn’t have a green card and wanted nothing to do with authority in any form; my kind of cynic thought it was probably an ingrained fear born of poverty, oppression, and racial hatred.
Carmelita admitted in broken English that she had found “the dead one” — she crossed herself as she spoke the words — but had told the other policía all about it, she didn’t know anything more, she was only a mujer de la limpieza, a cleaning woman. I asked her in Spanish to tell it one more time, por favor, but the politeness didn’t do much to put her at ease. She rattled off her story, not making eye contact, getting it all out in a rush as if she were purging herself of a virulent form of bile.
Erskine had had the end room on the ground floor, north wing; she’d been two rooms away, waiting for “the Mr. and Mrs. Doyle” to move their luggage out so she could clean. All three had heard the report at seven-forty. She knew the time because Mr. Doyle had looked at his watch and later she’d heard him tell the police. Mrs. Doyle said the noise sounded like a gunshot; Mr. Doyle said it was a gunshot and ran to Erskine’s room and listened at the door and then pounded on it. When no one answered, he told Carmelita she had better use her passkey, somebody might be hurt inside. She hadn’t wanted to do that, it was against motel rules, but when he insisted she gave in. She and Mr. Doyle both went inside. “I wan to scream when I see the dead one,” she said, and crossed herself again, “but I can’t make a sound.” Mr. Doyle took her arm, led her outside, told her to stay there with his wife while he went to the lobby to call the police. And that was all that had happened, all she knew.
I said, “Just a few questions, Carmelita. Si usted no dene inconveniente. How long was it from the time you heard the shot to the time you unlocked the door?”
“I doan know for sure. Quatro, cinco minutos.”
Enough time for somebody to wiggle out through that narrow bathroom window; more than enough time. “When Mr. Doyle listened at the door, did he say if he heard anything inside?”
“No, he doan say.”
“Did he act as if he had?”
Headshake.
“When you were inside the room, did you or Mr. Doyle go to look in the bathroom?”
“The bathroom? No, señor. We go out again, quick.”
“How quick? Un minuto? Dos?”
“No! Diez segundo, cuando más.”
Ten seconds at the most. “Did you or Mr. Doyle touch anything in the room?”
“No. I wan to pick up the pitillo but he doan let me.”
“What cigarette, Carmelita?”
“On the carpet. Mr. Doyle say doan touch nothing so the carpet, it gets burn.”
“Where was it burning the carpet?”
“Where?” She shook her head, not understanding.
“Close to the dead man or not?”
“Close.” Carmelita shivered. “Almost burn him, his hand.”
“As if he’d dropped it when he fell.”
“Sí.”
“And where was he lying, exactly?”
“Near the bed.”
“Closer to the bed than the table?”
“Si.”
“You’re sure of that?”