The Titans room-service menu was almost as limited as my wardrobe and my viewing options, but I settled on a turkey club, hoping that the tryptophan would counteract the caffeine in the diet sodas I'd guzzled on the drive to Titans. Then I curled up on the scratchy synthetic love seat and waited for food and Lucy.
I should have been at home fine-tuning this year's plan for Caroline Sturgis's garden. Dirty Business had a few customers in the high-rent district, and a handful of retailers whose seasonal planters I serviced, but Caroline was my biggest and favorite individual client. Four and a half rolling acres bordering the arboretum, money to burn, and always happy to see me. And she had so much lawn that her property was like a blank slate, like that chunky brick of loose-leaf paper the first week of school. Filled with possibilities.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't entirely quash her enthusiasm for a green carpet and mass plantings of monochromatic annuals and bulbs. But I was chipping away at her, and her lawn, and had arranged to see her later that week. I wanted to be armed with sketches and some innovative ideas for her garden. That's what I should have been doing, instead of sitting in a monastic room with mediocre food and no cable.
I must have dozed off on the love seat around nine P.M. and the knock came not long after. Still in my flip-flops, yoga pants, and hoodie, I opened my door and was then led downstairs and through the lobby by two uniformed cops and a hotel security guard who had introduced himself as Hector Ruiz. Hector was as short and wide as my first car, a vintage Volkswagen Rabbit. Remarkably, the shiny suit he wore was almost the same shade of Spanish olive green, not beautiful but very easy to spot in parking lots.
The cops marched, he waddled, and I followed, through a narrow service corridor, past a number of doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, the laundry room, and the kitchen, until we emerged at the back of the hotel onto the outside loading dock.
Off to one side was a tall, bearded guy in a stained down jacket. His Big Y shopping cart was crammed with bottles, bags, an American flag, and a padded moving blanket that, like him, had seen better days. Glassy eyes shone out of his dirty face and matted hair; was it drugs, psychosis, or fright?
On the ground, to the homeless guy's right, surrounded by a knot of people, was a muscular body in black jeans and a gray-and-black-striped shirt, legs askew, face covered by an opened and now bloodied copy of yesterday's Connecticut Post.
Not far from us two men donned paper jumpsuits and prepared to climb into a giant Dumpster. "Why do we always have to do the wet work?" I heard the younger one mutter. "Because we're the new guys," the other one said.
I followed my escorts down the few sticky steps at the right of the dock to where the body was. From the center of the crowd someone barked, "She the one?" The men stepped aside. Hidden behind a cluster of uniformed cops, plainclothesmen, and hotel security was a slight woman who appeared to be in charge.
"I'm Detective Winters. This you?" she asked, holding up my business card. Not too cute, not too boring, tasteful colors. I recognized it immediately, having agonized over it for weeks. I nodded yes.
"Dirty Business. You wanna explain that?"
"It's a gardening business. Dirt. It's a joke," I said lamely. "Get it?" Obviously the woman had no sense of humor.
"You know this guy?"
I'd seen dead bodies before, and steeled myself for the shock. Winters used two gloved fingers to lift the tented newspaper. She kept her eyes glued to my face as she peeled back the paper and showed me Nick Vigoriti's rugged face, which now had a gaping two-inch hole in the forehead.
I fought the urge to puke . . . then quickly lost the fight, turning and narrowly missing my own bare toes and the dead guy's Italian shoes.
"Whoa, that's what we call contaminating the crime scene." She snickered, stepping aside to avoid any backsplash. I swung around, unsteady on my feet, bumping into Hector and bouncing off his barrel chest. He grabbed me with both hands so I wouldn't fall back onto the body or slip on the remains of my club sandwich.
"What's the problem?" Winters said. "This should be right up your alley. You're in a dirty business and he's taking the big dirt nap."
I was retching again, bent over, hands on knees, and couldn't answer.
"It's a joke," she said. "Get it?"
Two
It was a safe bet that Detective Stacy Winters and I wouldn't be going shopping together anytime soon. After making the cheap joke at my expense, she realized I had contaminated her crime scene and, annoyed, she continued to interrogate me without so much as missing a beat or offering me a tissue or a glass of water.
She was about my height, five foot six, but, unlike me, had no hips or breasts to speak of. Her closely cropped hair was bleached white and stuck out in little spikes all around her face, making her look more like an android or the lead singer in an eighties girl band than a cop in small-town Connecticut. She wore a dark blue suit and a plain white shirt, a sexless version of the outfit I'd been wearing a few hours earlier. Clumpy black mascara was her one concession to femininity and against her pale skin and watery blue eyes it made her look faintly psychotic. She shook some Tic Tacs into her hand and popped them into her mouth, but pointedly didn't offer me any, even though I could have used one.
"I don't think it's suicide," she said. "What do you think?" She looked me over, and took her time before saying anything else. I searched for the good cop since she was obviously the bad one.
"You're not Nicky's usual type," she said. "He likes—liked—blondes. And generally a little older, more seasoned, he'd say."
"I don't know what he liked. I just met him tonight. He helped me into my room." That elicited muffled laughs from the group until she ordered them to settle down.
Suddenly, I was conscious of standing, in thin pants and a threadbare top, in the cool night air, in a sea of cops and security guards. I struggled to maintain my dignity and cover my chest, which was threatening to reveal just how cold I was. The homeless guy and I were in this together; he must have found the body. In a show of solidarity I made eye contact with him and folded my arms in an attempt to stay warm but also to hide my shaking, both from the cold and from the experience.
"Nick Vigoriti," Winters recited. "Low-level hood, lucky in love, unlucky in everything else."
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, too polite to spit, but desperately wanting to. "If you knew who he was, why did you need to call me?" I asked. She wasn't used to being challenged and, not surprisingly, didn't like it.
"'Cause you were seen with the deceased," she said, flipping through a small blue notepad, "interviewing him, apparently, a few hours ago." She looked at me as if she'd caught me in a lie.
"I wasn't interviewing him. He just happened to sit down next to me. I'm not sure it's germane to your investigation, but I'm writing an article. On gardening."
She seemed to find that amusing. And under the circumstances, it did sound pretty lame. "Right. And all those other girls at the bar are writing their theses on the sex lives of the Arapaho Indians." This drew howls from her captive audience of subordinates, who, I had the feeling, knew they'd better laugh at the boss's jokes. It only confirmed my earlier notion that the woman and I didn't have the same sense of humor.
"The article is for the Springfield Bulletin. It's on the titan arum in the hotel's lobby." My illustrious press credentials and the Latin name failed to dazzle her. "The common name is the corpse flower—" my voice trailed off.