Cry Me a Murder (Part four) : A Strange Crunching Underfoot
#4 of Cry Me a Murder
That night I played in the hotel bar. I played the guitar and a local musician by the name of Raymundo joined me on the keys. Going by the impromptu stage name of Sunny Dan and the Rayman, we played a bunch of jazz standards right out of the Real Book. Playing gave me an opportunity to study my fellow hotel guests from the low stage. In the back of the room Paul Slater was having dinner with Darleen. He gave me a thumbs-up and raised his wine-cooler in salute. He whispered something into Darleen's ear, and she waved at me. I was too busy playing to wave back, so I nodded at the couple and they went back to studying the menu.
The graying Mr. Tejón sat in the middle of the room by himself, sipping a glass of Chablis. I guessed he was the type who ordered his drinks by the glass rather than by the bottle. He was dressed in a blue dinner jacket and freshly pressed trousers. Archie Phelps sat by a round table close to the low stage. I knew he was some kind of shoes representative, who tipped generously and called his mother twice every day, morning and evening. Catalina had taken a liking to him because he "wasn't creepy, and he loved his mother."
Chris sat in his wheelchair right in front of the stage, along with his nurse. I don't think she was much of a jazz lover, for she kept looking around as if her mind was preoccupied with something else. Now and then she turned her attention to Chris, dabbing drool off his chin with a disposable napkin. I felt sorry for the boy who seemed to be on a different planet most of the time. But while we played, his eyes suddenly fixed on me and his mouth moved. I'm not sure if he tried to sing along, or if he was talking to me, but his nurse didn't make any notice of it. For one brief moment, Chris and I seemed to connect, and I got the impression the boy wasn't completely lost to this world, but hidden away somewhere deep inside his own mind. Then his eyes went blank again.
His father sat by himself at the far right of the room. Unlike his son, Jack Tell was a heavy set man with a bulging stomach and a double chin, and he kept making phone conversations while we played.
"I'm not paying you to make guesses" he growled into the phone during_Corcovado_. "I want delivery! And I want them NOW." When he hung up, his face was red and his breathing was labored. His hands were shaky from excitement or strain and he reached for a bottle of pills, which he downed with a glass of house wine from a clay jar.
Raymundo and I played two sets of forty-five minutes. Then we said our good-nights and unplugged our gear.
The guests had fallen into casual conversation when Artie Phelps waved at me to join me at his table.
"Gastón," he commanded and snapped his fingers. "Bottle of wine and two times catch of the day."
"I think the word is Garcon when you call for a waiter," I whispered. "Besides, Catalina is a woman."
"Who cares?" laughed Phelps. "As long as they bring food and wine to the table, they can be boy, girl... or in-between. I don't give a damn."
Minutes later, Catalina brought us two plates of home-farmed trout with freshly baked rye rolls.
Holy crap, I thought; everything around here was home-made. No wonder they were seeing things. My thoughts were interrupted, when Phelps suddenly let out a loud
"OW!" and spat out a mouthful of fish onto his plate. "Fuckit! I bit into something hard." He poked at the half chewed meat with his fork and dug out a little red nugget. The moment he held up the offending piece of food, I recognized the shape and color as an exact copy of the rubies I'd seen in Quinn's office.
"What IS this shit?" Phelps asked, probing his teeth with his tongue.
"I believe that's a ruby."
"Well it damn near destroyed my molar," cursed Phelps and pushed the plate away. "How did it get into my fish, anyway?"
I shrugged. "A trout will eat anything. Maybe it fell out when they gutted it."
Phelps sniffed, wrapped the ruby in the cloth napkin and stuffed the bundle into his coat pocket. Then he went back to eating. "Gaston!" he shouted and snapped his fingers.
"we need more wine!"
On my way back, I passed the small TV lounge, where Mr Tejõn was now engaged in a low conversation with Darleen. He'd exchanged his dinner coat for a neutral gray suit and white shirt with a thin black tie. He sat across from Darleen on a worn out couch, and writing something in a spiral-bound notebook. The moment he saw me standing in the hallway, he quickly closed the book.
"Ah, if it isn't our very own house musician," he said, and laid his fountain pen on the notebook without capping it. It was a _Mont-blanc_pen with a piston knob at the end for refilling. It's the kind of stationary that sets you back five hundred bucks.
"You and Mr. Garcia play well together."
Although I'd not previously met Mr Tejõn, I got the impression he addressed everyone by their last name. I didn't even know Raymundo had a last name, or had cared to find out.
"Glad you liked it," I replied. "The lame kid in the wheelchair seemed to connect."
Tejon and Darleen looked at each other in a way that suggested I had made some kind of Faux pas.
"The kid's name is Chris," said Darleen sharply.
"Of course."
"Would you care to have a brandy with us, Mr. Kent?" Mr. Tejõn motioned towards a crystal carafe on the table that came with six crystal tumblers. He spoke in a quiet, rich baritone and never seemed to raise his voice more than necessary for keeping the conversation going. I've seen so many shrinks over the years, I recognized his speech pattern as a practiced technique. At some point he had been trained in ways to make make people feel at ease and gaining their trust. Whatever he was, he was good at it, and I really wanted to sit down with them and have a shot of brandy. But the fountain pen was still uncapped and the conversation between him and Darleen wasn't over. So I made my excuses and left. I was only fifteen feet down the hall when I heard Mr. Tejõn chuckle quietly.
"We'll have to write this down all over again," he said. "The ink was still wet when I closed the book."
Fernando was much relieved when I told him about room 203.
"Nothing?"
"Nothing I could sense."
"Madre de dios!" Fernando's lower lip quivered softly and his eyes grew moist. "I thought I was going loco like my uncle Hernandez."
"I did find this, though." I placed the empty 9mm shell on the desk before Fernando. He picked it up and twirled it between two fingers.
"It's a bullet?"
"Casing only, the bullet is somewhere else. I figured maybe you took a shot at the creature?"
Fernando shook his head. "I don't even know how to fire a pistol. Even if I did, I could have missed the creature -and hit Catalina."
I hadn't thought of it, and I felt slightly embarrassed about bringing it up.
"So, apart from... the thing... you've had no shootings or disturbances?"
"Take a walk around," he said. "San Blas is a quiet place."
Fernando squinted and peeked into the empty shell. "Maybe it fell out of somebody's pocket?" He opened the register book and browsed a few pages back. "There! We had a Mr and Mrs Thomson staying with us in room 203, two weeks ago."
"That's not it." I held the case to my nose. The smell of nitroglycerin still stuck to the metal, but it would evaporate within a few days. Whoever fired that pistol was still in the hotel.
In that moment, a loud scream rang out from somewhere inside the hotel, and we froze mid-sentence. It was a man's voice, but it wasn't the scream of someone in agony, or a desperate howl of sorrow; It was the long scream of paralyzing horror; a terror so stark, the only way your mind can express it, is through screaming. For no human words exist to describe what you are experiencing.
"Caramba!" shouted Fernando, his glass still raised and hovering an inch from his lips.
Seconds later, the scream was followed by the sound of a single gunshot.
"The pistol!"
"Upstairs or downstairs?"
"It must be Room 203," gasped Fernando.
"This place is cursed."
We stormed out of the office and leaped up the stairs, taking two steps at a time.
"Don't take the elevator," panted Fernando. "It's too slow",
It wasn't until we faced the door to 203 I realized I was still clutching my glass of Mezcal.
Fernando hesitated, key in hand. "But, what if..."
"If there is a tentacle from hell in there, I'll throw..." I looked at my empty glass. "...this tumbler at it."
My remark was meant half as a joke and halfway in earnest. It failed on both accounts, but in this moment Fernando and I found something in common; something that bonded us together.
"You're even more loco than me." Fernando laughed.
"I'm glad you feel that way."
Fernando turned the key, and on the count of three we crashed through the door.
The room was dark, quiet and empty. The window was closed and the bed-sheets were still ruffled from my nap earlier that same day.
"Well, it's all quiet now," Said Fernando.
"If there's nobody in here, then who screamed?"
Fernando's eyes widened, as we both reached the same conclusion.
"The curse has spread to more than one room now..."
Fernando went to check on Chris and the nurse, while I flew down the stairs. I had no idea who lived in which room, so I just banged on every door from 103 to 106, when I found Archie Phelps standing outside 107. He rattled the doorknob and knocked at the same time.
"I heard a gunshot from in there!" he said and pounded the door with his fist.
When nobody answered, I opened the door with the key Fernando gave me earlier that day.
"You've got a master key?" noted Phelps as he moved out of the way.
Jack Tell was on the floor in room 107. Alone, and flat on his stomach. A 9mm Glock pistol lay next to him, just out of reach. Tell's eyes were wide open and slowly glazing over while a stream of bubbly saliva dribbled from his mouth. His faced was frozen in a terrified grimace. Phelps knelt by Tell to check his pulse while I held my breath in silence. Eventually Phelps shook his head.
"He's gone."
Suddenly, the fingers on Tells right hand twitched like he was reaching for the pistol, and I flinched in surprise.
"Don't touch him," snapped Phelps with an authority I didn't anticipate from the mild mannered shoes representative.
"It's only muscle spasms. He must have died seconds before we entered." Still on his knees, Phelps put his nose to the muzzle of the pistol. "Freshly fired."
There was no blood on the floor, and no visible wounds on the back of Tell. If he had been shot, the entry hole would be in his stomach or chest.
"Can't we turn the body over and check?"
Phelps sighed. "The police will throw a fit if we touch anything."
I called out to Fernando from the door and asked him to phone the police. When I turned around, Phelps was still kneeling by the corpse. From where I stood it looked like he had put his hand inside Tell's coat pocket, but I wasn't sure. He quickly slipped something into his own pocket, then crawled around on all fours.
"There's got to be a shell case or two somewhere."
The night was warm and a soft breeze breathed in through the open window. As I walked towards it, something brittle crushed under my shoe. It felt like I'd stepped in a few grains of salt. Fernando who had returned with a flashlight traced the trail of tiny crystals that ran from the window to a chair next to the corpse.
"Salt?"
I picked up a few crystals between my thumb and forefinger. The grains were the size of sushi rice, but slightly pink, like Himalayan rock salt. Only, they were tasteless.
"It's not salt."
"Drugs?" Asked Fernando concerned. "I don't want heroin in my hotel."
"I don't know what heroin tastes like."
Fernando and I were both surprised when Phelps took one of the crystals from my hand and chewed on it.
"Not drugs," he said. "It's something different."
Fernando pointed his torch at the freshly raked flowerbed outside the window.
"There's footprints on this side," he whispered. A clear set of prints was visible in the soft soil; someone had left by the window and taken two steps towards the lawn where the prints disappeared in the grass. The footprints all pointed away from the window, so whoever left this way, had entered 107 by the door.
"Do you think it's the tentacle monster?" Asked Fernando. He was shaking, and struggled to keep the flashlight still.
"Nope," I said, examining the imprints. "Tentacles from the abyss don't slither around in their bare feet."
Officer Gabriel Ramirez of the San Blas police turned the corpse over, so that Jack Tell now rested on his back. His dead eyes were closing and the terrified grimace on Tell's face had relaxed into to a blank, dead expression. No bullet holes or other visible signs of trauma marked the body. Ramirez searched Tell's pockets and pulled out a set of car-keys, a loaded money clip and a pillbox of amyl-nitrite.
"He had a bad ticker," noted officer Ramirez when he saw the medication. "Whatever happened in here must have caused a cardiac arrest."
"Why would Mr Tell be in the company of a barefooted stranger?"
"It's Saturday night," said Ramirez. "Maybe he was lonely and picked up a prostitute."
Fernando pointed his flashlight at the outside flowerbed. "Those are man-sized feet."
Ramirez shrugged. "This is San Blas. Don't be on the wrong side of history."
That same moment, Phelps got up from the floor with two 9mm bullet cases in his hand. They were identical to the case I found in 203, but there were no sign of the projectiles themselves. Whatever the shooter had aimed at, was hit point blank. Officer Ramirez opened a single-use test kit for gunshot residue. He rubbed Tell's right hand with a fiberglass swab, put it into a plastic container and soaked it with a clear solution. Then he shook it a few times. "Now we wait," he said. "Two minutes and I'll have solved the case."
"Sounds simple?"
"Simple works best," Said Ramirez. "Investigations cost man-hours but a GSR kit is only twelve bucks." He kneeled and repeated the test on Tell's left hand. Two minutes later, he compared the containers. The solution in the right hand container had turned dark blue, the other remained colorless.
"That's it," said Ramirez. "The shooter was no other than the late Mr. Tell."
"And that somehow solves the case?" I asked.
"Sure!" Ramirez was all smiles. "Mr. Tell picked up male company for the night. At some point they flew into an argument and you heard them shouting. Tell got angry and shot at the rent boy, who fled out of the window without getting dressed. Tell has a heart attack from the struggle and dies."
Ramirez wrote a few lines on a sheet of official looking paper and signed it.
"That's what goes in my report anyway," he said and left the corpse to be picked up by the coroners.
If Chris Tell was shocked over the sudden death of his father, he made no show of it. He sat by the window, staring blankly into the moonlit summer night and ignoring our presence. Mr Tejon, still in his evening coat was speaking quietly to the nurse. I'd expected her to be upset with the situation; after all, Tell was her employer and her future was uncertain. But the baritone rumblings of Tejon seemed to calm her and she looked relaxed, maybe even relieved. We went downstairs to check on room 110 where Slater and Darleen stayed, but got no reply when we knocked.
"Try knocking again!"
No reply.
"Open it," I barked and Fernando got out his master key. We tumbled into the room as soon as the door sprang open, only to find Slater busy playing a video game on his laptop and wearing headphones.
"Dude?" He said surprised.
"There's been a situation," I said. "Did you hear any screams, or maybe a gunshot?"
Slater pressed the space key to pause the game, and he took off his headset.
"When you play Zombie Nosh, screams and gunshots are pretty much all you hear."
"And Darleen?"
"Fast asleep. We shared a bottle of wine and later she took a sleeping tablet. I guess she's out cold."
Sure enough. Darleen was asleep on the hotel bed. She was still dressed in the same outfit she wore when I saw her with Mr. Tejón less than an hour ago. She had looked well back then, but now she was awfully pale, her skin almost transparent.
"You're sure she's alright?"
"She's just exhausted herself, that's all."
The hotel grew quiet once the coroner left. It was past midnight now. Ramirez had left to type his report and Phelps was off to phone his mother, but Fernando and I couldn't sleep; we both felt we had overlooked something in 107, so we paced the floor and drank far too much Mezcal, just hoping for some kind of magic breakthrough. I climbed onto the window sill of the neighboring room 108 and found an unmarked spot in the flowerbed. Then I jumped, landing with both feet in the soil. The imprints of my shoes were clear, but nowhere as deep as the prints left by the barefoot stranger.
"He was one big dude to leave prints this deep. Either that, or he was carrying something heavy."
"You shouldn't jump when you carry anything that heavy," slurred Fernando, the Mezcal hitting him hard. "It'll break your back."
I checked the walls of 107 for bullet holes, but found none. "Somebody got shot, right?"
"I suppose so?"
"Then where's all the blood? People bleed when they get shot. Especially at point blank."
"I tell you" whispered Fernando. "He shot at something. But it wasn't anything human."