Read Online Lady Yesterday by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page B

easy as doormen and confidential secretaries at the Pentagon. Clams were named for them.
    I was still holding the picture. Having failed to draw any vibrations from it, I returned it to my breast pocket, brushing the paging device with my hand. I remembered Lester Hamilton then at the motel on Tireman, and as if that completed some sort of telepathic connection the beeper sounded. I turned it off and called my service. The girl said someone had left the name Lester and a number. I dialed it. He answered on the first ring.
    “Mr. Walker?”
    He sounded out of breath. I felt a tingling. He hadn’t called to tell me he’d turned up a license plate that didn’t belong in the motel parking lot. I asked him anyway.
    “Forget that,” he said. “It’s Mr. Charm. I’m in his office.”
    “Is he listening?”
    “No.”
    The tingling was stronger now. “Can he be?”
    He might have swallowed. You can’t tell over the telephone. “No.”
    I told him to sit tight and got my hat and coat and started reeling in line.

9
    T HE MOTEL LOOKED much the same at night. The parking lot was well lit and the sign splashed green neon on the snow at its feet. Lester was standing under the canopy when I swung into a slot near the entrance. He had on the same red blazer and green-and-white-striped scarf. He opened my door.
    “ ’S’go in the side,” he said. His flattop was a little mussed but other than that he looked as calm as moonlight.
    We went through a steel fire door around the corner from the main entrance, at the end of a corridor carpeted in orange sherbet that started at the unfriendly lobby. I didn’t get close enough to tell if the blazer behind the desk contained the towheaded clerk with the spiky moustache who had sneered at me that afternoon. Long before we got to it we turned down a shorter corridor ending in a ridged glass door with PRIVATE stenciled in black on one of the horizontal ridges. Lester pushed it open and stood aside holding it against the pressure of the closer. I accepted the invitation.
    It was a narrow room where work got done, unlike Drago Zelinka’s office at the Kitchen. A paneled desk two steps inside the door held up a scribbled-over appointment calendar and a metal rack jammed with letters in envelopes and a telephone with one of those caddies that let you rest the receiver on your shoulder while you’re going through the mail. There were a locked file cabinet and a gray steel safe and a clipboard attached to the wall by the desk with papers curling away from it. There was a window looking across the space between the two buildings at the windows of the rooms on that side. I turned up the Venetian blinds to determine that and closed them again. The walls were painted beige.
    The carpet was shallow for easy cleaning and made of tough short black-and-brown fibers that wouldn’t wear out quickly. Mr. Charm was lying on it in a fetal curl with his congested face to the door and one hand curved loosely around an imitation stag handle protruding two inches above the watch pocket of his gray vest on the left side. The vest was stained dark around it but aside from that he was as well turned out as ever, with the gray knot of his silk necktie snugged up under his Adam’s apple and a soft shine on his black tasseled loafers and not too much cuff showing at his wrists. The round gray moustache was perfect. He’d approve.
    “He didn’t go off at three like usual.” Lester had stepped inside, letting the door close. “His light was still on and the door was locked when I checked again at ten. No one had saw him. I slipped the lock.”
    His skin was as cold as it gets, which is colder than just about anything. Still squatting, I examined the knife handle without touching it. It looked like a standard Boy Scout jackknife, only larger. They sell them in army surplus stores from Fairbanks to Miami. I got up, looked at him, looked at the door. If the body hadn’t been moved he could have got it while he