Read Online Winter at Death's Hotel by Kenneth Cameron - Free Book Online Page A

precinct were taken over and—in theory—solved.
    The Squad had its own lockup just off the big room. Anybody who went in there was assumed to be a killer and would already have been “downstairs,” meaning in the basement, where detectives “softened them up,” usually with lead-filled rubber hose. As a result, the lockup smelled of urine and blood and worse. Even though the door to the two cells was kept closed, the smells came through to mingle with the smells of tobacco smoke, sweat, suits too long worn without cleaning, old dirt, floor wax, and aggression.
    The reigning lieutenant had a separate office opposite a wall of windows that had remained unwashed and unopened for so long that nobody any longer tried to look out of them. They looked, anyway, at a brick wall a dozen feet away. The sky, two stories above, was long forgotten.
    Lieutenant Cleary, the Squad’s commander, had called a meeting to give them his own version of what Roosevelt had told him at the mortuary, but first he was huddling in his office with a sergeant named Grady, who was, as other detectives put it, tight to Cleary’s duff. Grady was in his forties. He looked tougher than a lot of his suspects, and he stank of cigars. He wore a wrinkled double-breasted suit in a fabric that seemed to be covered with fuzz; his high collar was tight enough to cause his neck to slop over it like a pie’s crust. He had little eyes, often bloodshot, and an expression that made people of goodwill want to talk to somebody else. He was wearing a bowler hat, even though he was indoors.
    Cleary kept his head low and almost whispered, even though Grady was sitting just across his desk from him. “Here’s the situation. Roosevelt tells me yesterday to go to the City Mortuary and get everybody out of the way so somebody can view the murdered whore. ‘Somebody’ turns out to be Roscoe G. Harding, who owns enough coal mines to keep the trains running for the next hunnerd years. Rich . The whore turns out to be his wife—he recognizes her from some goddam drawing in the papers.”
    â€œWhat’s Roosevelt in it for?”
    â€œHarding’s a big Republican moneybags. Roosevelt wants to be governor. Harding sees the picture in the paper, he telephones Roosevelt and says he thinks it’s her and he wants it hushed up who she is.”
    â€œWhy? She’s dead.”
    Cleary sighed. “Because she’s his wife. He doesn’t want people knowing his wife had her twot cut up by some crazy who takes her for a whore! Plus he’s maybe sixty and she’s young enough to be his kid and a looker , and he doesn’t want people saying she was out looking for a little of the real meat because he hasn’t got it! See?”
    â€œMuch ado about nothing, like they say.”
    â€œIt’s all in his head, yeah, but the way it’s gotta be is, nobody knows the whore’s been identified, she isn’t somebody’s wife, she’s gone off to Potter’s Field and that’s that! Enh? Get it? We gotta say the case is dead, nothing more to come. Get me?”
    â€œWhere’s the whore at now?”
    â€œHusband took her last night and is going to bury her someplace upstate.”
    â€œToday?”
    â€œPretty quick, yeah, I think.”
    Grady screwed his face around so it looked hesitant and deliberately stupid and said, “Ya know, Jack, a case like this, the husband is the obvious suspect.”
    â€œJeez, don’t even think it! He isn’t! There is no suspect!”
    Grady shrugged. “Just thinking.”
    â€œDon’t think!” Cleary put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Now.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œHarding’s rich . I don’t see it yet, but I will—some gelt for you and me. He owes me.”
    â€œJust us two.”
    Cleary nodded.
    Grady said eagerly, “We tell this Harding if he don’t pony up we go