Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      I chose the closet. It had two louvre doors, and both were shut. I eased one open. It made no noise. On the closet rack, Fenk had hung the beige jacket and the plaid. There were no others. Lord Thomson of Fleet had more newspapers than Fenk had jackets. There were a couple of shirts alongside the jackets and a pair of loafers on the floor. I hunkered under the jackets and shirts, and closed the louvre door. It was as noiseless shutting as it had been opening.

      Inside the closet, all was black. Outside, all was silent. The black didn’t change much over the next few moments, but the silence was broken by voices coming from the sitting room. Two of them, or possibly three. I couldn’t make out words, but I could judge tone. None of the voices sounded happy. At a guess, I would have said it was a two-way or a three-way argument.

      Ten minutes went by. The dispute continued, and my legs, in the hunkered position, throbbed. I dropped my bottom to the floor. My left buttock crushed one of the brown loafers. I moved the loafers and reached my legs half the length of the closet. Both feet struck something metallic and made a ping sound. I sucked in my breath and counted to sixty. Nobody launched an attack on my hiding place. I let out my breath. The ping couldn’t have been loud enough to reach beyond the confines of the closet.

      I leaned forward from the waist, in the kind of stretch one makes to loosen up before a set of tennis, and I touched the object my feet had hit. It felt smooth and slick and had curves and interruptions in the curves that could have been valves. Had I found Dave Goddard’s tenor saxophone? Seemed close to a sure thing.

      Ten more minutes passed, give or take an eternity. It was no fun in the closet. The voices kept on, definitely angry. Then, in a snap, they were gone. Had I missed something? I listened so hard my ears hurt. A minute or two later, I got my reward. I heard a door close. It wasn’t loud enough to be the bedroom door but faint enough to be the door out of the suite and into the hall.

      I sat and strained some more and heard nothing. The voices had fled, all of them except the voice that whispered from the other side of the louvre door.

      “Okay to come out of there,” James whispered.

      I pushed back the door.

      “Thanks, James.” I was whispering too. “Close call.”

      “Had closer.”

      I shoved up from the floor and got myself tangled in Fenk’s plaid jacket.

      I said, “Fenk must have come back.”

      “Him and somebody else. There were two guys altogether. Maybe three.”

      Both of us were still whispering. James crossed the bedroom to the door. He opened it slowly, looked around the edge, and went into the sitting room. I slid back the other louvre door. It was Dave Goddard’s tenor saxophone on the closet floor unless someone else owned a forty-year-old Selmer with no polish and elastic bands holding some of the valves in place.

      James came back into the bedroom.

      “Guy’s in the next room,” he said, not whispering.

      “Why aren’t you whispering?” I whispered.

      “Guy won’t hear us.”

      “Unconscious?”

      I was still whispering.

      “Probably was two, three minutes ago,” James said. “No way he is now.”

      “Quit it with the laconic stuff, James.” I’d given up on the whispering. “What’s the mystery?”

      I walked past James into the sitting room, and once again came face to face with Raymond Fenk. My face developed a quiver around the mouth. His stared up at the ceiling from the floor.

      “Dead,” James said.

      Fenk had a cord wrapped into his neck so tightly that most of it disappeared into the flesh. His face was a high red, and his eyes were open and bulging. If he hadn’t been garrotted, he’d suffered something as close to that technical description of strangulation as I cared to witness from up close. On the other hand, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and I’d lost the quiver around the mouth.

      “You feel for a pulse or anything medical like that?” I asked James.

      “The guy’s out of here. You kidding?”

      James was right. Fenk’s vital signs had fled while I was hunkered down in the closet.

      “Now what?” James said. “For us, I mean.”

      “We skedaddle.”

      I went back into the bedroom and reclaimed Dave Goddard’s saxophone from the closet floor.

      “Hey, all right,” James said when he saw what was in my hands.

      I fitted the saxophone into the case and snapped it shut just the way I’d seen Dave do it at Chase’s three nights earlier.

      James had the door open a crack.

      “Don’t get your speed up,” he said. “People out there that got their names on their lapels, buttons, ribbons, stuff like that on.”

      At the desk, I looked for the Hell’s Barrio press release. It was gone, and with it went the three names and the phone number that someone, undoubtedly the late Fenk, had written in the margin. The page from the scratch pad where I’d scribbled Trevor Dalgleish’s name and the first three digits of the phone number remained in place. I tore it off the pad and crumpled it in my jeans pocket.

      “People got something against their rooms or what?” James said from the door. “They’re having a party in the hall.”

      Fenk’s face was the colour of a Santa Claus suit. His mouth was slack, and his eyes popped in a way that made the irises seem smaller and the white parts larger. He didn’t look as bad-tempered in death as in life. He looked scared. The cord must have hurt like hell.

      “Oh my God.”

      “What’s the matter?” James asked, holding position at the door.

      “Nothing that’s part of your job,” I answered James.

      I opened the saxophone case. No strap. I looked back at Fenk. The strap was buried in his neck, the strap that held Dave Goddard’s saxophone when he played it.

      “People in the hall,” James said, “they’re . . . dispensing.”

      “Dispersing.”

      “Going to their rooms.”

      One saxophone strap looked like another. The police medical people would say Fenk died of strangulation brought on by the tightening of a saxophone strap around his neck. But there was nothing to connect the strap to Dave Goddard. How did that stand up as reasoning? Probably had a flaw or two. But removing the strap from the folds of Fenk’s flesh was a task for a man far less squeamish than I.

      “Cleared up out there,” James said.

      I lifted the saxophone case in my right hand, and James and СКАЧАТЬ