The Enemy

“Let’s look at the dead guy,” I said to him.

He led the way inside. Flicked a switch that lit up the interior hallway. Then another that lit up the whole room. I saw a standard motel layout. A yard-wide lobby with a closet on the left and a bathroom on the right. Then a twelve-by-twenty rectangle with a built-in counter the same depth as the closet, and a queen bed the same depth as the bathroom. Low ceiling. A wide window at the far end, draped, with an integrated heater-cooler unit built through the wall underneath it. Most of the things in the room were tired and shabby and colored brown. The whole place looked dim and damp and miserable.

There was a dead man on the bed.

He was naked, facedown. He was white, maybe pushing sixty, quite tall. He was built like a fading pro athlete. Like a coach. He still had decent muscle, but he was growing love handles the way old guys do, however fit they are. He had pale hairless legs. He had old scars. He had wiry gray hair buzzed close to his scalp and cracked weathered skin on the back of his neck. He was a type. Any hundred people could have looked at him and all hundred would have said army officer, for sure.

“He was found like this?” I asked.

“Yes,” Stockton said.

Second question: How? A guy takes a room for the night, he expects privacy until the maid comes in the next morning, at the very least.

“How?” I said.

“How what?”

“How was he found? Did he call 911?”

“No.”

“So how?”

“You’ll see.”

I paused. I didn’t see anything yet.

“Did you roll him over?” I said.

“Yes. Then we rolled him back.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Be my guest.”

I stepped to the bed and slipped my left hand under the dead guy’s armpit and rolled him over. He was cold and a little stiff. Rigor was just setting in. I got him settled flat on his back and saw four things. First, his skin had a distinctive gray pallor. Second, shock and pain were frozen on his face. Third, he had grabbed his left arm with his right hand, up near the bicep. And fourth, he was wearing a condom. His blood pressure had collapsed long ago and his erection had disappeared and the condom was hanging off, mostly empty, like a translucent flap of pale skin. He had died before reaching orgasm. That was clear.

“Heart attack,” Stockton said, behind me.

I nodded. The gray skin was a good indicator. So was the evidence of shock and surprise and sudden pain in his upper left arm.

“Massive,” I said.

“But before or after penetration?” Stockton said, with a smile in his voice.

I looked at the pillow area. The bed was still completely made. The dead guy was on top of the counterpane and the counterpane was still tight over the pillows. But there was a head-shaped dent, and there were rucks where elbows and heels had scrabbled and pushed lower down.

“She was underneath him when it happened,” I said. “That’s for sure. She had to wrestle her way out.”

“Hell of a way for a man to go.”

“I can think of worse ways.”

Stockton just smiled at me.

“What?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“No sign of the woman?” I said.

“Hide nor hair,” he said. “She ran for it.”

“The desk guy see her?”

Stockton just smiled again.

I looked at him. Then I understood. A low-rent dive near a highway interchange with a truck stop and a strip bar, thirty miles north of a military base.

“She was a hooker,” I said. “That’s how he was found. The desk guy knew her. Saw her running out way too soon. Got curious as to why and came in here to check.”

Stockton nodded. “He called us right away. The lady in question was long gone by then, of course. And he’s denying she was ever here in the first place. He’s pretending this isn’t that kind of an establishment.”

“Your department had business here before?”

“Time to time,” he said. “It is that kind of an establishment, believe me.”

Control the situation, Garber had said.

“Heart attack, right?” I said. “Nothing more.”

“Probably,” Stockton said. “But we’ll need an autopsy to know for sure.”

The room was quiet. I could hear nothing except radio traffic from the cop cars outside, and music from the bar across the street. I turned back to the bed. Looked at the dead guy’s face. I didn’t know him. I looked at his hands. He had a West Point ring on his right and a wedding band on his left, wide, old, probably nine carat. His dog tags were hidden under his right arm, where he had reached across to grab his left bicep. I lifted the arm with difficulty and pulled the tags out. He had rubber silencers on them. I raised them until the chain went tight against his neck. His name was Kramer and he was a Catholic and his blood group was O.

“We could do the autopsy for you,” I said. “Up at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.”

“Out of state?”

“He’s a general.”

“You want to hush it up.”

I nodded. “Sure I do. Wouldn’t you?”

“Probably,” he said.