Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro by Loren D. Estleman

closets are the hiding places of choice of nine out of ten hotel felons.
    I walked into the room and hesitated near a lamp on the low bureau, but there was no one to throw it at. The place was standard size, with a pair of those beds that desk clerks think are queens, a nightstand between, and a maple hutch with the doors open to expose a nineteen-inch TV set. One of the beds was rumpled slightly, as if someone had been sitting or lying atop the spread, and the blinds were drawn over the window. Del-wayne Garnet lay on his back on the carpet between the far bed and the TV. He was dressed pretty much as he had been the day before, in the gray college sweatshirt and distressed corduroys, but he’d traded the carpet slippers for sooty-looking Trainers. The sweatshirt had acquired two holes since I’d seen it last. He hadn’t done much bleeding through them because they’d stopped his heart.
    I leaned down far enough for a sniff. The shooter hadn’t stood close enough for the powder to burn the material. Garnet’s mouth was a little open. His eyes, open also, looked surprised and a little hurt, but wise with a knowledge we’re not to have until there’s nothing we can do with it. He never looked more like his father.
    I straightened. I was breathing through my mouth, and I could already feel my throat growing itchy from the brimstone air. For all that, it had already begun to fade. His skin would still be warm.
    He had a key card to the room in one pocket, nothing else on his person. The drawers in the bureau and nightstand showed only a Gideon Bible and two mammoth metropolitan directories. I looked under the bed and took another tour of the closetand bathroom. I wondered if the killer had taken his luggage.
    I found an airline ticket folder and a fat wallet in the leather coat in the closet. I opened the folder, holding it by its edge like a phonograph record, and read the return date. He had an aisle seat on a nonstop to Toronto leaving at 6:19 P.M . That explained no luggage. He had a U.S. Social Security card and a Canadian driver’s license in his wallet, both in Lance West’s name. The Social Security card was a good copy, but it’s a pathetically easy design to counterfeit, with the name typed on an ordinary typewriter. Fake credentials were a cottage industry during the sixties, when the demand among draft-dodgers and other fugitives was at an all-time high. If they were good enough you could use them to acquire all the legitimate papers you needed at your final port of call.
    The money compartment held a little over sixteen hundred in U.S. bills, nothing smaller than a fifty. After paying me my advance he’d have had just enough to buy a magazine for the flight home, and maybe a drink aboard. I didn’t find any credit cards. He’d probably paid cash for the room. I wiped off the wallet and put it back, money and all.
    A careful man, Delwayne Garnet; but then he’d had thirty-four years to practice. No wonder he looked so surprised when two bullets went into his chest.
    What a mesoblast.
    The TV remote lay on the rumpled bed near the foot. I left it there and pushed the Power button on the set with a knuckle. Bette Davis shrieked at me. I jumped and muted the sound. Filmed in black-and-white, she was talking with what looked like a trim British official in a room furnished in rattan with a fan turning slowly from the ceiling, a tropical set. I knew the film:
The Letter
. It was an early scene. The movie opened with a fusillade from a revolver. That would explain none of the neighbors reporting the shots. I switched off the set.
    I wiped off everything my fingertips had touched, conned the hallway, and went out. A vacuum cleaner whined in theroom where the housekeeper was cleaning. I’d thought about hanging the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door of Garnet’s room, but decided against it. The police would probably consider that obstruction of justice.
    My young waiter was busing the table that had belonged to