The Wrong Quarry by Max Allan Collins

That gave me time to shower and brush my teeth and take a crap. When I returned to the window, she was on the second of the three car-less cabins. So I got up and put on a sweatshirt and jeans.
    By ten-thirty she had cleaned the three cabins, and now began again on the cabins with cars parked outside. She would knock, saying something (presumably, “Housekeeping!”), and in the first two instances was apparently told to come back later. Last night I’d noticed NO DO NOT DISTURB signs, so apparently the Rest Haven Court did not splurge on such niceties.
    When she tried the door to Cabin 12, she for some reason didn’t get a response from the occupant. She unlocked the door with her passkey and went in. Perhaps a minute and a half later she came out. She looked only mildly upset. Not that I had expected her to come out screaming, “Laws a’mighty!” People die in their sleep in motel and hotel rooms all the time.
    She did move fairly briskly over to the manager’s office in the oversize cabin by the neon sign, leaving her push cart behind, and I took in the action with the bored semi-interest of somebody watching a Love Boat rerun (one of which was playing on my room’s television, volume down low enough to keep me company but not distract me). The manager came out, moving quickly, and she followed. This was a small man in a brown suit, tie flapping, not the bald snoring guy of the night before. She waited outside as he went in. He came out in under a minute. He said something to her along the lines of “You need to wait here,” and went back to his office. She lighted up a cigarette and leaned back against the windows of Cabin 12. White man dead in bed. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
    I went over and swung the desk-perched TV around to face me. A lot would happen now over at the Rest Haven, but the pace might be slow. The Love Boat was over. Pretty soon a very dumb game show on NBC came on, called Hit Man. I wouldn’t kid you.
    What I was watching for was whether the cabin got treated like a crime scene. I didn’t figure it would, and I was right. A patrol car with two uniformed cops arrived first, then a Ford Fairmont driven by a dumpy guy in a dumpy suit pulled in—a plainclothes cop. He and the manager went into 12 and weren’t gone long. The plainclothes cop was giving the manager instructions and the manager was nodding. Then all the cops left.
    During Family Feud, an ambulance arrived, no siren, no hurry. Within five minutes, the body of a man who had caused so much suffering to so many (you’re welcome) was carried out in a body bag. No need for a gurney for so short a distance.
    Not a crime scene, then. No small-town forensics guy, no photography, no yellow-and-black tape. Some guy had died in his sleep. Because the room had been Mateski’s originally, Farrell would probably be listed under whatever fake name his partner checked in under—a good chance that was the name Farrell had used, too, to keep things clean. When the dead man’s I.D. would prove to turn up nothing interesting—no priors, no relatives—that Chevy Cavalier would be seized and eventually raffled off for some city or county fund or other.
    Was I a genius to predict all this? No, I just knew how deaths in the lodging business were handled, particularly in a small-town vacation destination. No hotel likes its living guests disturbed by the exit of a deceased one. Vacationers get sent the wrong signal when people are dying around them. Even businessmen on the road don’t like the thought that they might die in bed, far from home.
    So motels and hotels checked dead guests out with as little fanfare and as much alacrity as possible, with (in Stockwell’s case, anyway) the cops complicit in helping along the town’s main industry. I’d been careful to avoid bruising Farrell and the only thing that might indicate he hadn’t died in his sleep of a heart attack or aneurism would be his slightly bloodshot eyes, if anybody bothered to