THE STATLER Hotel
She died quietly in a rundown hotel room, an old woman nobody thought twice about.
The old lady lay silently, though not exactly in peaceful slumber. Rather than resting in peace, her repose appeared violated by two city employees hovering over the bed. They were Smith City detectives. Her, or its, eyes were open accusingly, mouth gaping as if to say, “Leave me alone, you bastards.” At least that was Detective Sergeant Jablonski’s impression, and would have also been his choice of expletive if it were him being exposed to the world in a similar condition.
The body lay on its back on the bed, sheets twisted as if fighting its demise, an all too familiar sight to them both. Jablonski’s partner, Detective Second-Grade Edwards, stood in the open doorway to the room. It was a single in a cheap residential hotel. The coroner’s assistant had been called to certify death and he was waiting for her to appear.
Once a popular stay, luring visiting tourists and businessmen, the Statler Hotel had downgraded to cheap lodgings for local residents and prostitutes, showing its age with a sign reading “Stat_ _ _ _otel.” Even local pimps lived in better quarters around the corner.
“Here she is, Trix.” Edwards led the assistant coroner, named Trixie Thompson, over to the reposing body. Trixie’s looks did little to belie her name, in that the lady looked as though she would fit well on the stage of an ancient burlesque theater next door. A tall, fashionably dressed brunette, thick glasses magnified the image of large green eyes, accentuating their color.
“This okay?” she asked, nodding at a cluttered dresser top near the bed as a place to leave her bag.
“Better not. At least until you make your expert opinion, Trix,” John Jablonski told her. In that city, every death rated the heading of “homicide” unless, or until, the cause was known without doubt. Even little old ladies dying peacefully in bed.
“Here, this should be okay.” Using a hankie, he pulled over a kitchen chair that had been sitting in a corner.
Just one hell of a way to start a Friday, John thought.
Trixie sat a brown medical kit on the edge of the chair, laid out a few instruments, and began a simple but, to her, repetitive task of determining an initial opinion on cause of death. While John complained of a few times each week, Trixie repeated that duty three to eight times a day.
While she was busy, the detectives looked the room over. It seemed cut and dried, an old woman dying alone in bed. Neither detective nor the ME expected any complications. It was only bad luck that they’d caught the squeal on their way to work. Hell, it was bad enough, John thought, that they had to suffer through the constant chatter of radios in their official cars, but now the damned things were required in personal vehicles too. Detective work needed concentration, and who could concentrate while listening for a call sign among idle chatter?
“About time we had some free time,” Edwards said, looking out a dirty window at a brick wall. “Jane and I are supposed to go to a PTA meeting tonight. I’ve missed the last two. How you going to spend them?”
“Dunno. Probably sip cheap wine and watch TV.” John shrugged, watching Trixie. Single, he admired that view better than the brick wall showing through the outside window.
The landlady had knocked on Mabel Trum’s door that morning. Since cooking was not allowed in single rooms, the two older ladies normally breakfasted together in the hotel manager’s apartment. That morning, Mabel hadn’t shown up. Since they were such good friends, the landlady had checked on her. Discovering poor Mabel still asleep, she had shaken her by the shoulder, with no reaction. In her capacity, the landlady had seen many dead bodies and recognized her friend would never again be down for breakfast. Checking the magnets on her own refrigerator door, she had called the police to start events rolling.
“Well, John?” Edwards poked a pen at a ten by eleven inch photo of three people standing next to what looked like a Ford from the forties or fifties. It appeared to be a normal-looking shot for the time frame, but more like Bonnie and Clyde in that two of them had the handles of pistols protruding from their waistbands or pockets. Except by a trained policeman such as Larry Edwards, the weapons were barely discernible in the small print. He bent into dim light filtering through the dirty window to study the photo.
“With any luck we should have a weekend off for a change,” he said, looking closer. A rifle or shotgun barrel could be seen through the glass in the back window of the Ford.
“Hey, John. Take a look at this.”
Jablonski leaned over to pick the photo up with two fingers and his handkerchief, holding it to the light. “Don’t look like one of those amusement park backgrounds.” Jablonski studied the photo, glancing back and forth from the body to the teenage girl in the shot. “Looks like a younger edition of our body here, Larry. Wonder if she has a record?”
“I suppose we can run her prints after Trixie gets them? Wouldn’t hurt nothing,” Edwards answered, idly stirring items around on the dresser top with the tip of his pen.
The detectives were killing time until Trixie finished making her ruling on the cause of death from old age in some form or other. Although mildly curious, both knew they wouldn’t really bother running the prints. The two had too much other work to do if they hoped for time off. After Trixie finished, the detectives would search the room for identification, notify the meat wagon and the deceased’s relatives, if any, then go on to other things. After finding a cup of coffee and donuts on the way to the station, of course. Later, Trixie would send a report to them giving information to use in their own one-page summation. That would be the end of it. The two had up to a half dozen of those deaths to check out in an average week.
“I don’t think you guys are going to make it home this weekend.” Trixie interrupted their puttering around. “Come here a minute.” She had the corpse’s head cocked to the side and, using a penlight, showed them several red spots on the exterior of the left ear, along with a small glint of red inside. A dribble of dried blood led from the inner ear down to the earlobe, hardly noticeable unless you were looking.
“I’ll have to take the body back for Dr. Johnson to do an autopsy, gentlemen. It looks from here as though it’s an ice pick wound, and someone has jammed toilet paper in to stop the bleeding. Sorry fellows.” She grinned up at them as though she weren’t all that sorry.
Icepick. Icepick? Jablonski thought. Where the hell did you find one of those things these days? A few years back he had even looked, and couldn’t find one anywhere.
Glancing at his partner, he said, sighing, “Looks like a very long night.”
* * *
