“I mean, I thought . . .”

“You can speak freely, Mr. Craig,” Harold said.

“Why shouldn’t I be able to?” Duke asked. “And it’s not Mr. Craig, it’s Mr. Duke.”

“Mr. Duke,” Sal said, “you’re not in any way a suspect in this.” But even as he spoke, Sal wondered. Duke was a male in the same age group as D.O.A., and like a lot of other men, he fit D.O.A.’s general description.

Sal told himself he was way off base, but he should keep an open mind. The way you had to do with Harold around.

“Of course I’m not a suspect,” Duke said. “I didn’t mean that.”

Harold flashed him a reassuring smile. He pretended to check his notes. Fishes. “What kind of knocking was it? I mean, hard and loud? Knocks close together? In a pattern? Like somebody had something important to relate to you?”

“Nothing like that. Just knocking. That’s why I went to the door and looked out in the hall. But there was nobody at my door.”

“You sound as if you were disappointed, Mr. Craig.”

“It’s Duke. I was, slightly. I was hoping it was one of the Glow View color people. If it wasn’t, I was gonna go down to the bar and look for somebody to talk with. Nothing else to do, I guess. I was waiting for the drying competition. You know, how long it takes different brands to set up in various temperatures and humidity.”

“Sound’s interesting,” Sal said, stifling a yawn.

“Like watching paint dry,” Harold said, perfectly deadpan.

“So you saw a man and a woman at the door across the hall?” Sal asked, hoping to keep Duke on track.

“Yeah. I got a good look at the woman when she let him in.” He swallowed. “I found out later she was one of the victims. Andria Bell. She was the guide or chaperone for those young girls.” Duke looked slightly nauseated and absently touched his stomach. Swallowed hard enough that Sal and Harold heard phlegm crack. “Jeez, what a shame!”

“What did the man look like?” Sal asked.

“Well, he was kinda facing away from me. He looked pretty average. I think he had brown hair, but I’m not sure. He had on dark slacks and a gray or pale blue sport coat, I think.”

“How tall would you say?” Sal asked.

“Think in terms of the door,” Harold said. He drew a fish.

Duke looked at him.

“The door’s height is standard,” Harold said, “so you can use it as a guide to height.”

“Yeah, I guess you can,” Duke said. “I’d say he was right around six feet. Maybe a little taller, maybe a little shorter.”

Good work, Harold. “What about eye color?” Sal asked.

“Oh, I never got that good a look at him. She—Andria Bell—stepped back right away and let him in.”

“Did you see a weapon?”

“No, but he could have had one shielded from view by his body, the way he was standing.”

“Close your eyes and look at him going into the room again,” Harold said, closing his own eyes. “See it in your imagination. Smell it. Hotels have a certain smell. Breathe it in. Be there. Look around again. You might see something you didn’t notice before.”

Sal wished Harold would shut up. His role in the interview was supposed to be simple. He was supposed to keep the conversation flowing from Duke, and to pretend he was taking notes. Maybe even take some notes.

“Anything?” Harold asked.

“No,” Duke said. “Sorry.”

“Keep your eyes shut. Go through it again. There’s the knocking.” Harold rapped a mahogany end table with his knuckles. “Now you walk to the door.”

Sal was about to put an end to this nonsense, when Duke said. “Scar.”

“Star?” Sal asked.

Harold looked at Sal and silently mouthed Scar.

Sal looked bewildered.

“Odd how I’d forgotten that,” Duke said. “The look I got of the man, sort of a quarter view from behind, gave me a glance at the side of his face when he stepped across the threshold. Just before the door shut. There was a kind of curved scar on his right cheek.”

“Like a knife scar?” Sal asked.

“No, no. Slightly reddened, slick skin. More like a burn.”

“Like he was in an accident and got burned?” Harold asked.

Duke shrugged. “I’d assume it was an accident.”

“Like a car accident. Or a plane,” Harold said.

Duke nodded. “Could be, I guess.”

“Did he walk with a limp?” Harold asked.

“Limp?”

“A slight one.”

Duke thought. “I couldn’t say he didn’t.”

“After you saw this, when you knew the knocking wasn’t on your door, what did you do?” Sal was hoping Duke might also recall that he’d heard screaming, or some other indication of the hell that was going on across the hall.

But the horror was suffered in silence or near silence.

“What did you do?” Sal repeated.

Harold chimed in, “These are routine questions.”

“I did like I was thinking about,” Duke said. “Went down to the bar. Had a scotch. Ate enough pretzels and nuts that I didn’t feel like having supper. I didn’t see anybody from Color View, so I talked for a while with Bonnie the Barista. They call her that because she’s responsible for coffee as well as booze.”

“It’s crept into the language,” Harold said.

“Then I went to one of the ballrooms where the paint setup contest was going on. Watched that for a while. Met up with some Color View guys from Milwaukee and went back to the bar with them. We drank and talked till about eleven o’clock, I guess. Then I came up to my room and went to bed. I woke up this morning, went down to breakfast, and heard about Andria. Made me sick. I came back upstairs and heard somebody knocking on a door. This time it was my door. It was you guys. Not you two personally, but the police.”

Sal thought this was a logical place to stop the interview. He thanked Craig Duke, and he and Harold moved toward the door.

Harold turned. “Who won the paint drying contest?”

Duke seemed surprised that he’d be asked, but he answered without hesitation. “Guys from Minnesota. They always win. It’s cold there and the paint’s blended to set up fast.”

“Doesn’t seem fair,” Harold said.

“Like life,” Duke said. He made a head motion toward the door and the suite across the hall. Meaning, that was where it always ended. Sooner or later, in one way or another, death had its way with us, and fair didn’t enter into it.

There was a thought to cheer you down.

On the descending elevator, Harold said, “Time not to have a drink.”

Knowing Harold code, Sal understood what he meant. It was time to drop in at the hotel bar and talk to Bonnie the Barista.

13

Early as it was, there were only a few people in the Fairchild Hotel’s bar. Four solitary male drinkers were spaced about the place as if trying to be as far apart from each other as possible. Two women sat at a small round table. One very attractive woman was perched on a stool at the end of the bar.

Sal and Harold took stools at the opposite end of the bar from where the woman sat nursing some kind of drink that looked like a bloody Mary. Yep, there was a stalk of celery on the napkin where the glass rested. The woman picked up the celery, dipped it in the drink, then took a bite of it that could be heard around the bar. She pursed her lips and chewed. Harold had never thought of eating celery as sexy, but now he did.

A tall woman about fifty, in a white shirt and red vest, came over, and Sal ordered seltzer water, Harold an espresso. Sal flashed his shield, given to Q&A detectives while they worked for hire for the NYPD. The barista looked at it briefly and then went and got their drinks. She set them on cork coasters in front of the two detectives. A small plastic nameplate pinned to her vest identified her as Bonnie. She had one of those round, perpetually almost-smiling faces that made her hard to read. An all-purpose expression.

“You here about what happened upstairs?” she asked.

“Yeah, I heard about it,” Harold said.