“Shit. I owe Curtis ten bucks.”
The familiar voice at the door yanked me sharply from the frozen horror on Mr. Webber’s chalk-white face. One edge of his forehead appeared darker than the rest and soft, like he’d hit the ground hard. He was still dressed in his sad, shabby coat. “Mrs. Berns?” I asked. She looked tiny in the doorway, tiny and crazy-sexy in thigh-high stockings and a black teddy under a translucent, feather-lined robe. “What are you doing here?”
She took in my bedhead and bloodshot eyes courtesy of an evening of power hurling. “We’ll have the talk when you get a little bit older, honey. We have a more important situation on our hands. You just cost me ten cucumbers.”
Bernard, the stuffy reporter who yesterday had been in her room at the Senior Sunset, materialized behind her, looking ridiculously bird-legged in boxer shorts and a white v-neck T-shirt.
“Wah?” I asked.
She crossed her arms and leaned into the door frame. “We have a Mira and Corpse pool at the Senior Sunset. Curtis Poling bet you couldn’t make it through Octoberfest weekend without finding a dead body. I figured if I steered you away from your usual haunts and kept a close eye on you, I’d win the bet. Turns out you can’t trick luck as bad as yours, sweetie pie.”
“Wait, is that why you talked Johnny into bringing me here? To win a ten-dollar bet?” Nothing like indignation to arrest your attention.
“Pah.” She strode over to the corpse and knelt down to stare at his face. “It’s that Leeson boy we should feel sorry for. How’d you humiliate yourself this time? And who’s the wormfood here?”
“Bob Webber,” Bernard said from behind us.
“One b or two?” I asked, staring at the face of the deceased and wondering why he looked so frightened. My experience with corpses is that most of them left the world with a disgusted looked on their faces, a final “Really? Is that all?” Bob Webber, on the other hand, looked like his last moments had been awfully scary.
“Two.”
“Well now, how do you know him?” Mrs. Berns asked, turning toward her date and sounding peeved.
Bernard cleared his throat. “He operated The Body Politic blog. Well-known in the business of political reporting, a reputation for mendacity.”
I didn’t like the guy’s arrogance, and I didn’t trust his aim with big words. “Mendacity or tenacity?”
“My dear girl, he didn’t give up when he had a story. He was efficacious.” He talked slowly to give me the opportunity to dig out my thinking cap.
I pointed at the plastic bag sealed tightly around the corpse’s neck. “Was he going through tough times?”
“I didn’t know him personably,” Bernard answered.
I stared from Bernard to Mrs. Berns and back again. “Where did you two meet?”
“Gas station.” Mrs. Berns stood and grabbed Bernard’s hand. “Time to go, honey.” She shot her most threatening look to the cleaning lady, which was difficult to pull off in her Victoria’s Oldest Secret regalia. “We were never here.”
The maid rolled her eyes and reached into her apron for a squirt of Purel, leaving me to decide if I also should never have been here. Lots of questions get asked when you’re standing near a dead body, suicide or no. Besides, my eyes and throat were scratchy and my stomach was still unsettled. I backed out of the room, pausing long enough outside to lift the room list from the maid’s cart and slide it into my jeans pocket before returning to room 20 to retrieve my car keys and purse.
My plan was to scurry down the walkway and never look back, but once past the cart I was slowed by an agitated-looking Grace, barreling toward me. I stepped aside to let her enter room 18, her hands shaking as she slid in the electronic key card. She didn’t make eye contact with me, acted, in fact, as if she dearly hoped she were invisible. When the door glided closed behind her, I had enough time to note that both the beds were made. I returned to room 19 for a moment, peeping my head in. The maid was dragging on an Eve’s Slim in the entirely smoke-free motel, studying the body in the center as if she were considering whether to get one for her den.
“Did you clean room 18 yet?”
She shook her head in the negative. “This is my first room of the day. It was supposed to be empty,” she repeated.
I thanked her and made my way to my car just as a wailing ambulance pulled into the lot, followed by a navy blue Battle Lake police cruiser with its cherries on. What I spied in the police car froze me until a basic instinct kicked in. I zipped to my left and launched between two four-door sedans. I skinned my knees in the process but it would be completely worth it if I was right and that was Gary Wohnt, former chief of the Battle Lake Police Department, persona non grata since August, behind the wheel of the cop car.
“You okay?”
I looked into the clear brown eyes of a man in his late fifties. He was sitting cross-legged in the space between the two cars I was now occupying. His clothes were worn but serviceable, and if not for the smell of BO and his odd location, he looked like Everyman. “Why’re you sitting between two cars in a parking lot?”
“Why’re you?”
He had a point. I shot a glance over my shoulder to see if the cop car was parking nearby. “I tripped.”
“Pretty spectacular trip,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Not that you asked, but when I need to hide from the police, I find it most effective to not draw attention to myself. For example, I don’t start my hair on fire, yell ‘help,’ or leap into the air and land between two cars like a handicapped gazelle.”
“Point taken.” I looked away from the emergency vehicles to study him for a moment. “Hey, were you one of the protestors at the debate yesterday?”
“I am.” He held out his hand. “Randy Martineau. Pleased to meet you.”
I shook it. “You get a chance to talk to Swydecker and Glokkmann at the debate?”
“Swydecker, yes. Glokkmann, no. She executed her usual escape.”
“You at the motel to corner her?”
“Something like that.” He nodded toward the far end of the parking lot. The Battle Lake police car and ambulance pulled around to the other side, out of sight. “I think you’re in the clear.”
I relaxed marginally and tried to push my hair out of my eyes, but it moved as a mass, more post-hurling-restless-sleep-dreadlock than tress. “Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to shower, brush my teeth with a sander, and get to work.”
He nodded, seeming to give my list serious consideration. “If you duck behind that yellow VW and then scurry toward the Hummer, there’s a line of bushes that should get you all the way to the back of the parking lot.”
“Thanks,” I said. It wasn’t until I was safely behind the wheel of my car and out of town that I wondered how he knew where I’d parked. That concern sparked a realization: the vaguely familiar man I had passed on the stairwell last night on my way to the Night of Humiliation with Johnny had been Bob Webber. He hadn’t been carrying any bags, and if I replayed the brief encounter in my head, I remembered him appearing agitated, though I’d been too deep in my own problems to make more than passing note of it.
I pulled the room list I had pinched from my pocket and scanned it while driving. It consisted of three columns: the first with room numbers, the second with last names, and the third with duration of stay. Glokkmann and Swydecker snagged my attention first. They were both staying on the same level as I had and were checking out today. I found Webber, but his room had been on the other side of the hotel, right next to the lobby door: room 4. And he was supposed to have checked out yesterday morning. What room had I seen him come from last night? And more pressing, what in the hell was Gary Wohnt doing back in town?