Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [39]
I nearly tripped turning into the final corridor, some animal getting under my feet. I turned, trying to see what it was, but it disappeared round a corner. It looked a little pale and strange to me, but presumably that was an effect of the half-light Probably it was just some stray cat, though it seemed to scuttle rather than run. There was no singing behind Shelley’s door now, and no answer when I banged on it. I called her name and pressed my ear close to the wood, but couldn’t hear anything inside. I gave her a minute, then I pulled my gun and kicked it in.
The hallway was dark but a flicker of orange light came from the room down the end. I ran in to find a candle burning in the middle of silence, and a slim brown body lying curled round it. A needle still hung out of the artery in her thigh, and the candle had an inch to go. When I rolled her onto her back I saw that her eyes were tilted completely up under the lids, and a trickle of drying vomit ran out of her mouth and slid off her face.
Shelley Latoya was about as dead as you can get, outlasted by a cheap candle that was dripping milky wax onto the carpet. Head thumping, my vision blurred orange by Jack’s and the guttering flame, I searched the area around her until I found the foil packet. It was empty, but one taste told me what I already suspected. Rapt, hardly stepped on at all. A tiny spark of darkness flared on my tongue and then disappeared, leaving me next to a cooling corpse and without the confirmation I needed.
I held the foil next to the candle and found the name of a club embossed in the back: “Weasel Enemas.” Maybe if I’d just thought about the information I’d gathered I could have worked it out more quickly. Perhaps if I’d been thinking less about having a drink I might have paid better attention to Golson. Maybe not. My whole day had been predicated on just seeing the murder sites, and then relying upon Mal’s reports. How was I to know that two half sentences would have been enough, and that burying myself in real information would just blind me?
Laverne Latoya had been seeing a man she met in a club in the 130s. Okay, there were probably a hundred clubs in that area, but Club Bastard, where Louella Richardson had been spending her time in the weeks before she died, was on 135. It catered to aspiring young things from the low hundreds and high-lifers slumming it down from the 140s. It also—the database had said-featured dancers, with strippers after midnight.
Not many people deal Rapt. It isn’t very popular. It’s kind of a heavy experience. Weasel Enemas was owned by a different guy than Club Bastard was, but that was exactly the point: If you were dealing drugs out of your club you didn’t pack them in something with your own logo on it. You stole stuff from a competing joint, and sold them in that for the cops to find.
I’d come to see if Club Bastard rang any bells with Shelley. What lay in front of me wouldn’t stand up in court as the answer, but was answer enough for me. There had never been any question that this was going anywhere near a court anyway. Two women had died through their contact with just one club. The computer had supplied me with the name of the man who owned it, and I felt my head glow like a bulb as I knew what I was going to do.
First I pulled a sheet from the pile at the back and laid it over the body, then I snuffed out the candle and stood for a moment in darkness. I was drunk, and angry, but not stupid enough to be able to ignore a simple fact. I couldn’t blame Shelley’s death on anyone else. I couldn’t blame it on anything except a hundred-dollar bill left by someone who thought he was doing her a favor.
But I didn’t know how to punish myself for that, and so someone else was going to have to do.
What was it like, being a cop? In New Richmond, of all places? A complete waste of time.
I don’t say that for effect, as a heroic declaration of the pride of doing a difficult