Dr. Death by Jonathan Kellerman

The Happy Trails Motel was a single-story, U-shaped collection of a dozen or so rooms with a front office on the left-hand tip of the U and a dead neon sign that

pleaded VACANCY. Red doors on each room, only two of them fronted by cars. The building had blue-gray walls and a low white gravel roof. Over the gravel, I saw coils of barbed wire. An alley ran along the west side of the motel and I drove around back to see what the wire was all about.

The coils sat atop a grape-stake fence that separated the motel from its rear neighbor: a trailer park. Old, sagging mobile homes, laundry on lines, TV antennae. As I cruised closer, a dog growled.

Returning to the street, I parked. Nothing crisp about the air here. High eighties, arid, dusty, and heavy as unresolved tension. I entered the office. No reception counter, just a card table in a corner, behind which sat an old man, hairless, corpulent, with very red lips and wet, subjugated eyes. He wore a baggy gray T-shirt and striped pants. In front of him was a stack of paperback spy novels. Off to the side sat a collection of medicine bottles, along with a loose eyedropper and an empty pill counter. The room was small, murky, paneled with pine boards long gone black. The air smelled like every kid’s first booster shot. A comb dispenser hung on the rear wall, along with another small vending machine that sold maps and a third that offered condoms and the message Be Healthy!

To the old man’s right was a glass display case filled with photos. Ten or so pictures of Marilyn Monroe in black-and-white. Scenes from her movies and cheesecake shots. Below the montage and stretched across the center of the case, pinned in place like a butterfly, was a pink satin two-piece bathing suit. A typed paper label, also pinioned, said, CERTIFIED GENUINE M.M.’S SWIMSUIT.

“It’s for sale,” said the hairless man wearily. His voice was half an octave below bassoon, clogged and wheezy.

“Interesting.”

“If you meant that, you’d buy it. I got it from a guy used to work on her pictures. It’s all bona fide.”

I showed him my police consultant badge. The small print tells them I’ve got no real authority. When they’re going to be helpful, they never bother to check. When they’re not, a real badge wouldn’t impress them.

The old man barely looked at it. His skin was pallid and dull, compressed in spots, lumped like cooling tallow. Licking his lips, he smiled. “Didn’t think you were checking in for a room, not with that sport jacket. What is it, cashmere?”

He stretched a hand toward my sleeve and for a moment I thought he’d touch it. But he drew back.

“Just wool,” I said.

“Just wool.” He humphed. “Just money. So what can I do for you?”

“Several months ago a woman from L.A. checked in and—”

“Killed herself. So why’re you here now? When it happened, the police didn’t barely want to talk to me. Not that they should’ve, I wasn’t working that night, my son was. And he didn’t know much, either—you read the report, you know.”

I didn’t deny it. “Where is your son?”

“Florida. He was only visiting, doing me a favor ’cause I was indisposed.” His fingers brushed against one of the medicine bottles. “Back in Tallahassee. Drives a truck for Anheuser-Busch. So what’s up?”

“Just doing some follow-up,” I said. “For the files. Did your son ever talk to you about who checked Ms. Doss in that night?”

“She checked herself in—the coward. Barnett said she

didn’t look too good, unsteady on her feet, but she did it all, paid with a credit card—you guys took the receipt.” He smiled. “Not our usual clientele.”

“How so?”

His laughter began somewhere in his belly. By the time it reached his mouth he was coughing. The paroxysm lasted too long to be trivial.

” ‘Scuse me,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a dimpled hand. “Like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

He smiled again. I smiled back.

“Not poor, not horny, not drunk,” he said, amused. “Just a rich coward.”