“Close enough.”
“And sacked out?”
“Slept like death until maybe eight o’clock.”
“When you make a will, Mr. McGee, leave a little something to Mrs. Imber.”
“Who is she?”
“Sort of the housekeeper. Checking on the job the maids do. Opened your door with her passkey at four o’clock, give or take ten minutes. You were snoring on the bed.”
“Which sounds as if it was the right place to be.”
“A nice place to be. Let me read you a little note. I copied this off the original, which is at the lab. It goes like this:… By the way, it was sealed in an envelope and on the outside it said Mr. T. McGee, One-O-nine. So we check some places and find a place with a One-O-nine with a McGee in it. Which is here, and you. It says: `Dear Honey, What do I say about the wages of sin? Anyway, it was one of his lousy ideas and overlooked, so here it is back. Woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep and went into the purse for a cigarette and found this. Reason I couldn’t get back to sleep? Well, hell. Reasons. Plural. Memories of you and me… getting me a little too worked up for sleepy-bye. And something maybe we should talk over. It’s about something SS said about memory and digital skills. Have to go do a trick as a Special at eight, filling in for a friend. I’ll drop this off on the way. No man in his right mind would pick a girl up in the hospital lot at four fifteen on Sunday morning, would he? Would he? Would he?’ ”
Stanger read badly. He said, “It’s signed with an initial. P. Nobody you ever heard of?”
“Penny Woertz.”
“The hundred bucks was the wages of sin, McGee?”
“Just a not very funny joke. Private and personal.”
Nudenbarger stood looking me over, a butcher selecting a side of beef. “Get chopped up in the service?”
“Some of it.”
Nudenbarger’s smirk, locker-room variety, didn’t charm me. “How was she, McGee? Pretty good piece of ass?”
“Shut up, Lew,” Stanger said with weary patience. “How long did you know Miss Woertz, McGee?”
“Since we met in the bar last night. You can ask the man who was working the bar. His name is Jake.”
“The room maid said you must have had a woman in here last night. So you confirm that it was the nurse. Then you took her back to her apartment at about noon. Did you go in with her?”
I did not like the shape of the little cloud forming on the horizon in the back of my head. “Let’s stop the games,” I said.
“She mention anybody she thought might be checking up on her?” Stanger asked.
“I’ll give you that name after we stop playing games.”
Stanger reached into the inside pocket of his soiled tan suitcoat, took an envelope out, took some color Polaroids out of it. As he handed them to me he said, “These aren’t official record. Just something I do for my own personal file.”
He had used a flash. She was on a kitchen floor, left shoulder braced against the base of the cabinet under the sink, head lolled back. She wore a blue and white checked robe, still belted, but the two sides had separated, the right side pulled away to expose one breast and expose the right hip and thigh. The closed blades of a pair of blue-handled kitchen shears had been driven deep into the socket of her throat. Blood had spread wide under her. Her bloodless face looked pallid and smaller than my memory of her, the freckles more apparent against the pallor. There were four shots from four different angles. I swallowed a heaviness that had collected in my throat and handed them back to him.
“Report came in at eight thirty,” he said. “She was going to give another nurse a ride in, and the other nurse had a key to her place because she’d oversleep sometimes. The other nurse lives in one of those garden apartments around on the other side. According to the county medical examiner, time of death was four thirty, give or take twenty minutes. Bases it on coagulation, body temperature, lividity in the lower limbs, and the beginning of rigor in the jaws and neck.”