Chapter Sixteen - “We’ll Know It When We See It”

I hugged her for while, then pulled away and pounded on the door. Lynda shook her head. “No use knocking. He won’t hear you.”

“Get me in there.”

She pulled a flat rectangular key card out of her purse, slid it into the opening, got the green light, and pushed open the door. I brushed past her into a luxurious Winfield room with real paintings on the walls and heavy quilt spreads on the two beds.

Hugh Matheson lay on his back on the floor a few feet from the first bed. Bright red blood had gushed out of the right side of his neck, dripping on the deep pile carpet. The lawyer’s blue eyes, fixed and unseeing, stared up at the ceiling.

It seemed impossible that a spark of life could remain in the motionless body. But if there was even the slightest chance...

I moved toward Matheson.

“The place in the neck where you check for a pulse isn’t even there anymore,” Lynda said. “He’s dead, all right. And he didn’t do it to himself. I could see right away that there’s no gun nearby.” Her voice was jagged, bordering on hysteria.

“He was shot? How could you even tell with all that blood?”

“I looked closely. I’ve seen autopsy pictures.”

She looked away from the body and hugged her shoulders as if trying to warm up in a deep freeze. She breathed in deep gasps. I was feeling sick and scared myself, but I had to keep it together for her sake. Lynda may be the toughest person I know, but right now she needed a rock to hold on to.

“It’s going to be okay,” I promised, wrapping a comforting arm around her. “I’ll get you out of this somehow. I know you didn’t do it. You didn’t have the time.”

She jerked away from me. “Didn’t have the - That’s how you know I didn’t kill him? Of course I didn’t kill him. Who the hell would think that I killed him?”

“Almost anybody but me who found you leaving a hotel room with a fresh body in it,” I said. My voice rose a bit. “And I do mean fresh. The blood is still wet.”

Lynda glanced at the gruesome thing on the floor, then looked away again. I couldn’t blame her, but I felt guilty for being so repulsed at the bloody sight. He had, after all, been a human being.

“I was leaving to get the manager so he could call the police,” Lynda said. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I followed you from Muckerheide on my bike.”

“What! I can’t believe it. No, wait. You’re Jeff Cody. I believe it.” Was that irony or sarcasm, Lynda? I still get the two confused. “What a sneaky thing to do.”

“I was sneaky? You’re the one who lied about where you were going. But I can see why you didn’t want to tell me you were coming here to meet Matheson in his room.”

“So that’s what you think! I should have known. Damned jealous... You’ve got the wrong idea totally. Matheson came on to me-”

“Then I don’t have the wrong idea,” I interrupted.

“Shut up. Sitting next to me at the colloquium he kept on and on about his collection of Sherlockiana and made snide comments about Chalmers’s. He didn’t even try to hide his delight that somebody had made off with the best parts. I figured it was probably Matheson who’d done it, or somebody paid by him, and that he would brag about the whole thing if I got him loosened up enough.”

“Hence the key, I suppose - part of the loosening up process.”

Lynda nodded. “When he invited me to have a few drinks with him, I suggested we go someplace where we could talk quietly. I’m sure he didn’t think I really meant talk, but I did. Anyway, Matheson said he was going to try to have a word with somebody for a few minutes right after Kate’s talk. He slipped me a key to this room and told me to wait for him if he didn’t show up right away. I was hoping to beat him here and look around for the stolen books, but talking to Post ran a little long and I was too late for that.”

“Matheson didn’t say who he was meeting?”

“No.”

“Of course not. That would be too easy. All right, try this on for size: Suppose the meeting turned nasty and they parted with words. The other person could have come here later with a gun and plugged Matheson.”

Lynda grimaced. “We’d better let the police deal with that.”

“The police?” If I sounded incredulous, it’s only because I was. “Don’t you know what Oscar would do if his people were to find you with that?” I pointed to the late Hugh Matheson, his life’s blood seeping into the expensive carpet of the Winfield Hotel.

“Muck up the evidence?” Lynda said.

“Hang you out to dry, that’s what. He’s been looking for an excuse for months. A murder charge is beyond his wildest dreams.”

Oscar Hummel is Erin’s chief of police, a retired desk sergeant from Dayton who never tires of telling Mac how unrealistic his Damon Devlin plots are. (I’ll give him points for that.) He’d had a feud going with Lynda over unfavorable coverage of his department in her paper. Last winter one of his overeager officers had arrested an out-of-town drug dealer who turned out to be under surveillance by the Sussex County Sheriff’s Department. The evidence was thrown out of court for lack of a search warrant and the dealer walked. Then earlier in the spring, Oscar himself - in hot pursuit of a stolen truck - had driven his cruiser through a cornfield. The Erin Observer & News Ledger’s editorial asserted that the chief’s operation had gone “from Keystone Kops to bull in a china shop.” As news editor, Lynda didn’t write the editorials, but that distinction was lost on Oscar.

“That’s absurd,” Lynda said. “What possible reason would I have-”

“Lovers’ quarrel.”

She said a rude word, followed by, “I barely knew the man. And what would you be doing here - cheering me on?”

Apparently the question was hypothetical, because she didn’t wait for an answer before she reached into the outside pocket of her purse and pulled out her Android.

“No you don’t,” I said firmly, grabbing the phone. “If you don’t believe that scenario will appeal to Oscar, how do you think he’d like the ever-popular ‘Love Triangle with Jealous Ex-Boyfriend’? Consider what we have here: you, me, and a formerly handsome corpse. Oscar may not be as dumb as he likes to pretend sometimes, but he is totally lacking in imagination. He always goes for the most obvious explanation. Remember the Parsons case?”

When a popular city councilman was strangled with his own necktie, Oscar arrested his promiscuous wife. But her attorney proved in court that Parsons had died during an autoerotic evening gone awry.

“But Oscar’s your buddy,” Lynda objected.

“I’d say we’re friendly in a casual way. He calls me once in a while when he gets free tickets to a Reds or Bengals game, and I’ve gone fishing with him a few times when I had questions about police procedure for a mystery I was working on. But I don’t think our personal relationship would hold him back for twelve seconds from doing his job if he thought I’d killed a man, not even if we were best pals.”

“So that’s what you’re really afraid of!”

“Partly,” I conceded, hoping to disarm her with my candor. Actually, it was a tossup between Oscar’s jail and Ralph’s wrath as to which I was more afraid of. Ralph would not like for me to have found a body. “But I’m worried about you, too.”

Spearing me with a skeptical look, Lynda yanked her phone back, but returned it to her purse.

“Well, we can’t just leave the body here to rot.”

“We’ll call the police from the pay phone.”

There was still one left in Erin, about two blocks from the Winfield.

“All right, all right,” Lynda said. “Whatever you say. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

I shook my head. “We can’t just leave. We have to search the room first.”

“For what?”

“For any clues that Oscar and his crew might not understand,” I said. “Something Sherlockian maybe.”