Free Lady Yesterday by Loren D. Estleman Page B

under her arm. She was barefoot; her toenails were painted coral. “Another five minutes and I might’ve been back in business.” She smiled at me.
    Iris said, “No, you’d be out of business.”
    “It’s like that?”
    “No, it isn’t.”
    It was too much for Sara. She left.
    “That your type now?” Iris asked.
    “To bounce on my knee and tell clean stories to.” I found the door and closed it. “I didn’t find him. It’s about the man who left your mash note.”
    “You could have left the door open. Mary knows.”
    “Not all of it.”
    She sat down then in the chair Sara had been using. I remained standing and unbuttoned my coat. The room was warm. “You reported the break-in to a Mr. Charm?”
    “Yes. The name’s appropriate.”
    “To a point. He called me a name and offered to bend my license.”
    “Not an obscene name. Not Mr. Charm.”
    “Depends on your definition of obscene, but I didn’t start blubbering until he was out of earshot. There’s a kid who works at the motel, Lester Hamilton. Maybe you talked to him. Black, goatee, wears his hair like Jimmy Hoffa?”
    “I don’t think so. The clerk was white.”
    “Not important. Lester’s part of the security, keeps tabs on the cars with plates that aren’t in the register. I slipped him ten bucks to check the list for the night you were broken into.”
    “Bet Mr. Charm won’t like it.”
    “He wasn’t doing any complaining when I saw him a little while ago.”
    She picked up on that. Her face went stiff as dark marble. “He’s dead?”
    I lit a cigarette and to hell with the no ashtrays. I deposited the match on top of last week’s TV Guide .
    “Somebody put a jackknife where it would do the most good. He didn’t take a lot of time finding the right place. In Charm’s office. Sometime today between say three and seven. I was there at ten-thirty and it would take at least that long for a body to get cold in a warm room, but not long enough to get stiff.”
    “Who did it, this Lester?”
    “I considered it for about a second and a half. Not for the fifty I gave him to keep me out of it—you too, though I didn’t mention you—and if there was something else between them it’s not our business. Besides, he called me. Anyone who knows as much about how to knife a man as the one who did Charm also knows that the guy who reports finding the body is always the first suspect. Also I like Lester. But then I’ve liked killers before.”
    “Why’d you pay him? I’m clean with the cops.”
    I tipped some ash onto Richard Chamberlain’s forehead and let the opening go past. “This list I asked Lester to get for me was missing from Charm’s office, torn off the clipboard in a hurry. I tumbled to the fact that there was a list because I saw Lester making one, but the practice isn’t uncommon. Whoever left that drawing in your jewelry box might have thought of it later. Professionals make mistakes sometimes. That’s why we fry one every half-century or so.
    “What I can’t figure is why kill him at all. It’s a lot of trouble to go to just to bury a piece of paper that’s less than evidence, and of a petty B-and-E to boot. And if our man wanted to drop bodies he’d have started with you instead of drawing skulls and crossbones and shooting innocent automobiles.”
    “Maybe it was something else like you said.”
    “Then why steal the list?”
    “Maybe the person who killed Charm isn’t the same person who took it.”
    “Maybe. I hate that kind of clutter.”
    “I see. You want a tidy murder.”
    It seemed as good a time as any. I took the pin out of my wallet and put it down on the end table with a click. The diamond horn threw off colors under the lamp. “Where were you today between three and seven?”
    “Where’d—” She reached automatically for the pin, then withdrew her hand and dropped it in her lap. She curled the other one around it.
    “He was almost lying on top of it. Were you with anyone?”
    “I was