Free You Know Who Killed Me by Loren D. Estleman Page A

partner had said if that made sense, guns would come with two handles, like a weed-whacker. I circled a living room that wasn’t any messier or tidier than it had to be, with a flat-screen TV mounted on a wall, a smattering of magazines, some sleek furniture the manufacturer couldn’t be bothered to assemble itself, and half an inch of pale green carpet pasted to a subfloor that sprang underfoot like the plywood it was. The manager stood in the doorway, watching me and going to town on that dry patch under his toupee. It hardly seemed worth the trouble; he didn’t look even a bit like Brad Pitt. I didn’t stumble over any bodies and there were no curtains on the windows for a pair of shoe tips to poke out of. I wondered just when all the romance had worn off the profession.
    â€œDon’t look like he’s here,” said the manager.
    I gave that all the attention it needed and checked the bathroom. Yako squeezed his toothpaste from the middle of the tube and unrolled his toilet paper up from under. I liked him less and less.
    I didn’t like the bedroom even more. He’d flung his clothes into a pile on a chintz-covered slipper chair and turned down the page corners in a slipshod stack of racy paperbacks on the nightstand. In the stir of air when the door opened, a dust bunny rolled out like a tumbleweed from under the bed. It was big enough to let loose in a dog park.
    But it wasn’t his shoddy housekeeping I didn’t care for. The bed was made, hospital corners and all, under a green foam spread turned down at the top as neatly as a show handkerchief.
    â€œHey!” The manager had followed me as far as the doorway, but that was the only objection he made as I put away my revolver and tore loose the bedding, mattress pad and all. The mattress looked clean except for a few shed hairs.
    I slid both hands under the bottom and heaved it over. A corner clipped the paper shade on the lamp on the nightstand, knocking it crooked and tilting it off its base, but the lamp settled back down without overturning.
    I didn’t pay it any attention, and neither did the manager. We were looking at a bloodstain the size of a throw rug on that side of the mattress.
    The drawer in the nightstand was empty except for a pair of drugstore reading glasses and a squat semiautomatic pistol. Wrapping my hand in my handkerchief, I picked it up, sniffed vanilla-scented oil, and turned it to tip light inside the muzzle.
    â€œIf I knew he had that, I’d’ve told him to get rid of it or find another place to live. I don’t like guns or the people that use them.” The manager frowned at my revolver.
    â€œIt didn’t do him any good. Dust in the barrel.”
    It was an unfamiliar piece. I looked for the name of the manufacturer. The characters were Cyrillic.
    I asked the manager if he knew Russian.
    â€œJust my way around a bottle of vodka. Think it was communists?”
    â€œIf it was, they didn’t use this gun.” I put it back in the position I’d found it.
    â€œWe better call the cops.” He made for the telephone on the nightstand.
    I blocked his path. “You don’t want those print boys mad at you.” I got out my cell and went to the window. I had to change positions three times before I found a signal.
    The manager waited until I finished talking to the sheriff’s sergeant. “I was out of work three months before I got this job. Guess I’ll be looking again.”
    â€œDid you kill him?”
    â€œBrother, I didn’t even know him.”
    â€œNot much of an alibi in this town.”
    A set of tires squished to a stop in front of a fire hydrant four stories down. A star was stenciled on the hood of the car. Ray Henty got out.

 
    TEN
    â€œI think we can safely call this a homicide,” Henty said.
    â€œThat, or somebody’s in deep shit for slaughtering a hog inside the city limits.”
    The comedian was a sheriff’s