Kill Your Darlings Read Online Free PDF Page A

have to leave him as he is,” I said, finally, quietly. “We can’t touch anything.”
    She drew back from me, her eyes wide, a look of sudden, sharp curiosity giving her that Joan Crawford ’40s movie star presence again.
    “Why?” That came out in three or four breathy syllables; it was an accusation and a question and a threat, all at once.
    “Look, Mae. Mr. Kane... Roscoe... he’s dead. It isn’t going to hurt him any to stay put.”
    “You bastard.” Softly; knowing I was right, but not liking it, or me, at the moment.
    “Roscoe didn’t die of natural causes, Mae. He drowned. An accidental death, probably, but one that’s going to require some care and caution. We have to call the desk, now, and get the manager up here.”
    She sighed, nodded, and the theatrics—which I think were not false theatrics, but quite genuine theatrics, if that makes any sense to you, the affected melodrama that becomes real if a person makes enough of a habit of it—sort of drained out of her and she sat in her coat on the edge of one of the room’s two double beds with her shoulders slumped; and she looked old. She kept her back to the open doorway to the bathroom.
    The manager came up within minutes—well, actually, the assistant manager, or
an
assistant manager. I never quite got that straight. But I did manage to gather he’d only had this position of responsibility a few weeks. He was younger than me, and dark, and had an Indian accent and a blazer with a hotel crest; he was immaculately groomed and very polite, like Andy Kaufman doing his foreign-man routine.
    He was also a little thrown by all this.
    “I have never had a dead guest in my hotel before,” he said. As if Roscoe Kane had checked in that way.
    “Well, you’ve got one now. Don’t you think you should call the police and get somebody from the coroner’s office over here?”
    “It’s very late.”
    “The cops are open twenty-four hours. Somebody’ll come.”
    “If a guest dies of natural causes, we’re to phone a certain funeral home. It is written on my calendar.”
    “That’s nice; that way you’ll know what day it is when your guests drop dead.”
    He gave me a look that said my humor eluded him; it eluded me, actually. I was lapsing into talking like Gat Garson, I suddenly realized. I felt embarrassed.
    “Look,” I said, “a drowning is not a natural death.” We were standing just outside the bathroom where Roscoe still bathed. Mae was on the far double bed, sitting, staring at a draped window. She didn’t seem to be listening, but I kept my voice down just the same. “And,” I added, “I think this may be something other than just an accidental drowning.”
    The brown eyes in the brown face were so alert it was uncomfortable meeting them. The earnestness there was disconcerting.
    Very softly, I said, “This may be murder.”
    Without asking for an explanation, he said, “I’ll call the police.”
    I touched his arm, stopping him, as he was already on the move.
    “Just tell them we need somebody from the coroner’s office,” I whispered. “Don’t say murder. That’s premature.”
    He nodded curtly and went to the phone.
    A heavyset man in a brown baggy suit arrived in forty-five minutes; I’d had room service bring up some gin and Mae was pretty much sedated by now, and lying on the turned-down bed in her coat, not asleep, but not awake. I’d offered her my room, so she wouldn’t have to share the suite with her late husband, still soaking in the tub, but she wouldn’t hear it. She wouldn’t let me turn on the radio or TV, either. The gin she was agreeable to.
    The man from the coroner’s office with his brown baggy suit and his brown baggy eyes and his brown bag took a look at the scene and without asking a question said, “Drowned in the tub,eh.” He was alone in the bathroom, the assistant manager and I standing just outside listening as his voice echoed in there. He gestured at the bottle on the floor without