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last night, he asked if he could have a room
on the top floor. I guess he wanted to look out at the view."
    The fat man cleared his throat nervously.
    "He seemed like a nice man. Leastwise he was
polite to me."
    When we got to five, the clerk held the elevator door
open with his right hand as we got off. "You wanta come back
down, you press the bell." He pointed to a painted-over buzzer
on the jamb. "I’ll come up quick as I can."
    He tipped his hat again to Cindy and released the
door, disappearing behind it with a rattle of pulley chains.
    "It’s down here on the front right,"
McCain said.
    Diffuse daylight was coming from a bank of windows at
the end of the hall. Through the grimy glass you could see the east
side of the city, crumbling away in a rubble of faded brick to the
green base of Mount Adams. Atop the hill the brilliant white steeple
of St. Gregory’s Church blazed in the sun.
    "You can see Mason’s house," Cindy Dorn
said heavily. "There on the hillside."
    I squinted into the glare and could just make it out,
a tiny drop of red on the green hillside.
    A CID man with a pair of magnifying goggles perched
on his forehead came out the door of Greenleaf ’s room.
    "We’re set," he said to McCain. He
glanced at Cindy. "You’ll want to wear a mask, ma’am."
 
He handed her a blue hospital mask. Cindy
stared at it with a sick look of terror.
    "Let’s just do it," I said.
    The CID guy stepped out of the doorway. "He’s
on the bed at the back of the room. Take a look at his face, ma’am.
Just a look."
    The blue mask dangling loosely in her hand, Cindy
stepped through the hotel room door. I went in behind her. The smell
of death rose up like an animal and ran toward us in a blind rush
that made the girl’s knees buckle. I grabbed her arms to steady
her. He was lying on the mattress at the back of the grim little
hotel room—something the color of a roach wing, swathed in white
sheets.
    Somehow the girl made herself stare at it before
collapsing against me with a sob.
    "It’s him," she said, gagging.
    I lifted her to her feet and maneuvered her out of
the room into the hall. McCain ducked his head with embarrassment.
    "Sorry, Ms. Dorn," he said heavily. "Very
sorry."
    By the time we got back out to the car, the girl had
gone into shock. I told the driver to take her to the emergency room
at Jewish.
    McCain rode with us to the hospital. No one said a
word on the ride.
    The emergency room was triaged, but McCain flashed
his badge and they took the girl immediately, wheeling her in a chair
into one of the curtained-off examination carrels. I didn’t know
McCain particularly well, but the concern he was showing for Cindy
Dorn was
enough to make me like him.
    We sat in a waiting area, drinking vending machine
coffee. All around us weary, sad-eyed people sprawled on hospital
chairs and benches. Above them, on wall consoles, television sets
murmured late-afternoon fare.
    "Do they let you smoke anymore?" McCain
said, pulling a pack of Luckies from his shirt pocket.
    "You have to go outside."
    "Smokers are the new niggers, you know that?"
He rammed the cigarettes back in his pocket as if he were stabbing
himself in the heart. "The nineties are starting to depress me.
The whole world depresses me." McCain got to his feet. "I
gotta have a nail."
    I followed him through the exit door, out onto a
cement concourse. The afternoon sun lit the pavement like sheet ice.
    "Christ, it’s hot," McCain said,
squinting into the glare as he screwed a cigarette into his mouth and
touched its tip with a lighter.
    "When’s this weather gonna break, huh? It’s
been like a hundred for a solid week."
    "That was a nice thing you did back there for
the girl."
    McCain shook his head. "She showed a lot of
guts, considering."
    "When do you figure you’ll get criminalistics
on Greenleaf?"
    "Day or two. There wasn’t much for them to do.
Hell, you saw the hotel room. Now why would a guy like him end up in
a place like that?"
    I remembered