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“I don’t get it.” This was the voice of the clerk. “I could have sworn he came in, Detective.”
Detective.
He might be doing a routine follow-up to the murder. But considering I took the key, how the hell did he know where Zoogie was staying? Unless it wasn’t part of the investigation and it was Navarre, who either already knew where Zoogie roomed or had pried it out of him before running the razor across his carotid.
Sounds came out the partly closed window as the room was ransacked. What would I do next? I leaned against the old masonry, trying to make myself invisible as the window below came up and a fedora popped out. Frenchy? Muldoon? Don? I couldn’t tell. Damn, I couldn’t remember the hats worn at the junkyard. Its owner looked below, but not above. Somehow the decades-old ironwork of the fire escape didn’t creak or groan with me imposing on it. The window slammed shut.
I gave it a good fifteen minutes, then took the fire escape all the way down to the alley.
Out on the street, I leaned against the Professional Building and lit a nail to calm my nerves. I pulled out the envelope, and it had my name on it. Opening it, I found a single business card. Decorated with a saguaro cactus, it read:
Summer Tours
Cynthia
3–7222.
A big clue from a dead man. Maybe Zoogie had the presence of mind to know his room might be tossed if something went wrong, that he might be searched if he kept it on his person. So he gave it to the night clerk to place in his cubbyhole at the front desk.
Then I remembered the slip of paper from Zoogie’s pants pocket. I unfolded it and read a typed message:
Meet me at the Triple-A, midnight.
Walking across to the Hotel San Carlos, I found a phone booth and shut myself behind the folding door. Then I dialed the number on the card.
“Answering service.” A woman’s voice.
“Is this Summer Tours?”
“We’re their answering service.”
I leaned in. “This is Detective Hammons of the Phoenix Police Department.” Just to be safe, I gave Don’s badge number. “Are you Summer Tours or are you a commercial answering service?”
This got the woman’s attention. She said they answered for sixty clients, ranging from doctors to locksmiths. I asked about Summer Tours. I listened as she opened a drawer and thumbed through it.
Coming back in five minutes, she said Summer Tours had engaged them this past May, paying five dollars a month. But they had stopped paying in January and were in arrears.
“That happens often these days,” she said.
“Do you know what Summer Tours was?”
“Something to do with tourism, the girl who opened the account told me.”
I asked for a description: Young, blond hair, blue eyes, pretty. Cynthia Thayer. She paid three months ahead in cash. Customers would leave their names and phone numbers, and she would call daily to retrieve them.
“Would you happen to have a log of those calls and the numbers?”
“Oh, yes. We keep records for all our customers.”
I asked if I could take a look, expecting her to demand a warrant.
“Of course,” she said and gave me her address.
Sixteen
Victoria came over that night. She brought news from her visit to Tempe, too, carrying a box. She placed it beside the sofa and I poured us Scotch. Thanks to my name as an introduction, the registrar gave her this container that held Carrie’s belongings, left behind in her dorm last semester. Besides some clothes and shoes, it held a notebook of her writing, a diary, and letters.
“Jackpot,” I said.
