Chapter Nineteen

    Karen saw Johnny flip the bedspread off him. He looked at her and grinned and got up. He chased her out of the motel room and down the stairs to the parking lot. She ran along the side of the building to the breezeway, and that's where Johnny cornered her, in the alcove by the janitor's room. His shirt was completely soaked with blood and his face was pale white. He aimed his gun at her and said, "Why'd you shoot me?"

    Karen said, "I was afraid for my life. I…" That's when Bobby appeared aiming Lou's.45 and blew Johnny off his feet. Bobby looked at her and said, "Where's the money?" She opened her eyes and looked around the room. She was in a junior suite at the Townsend Hotel, sweating and afraid. It was a dream but it was as vivid as any dream she'd ever had. You didn't kill someone—even in self-defense—without repercussions.

    Karen got up and went in the bathroom and brushed her teeth. She came back in the bedroom and turned on the TV. A line moving across the bottom of the screen said, Channel 1 Action News Exclusive. Now the camera panned a motel courtyard as a reporter's voice said, "A forty-year-old white male was found shot to death this morning at a local motel."

    The camera framed the reporter, a middle-aged journeyman who looked vaguely familiar. He was standing on the second floor balcony of the motel. The room they'd found Johnny in was behind him. He said, "Fifty yards from where I'm standing, Troy police discovered another shooting victim in the back seat of a stolen minivan less than twenty-four hours ago. Are the two deaths related? Police are investigating."

    Karen pushed the power button on the remote and turned the TV off. She started to get paranoid, picturing police dusting for prints and finding hers all over the van and the room. She saw herself in orange jail fatigues, her wrists cuffed to a belly chain, besieged by reporters as she made her way into court escorted by her attorney, Mr. Robert P. Schreiner.

    She'd had the presence of mind to wipe off the minivan steering wheel, but what else had she left her prints on? She'd opened the motel room door and touched both sides of the door handle, and touched the ice bucket and the bedspread. Could they get fingerprints from a bedspread?

    Karen had planned it all so carefully, every detail, and nothing had gone right. Two people were dead, and she was the prime suspect. Maybe not at the moment, but it could happen at any time. There was plenty of evidence if they looked in the right place. Samir stole her money and she was just trying to get it back. Wouldn't a jury sympathize with that?

    She tried to calm down, analyzing the situation. So what if they found her fingerprints? She'd never been arrested. The police wouldn't have her prints on file. But a lot of people had seen her at the motel and could ID her, like the hillbilly manager who helped her put the suitcase in Johnny's car. Add it all up and it didn't look good.

    But on the positive side, Karen had gotten her car back so there was nothing connecting her to Johnny. Fly had parked the

    Audi where she told him to on the fourth floor of the parking garage, the extreme west side. Karen had watched to see if anyone followed him. Nobody had. She could look across Pierce Street from her hotel room window and see her car.

    She'd picked up a backpack at Moosejaw and stuffed $500,000 in it. She'd put the rest of the money in two safe deposit boxes at a bank a couple blocks away. Her plan was to drive to Chicago, see her friend Stephanie, then head south to Miami and get on a cruise ship to the Bahamas, and deposit her money in a Bahamian bank—no questions asked. Then she'd fly to Nice and disappear in the coastal towns along the Mediterranean.

    Karen had applied for a passport a couple weeks earlier. She had it sent to her mother's in Garden City, figuring she'd be on the run. She called her mom from the hotel to find out if it had arrived. No mail had come for her except for a Garden City High School 15 Year Reunion flyer.

    "You're going, aren't you?" her mother said.

    Karen said, "When is it?"

    "The day after Thanksgiving."

    "Mom, I've taken a modeling job in Europe. I have to leave as soon as my passport comes."

    "Weren't you going to tell me?"

    "I didn't know all the details until today," Karen said.

    "Oh, dear," her mother said. "I'm so proud of you."

    Karen wondered how proud her mother would be if she found out about all that had happened, hoping her picture didn't appear on the evening news and give her seventy-one-year-old mom a heart attack.

    Karen called the passport office in Chicago and was told her passport had been processed and was going to be sent the next day. Finally. She decided to leave the hotel as soon as it was dark and find another place to stay. She had to keep moving. But where?

    O'Clair was asleep when he got the call from Ann-Marie Karmo telling him Johnny had been killed. Troy police had knocked on her door at eight o'clock in the morning to give her the bad news, but few details. She wanted to know what happened and asked O'Clair if he'd look into it for her. What was strange, she didn't sound sad or upset, maybe it was a relief after all Johnny had put her through.

    Now O'Clair was on the second floor balcony of the Red Roof Inn, looking across the parking lot at the building where they'd found Johnny. It was entertaining to watch the local cops secure the crime scene, taking O'Clair back to his own days on the force.

    He stood there like one of the renters who'd gathered on either side of him, coming out of their rooms to see the action. Guys with shaving cream on their faces, cigarettes in their mouths; couple of girls in tank tops, girls drinking beer, smoking cigarettes- up all night, or just getting up-their idea of breakfast—breakfast of champions. It was strange seeing people partying so early in the morning.

    At the far end of the building he saw a black maid in a China doll wig come out of a room and wheel her cart toward him. The wig was shiny black and had bangs that came down to her eyebrows. O'Clair moved toward her, blocking her way and said, "How're you doing?" Her skin was the color of dark chocolate and she had high cheekbones and dark eyes that wouldn't look at him. "You know what happened," O'Clair said. "Don't you?" Now she glanced at him.

    "You with the police?"

    He stared at her, picturing himself in his dark blue Detroit police uniform, his attitude and expression saying, I can make a lot of trouble for you.

    "I didn't find him," she said in a slow voice with an island accent that sounded Jamaican. "Was Loretta. She like to faint, going in that room, blood all over, man dead under the bedcovers."

    O'Clair said, "What else can you tell me?" He could see her hesitate like she didn't want to talk to him, like she had something to hide. "I'm not with the police."

    "That right," she said. "Who you with?"

    He could see beads of sweat on her upper lip.

    "Man was a friend of mine," O'Clair said. "You saw who did it, didn't you?"

    She looked over the railing where the police were. Sweat rolled down her face and she wiped it with the back of her hand.

    "I was over in building A, across the lot from where they find the dead man at," she said. "I seen the red hair girl go in there. Come out later on, rolling a suitcase, looking around like she sneaking out."

    "What else?" O'Clair said.

    "Saw the red hair girl get in a black car, drive off, almost run this dude over. Seem like he know her."

    O'Clair said, "What do you mean?" He wiped sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his tan sport coat.

    "Talking to her, like they friends, or was."

    "What kind of car?" O'Clair said.

    "BMW," the maid said.

    O'Clair said, "What'd the guy look like?"

    "White dude," the maid said.

    "How old?"

    "Can't say for sure."

    O'Clair took the photo of Bobby out of his pocket and showed it to her. "This him?"

    She glanced at it and said, "Could be."

    "What do you mean?" O'Clair said. "It's either him or it isn't."

    "I don't know. I got work to do," she said, and wheeled her cart past him.

    He watched the action outside Johnny's room, local cops going through the motions, and wondered about Johnny. Was he mixed up in it too? Johnny knew Samir's habits, his routine. Knew who'd be in the house and the best time to hit. But O'Clair also knew Johnny and didn't think Johnny would have the nerve to do it.

    O'Clair and Johnny had worked together on occasion over the years, helping each other out whenever two guys were needed. He tried to guess how many houses they'd broken into in the middle of the night, surprising the mark who was avoiding them, past due on payment, the vig having multiplied out of control.

    In another life, they might've been burglars. They knew a few things about breaking into houses that was for sure. If O'Clair was giving advice to young collectors, he would've said: get yourself a crowbar. With a crowbar you could break into a house, any house in a couple minutes. Okay, a pocketknife too, a good one with a sturdy blade. And don't worry about security alarms because most people forget to turn them on.

    What they'd do, O'Clair and Johnny would go into the mark's bedroom, wake the guy up sleeping next to his wife. O'Clair would say, Hey Jerry, or whatever his name was, get up, we need to talk to you. Scare the shit out of him. That was the point; make him feel vulnerable and afraid. The guy would get out of bed in his underwear, praying his wife wouldn't hear them.

    One time they broke into a house and sat in the guy's family room and watched the end of a bowl game that was running late—Michigan State against Fresno State. The mark heard the TV, got up, came in rubbing his eyes.

    O'Clair had said, "Hang on a second," waiting for the Spartans to score the winning touchdown.

    "I'm calling the police," the mark, whose name was Rob Snipes, had said. "What do you think you're doing?"

    O'Clair said, "What's the matter, don't you like football?"

    Or O'Clair would wake the mark up, bring him in the living room and say, "Want Johnny to go in there keep the little lady company?"

    Guy'd start begging. And O'Clair'd say: "You better quit fucking around, hand over the money."

    If he got the impression a mark was holding out on him, they'd take his car or his wife's car. No guy wanted to get his wife involved. He'd never hear the end of it.

    O'Clair left the motel and drove to the Palace in Auburn Hills to see Minde, the Automotion dancer, surprised the girls were practicing their routines on the Pistons' basketball court. There was a guy on a ladder replacing one of the nets, and maintenance guys in burgundy golf shirts, cleaning the VIP seats. O'Clair and Minde sat on the Pistons' bench, the dancers bending and stretching on the basketball floor-twelve girls with lean hard bodies in all kinds of different outfits-getting ready to practice some new routines for an exhibition game that night.

    "He was unconscious when I found him," Minde said. "I was going to call 911, but the police were already pulling in the driveway. How'd they find out so fast?"

    Good question. The police told Ricky someone had called 911 from the house. But who? It wasn't Ricky or Moozie or Minde, so who was it? He noticed Minde's face was bruised. It looked like she tried to hide it with makeup.

    "My friends thought Smoothie hit me. He has a temper but he'd never do that. It was one of them dressed like cops who did it."

    O'Clair said, "Where was Ricky when all this was happening?"

    "On the kitchen floor," Minde said. "They taped his hands. I cut him free and he stood up and said what he was going to do when he caught them, not I should've done something when they were here."

    That was Ricky, tough guy till he had to prove it. O'Clair was watching the dancers, fixing his attention on a dark-haired girl with a pair of melons that were trying to bust out of her workout shirt. He turned back to Minde as she slid onto the floor and did the splits.

    "You don't mind, I have to stretch while we talk," Minde said.

    O'Clair said, "What's it like dancing for the basketball fans?"

    "It's okay. Most of us model and appear in commercials. We do this to stay in shape. Not for the money, we get like twenty bucks a game."

    O'Clair wondered what would happen if he tried to do the splits. He didn't know if he'd be able to get up.

    Minde looked up from the floor, her eyes on him. "Oak, do you know who hurt Smoothie?"

    "That's what I was hoping you were going to tell me." He took the photograph of Bobby out of his shirt pocket, handed it to Minde and watched her eyes light up.

    "He's the one that came out of the closet," Minde said. "I knew he wasn't a cop."

    "What about Johnny?" O'Clair said. "You see him that night?"

    "He was over earlier, playing cards with Ricky," Minde said. "Left about eight-thirty. He came in the living room and said good night to Smoothie. Yalda locked up after him."

    Johnny could've set the whole thing up without being there, without taking part in the actual robbery. Johnny knew Bobby, had loaned him money, and Johnny knew Karen. But again, he doubted Johnny would rob his uncle. It was totally out of character.

    O'Clair used his contacts and found out the Bloomfield Hills police department had impounded a black BMW the day before. It was registered to a John Karmo of Troy. Jim Simoff, a former Detroit cop O'Clair had worked with, also told him the car had been left in the Kingsley Inn parking lot with the key in the ignition.

    The concierge at the hotel said he'd called a cab for a good-looking woman with red hair and a big suitcase. Metro Cab had taken the woman into Birmingham and dropped her off at Pierce and Merrill the dispatch record said.

    O'Clair followed the trail. Across the street was a hotel called the Townsend where all the visiting rock bands stayed. He remembered reading that the Rolling Stones and their entourage spent more than fifty grand there in a week. A woman fitting Karen's description had checked in the day before, a bellhop told O'Clair after O'Clair handed him a $100 bill and said he was a process server. He had to give her divorce papers, put them in her hand.

    "I'll take them up for you, sir," the bellhop said.

    "It's a legal thing," O'Clair said. "I've been empowered by the 48th District Court," O'Clair said. "Is she still in the hotel?"

    "As far as I know, she's upstairs in 326," the bellhop said. "I carried her bag."

    "Three twenty-six, eh? How do I get up there?"