were friendly, a couple of chairs, a standing lamp with an old silk shade, and a wooden table, badly stained pine, standing slightly askew. On the table was a glass vase with a bunch of wilted flowers. The shelves next to the closet in the entry hall were empty. So was the small brown refrigerator that sat in a nook between the armoire and a built-in chest of drawers. I opened every drawer. Each one squeaked as I pulled it out.
Nothing a little soap on the runner couldn't fix.
"The foreigner was on the floor, in the sitting room. It looked like he had tripped on the light cord, but no one could hit his head so hard on such a small table and leave that vase standing."
I turned around to find the floor lady standing in the hall, a short, compact woman of about forty, in a plain brown dress with a white apron. I hadn't heard her footsteps because she had on socks but no shoes. "I found him. I went in to see if there was a bottle of water in the refrigerator, and there he was. I never seen a skull bashed in like that."
She paused and then added, with a note of disapproval over what she seemed to think was a breakdown in procedure, "I didn't know anyone had checked into this room."
"My name is O." I bowed slightly to her and smiled. Most inspectors like to begin conversations with a witness on a menacing note-standard procedure, the way they teach it at training class-but I needed this woman on my side. She acknowledged my gesture with the slightest softening around her eyes, not yet a smile but something to build on.
"You a police inspector?" Without waiting for an answer, she continued, "Chief Inspector Pak scolded me, but what does he expect? If I had called him, I'd lose my job."
"Pak will be alright. Why don't you come in and sit down?"
"I can't sit in the rooms." She leaned against the open door. "I'm not even sure you can if you don't register."
I sat down on the couch in the sitting room, pulled the heavy curtain to one side, and looked out the window to make the point that the hotel's normal regulations didn't concern me. "Comfortable, tidy, nothing out of place. Tell me, why would you put flowers in a room you thought was empty?"
"They aren't our flowers. I don't bunch them up, and I don't have any vases like that one. We grow our own flowers out back, in the garden.
Nothing purple, and if we did, I would never cut it so short. Anyway, that vase is all wrong. Too narrow a neck. Why put a bunch of flowers in something like that? Makes it look like they're in prison. The whole idea of flowers in the rooms is to make it seem like outdoors."
"Like a mountain meadow, or at least a cabin."
"Yes," she studied me to see if I was mocking her, which I wasn't.
"At least like the hills after the rain."
"I'm not asking about the arrangement. I'm asking, if they aren't your flowers, who put them in the vase?"
"How do I know?"
I didn't like it when a witness answered my question with a question.
It usually meant I had lost control. "Were they here when you found the body?"
"I couldn't say. I mean, it's awful dark in these rooms with the curtains closed."
"So, they weren't your flowers, you didn't put them in the vase, and you're not sure if they were here when you discovered the body or not.
If they weren't already here, who would have put wilted flowers into a vase in a room with a murdered man?"
"Not me."
"Very good, not you. We've more or less established that. Then who?"
She was edging into the room as we talked, and I could see she was looking for something, hoping I wouldn't notice. "Anything missing?"
"There isn't. No." She shook her head slightly, but her eyes were darting around.
I took out my notebook. "I'll need your name, for the record. And when I leave, I will have to instruct you to lock the door and let no one in here without my permission." Her eyes stopped darting and searched mine. "I mean that literally, no one. I'll get an MSS guard here as soon as I can, but for now, it's your responsibility."
"My name is Li, Li Yong Hui. I can't make any promises. The locks on these doors barely keep out the breeze, Inspector. And as we can see from your sitting on that couch, not too many people take orders from me."
I closed my notebook, then opened it again. It was meant to be a gesture of authority, tinged with annoyance. Pak could carry something like that off, but it usually only made me look indecisive. From the expression on the floor lady's face, I needed to practice it more. "I'm going to look around the room, make some notes. You can stand there in the doorway and watch or go about your business, Mrs. Li. In any case, this room is now the scene of a crime against the people, officially. That means the normal rules don't pertain. This room belongs to me until the crime is solved, and when you tell people they cannot enter, you are speaking for me, is that clear?" This was not even remotely true, but it might get me some extra cooperation from her, and it wouldn't bring her any harm.
"Any information you have about the events or the scene is important to the solution of the crime, the apprehension of the criminals, and the dignity of the fatherland. You will be contacted by my office for a formal interrogation in a day or two. I trust we can work together."
She said nothing. Partly she was judging whether I was going to cause her extra grief, partly whether there was anything to gain from going along with my game. She nodded, not very convincingly I thought, and padded down the hall.
My second walk through the rooms took five minutes. There was still nothing to see. Everything had been bumped or jostled. The bedroom had been dusted and waxed in the three days since the body was moved out. I sat in the chair and turned on the TV with the remote.
There was a children's cartoon on. A weak old king, a lovely princess, a handsome commoner sitting under a tree looking at the mountains.
Even in a cartoon, mountains. I turned it off before the fire-breathing dragon appeared. There had to be a dragon, and he was going to threaten to barbecue the princess. Actually, he wanted something else, but they couldn't put that in a cartoon, not in this country, anyway.
The bathroom was spotless. The refrigerator was unplugged, and water from the melted ice had pooled on the bottom shelf. There was no water bottle, but there was a faint odor, as if something had been rotting. I looked in the sitting room again. No mess on the floor near the table. Skulls are not empty, and when they are crushed, they leak all manner of unpleasant things that don't clean up easily. There was no way the carpet had already been replaced, not in this hotel, not in this city. So what happened to the mess?
As I walked out the door, thinking about lunch, something nagged at me. I hadn't checked the closet. I went back and stuck my head inside.
The entry hall light didn't work, which made the entry hall dark and the inside of the closet even darker. I didn't have a flashlight with me; even if I did, the battery wouldn't work. My eyes refused to adjust; there was no light, nothing to adjust to. I felt along the shelves that took up one side of the closet, but they were empty. I swept over the long shelf along the top. There wasn't anything, not even an extra blanket. Finally, I got down on my knees and traced my hand along the edges of the closet floor. In the far corner, my fingers found something small and round. I picked it up, walked into the hall, and turned it over in my hand. It was a button, blue like the sky, blue like a lake in a Finnish summer.