Charleen sat in her comfortable living room in an east-side condo.
She was an exact copy of her sister, Charlotte Albers. She was watching a show on television, but every minute or two she glanced at the telephone on an end table. Her husband, Ed, sat across the room, reading a paperback and watching the good bits on the tube.
"Charlotte's in some kind of big money trouble," she had told her husband when he got home. They'd decided they had to let Lot try to work it out.
If everything else failed they would take a signature loan at the bank to save her from the loan sharks.
Charleen could never recall Lot being so frightened as when they had talked. Lot did not cry much; she was tough, assertive and independent. But lately she had a string of bad luck.
Charleen walked to the kitchen, then wandered into the bedroom, where she hung up some clothes. She returned to the living room and dropped into a chair.
The chiming mantel clock struck eleven.
They watched the local news, then Johnny Carson.
"Lot should have called by now," Charleen said.
Ed looked up. "We'll hear. We can't live her life for her."
"I know, that's what scares me." Charleen saw Carson doing his monologue, but didn't hear the words.
First policeman on the scene had to push people back from the grisly mess on top of the Datsun in the parking lot.
"Keep back, move it back, all the way now. This isn't a sideshow."
Another squad car pulled in, and then two more, and the police used tape to mark off the area.
Officer Quincy Smith lifted the tape for the coroner to pass. He walked with the small man in the black suit up to the bloodstained white Datsun.
The roof of the car had caved in. The black girl had been beautiful, still was. She was naked. The back of her head was crushed, but her face was perfect. He looked up and saw a dozen small balconies she could have come from. Detectives would be working those dozen rooms as quickly as they could.
It did not take the coroner long. Preliminary judgment on the cause of death: broken spinal cord and massive brain damage. Officer Smith placed a sheet over the body and motioned to the men with a stretcher.
Two ambulance attendants were bloody before they got the broken body off the Datsun and onto the stretcher.
"You were the first on the scene?" asked a plainclothesman whom Smith recognized as a detective from homicide.
"Right. I got here and waited. There were some people up on those balconies looking out, but they were just curious about the sirens, the activity."
"Any guess, Officer Smith?"
"Jumped or was pushed."
The detective grunted and marched off toward the hotel.
Detective Ormsby went directly to the sixth floor. The first five floors were too low a launching point to reach the Datsun.
Room 606 was vacant. The hotel manager met him there and they went to 706. A couple from California had occupied the room for three days. They had not noticed the disturbance.
On the next three floors they found nothing. A man in 1106 had tried to hide a small quantity of marijuana when Ormsby came to the door, but the detective told him to forget it and they moved on. A call came for Detective Sergeant Ormsby to go up to the fourteenth. He and the hotel manager went together. A uniformed cop showed them a woman's clothes and a purse. He had not opened it.
Sergeant Ormsby did, and found a picture of a black girl about the right age and height. He looked at the face, and was sure. The girl, Charlotte Albers, had fallen or been pushed from 1406. No one was in the room. A call showed it had been rented to John Smith.
"Hooker," the hotel manager said.
"Probably," Ormsby said.
Downstairs, he found out that "John Smith" was white, about forty and had arrived alone. There was nothing left in the room to suggest he had been there. They would dust for prints, just in case.
"Any next-of-kin card?" the manager asked.
"Yes. You want to make the call?"
The manager shook his head, retreating.
"Figures," Ormsby said. "We'll let our police psychologist do that. He's going to earn his money tonight."