Lawrence Block - Scudder 08 - A Ticket to the Boneyard(1990) by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

What I said was, “Well, you know how it goes. It’s a slow process.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I guess that’s one thing’s the same the whole world over. You put the puzzle together a piece at a time.” He cleared his throat. “Why I called, I might have a piece of the puzzle. There’s a night clerk at a motel on Railway Avenue who recognized your sketch.”

“How did he happen to see it?”

“She. Little bitty woman, looks like your grandmother and has a mouth on her would shame a sailor. She took one look at him and knew him right away. Only problem was matching him to the right registration card, but she found him. He didn’t call himself Motley. No surprise there.”

“No.”

“Robert Cole is what he put down. That’s not far from the alias you said he used in New York. You had it written down on the sketch but I don’t have it handy. Ronald something.”

“Ronald Copeland.”

“That’s right. For address he put a post-office box, and he put down Iowa City, Iowa. He had a car, and he put down the plate number, and the motor vehicles people in Des Moines tell me there’s no such plate been issued. They say they couldn’t issue such a plate because it doesn’t jibe with their numbering system.”

“That’s interesting.”

“I thought so,” he said. “Now my thinking is either he just made up the plate number or he used the one on the car he was driving, but it wasn’t an Iowa tag in the first place.”

“Or both.”

“Well, sure. To take it the rest of the way, if he drove from New York he most likely had New York plates, and he might want to put down the correct plate number just in case some sharp-eyed clerk compared his car with the card he filled out. So if you were to check motor vehicles there at your end—”

“Good idea,” I said. He gave me the plate number and I copied it down, along with the name Robert Cole. “He used an Iowa address at a local hotel here,” I remembered. “Mason City, though. Not Iowa City. I wonder why he’s fixated on Iowa.”

“Maybe he’s from there originally.”

“I don’t think so. He sounds like a New Yorker. Maybe he locked with somebody from Iowa in Dannemora. Tom, how did the motel clerk get to see the sketch?”

“How did she get to see it? I showed it to her.”

“I thought the case wasn’t going to be reopened.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “Still hasn’t been.” He was silent for a moment.

Then he said, “What I do on my free time’s pretty much up to me.”

“You ran all over town on your own?”

He cleared his throat again. “Matter of fact,” he said, “I found a couple of the fellows to help out. I was the one who showed the sketch to that woman, but that was just the luck of the draw.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know what good all of this is, Matt, but I thought you ought to know what showed up so far.

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