Murder Off the Page by Con Lehane

Author:Con Lehane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter 20

The next-to-last man on Cosgrove’s list, Alan Hoffman, proved difficult for Mike Cosgrove to find. The last man on the list, Dillard Wainwright, the guy Ray was interested in, was worse. He was in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Disappearing from a job and a life meant something, especially when the guy’s name pops up in a homicide investigation.

Cosgrove was running checks on Peter Esposito and planned to interview him again the next time Esposito came to the city. He wanted to check the Commodore Hotel records, but at the moment, he didn’t have enough evidence for a warrant, and the hotel had a policy of not releasing its guest records without a warrant. The desk clerk he spoke with knew Esposito as did one of the bartenders and a waitress. None of them remembered if he stayed in the hotel the night of Ted Doyle’s murder.

Most of the Dean woman’s assignations had been at the Commodore, so he tried the hotel again this time looking for Alan Hoffman, stopping off late in the evening when the night auditor would be on the desk. The head of security for the hotel was an ex-cop, full of himself, protecting the hotel as if he were the palace guard. The night auditor was a regular guy who saw the hotel’s promotional bullshit about its “beautiful people” clientele for what it was.

What happened, as sometimes happens, was that Cosgrove was right for the wrong reason. The auditor knew Alan Hoffman and told Cosgrove he never registered at the hotel because he was local and a regular at the hotel bar. The bartender knew him, too. Alan Hoffman was a cop, a detective, who at one time stopped in regularly but hadn’t been in for a long time.

“Do you remember him meeting a woman here one night, a pretty blonde, not a kid, not yet middle aged?”

“Al wasn’t the kind of guy who was looking for that,” the bartender, whose name tag read Moses, said. “He came in by himself, had a couple of pops, maybe talked with someone on the next barstool. A lot of times he talked to me. What he talked about was baseball, coaching kids playing baseball in Riverdale, or taking his boy to Yankee games.”

The bartender went to refresh the drinks of a couple at the far end of the bar. When he came back to Cosgrove, he said. “I’m wrong. You mean the blonde woman who got killed? He did meet her.” Moses was a big, light-skinned, black guy, athletic looking, still in good shape. Cosgrove thought he might have played football. He was soft spoken when you’d expect him to bluster from his size and how he carried himself.

“A year ago, maybe longer, Al ran into her here at the bar. She’d been drinking. They talked till closing. He took her under his wing and walked her out. I figured he was being a gentleman, making sure she got back to her room with no trouble.

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