Page 21 of A Talent for Murder

More whistling. “Well, nothing that came to anything. You know, though, there’s pictures of the body here in the file and she was out to party that night.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s possible that her skirt hiked up or something when she hit the ground, but even if it did, that skirt was shorter than my kids’ attention span. She was either out clubbing or in the game.”

The first informative conversation she managed to have was with Detective Melissa Cruz, who was in charge of the still-open murder of Nora Johnson in Fort Myers, Florida.

“We think the perpetrator was an attendee at a conference that was going on that weekend,” the detective said, unprompted. Martha, who was taking notes, quickly scribbled that down.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because I’ve learned a lot about Nora Johnson in the last six months, and what I learned was that about eighty percent of her job was as a bartender, and the other twenty percent was running scams on married men attending conventions at the hotel she worked at. She worked with a parking attendant named Dyson Holmgren, and he was the one who found the body. She was parked in the employee section of the belowground garage, and he told us that he spotted her car there long past the time her shift ended, so he went to check it out.”

“She was dead in the car, right?”

“Yes. But we got witness statements from everyone who came and went from that parking garage from the time Nora Johnson’s shift ended at eleven to the time that Holmgren called in the body. And one of our witnesses was another employee, a woman on the front desk who said that when she was leaving the lot at twelve she saw Holmgren peering into Nora Johnson’s car.”

“What time did Holmgren call in the body?”

“Not until about three o’clock.”

“So, you think he saw the body was there at midnight?”

“At the time we thought it was a possibility, but he claimed he didn’t. Regardless, it put Holmgren at the scene of the crime around the time it was probably committed. And then it turned out that Holmgren was friends with Nora Johnson, that she was the one who got him the job at the hotel in the first place.”

“And you arrested him?”

“And we arrested him. His prints were on Johnson’s car door, but that was because he’d opened it when he spotted her sitting on the front seat, not moving. There were no other indications that he’d been in the car when she was strangled.”

“Was there any forensic evidence?”

“There was and there wasn’t. There were a couple of fibers from whatever it was that had strangled her. Some kind of synthetic rayon. But other than that, we found far too much evidence. Hairs from at least fifteen different people. Multiple fibers. We even found semen stains, but they were all at least twenty-four hours old.”

“Wouldn’t that be common in someone’s car?”

“You have sex with a lot of people in your car? I know I don’t.”

“I didn’t mean the semen so much as the fibers and hairs.”

“I guess so. Depends on how many people you drive around. Or, in Nora’s case, depends on how many men she brought to her car.”

“A lot of them?” Martha said.

“Yes, a lot of them. When we brought in Holmgren, he panicked pretty fast when we told him he was going to prison for first-degree murder. So he told us why he’d been snooping around her car. He and Nora had a little scam going at the Anhinga Hotel, pretty much the oldest scam in the oldest book. She would get to know one of the visiting conventioneers, preferably a married man, and after her shift she’d either go to his room, or, more usually, she’d ask him to walk her to her car. Then she’d get him inside the car for some extramarital activity, and that was when Holmgren would come in, crashing the party.”

“Oh wow,” Martha said, then gritted her teeth, telling herself to talk more like a fellow investigator.

“He’s a big muscular dude. Sometimes he’d pretend to be her pimp. The guy almost always ended up emptying his wallet to get out of the situation. If he didn’t have money on him, Holmgren would confiscate his driver’s license and ask for a thousand dollars or something before he left Florida or else he’d make his life miserable. It was all pretty small-potatoes. According to Holmgren they only did it about once or twice a month. Sometimes they got a thousand and sometimes it was a couple of hundred bucks. Oh, hold on a moment.”

She could hear Detective Cruz talking to someone, her hand held over the phone. When she got back on, Martha said, “You still got time?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“So what do you think happened the night that Nora Johnson was strangled?”

“Well, that’s why I said I think one of the attendees at the conference did it. She picked up the wrong guy.”

“Then why wasn’t Holmgren on the scene to stop it?”

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