The coffee wasn’t very good. I ordered a second cup anyway. I interlaced my fingers and looked down at my hands. That was the trouble, my fingers meshed well enough but nothing else did. What kind of accountant type went batshit with a machete? Granted, anyone could explode that way, but this had been a curiously planned explosion, the hotel room rented under a false name, the murder performed with no traces left of the murderer’s identity.

Did that sound like the same man who bought the fur?

I sipped my coffee and decided it didn’t. Nor did the picture I got of the boyfriend jibe with the message I’d been given after last night’s meeting. The fellow in the lumber jacket had been muscle, pure and simple, even if he hadn’t been called upon to do anything more with that muscle than flex it. Would a mild-mannered accountant command that sort of muscle?

Not likely.

Were the boyfriend and Charles Owen Jones one and the same? And why such an elaborate alias, middle name and all? People who used a surname like Smith or Jones for an alias usually picked Joe or John to go with it. Charles Owen Jones?

Maybe his name was Charles Owens. Maybe he’d started to write that, then changed his mind in the nick of time and dropped the last letter of Owens, converting it to a middle name. Did that make sense?

I decided that it didn’t.

The goddamned room clerk. It struck me that he hadn’t been interrogated properly. Durkin had said he was in a fog, and evidently he was South American, possibly somewhat at a loss in English. But he’d have had to be reasonably fluent to get hired by a decent hotel for a position that put him in contact with the public. No, the problem was that nobody pushed him. If he’d been questioned the way I questioned the fur salesman, say, he’d have let go of something. Witnesses always remember more than they think they remember.

The room clerk who checked in Charles Owen Jones was named Octavio Calderón, and he’d worked last on Saturday when he was on the desk from four to midnight. Sunday afternoon he’d called in sick. There had been another call yesterday and a third call an hour or so before I got to the hotel and braced the assistant manager. Calderón was still sick. He’d be out another day, maybe longer.

I asked what was the matter with him. The assistant manager sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to get a straight answer out of these people. When they want to turn evasive their grasp of the English language weakens considerably. They slip off into the convenient little world of No comprendo.”

“You mean you hire room clerks who can’t speak English?”