8. Vincent Retires.
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Room 579
Vincent sat upright on the bed and stared at the clear afternoon sky through the hotel room’s window. He’d closed it earlier when the courtyard voices had grown too loud.
He used a single finger to adjust the earpiece that was connected to his transistor radio. Curt Gowdy was on the call as the Orioles’s Jim Gentle came up to bat.
“Muffet winds up and tosses the pitch, and Gentile swings and lofts the pitch to right field. Brooks Robinson tags up at third and Lou Clinton makes the catch, Robinson darts home, and the Orioles take a three to two lead,” Gowdie said as a simmering murmur came from the crowd.
Vincent thought he heard a muffled thud from the next room. He yanked the earpiece out, set his radio down on the bed, and grabbed his work bag from the ground. He put on his rubber gloves and stretched them over his fingers.
He heard a soft one-two-three-four knock at the door that connected Rooms 579 and 580. Approaching the door, he mimicked the knock back. As he unlocked his side, he heard the other room’s front door click shut, then the shuffle of feet in the hotel hallway. Another gentle four-stroke knock sounded on his own front door.
That meant the adjacent room was cleared for him to work. He opened the connecting door.
The body was face down, blood from its head wound already seeping out in a mushroom spread onto the carpet.
This was unfortunate.
Vincent knelt near the body and removed three towels from his bag to create a perimeter that stemmed the flow. When that was accomplished, he stood up and scanned the room. Curtains closed, lamp knocked over and cracked at its base, bloody brain matter and skull against the wall.
He walked to the new room’s front door, plucked the “Do Not Disturb” sign from the interior doorknob, hung it outside, and sprung the deadbolt.
The body was that of a large man with pale skin, hair slicked back except for the sopping mass near the entry wound. It wore a tailored grey pinstriped suit. Its arms lay near its head; some instinct to catch its fall, the body acting out of reflex, irrespective of the fact that it wouldn’t matter. A stench already came from the back of its pants.
Vincent reached under its jaw and pulled up to inspect the exit wound. Within the red mess were splinters of bone peeking out from its forehead. He set the head back on the carpet and imagined the bullet’s trajectory. The exercise took him to the wall between rooms. A painting hung above the desk, pierced by a small bullet hole. He’d return to it later.
He pulled out a plastic bag and wrapped it around the body’s head to collect any blood that might leak during transport. Then he reached into his satchel and withdrew a nylon bag. Inside was a bundle of pipes and screws and wheels that he laid out on the carpet.
He spent the next forty seconds putting together his rolling pushcart. It was only a few inches above the ground, but it made all the difference in the world. Vincent used to be able to carry them to the bathtub without much fuss, but his back wasn’t what it used to be.
Vincent grabbed the body by its armpits, took a deep breath, and hoisted the torso onto the cart. He lifted the legs on next, made a cursory pass to check that nothing would drag, then pushed the cart into the bathroom. This is where the dismemberment, the big part of the job, would take place.
He maneuvered the cart so that it was parallel to the tub, took another deep breath, then lifted it over the tub’s edge and dropped it inside. It could remain there for the time being—first, he had to administer to the mess in the bedroom.
Paper towels and sponges for the brain matter that spackled the wall, a garbage bag for the pieces of skull, tweezers for hairs and threads. He dropped it all into a large plastic bag and began to pour his bespoke mixture of cleaning ingredients onto the carpet. He watched them fizz the blood into a pink froth.
As the chemicals did their work, Vincent unplugged the shattered lamp from the wall socket and carried it in pieces back into his own room. He went back to his bed for a moment and popped the radio earpiece back in.
“And Woodling takes the pitch,” Curt Gowdy said from miles and miles away. “Don Giles grabs the grounder and tosses it to Pumpsie Green coming over to cover second base. But all the action lets Ron Hansen hustle in from third base, so now it’s four to two, Orioles.”
He let the earpiece drop back onto the bed, and went to his room’s desk, where he set down the broken lamp and unplugged his room’s intact one. A trick he’d used plenty of times over the years. Simple enough to inform the front desk that he’d knocked over his lamp accidentally. It added a small cost to his check-out bill. He’d invoice it.
Vincent returned to Room 580 and began scrubbing the carpet, the mixture having done its job. As it dried, he inspected it with his loupe lens and tweezed out a few leftover organic fibers, then returned to the bathroom for the big job.
He took knives from his bag and sliced the body’s veins. Blood gurgled down the pipes. He cleaned the knives under the tub’s faucet and set them to dry on a towel, then used his handsaw to carve through muscle and bone. Vincent was always pleasantly surprised at how easily a human body could be dismantled.
When each piece was portioned out, he wrapped them in thin towels and set them aside. He built a pyramid out of the long rolls. The head always came last, placed on the top like a decorative ornament.
One by one, he bunched the wrapped limbs into a plastic bag, another safeguard against leakage. He took each bag back to his room and placed them in the empty luggage he’d brought just for this purpose. When the transfer was complete, he returned to the other room for one final cleanup.
He watched the last of the blood circle the drain, then scrubbed down the tub. He flipped off the bathroom light, retrieved his tweezers, and went to work on the bullet hole in the painting.
The print that spanned the width of the desk depicted a scene of four darkly silhouetted men in front of a city building. Three of these men surrounded another who’d slumped to the ground. Two had the fallen man by the shoulders, as if they were helping him back up to his feet, but the true tale was told by the third, who wound an arm back to deliver another blow.
The bullet that had made so much work for Vincent had pierced the slumped man’s face.
Vincent stepped onto the chair, then onto the desk itself. He lifted the painting from the wall and set it beside the desk. It revealed a hole in the wall. He turned on his flashlight and stuck it in his mouth, then began extracting the bullet with his tweezers. But as he tried to grip, the tweezers caught nothing but air. A metallic echo as the bullet rattled through some space between the walls.
Vincent angled his flashlight to see through the bullet hole. A thin passageway ran between the walls of this room and his own. He put his eye to the hole. A few feet away, the darkness was lanced by a pinhole of light.
That was odd, Vincent thought.
He stepped off the desk and walked through the connecting door, hugging the wall to locate the pinhole in his own room. He aimed his flashlight and looked inside.
Vincent saw that a wooden chair had been wedged into the narrow crevice between rooms. As if someone had set it up to watch.
A breeze came through his room’s open window.
He turned to examine this incongruity and saw a brief flash in the corner of his eye, then heard a muffled pop. And suddenly, Vincent was no longer in control of his body.
It fell to the floor. Its cheek lay on the carpet. It couldn’t move, but could still feel a liquid warmth seeping down past its ears. It smelled an acrid smoke in the air. It heard the shuffle of feet on the carpet; it saw a pair of black shoes walk into view.
“—getting too expensive,” it heard a deep voice mutter from somewhere.
Then it heard the tinny narration from the earpiece that hung off the bed.
“Everybody quiet now here at Fenway Park, after they gave him a standing ovation of two minutes, knowing that this is probably his last time at bat,” the radio said.
It no longer remembered the announcer’s name, it no longer remembered what was being broadcast.
“One out, nobody on, last of the eighth inning. Jack Fisher into his windup, here’s the pitch—”
The radio clicked off as the man in the black shoes stuffed the earpiece into a plastic bag. The man dropped to a knee and started to assemble a rolling pushcart.
Then Vincent began to fear what was next to come.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).