The Sun Down Motel

Alma sipped her coffee and looked at me as if she might be reassessing. Maybe she’d expected an airheaded twenty-year-old dunce who liked to Twitter. Who knew? Most people expected that. “How do you know about that?” she asked.

“The Fell library archives.”

She put her mug down, her expression calm. “Okay. What do you want to know from me?”

I pulled my own mug toward me. I didn’t sip it yet, though I’d barely slept today and I needed the caffeine. “Can you tell me anything about Viv’s case file? What was in it?”

“I was just the night shift duty officer, not a detective. I didn’t work missing-person cases.”

“But you saw the file,” I insisted.

She sighed and lowered her hand below the seat of her chair in the absent way that dog owners do. Her dog pushed his nose into her palm. “I read the file,” she admitted. “I knew Vivian. It bothered me that she would go missing. She wasn’t wild, and she wasn’t on any drugs. And she wasn’t stupid.” She scratched the dog’s head. “It was like the newspapers said, I guess. It seems that she went to work, because her car and purse were at the motel and she talked to the man on shift before her. But she vanished sometime during her shift, leaving everything behind.”

“Her roommate says that Viv was out a lot during the day in her last weeks. That she seemed down or angry about something. She also said that when she got their phone bill after Viv disappeared, there were phone calls on it that she didn’t make. She says she gave the phone bill to the cops but never heard from them again. It was like they didn’t even follow up.”

Alma shook her head. “I don’t remember that.”

“Jenny says she doesn’t think there was a boyfriend, but there was something going on.”

“Jenny didn’t know her very well.” Alma’s voice was slightly clipped. “Considering she sat in an empty apartment for two days and didn’t wonder where her roommate had gone. Whether she was even all right.”

“Okay,” I said. “The newspapers all described Viv as pretty and outgoing, but Jenny says she wasn’t outgoing at all.”

“Pretty, yes,” Alma said. “She truly was. That was one of the reasons I worried about her working alone at the Sun Down every night. But no, she wasn’t outgoing. She was quiet, a little intense. She could light up when she was talking about something she was interested in. But I never heard about her having any friends.”

“What was she interested in?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said she’d light up when she talked about something she was interested in. I just wondered what that was.”

Alma paused, still stroking her dog. “You know, I don’t remember. A movie or a TV show, maybe. We passed the time chatting. Like I say, I was worried about her.”

“No one at the motel knew her?”

“Like who?” Alma said. “There’s no one around on the night shift. I knew Jamie Blaknik was one of the regulars out there, and he’d definitely met her, but that was all I could get out of him.”

“Jamie Blaknik?” I asked.

“He was a pot dealer in those days. Uppers and downers, too, when he could get his hands on them. That seemed like a big deal in 1982, before the harder drugs started coming in. He did some of his business out of the Sun Down, which meant he would have at least talked to Vivian. He was at the motel the night Viv disappeared.”

“He was?”

“Yes. I questioned him myself. He told me he was only at the motel for a few hours, doing business, and then he left. He had more than one alibi, too. It seems he had customers between eleven and twelve, and more customers after he left and went to a bar. If he killed Viv, he would have had to do it in a ten-minute span between one customer and the next. The PD could never pin it on him. He wouldn’t break.”

“You questioned him,” I said. “I thought you weren’t a detective.”

Her expression turned defensive. She pulled her hand from her dog’s head and put it back in her lap. “I asked around. That isn’t the same thing. There wasn’t a lot to do on the night shift unless someone was drunk and disorderly. And I knew a different set of people than the day shift guys. Not that any of them wanted to listen to me anyway.”

“Because you were just the duty officer.”

She gave me a smile that had a layer of complexity behind it I couldn’t read. “Because I was the Fell PD’s only female officer,” she said. “You think I did thirty years on nights by choice? That was the only shift they would give me. It was either take it or quit. And boy, were they mad when I worked it instead of quitting.”

“That’s crazy. Isn’t it illegal or something?”

She laughed, a real laugh that came from her belly. “You’re a smart girl, but you’re so young,” she said. “I started on the Fell PD in 1979. I was lucky to be able to get a credit card in those days without a husband. My coworkers called me ‘Dyke’ instead of my name, right to my face. I could have dated Robert Redford and they still would have called me that. If I got married and had babies, I was weak. If I stayed single, I was a dyke. I learned to appreciate the night shift because I didn’t have to listen to pussy-eating jokes. If I’d complained, I would have been ridiculed and probably fired.” She shrugged. “That was the way it was in those days. I wanted to be a cop, and I wanted to be in Fell. This is my town. So I took the night shift and I did things my way when no one was looking. And that included asking around after Viv disappeared.”

I leaned back in my chair. “If I ever get a time machine, remind me not to go back to the seventies.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Alma said. “We had Burt Reynolds and no Internet and no AIDS. We didn’t know how much fun we were having until the eighties came and it started to dry up.” She sipped her coffee. “Jamie was around Viv’s age and not bad-looking. He would have noticed a girl as pretty as Vivian. But I knew him most of his life, and he wasn’t the violent type.”

I pulled out a pen. Anyone who had met Viv was still on my list. “Do you know where I can find him?”

“Dead,” she said bluntly. “Ran his car off the road and wrapped it around a tree. Gosh, when was that? The early nineties.”

“Okay.” I clicked the pen. “Who else did you suspect? Who else did you talk to?”

“There weren’t a lot of options. I did talk to Janice McNamara, who owned the place and hired Viv.”

I thought of the picture I’d seen in the newspaper in 1979, of the woman with her husband and son standing in front of the brand-new Sun Down Motel. “I work for her son, Chris,” I said. “He says he doesn’t spend any time at the motel if he can help it.”