Lady Yesterday by Loren D. Estleman

and neither did the fact of the missing list. It was a very short article. Acting Lieutenant Leonard Hornet, in charge of the investigation, said that robbery had not been ruled out as a motive.
    The man who finally answered Mary Ann Thaler’s line said she wasn’t at her desk. I thanked him and hung up and drove down. Before going inside I transferred the revolver from my coat pocket to the glove compartment. It was legal but I didn’t care to have the fine print on my permit read while the metal detectors were clanging.
    There were more detectives on hand at that time of day, but the more of them there are the quieter things get, somehow. I found Thaler in conversation with a plainclothesman in the squad room, half sitting on the edge of a cluttered desk with her ankles crossed and her arms folded. They were trim ankles above cut-down brown loafers and she was wearing a red skirt and a blue metallic blouse and a gray jacket. The blouse brought out the blue in her eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses. The plainclothesman was two hundred eighty pounds of hard fat in black polyester pants whose cuffs dragged at his heels and a burgundy blazer with brass buttons and anchors. His short red necktie brought out the congestion in his face. I knew him as Sergeant Hornet, John Alderdyce’s second whip in Homicide.
    “Who the hell let you in here?” His features were spread all over his raw slab of a face.
    “Good morning, Sergeant. Have you had your breakfasts today?”
    “Acting Lieutenant, damn you.”
    “I bet you can pull it off. You’ve been acting like a detective for years.”
    He glared at Thaler. “You got business with this horse’s ass?
    “He’s part of the public we serve,” she said. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Leonard?”
    He mumbled a negative and gave me the hard look before rolling back toward Alderdyce’s office.
    “He hates the name Leonard.” She looked at me. “I’m still waiting on that ballistics report, if that’s what you’re here for.”
    “Just partly. Got a minute?”
    She glanced down at a man’s gold watch on her wrist. It was the only thing mannish about her. “Just about that.”
    We went into her office, where she offered me a cup of coffee and I accepted it. The flowers had been changed; other than that the place looked the same as it had the day before, no less tidy.
    “Is that the motel murder you’re working on with Hornet?” I asked.
    She poured a cup for herself. She had real china cups, not Styrofoam, with matching saucers. “Peripherally. It looks more like some kind of mob thing now than robbery. Hornet liked the employee, Hamilton, at first—liked him a lot—but it won’t hang without a motive.”
    “What made anyone think robbery?”
    “The safe in the office had been jimmied. But we found six thousand in receipts still inside. Whatever the killer was after, it wasn’t money.”
    “Just six thousand?”
    “It’s an overnight stop, not the Westin. What did you want to talk about?”
    I sat down, balancing my cup and saucer. “With John on leave you’re my only friendly face in the department. I was wondering if you had anything on file on a fat little Hispanic who dresses like Al Capone and glides around in a gray Lincoln with a plate that reads grande .” I spelled it. “He calls himself Sam, but his driver calls him Manolo. Has a Korean torpedo named Ang, a real Bruce Lee type.”
    “Manuel Malviento.”
    “That came out fast.”
    She remained standing beside the desk and sipped coffee and placed the cup in its saucer, holding them in front of her. She didn’t look anything at all like an old maid in a parlor. “He’s managed to rub up against every detail in the department except Rape and I’ve got money in the pool says he’ll do that by next Monday. He came up from Colombia in the crowd five years ago and started with dope and now he’s got a thumb on every dirty dollar in town. He calls himself Sam Mozo. Mozo ,