Lemons 03 Stroke of Genius (10 page)

“God, will you be serious for a moment? And I can still see you. Back away!”

“Fine.”

I stood there and waited for three minutes before Elise instructed me to go. I took a deep breath and slowly moved into the range of the censor. I felt like I was moving maybe an inch per every five to ten seconds. It was hard and rather nerve racking. Still no word from Elise on my discovery. My foot stepped down softly on the carpet and I shifted my weight to make the next step. I reached the door after around two minutes or so. I had moved a total of three feet. Still no word from E.

I slowly wrapped my hand around the door handle. Still undetected. I turned the handle and slowly pushed the door open. Once the door broke free from the frame, Elise’s voice came on.

“Disco,” she said. I was discovered.

“Well shit. Okay, well at least we know it’s possible to reach the door without tripping it. Now we just have to get this thing open.”

“Okay, well let’s try again. Just stay perfectly still where you are and the camera should reset, that’ll save you from have to Sneaker across again.”

“Good deal. Over and out, Al.”

“Al?”

“Yeah, Al Powell. From Die Hard? Duh? Remember, McClane is up in the bathroom picking out glass from his foot and his talking to Carl Winslow down below. That’s what this reminds me of.”

“So you’re John McClane and I’m Urkel’s friend. Great, seems fair, thanks.”

“No sweat. Over and out.”

I waited another three minutes until I got the word from Elise. I tried the door again, this time even more slowly. No dice. I couldn’t even get a crack in the door without being discovered.

We stayed at it for two more hours, never gaining any progress. I was fed up and hungry and called it quits. In fact, I was so pissed off I was actually getting worse with each try, instead of better and I wanted to kick the goddamn door in. I told Elise I was coming down. I was frustrated as I stepped on to the elevator. When the doors closed, I said out loud, “How the fuck did she get out of this goddamn building?!” The question kept me preoccupied the entire way down.

I got back to the security office and Elise told me it was a valiant effort. She was right, it was something that needed to be done and now it could be crossed off our list. Leslie absolutely did not leave her floor via the stairs. It was something.

“How the hell did she get out of this hotel, though, E? It doesn’t make sense!”

“Well we’re just going to have to look harder. Mulroney said they checked everyone closely for a possibly disguise, but WE didn’t look. We’ll just have to look harder.”

“God, do you think she was lowered out of the window or something? There is a roof a few floors below their floor. It’s possible?”

“No its not, Vegas hotel windows don’t open. Besides, how would someone get on the roof in the first place, unless he was…staff?”

“Is it possible?”

“I don’t think so, but it’s worth checking. Let’s put that on the back burner for right now. We can, however, focus on the staff for the time being. She could have been taken out in a laundry basket or a food cart.”

“Okay, we’ll focus on that next. But for now, can we please get some food?”

“Sure, I know this great buffet.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me.”

“Such a bitch,” I say, trying to contain my smile.

“Hey, whatever works.”

“Yeah, well…Being a bitch didn’t work out too well for Meredith Brooks. Just remember that.”

“Meredith who?”

“Exactly.”

16.

We decided to leave the hotel and cross the street to the MGM Hotel & Casino and get a late lunch at Rainforest Cafe. We don’t have one of those back in Bakersfield, so it was a nice diversion. We tried not to talk about the case too much, deciding instead to talk about the kids. We missed them. We wouldn’t be able to stay here much longer so we were really going to have to kick it in to high gear and get this thing solved. We had pretty much pushed Vincent’s case aside; we just didn’t have much to go on. We decided we wouldn’t charge him any extra, even if by some miracle we did solve it.

We sat there a while longer, eating our meal. Elise had ordered this ridiculously large Mai-tai that came in a glass with lights flashing in it. Seemed to fit in with our surroundings, oddly enough.

I continued thumbing through the menu featuring nice photos of various rainforest critters. “Damn, for seeming to be all animal friendly here, they sure don’t have very many vegetarian options.”

“Sorry, hon.”

“Like here,” I said, turning the menu towards and showing her a picture of a frog. “Look, on this page it’s all; Look at this beautiful red-eyed tree frog. Then you turn the page and they’re like; Hey, try our new Red-Eyed Tree Frog Burger! Fuck you, animals, you make our burgers authentic! Because everything is totally authentic here at The Rainforest Cafe. Meanwhile, there’s a fucking animatronic gorilla over there about to catch fire.”

“Would you like to go somewhere else?”

“Nah, I’m good. Hey! Ya know what I was thinking?” I ask.

“Oh lord, I can only imagine. What, Archie? What were you thinking?”

“You remember that show Hunky Vampires of the Hollywood Hills?”

“Yes, of course I remember it. I was the one who told you about it. Remember?”

“Oh yeah. Well anyway, after the Brad Jackson case, I read up all about it, just out of idle curiosity.”

“Okay…?”

“Well, Brad’s character was a vampire, yeah?”

“Yes…”

“And him and that werewolfy, shirtless fella were fighting over the love of that dead-eyed shitty actress chick, right?”

“So far so good. Where ya going with this one?”

“I’m wondering. So Dead-eyed Shitty Actress Chick ends up choosing Brad Jackson’s vampire fellow and getting impregnated by him. You with me so far.”

“Yes, I am familiar with the story, remember?”

“Okay, here’s my question. Brad is a vampire. He is dead. He has no heartbeat, no pulse. He has no blood pulsing through his veins. So how, I ask you, was he able to get the boner needed to impregnate the girl?”

Elise stared at me, mouth slightly agape for what seemed like minutes. When she finally spoke up, it was not with an answer to my question. “I’m going to need another drink.”

When we were finished eating we returned to our drab security room. Mulroney had stopped in to check on us and see if we had any new leads. We didn’t. He reminded us that the clock was ticking on Balls’s room being unoccupied. We thanked him and got back to work staring at our monitors.

It was time to start eliminating some people. First thing we looked for this time was any staff members traveling in a pack of two. We struck out on that quite quickly. The only staffers in packs of two were women. Rather petite women at that. They posed no threat. Only six times during the entire three hours was a cart of food brought up to one of the floors on Leslie’s elevator, and all six times the men bringing the food returned minutes later completely empty handed.

“Maybe,” Elise said, “just maybe, someone finished their breakfast and pushed their cart out into the hallway, then someone attacked Leslie, knocked her out and hid her in one of the carts and got her later.”

“Maybe, but the cart would still have to come down the elevator, and none have. Plus, look at the carts.” I freeze framed on a busboy pushing someone’s breakfast into the elevator. “The carts have no bottom shelf. It’s pretty much a moving table.”

“Then why didn’t we realize that the first time we saw this and rule out this possibility all together?”

“Because we are exhausted and our eyes are going blurry from staring at these goddamn things for too long.” I let out a rather loud, frustrated grunt and slammed my fist on the table in front of me, sending our empty cans crashing to the ground below.

“We don’t have to do this, ya know?” Elise said, as she reached over to rub my back with her left hand.

“Yes, we do. Yes, we do. We can’t let rapists go free. You know this. You would never let it go, either. I don’t even know this woman but I feel some connection to her. An obligation to make things right. I want to catch these fuckers more than anything I’ve wanted in a long time.” I closed my eyes and lowered my head. (There’s one thing I want more, actually.) I opened my eyes and looked at Elise. She smiled at me. I returned one of my own.

We went back to the cameras.

“So, what exactly are we looking for?” I asked.

“Let’s see,” Elise answered. “Two men. Spoke English. That’s all we’ve got.”

“Wow, that’s great. I think I saw those two guys earlier. Ugh! So pretty much the only people we can immediately cross off are single men wearing giant sombreros. Great. Just fucking great.”

The next four hours of our lives were spent in the most ridiculously boring manner ever, aside from watching The King’s Speech back to back. What we did was set all the cameras in the hotel to the same starting point; five minutes before Leslie enters the elevator, while she is still sitting at the bar. Then we focused on the elevator camera, taking note of every.single.goddamn.person that entered or exited it. We would do one person at a time. If someone went up the elevator, we matched what room he went in to with the data from the keycard readout we had. If that person never reappeared on camera during the timeframe, he was a suspect. If he came down again, obviously alone, we would follow them through their travels until the timeframe was closed. If there was no funny business, that man was removed from the suspect list.

While it was true we were looking for a pair of men, we couldn’t afford to just focus on duos. We have no idea if the attacker followed the victim up to her floor then had somebody already there waiting for them. Keycards recorded all the data of being used, but there was no data on file from doors being opened from the inside. There was really no surefire way to tell what happened, so we followed everybody.

We had the screens lined up in sequence. The one thing we had going for us was that it was morning. The casino floor was not very crowded and a lot of people were coming down into the lobby for coffee then going right back up. Also, several people were checking out. We watched them all. If someone was going to check out, they got off the elevator then would have to cross through the casino, into the lobby then out the lobby doors to the outside. Or, they could have gotten off the elevator, made their way to the parking garage elevator, taken it down, and then entered the garage directly from the casino. The camera caught their every move, even through the maze of cars. We had all our screens in order. We continued watching, checking off people one at a time who left empty-handed before or after our time frame.

When all was said and done we had a handful of people still on our suspect’s list and no real way to dig any deeper in to them. We had to think of something else. We decided we would have to just start taking guesses. At first, if someone went up to their room and never came down, we kept them on the suspect list. The reasoning behind this was; if the girl got out undetected, so could the attackers. But after hitting that final brick wall, we had to start eliminating that particular set of people.

We still had more than a handful of suspects.

“E?”

“Yeah?”

“What time did Balls go up to his room, according to the key log?”

“Hold on, six something. Let me check.” She flipped through our rather expansive notebook of suspects, notes, non-suspects, time tables, drawings of happy faces, games of tic-tac-toe and various other crap all somehow related to this case until she found the information she needed. “He got up to his room at six-forty am and apparently again at seven-twelve. Wait…”

“The security guy said Balls got to his room then later pushed their room service tray out into the hallway a little while later. The tray was still in the hallway when Balls was discovered. You were in a waking coma at the time of this conversation.”

“Jesus Christ, so now our times are over-lapping, you realize this, right?”

“Why do you think I asked?”

17.

We decided to go up and take a look at Balls’ and Vince’s room. The elevator ride was hell. Pure torture. And on top of that, first we had to take one elevator up to our room so I could grab my work bag, then take it down to the lobby, then get on a different elevator and take it to the thirty-seventh floor where all the action occurred. Hell, I tells ya, hell!

We entered the room using the key we were given by Mr. Adams, the head of security. It was a two bedroom suite, but much smaller than ours up on the higher floor. Elise carried all the photographs we had and we used them to compare them to the scene. I went and kneeled down at the entry way of the closet where he was found dead, rightfully mindful the whole time that I may be crouching near some crusted up semen on the carpet. I held my breath while I poked around inside for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing popped out at me.

I stood back up and continued looking around the room. It was exactly how it was in the photograph, right down to the pack of gum and junior mints on the table. His suitcase was still sitting open on the bed, clothes removed and stacked neatly. A pair of Nike shoes at the bedside. Empty glass on the night stand. In the other bedroom, where Vince had probably stayed, was nothing. It had been cleaned. Only the room where the body was found was undisturbed. This bothered me, but I let it go. If I was Vince, I wouldn’t be willing to leave all my stuff unprotected in a hotel room for two weeks while someone, MAYBE, worked on the case at hand. Who knows who would be coming and going from the room. He had every right to take his stuff with him. I just wish he hadn’t, for some reason.

Elise had started looking under the bed and tables, behind the TV and whatnot, looking for, I suppose, anything that might help us out. She wasn’t having much luck. I went out in to the common room and put my bag on the table and squatted down next to it. I laid the photographs on the glass tabletop and removed my magnifying glass from my bag-o-goodies. I focused in closely on the dead body.

“Something tells me you’re not the first person to use a microscope on that guy’s junk,” Elise said as she came walking out from the bedroom.