Made to Kill (12 page)

“Three months?”

“
Sí
,
sí
.”

I frowned, or at least it felt like I did. “That’s some honeymoon.”

The cleaner shrugged. I guess she had heard of stranger things in this town.

“So have you seen the happy couple?”

“
Sí
, but sir, I would not say they are happy.”

“Oh?”

“No. They sound angry most of the time. But when they see us they stop talking.”

I noted the information and I pumped for some more.

“Can you describe them?”

“Oh, well. She is small. Black hair. She wears too much make-up. Around the eyes.” The cleaner mimed two rings around the eyes and I got the drift.

Eva McLuckie. One down.

“And the man?”

“Oh, oh.”

“Tall? Short? Fat? Thin? Black? White?”

“Oh, I…”

“Beard? Moustache?”

“Beard! The man, he has a beard. A big beard. Very orange.”

And there it was. Charles David.

The fact that Eva McLuckie and Charles David were apparently a couple was a surprise. I managed to hide it from the cleaner, which was pretty easy given I had no muscles in my face with which to change my expression.

“Have you seen them today?” I asked.

“Oh, oh, no, sir. Not for days. The woman, maybe… oh, Friday?”

“And the man?”

The cleaner shook her head. “Not for a long time. A week. Longer I think. I can ask Maria?” Then her eyes did something which suggested she wanted some more of the money in my wallet.

“No, that’s fine,” I said. I nodded down the corridor. “Four-oh-seven?”

“
Sí
,
sí
.”

“Can you let me in?”

“
Sí
,
sí
.”

She led the way, her keys in one hand and the two-dollar bill in the other.

The inside of honeymoon suite at the Ritz-Beverly Hotel was just as creamy as the rest of the place and the gilt that had started in the corridor came with me into the room. The main door led into a lounge not larger than a baseball field littered with gilt furniture. On my right was a hallway that ended in big gilt archway with a big gilt set of double doors. The doors were closed. The whole place was spotless but when I turned to compliment the cleaner on her work she’d already gone and I stood there listening to her cleaning trolley swoosh down the hallway on the thick carpet. I was alone in the room with all that gold. It made me think of the athletic bag still sitting next to my desk back at the office.

The lounge was a dead end so I headed for the double doors. If a couple of newlyweds had been living here for three months then there would be plenty of evidence and my guess was that most of it would be beyond those doors in the master suite. There would be a closet full of clothes, drawers full of socks, a bathroom full of potions.

The fact that Charles David hadn’t been seen for a week or more made sense. He’d fled. Maybe he knew his wife was after an early separation of a rather permanent kind. The fact that, according to the cleaner anyway, Eva herself hadn’t been seen for a few days suggested to me that she’d bolted too. She must have got wind of the price on her own head. Maybe that was why she hadn’t called Ada yet.

Which didn’t leave much for me to do in the honeymoon suite, but it was still worth a look. Maybe either one of them had left clues about where they had gone. And there was always a chance they would be back, maybe if they’d left something important behind.

I got to the doors. A clock was ticking on the other side. It didn’t sound like it was keeping particularly good time, like it needed winding or a new spring or both. I listened some more. Then I pushed the doors open once I was sure the room beyond was unoccupied.

The room I found myself in was wide enough to park four cars side by side on account of the fact it was empty, devoid not just of residents but of everything. The place had been stripped, leaving nothing but wallpaper and the thick cream carpet covered in a maze of indentations echoing where all the clutter that should have stood in room had once been.

I’d heard—or maybe Thornton had heard—that fancy hotels could customize the furniture in your room at your request, but taking it all out seemed a step too far. If someone was here for three months they would have to sleep on something and the carpet was thick but not that thick.

The bedroom had three doors leading off of it, which seemed excessive.

The first door led to another bedroom that was smaller in the same way the White House was smaller than the Capitol. This room had also been cleared out, but where the bed should be were instead two camp stretchers. They weren’t wide enough for me to lie in but they looked comfortable enough for a person of regular dimensions. They were a deep green and the metal parts were painted a flat ocean gray. They were foldable. They were the kind of bed the army might use but not the kind of bed you expect to find in the honeymoon suite of one of your fancier Hollywood hotels.

The clock’s ticking was louder in this room. I looked around but couldn’t see any clock.

The second door led to a connected bathroom. I was shocked to discover it was done out in cream marble and gilt and what wasn’t marble and gilt was mirrored. I looked at myself from four angles then checked the bath. It was dry. The basin too. Dry and clean. Immaculate. There were no hairs, nothing. If I hadn’t known better I would have said the bathroom hadn’t been used in about, oh, three months. I opened the cabinets and spent a couple of minutes counting folded towels and little bottles of hotel-branded shampoo.

Opening the third door that led from the master bedroom was like Christmas, given what I found on the other side.

This room had been emptied of the standard furniture, just like the others. In the middle of the room was a chair made of metal on a big metal revolving base. The chair consisted of three different parts to support the legs, body, and head, and had two long armrests. All of these parts were on an articulated frame, allowing the reclining patient to be lowered, raised, tipped and tilted. It was the kind of dentist’s chair you could fly to Venus on.

Hanging above the chair was a big metal arm with several ball-and-socket joints allowing free movement in three dimensions. The arm was attached the same base as the chair, and the part that hung over the chair ended in two separate parts: a four-pronged claw with sprung fingers, and a mirrored disc with a pointed cone in the center. This disc was on its own miniature arm, which sprung up from the wrist of the four-pronged claw and allowed the disc to be positioned independently in front of whatever it was that the claw was supposed to hold. The disc was no bigger than a bread plate and the pointed cone in the middle of it stuck out about two inches.

I didn’t know what the contraption was for. I took a couple of pictures and listened to the ticking clock. There was no clock in this room either.

And then I realized what it was. My Geiger counter was doing its best to get my attention. I frowned and told myself to do better. It was just that it had never gone off as far as I could remember (which today was about five hours) so I didn’t expect to hear it.

I turned it up and I took some readings. It sounded like someone was frying bacon in my head.

I headed back to the master bedroom, following the crackling. There was another door, next to the big set that led out. Somehow I’d missed it, but it didn’t matter, because I didn’t miss it now. As I got close the crackle got louder.

The door opened into a wide corridor, which after a couple of steps I realized wasn’t a corridor. It was a walk-in closet, bigger (I guessed) than most of the regular hotel rooms. As I walked forward I slid open the sliding doors that lined either side of the passage. They were empty save for big chromed coat hangers permanently attached to the rails. Even in the honeymoon suite, the Ritz-Beverly didn’t trust its guests all the way.

The passage ended in more sliding doors. I opened them. More space for clothes. Drawers here, big and wide and small and shallow. And underneath, at floor level, a big black rectangular safe.

My Geiger counter was now putting out a continuous howl. I feared for the safety of my new suit and hat.

The safe was locked. There was a combination dial on the front and a chromed handle. I turned the Geiger counter down and focused my audio receptors on the locking mechanism buried inside the safe’s door. It didn’t take long to crack the combination as I listened to the tumblers catch and engage and disengage.

Breaking into things was a useful skill in a job like mine.

Inside the safe was a box. I pulled it out. It was black plastic, and the plastic was textured, like it was pretending to be leather when it was anything but. The box was not quite a cube, a little taller than it was deep, ten inches high and eight square. The lid had a metal flip-catch, which I flipped.

The inner surface of the lid was lined with a metal that was dull gray and a little soft to the touch. Lead, but nowhere near enough of it to shield the outside world from the hot contents of the box. Under the lid was a stiff foam packer in two halves, the top half squeaking like a mouse in the jaws of a housecat as I pulled it out.

I looked into the box.

Inside was a square something. It looked like a cube made of frosted glass. Inside that glass was a tracery of filaments, like someone had printed a computer circuit on the inside of a giant ice cube.

I tilted the box this way and that to get a look. The sides of the box were also lead-lined. There was nothing else in the container. No label or writing or any kind, unless it was on the bottom, but I didn’t much feel like taking a look. I figured I’d exposed the hotel to enough radiation today. So I put the top half of the foam spacer back in, closed the lid, put the box in the safe, closed it, and spun the dial.

Then I left the honeymoon suite as I had found it and headed for the hotel lobby.

There was a phone call I needed to make.

There was a different bellhop waiting for me in the lobby this time. His smile was nicer. There were two young ladies behind the reception desk on my left, one of whom was dealing with a hotel guest who was nothing more than two legs as thin as pins with a sphere of fur balanced on the top.

I pulled my collar up and my hat down
and
headed for the row of four wooden phone boxes that lay beyond the forest of soft furnishings, in an alcove that mirrored the spot where the piano was dropped. The pianist was still there, swaying on his stool with his eyes closed as he played. I didn’t blame him. If I had to sit in the lobby for hours at a time I’d keep my eyes closed too.

The booths had narrow double doors fitted with leaded stained glass. I went to the second booth along.

And then I turned to face the man sitting on the sofa opposite.

He had on a broad brimmed fedora made of green rabbit felt, and he had his arms folded and his legs crossed tight. He looked uncomfortable and not at all concerned about the creases he was putting into his nice brown suit. His tie was red and it was pulled too tight as well, pinching the skin of his neck just below the waterline of a big orange beard. He wore dark glasses under the brim of his hat and he kept the brim down like I wouldn’t notice him sitting there.

I stepped away from the telephones and closer to the man.

Charles David looked up at me but he kept everything folded tight and I couldn’t see his eyes behind his glasses.

“It’s the beard,” I said. “Too distinctive. Stands out like traffic light. Lose the beard. And maybe you’d make a better tail if you unwound and tried a bit harder.”

He sighed
and
the sigh was a long one. He looked better in the photograph that was inside my jacket than in the flesh. I wasn’t sure whether it was the fiery color of his beard that did it but the skin of his face had a green tinge and there was a sweat on his brow. Altogether he looked a little seasick.

“That’s what they said,” he said, “but I told them,
no-can-do
. This beard is my livelihood. Do you know I have it insured for one million dollars?”

I whistled. It sounded like a truck making an emergency stop at the lights and made the bellhop and the two girls at reception and the ball of fur who was still arguing over a bill turn to look at me. I ignored them.

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked, and then I started running through some options. I couldn’t kill him here. I had to get him alone. Didn’t matter much where. I had an entire hotel of room around me but I didn’t like that idea. A movie star dies in the tub in his room and a lot of people would start talking about the big robot they saw in the lobby.

No, I had to get him somewhere else.

Charles David looked around. I followed his gaze. The others in the hotel lobby had gone back to their own business. Then he said, “Look, I don’t have time for this,” and then after a short pause, he said, “We need to talk.”

“Sure,” I said. Sounded like getting him out of the hotel would be a little easier than I first thought. “Tell me,” I said, “do you ever take down the top on that gold coupe, or do you worry about the upholstery getting faded?”

Before he could answer the phone in the booth behind me rang. Charles David nearly jumped out of his skin but with his arms and legs all locked up he just jerked on the sofa and made it creak. His mouth formed an O with the million-dollar soup-catcher all around it.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I think that’s for me.”

I went back to the second booth from the left. I couldn’t fit into the box, so I reached in and picked up the receiver and stood there looking at the stained glass in the folded doors. In the scene, Sir Galahad seemed to be having some trouble averting his eyes from a woman in a thin white nightie with lace around the edges. They were standing in a forest. The woman was going to catch a chill, dressed like that.

On the telephone was nothing but a hazy white noise, like a waterfall in the distance.