Slow Burn (27 page)

Stiles lost all color in his face as he sank back against the wall. “He… he could be Larry.”

Finally, a name. I grabbed him by the collar. “Larry who?”

“Larry Grimes,” Stiles said. “A guy I ran with a few years back. We were in a few scrapes together. He skipped town on account of knocking up this girl, then beating the hell out of her for getting pregnant on him. Bastard damned near killed her. He came back to town about six months ago looking for a job. Since I owed him a couple of favors, I put him to work for me from time to time when he needed it. Always seemed grateful.”

I looked over at Loomis. Larry equaled Lawrence, which could equal Lorenzo, which might equal Enzo. Not the biggest leap we’d taken that day. For the first time, I felt like we might be catching a break.

I eased up my grip on Stiles’ collar. “Tell us more about Grimes.”

“He worked mostly at The Chantilly for me, but I used him here a couple of times as muscle whenever I was shorthanded. He’s got a bad temper, which comes in handy for the action I’ve got going on downtown.”

“Did he know you owned The Chauncey Arms?” I asked.

“Sure. When he’s not working with Lennon, he runs the crap game I run in the Basement, and some other things I’ve got going on down there. He prefers the dives to some of my nicer places, so I put him up in an apartment down there.”

“The place on Twenty-Third,” Loomis said.

“I got places all over town,” Stiles said. “It wasn’t too fancy, and I figured that one…”

I wasn’t interested. “We just came from there, and he’s gone. And all we found was some empty bottles and a bloody shirt. Jack Van Dorn’s bloody shirt.”

Stiles blanched again as Loomis ran it down for him. “You own the building where Van Dorn lives, the club where he was probably kidnapped, the dump where his sister was killed, and the place he was held. And two of the kidnappers worked for you. You’d better think of places where Enzo could’ve taken Jack — and you’d better think fast.”

I thought Stiles’ bladder went. He grabbed for my arm, but I pushed him away. “Charlie? Charlie, you gotta believe me. These guys just worked for me! They just used my places, but I didn’t—”

I clipped him in the back of the head to steady him down. “These bastards have been using places you own every step of the way. You got any other places they might’ve taken Jack?”

“Sure. I’ve got all kinds of places, Charlie,” Stiles whined. “I’ve got places for mugs like Grimes to hang their hat. Some nice places for high rollers, too. They come in, play too long and need a place to sleep it off, take a girl, whatever they need to keep them in town and gambling at my joint.”

Loomis kept going: “Does Grimes know where any of these places are?”

Stiles shook his head. “Nah, he never…” And then Stiles’ head shot up. His eyes wide. “Oh, God.”

I was too close to the truth for theatrics. I grabbed Stiles by the shoulder and jerked him back in his chair. “Oh, God, what?”

Stiles pulled open the top drawer of his desk. Loomis went for his gun.

The drawer held several hotel room keys. About ten by my count, but there were probably many more. Stiles sank back in his chair and raked his fingers through his hair, clutching at a clump of hair at the back of his head. “Oh, no.”

I tapped him in the back of the head. “Snap out of it, stupid. What is it?”

“I pay the hotel to reserve ten rooms for me upstairs in case the high rollers need a place to stay. Larry knows that. I had him escort a big winner up to one of the rooms last week.” He looked down at the open drawer. “There are only nine keys here. The bastard must’ve palmed one when he was here last.”

Larry Grimes. Here. Jack Van Dorn. Here. Maybe. But maybe was more than what I’d had all day. The end of this whole, rotten mess might only be a few floors above me.

I grabbed Stiles by the collar and slowly pulled him up out of his chair. “What room number?”

I
T ALL
boiled down to one place: Suite 1411 of the Roosevelt Hotel. Forty-Five East Forty-Fifth Street at Madison Avenue.

Hauser, Loomis and I stood alone in the same stairwell we’d come down. I kept the door propped open for some light and air. My head was spinning, and I needed all the air I could get to keep from getting dizzy. Even stale air would do. Christ, the Van Dorn kid could be closer than I thought. Four floors above me.

I took several deep breaths while Loomis filled Hauser in on how Enzo was really Larry Grimes.

“The Enzo moniker threw me off,” Hauser admitted, “but I know Larry Grimes, alright. Knew him before he left town the first time. Tough, mean bastard. If it’s really Grimes we’re up against, he’s too smart to run somewhere we’d find him this easily. He’d know Stiles would put all of this together eventually.”

“Eventually is probably what he’s counting on,” Loomis said. “Grimes knows Stiles is down here hiding out from Lucky, so he’s banking on the fact that Stiles will be out of touch and won’t be able to put all of this together. And since he needed a place to stash Jack quickly after Chamberlain left, he used one of Stiles’ rooms. Why not? It’s not like Stiles would miss it for a while.”

Hauser chewed that over, but clearly didn’t like the taste of it. I didn’t care. “We’ve got to check the room out anyway, just to be sure.”

Loomis didn’t have the stomach for what was coming next, so I gave him something else to do.

“Floyd, go upstairs and badge the front desk clerk. Ask for the house detective, a guy named Favilla, Andy Favilla, he’s ex-PD. Tell him everything we know so far. Fill him in on what’s happening, then call Carmichael.”

“But do it quietly,” Hauser warned. “If Grimes is still here, he’ll have someone watching the lobby.” Loomis went upstairs like I’d asked him to.

When the door at the top of the stairs shut, Hauser said, “If Grimes really is holding the Van Dorn kid up there, the sooner we go in and get him, the better. He’s mean and he’s reckless, and he won’t go quietly, especially with half the cops in the city running in here to get him. If he’s going down, he’ll want to bring a lot of cops down with him. If we’re going to get him, we’d better do it now.”

I knew Hauser was right, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it. “Kicking in that door is a three-man job, and we both know Loomis doesn’t have the stomach for that kind of thing. We’ll have to bring in your men to help us out, and—”

“We don’t have time,” Hauser said. “Grimes has heard about that riot Chamberlain stirred up by now. He knows he’s got to find another place fast, before Stiles notices he’s short one key. We need to hit that suite and hit it right now before he tries to move Van Dorn. If we wait for backup or try to grab them on the street, a lot of innocent people will get killed, including your meal ticket.” Hauser smiled. “And we certainly wouldn’t want poor little Jack to get himself killed now, would we?”

I wasn’t in the mood for Hauser’s sarcasm. “If Jack dies, Carmichael will pin it on both of us.”

Hauser shook his head. “Not me, angel. You.”

“You know Carmichael. You sure about that?”

Hauser’s smile disappeared. “Come on. Let’s go up and see this Favilla character. After that, we’ll figure out what we should do.”

I’
D BEEN
in the Roosevelt Hotel several times, but I never paid much attention to the lobby. I never had to. My life had never depended on it.

The lobby was big on marble, with potted green trees and brass fixtures. It was a nice, inviting space where one could enjoy a pleasant afternoon drinking expensive coffee and smoking a cigarette or two. Maybe even a cigar. As fancy as it was, it was just like any other hotel lobby you’d find anywhere in the world: Filled with people on couches and plush chairs, taking tea and chatting and reading the paper while they waited for hotel guests to come downstairs.

But one little guy in the corner caught my attention. He was thin, even thinner than me, wearing a bowler and wire glasses. He looked up at me from his newspaper just as Hauser and I passed by on our way to the front desk.

He didn’t look for long, but longer than he should have. And long enough for me not to like it.

I took my eye off him for a moment when Loomis brought over Andy Favilla, the Roosevelt’s house detective.

I’d worked with Favilla a few times years ago, back before he’d caught a couple of rounds in the leg during a bank robbery. His injuries got him retired from the force, and he’d been working at the Roosevelt pretty much since it opened. We knew each other pretty well, which might explain why we didn’t like each other. Personal feelings aside, he was a good man to have on our side if we had to go up against Grimes. A

fter a quick round of introductions, Favilla got down to business. “Loomis filled me in on everything. My man at the front desk here remembers seeing three men leading in a fourth man about two hours or so ago. The fourth guy seemed a bit worse for wear, but they had a room key, so the elevator man took them upstairs.”

I kept one eye on the little guy in the bowler hat while Favilla kept talking.

“The drunk could be Van Dorn, though my man at the desk didn’t get a good look at him. He said he hasn’t seen any of them since. As far as we know, they’re still up in the room.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught some movement to my left. More like a lack of movement, really. The little guy in the bowler and wire rims wasn’t in his chair anymore. His newspaper was lying on the seat.

I spotted him about a hundred feet away, standing at a long table with several house phones on it. He had his back to me, and a phone up to his ear.

I pulled my .38 as I ran toward him across the lobby. I buried the muzzle in his ear and slammed down the cradle with my hand. He dropped the earpiece and started to shake.

“D… d… don’t hurt me.”

“Who were you calling just now?”

“A… a guy,” he said. “In Room 1411. A couple of hours ago, he gave me twenty bucks to watch the lobby for him. S… said he was upstairs with a woman whose husband might come looking for them. He even gave me a picture of him. Look.”

Favilla, Hauser and Loomis came over just as he handed it over.

It was the picture of me getting out of the car in front of the Van Dorn house. The same picture that had been on the front page of the newspapers that afternoon.

I crumpled the picture and tossed it on the table next to the phone. “You couldn’t tell that was from a newspaper?”

The guy shrank away from me. “What do I care? Twenty bucks is twenty bucks, and—” I smacked him in the back of the head and put my gun away. “Did you talk to him just now?”

He rubbed the sore spot where I’d just hit him. “No.

The operator was putting me through to him, but you hung up before I reached him.”

Hauser poked him in the head. “How many of them are up there?”

“I… I don’t know,” he said. “I only saw the guy who paid me. I thought he was up there with a girl. Honest!”

Favilla shoved him toward the table, patted him down, then cuffed him. He called over one of the bellmen and told him to lock him in the storage closet until the cops showed up.

Favilla asked, “Now that we know he’s up there, how do you boys want to play this?”

“How many men do you have working now?” Hauser asked.

“Just me. At night we have three, but it’s pretty quiet during the day, so we only have one. How many men do you have?”