“Where? What’s what?” Gib asked, annoyed.
“Naw, naw. We passed it. We went by it at fast speed,” Gunnar explained. “Take it back.”
“You take it back to whatever you saw, Marino,” Gib said and leaned back in his chair.
“...On the four-thirty news. Economists assess the impact of planned military base closures and realignments on the local…,” suddenly blared across the room from Lenore’s TV set. While Gib helped Gunnar work the editing console, his partner was left with nothing to do but watch a local station’s daytime lineup. With regular half-hour intervals, she would take the volume higher and higher.
“Could you turn that down a little bit?” Gunnar asked without looking at the video technician. The TV running at a reasonable sound level wouldn’t have bothered him much, but after the commercial break, he knew the talk show was soon to have a brawl between the three pregnant girlfriends of a long-haul trucker.
Lenore pretended not to hear.
“Please,” Gunnar raised his voice and looked at the woman. Her body, clad in black leotards, a black sweater, and black hiking boots, was slouched in a chair. She brushed some of her long, raven-black hair from her eyes and sent a sullen, resentful glare his way.
“I’m almost done,” he pleaded.
Refusing to answer, Lenore decreased the sound by the slightest degree.
“Look!” Gunnar said and aligned a notch in the control knob with a small arrow painted on the console. It made the monitor freeze on one frame.
“Yeah, what?” Gib moaned.
“I knew that happened,” Gunnar thought out loud. “But that’s the only thing out of the ordinary.”
The picture had frozen on a shot of the audience as the cameraman panned his lens to catch a male contestant walking back into the rest of the preliminary lineup.
“That’s the only odd thing I can think of,” Gunnar said.
“Yeah,” Gib moaned. “Very impressive performance. He should have placed higher. Hey, Lenore, would you mind getting me another soda?”
But with that same turn of the camera, the video man caught a clear glimpse of Jeanie O’Shaughnessy, ex-Ms. Empire and YouTube fitness star, and her entourage behind the judges. Laura Preston sat next to them.
“I gotta go with that,” Gunnar said slowly. “Hey, Gib?”
The noise of the door getting slammed shut in Lenore’s wake snapped across the editing room.
“...Gib? Do you think I could have copies of these video files?”
“Hell no.” The video man sounded all too glad to shatter Gunnar’s hopes.
He cast a quizzical eye Gib’s way.
“Look, man, none of this stuff leaves the studio. This is the copyrighted property of Full Eclipse Productions.”
Gunnar turned back to the screen and strained his eyes to see Laura in the shadows. As he advanced the frames forward ever so slightly, he saw her take her leave from the contest. But having studied more footage from the time between the preliminaries and the finals, Gunnar realized Laura was nowhere to be seen. There were various glimpses of her around the hotel in all the shots that could be categorized as pre-first-round contest footage, but Laura, it seemed, had departed the premises altogether after that exit from the auditorium.
Making a mighty effort to recall what he had seen at the contest himself, Gunnar thought he recalled the departure he just witnessed on tape. Laura got up from her seat at the foot of the stage, walked up the center aisle and, as far as he could remember, never reappeared at the contest.
“Where are you?” Gunnar whispered. “Where did you go off to?”
“Huh?” Gib moaned.
Lenore reappeared with two cans of soda.
“And the time is….” Gunnar continued talking to himself in a low mumble and looked at the time code identifying the moment of the frame of video in time. “Seven fifteen.” Grabbing inside his jacket, he snatched his notepad and jotted down the time. “Seven fifteen.”
“Congrats,” Gib said and popped the tab of his soda can.
Gunnar bolted out of his seat. “Sorry, I gotta go,” he said and moved for the door. “Hope I wasn’t a bother.”
CHAPTER 44
Like a crazy game of musical chairs, moving back and forth between cases, Gunnar thought as he forged his way north on the 5 after leaving his early morning shift in Lomita. Then he had to fish another chewable antacid pill from the breast pocket of the loud red-based, yellow and blue flowered Hawaiian shirt he wore under his navy-blue blazer. The blender and the range at the surveillance house had been joined by coffee and cappuccino machines. Tommy and Joey said they needed the devices to stay alert since they agreed they could use the extra money to do a second shift bodyguarding Copeland Whitlock twenty-four hours a day. Tommy worked nights and into the wee hours, and Joey spent his day with Kelly’s client. Coordinating the times spent watching the gunmen had become like unraveling an onerous little puzzle, and no matter what Gunnar tried to do, someone gave him grief for it. Or, more precisely, Kelly had been getting bolder and bolder in her critiques of Tommy and Joey handling so much of the Whitlock legwork. She didn’t seem all that worried by Amy, Gunnar noted. As the tension increased, however, he’d taken to using the coffee maker and the cappuccino machine three times in the past fifteen hours, and his stomach was aching for it. At one time, he developed excruciating gastritis in a two-and-a-half-year cycle of off-season bingeing and pre-contest dieting, and the damage done to his stomach lining had been bothering him ever since.
What didn’t help matters was the fact that he missed Erika, too. He would have liked to have spent the night with her. A seminar by a guest lecturer of some sort at her hospital—a cardiologist from Chicago, Gunnar tried to recall—took care of that, however. The event went late into the night, followed by an even later reception and dinner. But he ached to feel her body.
Arriving at the Santa Monica Palace Hotel twenty minutes later gave Gunnar the opportunity to focus his thoughts on something else. He noted how the place was hemmed in by a spacious parking lot on all sides. As he drove toward a slot near the front entrance, though, the only incongruous site around the tidy looking hotel was the dust-caked cab of a dump truck parked in the rear of the building.
Entering the lobby, he tried to picture where everything had taken place six days ago. To his left, first of all, off toward the east side of the building, he looked and found the entrance to the theater lobby. On his side of the wall separating the two lobbies, he recognized the corridor to the backstage he, Kelly, and Frank Jankowsky had taken when visiting the contestants. There were a few people milling about inside the restaurant straight ahead, and to the right of that, he spotted the administrative desk. On the direct right side of the lobby, he saw the stairs to the upper floors and remembered Holt departing in that direction when he got the phone call.
The phone call from Laura.
Gunnar had planned on returning to the scene of Brad’s death, but finding Laura’s phone number and name in Holt’s record of incoming calls sealed the plan.
“What happened up there?” he thought out loud, mumbling around his smoking cigar. If Holt was murdered by poison that reached its lethal potency when the athlete was on stage, the first logical choice for an administration site was the room he kept.
Is that where you went? he wondered, recalling Laura’s departure from the contest and the videotaped confirmation of her complete disappearance from the rest of the events.
So he looked toward the check-in desk and thought about a good line to use on the man and the woman handling the establishment’s business. Given bureaucratic paranoia, they would probably be less than cooperative with a man without a police shield broaching the subject of death on the premises.
“...So, I told em’! All I need to do is take one look at that place, and I’ll be one hundred percent certain the death was accidental
! His own damn fault!” He was improvising a quick yarn less than a minute later to an edgy young woman behind the counter. As he expected, the clerk was uncertain about letting a stranger interested in the accident know where Holt was staying. “Look, if you just allow me a quick look at where Holt’s room was, I can keep an army of cops, lawyers, investigators, what have you, from coming and trampling through here for the next six months and giving everyone the creeps with all their speculation of murder, poisoning, conspiracy, assassination, lawsuits—”
“A quick look,” the woman said at last. She cast a look toward her companion, who replied with a nod and uncertain creasing about his brows. Then she worked the keyboard of the computer terminal in front of her and reported, “Three fifteen. Wait a minute!”
“Yes?”
“We have a guest in that room, sir.”
“That’s okay! I just need its location. I swear.”
“I’ll send someone to show you,” the woman said after giving it some thought.
It was better than nothing, Gunnar admitted and thanked her. Even if he could have entered the room, it wouldn’t have been a sealed crime scene. It would be cleaned and disinfected by now, any clues obliterated.
“Thank you,” he said and waited.
“Sir,” the man behind the counter said half a minute later.
“Yeah?”
“You’ll have to put that out, sir.” He pointed at the wispy column of smoke emanating from the cigar.
“Huh?”
“Your cigar, sir! We don’t allow smoking anywhere in the hotel.”
“Oh,” Gunnar grunted, then walked over to the ashtray with a sign ordering NO SMOKING PLEASE beside the front door and stubbed the glowing ash on the end of the Antonio and Cleopatra into the fine white sand. Holding on to the rest of the extinguished cigar, he waited until a pretty young cleaning woman showed up with a stack of towels on one arm and asked to escort him upstairs.
“All the people in that bodybuilding contest had their rooms around the same area,” the cleaning woman—or, more accurately, cleaning girl, Gunnar considered as he tried to estimate her very tender age—said as she led him up the stairs. He marveled at her exquisite slender form and the elegant, graceful little steps she took with a ramrod straight back, shoulders poised, and hips undulating with tasteful, discrete left to right twists. Los Angeles, indeed, had the best looking service industry in the world. He would have guessed this girl’s moves as having been taught in the dance and ballet classes a pair of doting parents enrolled her in as she was growing up and dreaming of performing. Just like Alexandra Rinaldi.
“Right,” Gunnar made conversation. “Although I’m not sure it was wise. Those folks are pretty competitive.”
The girl looked back at him, and Gunnar noticed her attention getting stuck for a prolonged moment. “Are you like them? A bodybuilder.”
“Thank you for the compliment. Not for quite a while now. Listen, did you work on cleaning the rooms these people stayed in while they were here?”
“Oh yeah. Well, our shifts rotate, so we work all over the building.”
“Do you remember the guy who died? The room we’re going to?”
“Sure!” she said, and Gunnar’s hopes began to rise. “I just can’t imagine what someone could have gone through dying like that. I heard he kinda starved and dehydrated himself to death.”
“Something like it,” Gunnar said as they reached the third floor and turned right onto a lengthy corridor. “Do you remember seeing him in his room? Did you ever run into him during a cleaning or anything?”
“I think I remember seeing him twice. But not in the room. Why?”
“Do you remember who he was staying with?”
“I don’t think he was staying with anyone. I mean, I didn’t see him with anyone around here.”
“Anything peculiar ever?” Gunnar asked and slowed down, feeling his hopes deflated. “Ever see him fighting with anyone? Arguing with anyone?”
“No, I’m sorry. I just saw him from a distance, you know.”
“I see,” Gunnar mused with a dejected sigh and twirled the cigar between his left index and middle fingers in mild agitation.
They walked a few more paces ahead and found room 315.
“I’m sorry you can’t look around,” the personable girl said. “I was told—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Gunnar waved her off. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Harmony,” she said.
“Well, Harmony.” Gunnar stared at the door to room 315 for a protracted moment. “The good news is that no one can pick these locks. Only a key card will let you in.”
“Sure,” Harmony said with a vague tone of mixed fascination and confusion.
Unless someone stole a key card and easily let themselves in, Gunnar didn’t say.
If Holt got that phone call and had to leave the lobby, why did he come in this direction? Gunnar tried to piece what he had seen that night together into a logical sequence of events. If Laura was calling him, where was she calling from? Where had she gone off to? Had she left the building? Had she come up here and asked Holt to come to meet her here? It was a possibility, Gunnar decided. They had something to talk about in person. Had she somehow convinced Holt that they needed to discuss something so urgent that it couldn’t wait until after the contest was over? Had he fallen for it and whatever reason she had for demanding the meeting be private, come up here, and somehow gotten poisoned without realizing it?
“So, is that it?” Gunnar’s thoughts were suddenly disrupted by Harmony’s voice.
“I can’t be sure,” he said quietly and turned away from the door.
He already knew where they came from in one direction, so he took note of the emergency exit at the other end of the corridor. Assuming an event of murder, he had to consider the perpetrator’s need for stealth. But after all, this was a hotel jammed with people on Friday, and anyone could have gotten lost in the crowd.
“Where does that emergency exit lead?” he asked.
But Harmony hesitated a moment before answering. “Well…,” she began.
“Yeah?”
“It’s supposed to go out the back….”
“And?”
“Look, don’t tell anyone, but…but that exit downstairs was just blocked by a dumpster and those construction trucks.”
“Oh?” Gunnar raised his eyebrows. “How long?”
“That’s the problem,” Harmony said, still worried. “They’ve been there since last week. Well before the contest. Just to add to the hotel’s problems. I’ve heard the county health and safety board, or whatever they call the thing regulating safety in buildings, has written up some new citations. Because of all those people being in the hotel and the back safety exits being blocked.”
“So where do you end up if you go down those stairs? Just a dead-end stairwell?”
“Oh no! You wind up outside the backstage of the theater.”
“Let’s see,” Gunnar suggested.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to.”
“Don’t worry! We’ll come back up and go to the lobby by the front stairs.”
At length, the girl agreed, and they descended into the barren cinderblock-walled stairwell.
“How come the back’s blocked?” Gunnar asked on the way down. He now remembered seeing the truck visible in the back as he arrived.
“They’re tearing out some walls to replace electrical circuitry on the top floor. A real mess too,” Harmony said while keeping up with him. “They’ve got these chutes going down the back of the building and emptying into the dumpsters.”
“You said there was another way out the back?”
“Yeah, but that’s over on the far side of the building. At least one was open.”
When they reached the bottom floor, they were look
ing straight ahead at a sizable emergency exit door. Off to the left side, a door was marked STAGE. When Gunnar tried the emergency door, it indeed opened onto dust, plaster, and debris littered bedlam of dump trucks, two trailers, and a pair of thirty-foot long dumpsters with debris chutes emptying into them from the fourth floor.
After pulling the door closed, Gunnar tried the stage entrance. In case of an emergency, he realized, the backstage and perhaps some of the gallery would crowd out of the building this way. When he had the second door breached, he found sightless darkness beyond and complete silence. A few feet ahead, he also noticed a small four-step stairway rising.
After climbing to the top of the steps, it took his eyes some time to distinguish where he was, but a familiar terrain came into focus in due time. Straight ahead of him, he saw the shrouded outlines of the backstage area that had once been allocated to the male athletes preparing for the Sun State. That was where they first saw Holt collapsing. Turning to his left, he strained to see the spot the women competitors used to prepare for the show. The door to the corridor passing by the kitchen and the eatery was back that way too.
“Harmony! Can I get to the other rear exit from here?” he called back to his helpful guide.
“Yeah! But it’s way down at the other end. Behind an announcer’s booth and some equipment storage space. It’s kind of hard to make it in the dark.”
“Sure,” Gunnar mumbled and rejoined Harmony. “Come on. Let’s go back upstairs.”
“So, did you find what you were looking for?” the girl asked as they climbed back to the second floor.
“I’m not sure. There were some valets and people standing by the doors during the contest. Handing out playbills and selling tickets. Do you think I could talk to them?”
“Oh, they weren’t the hotel’s employees,” Harmony said as they stepped into the second-floor corridor. “They were from a special events company in Beverly Hills. They were hired by that bodybuilding federation that ran the show.”
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