Or She Dies

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Another popping sound, another message. This time it could just as easily have been my own thought bubble; the words seemed to look right through the windows of my eyes and read my mind.

  THEN YOU WILL NEVER KNOW.

  Chapter 32

  Midnight.

  I wasn’t going to that hotel room.

  Ariana asleep beside me, I lay and watched the clock. She’d taken an Ambien to help her doze off, but I was fairly certain that no sleeping pill would get me down tonight. Whatever this thing was, I had it by the tail or it had me by the neck. When I didn’t show up, would they come after me, renewed? If they didn’t, could I stand never knowing? Could I go back to student papers and faculty-room joking and neighborhood walks? I would have to. As Ari had said, I was tampering with other people’s lives. And if I kept following instructions, when would it end? By no-showing, I was taking my fate into my own hands. And if they reacted with wrath, I would be ready for them. If the lawsuit returned, I was no worse off than I’d been two days ago. In the quiet dark, I began listing the precautions I’d start taking at first light.

  12:27 A.M.12:28 A.M.

  I wasn’t going to that hotel room.

  TONIGHT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING.

  Who was waiting in Room 1407? A face from the past, a wronged friend, a man in a dark suit, legs crossed, silenced pistol in his lap? Or a stranger with a gift, nothing more to me than I was to Doug Beeman? How long would the person wait before figuring out that I wasn’t coming through that door?

  12:48 A.M. 12:49 A.M.

  I wasn’t going to that hotel room.

  I pictured Doug Beeman on his knees, his face up against the TV, how he’d sat back on his heels and swayed and how I hadn’t known he’d been weeping until I heard the sobs choke out of him. The school photo on Elisabeta’s table, the missing-teeth grin. Those heaps of banana peels. The despair, thick as a scent in that cramped living room. The duffel of cash that I prayed would lift that despair as the DVD had lifted Beeman’s, that might just buy a wink of light at the end of the tunnel.

  1:06 A.M. 1:07 A.M.

  I wasn’t going to that hotel room.

  Snippets of text floated in the darkness. SOMEONE YOU KNOW. A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. What was I going to do? Lie here miserably unasleep until I was awakened by a ringing phone? Or would the death notice come later? A day, a week, three months. Could I live like that, waiting, knowing I could have prevented whatever was coming?

  1:17 A.M. 1:18 A.M.

  The only way to beat them is not to play.

  I wasn’t going to that hotel room.

  1:23 A.M.

  I kissed Ari on the sleep-warm neck. Regarded her sleeping face. Lips fat and luscious, popped open just slightly, giving off the faintest whistle.

  Whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Slid from bed, guilty, miserable, and racked with fear.

  It wasn’t that I had to go.

  It was that I couldn’t not.

  Having parked at the curb up Sepulveda beyond eyeshot of the valets, having retrieved the key card from my glove box and snugged it in my back pocket, having pocketed my Sanyo and the prepaid cell phone to cover any recording or calling contingency, having waited for a break in traffic and threaded through the rear parking lot in my jeans and black T-shirt, I stood at the base of Hotel Angeleno, key in hand, confronting the service door from the photo.

  Crinkling in my pocket was the note I’d jotted hastily under the dome light of my car: I received an anonymous message telling me to come to Room 1407, and that it was a matter of life and death. I don’t know who’s in the room. I don’t know where this will lead. If something bad happens, please contact Detective Sally Richards of the West LA station.

  Past the concrete freeway wall to my left, invisible cars swooped by, rushing smooth and soporific, an endless wave. The cylindrical building loomed overhead, a cool green glow uplighting the penthouse soffit.

  A car approached from the curving drive, a valet closing my brief time window, but before the headlights swept into view, I zippered the key into the lock and twisted. A satisfying clunk. I slipped inside, breathed the heated air, and tried to shake the tingling from my fingertips.

  Immediately I heard a squeak of a wheel, but before I could move, a worker turned the corner, pushing a room-service cart. In the frozen instant before our eyes met, I put a hand up on the door nearest me and noted with great relief that it led to the stairwell. Hoping he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of my face, I swiveled quickly and stepped through.

  ‘Excuse me, sir—?’ The closing door severed his voice.

  I huffed my way up, the tapping of my Nikes coming back at me off the hard walls. The fourteenth floor was blissfully quiet. Ariana would’ve liked the LA-hip deco — sleek, slate, stone, earth. Dark wood trimmings, amber glows from wall sconces, silent carpet underfoot. A clock showed 1:58. Passing the elevator, I felt a jolt of panic as a woman dressed for the gym stepped from her room, but, busy on her cell phone, she didn’t bother with eye contact.

  The key card ready at my side like a stiletto, I counted down the room numbers. Reaching 1407, I jammed it home. The little sensor gave me a green light, and I turned the hefty handle and shoved the door open a few inches.

  Darkness.

  A few inches more. A bottleneck hall by the front bathroom, only a sliver of bedroom visible from the doorway. The curtains had been thrown back, floor-to-ceiling glass doors letting out onto a cramped balcony.

  ‘Hello?’ My voice, strained and thick, was completely foreign to me.

  Barely cutting the black of the room, the glow of the distant city lay in faded puddles on the floor. The hum of freeway traffic blended with the rush of blood in my ears as I inched forward. The door shut itself firmly behind me, cutting what little light the hall had afforded.

  Somehow I sensed an emptiness in the room. Was I supposed to wait for someone here? Would it be another phone call leading to another wild-goose chase?

  A faded smell — sweet, spicy, a trace of ash. My body tense, I stepped even with the threshold to the main room. The comforter had been dimpled where someone had sat on it. And lying next to the indentation, a slender object, about four feet long.

  Scanning the room, I took an exploratory half step forward and picked up the object by the rubber grip. The metal head swung up on the graphite shaft, glinting in the city lights. A golf driver. My golf driver. The one I’d hurled after the intruder as he’d hopped our rear fence. The etching on the face of the head was dark with something, probably dirt; I had left it out there in the leaves, after all. But the stuff didn’t act like dirt.

  It was sliding slowly down the titanium face.

  I dropped the driver abruptly on the bed. That smell in the air resolved, the faintest whiff of smoke. Clove cigarettes.

  YOU NEED TO SEE HIM.

  My chest heaving, I took another half step to my side to steady myself, and my foot struck something with a bit of give.

  It was attached to a dark mass sprawled to my left beside the bed. I sucked in a breath, amplified to a screech inside my head, and blinked down through the darkness at the body splayed grotesquely on its back, the death curl of the white hands, the dent at the forehead, the black tendrils of blood worming into the hair, the ear, pooling in the eye socket. The famous brow. Those perfect white teeth. And my nemesis, that well-defined jaw.

  TONIGHT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING.

  Horror knotted at the back of my throat, blocking off air, making my gorge lurch. I knew even before I heard the pounding footsteps coming up the hall. Stepping away from the bed to the middle of the room, facing that glorious smog-diffused cityscape, I tugged the woefully inadequate insurance note from my pocket and put my arms up over my head a split second before the door smashed in and the powerful beams of police flashlights hit me.

  Chapter 33

  I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him. It sounded like my voice, saying it over and over, but I wasn’t sure whether it w
as in my head or coming out of my mouth until one of the cops said, ‘Yeah, we got that part.’

  Patrolmen, huddled in twos and threes, alternately fielded phone calls and mumbled into their radios. They peered at me not with animosity but with a sort of bemused wonder, awed by the scope of what they’d stumbled into. I heard them from the end of a tunnel, their words strained through the humming in my ears. I’d gone into shock, I think, but I’d thought that when you were in shock you weren’t supposed to be so fucking terrified.

  I’d been frisked roughly and moved to a room up the hall, a match of 1407. They’d seized my note asking them to contact Sally Richards, though I didn’t know whether they had tried to reach her. Hotel Angeleno fell within her and Valentino’s jurisdiction, so that gave me my only glimmer of hope.

  I sat on the corner of the bed. Looking down, I realized I wasn’t wearing handcuffs, though I had a vague memory of being cuffed at some point earlier when they’d wiped my hands with a forensic swab. It seemed they weren’t sure what to do with me yet.

  One of the female cops asked, ‘Want us to call your wife?’

  ‘No. Yes. No.’ I pictured Ari waking up, finding me gone. It would take her about two seconds to put together that I’d gone to the hotel, though I’d promised her I wouldn’t. ‘Yes. Tell her I’m okay. Not injured or dead, I mean.’ That drew some odd looks. ‘They led me here. They put a bug on me. Give me a pen. Here. Here. I’ll show you.’

  One of the cops withdrew a pen from his breast pocket, clicked it, and handed it to me. Another said, ‘Watch him.’

  Using the tip of the pen, I dug into the heel of my Nike, right where the thin incisions were. The pen bowed and almost snapped, but I managed to fight out a chunk of rubber. ‘They bugged me. Right here. They were keeping track of -’ I bent the sole back, digging my fingers into the gash.

  Nothing inside the tiny cavity.

  My breath left. I wilted.

  One of the cops snickered. The others looked like they felt sorry for me. My shoe slipped from my hands, hit the floor. My sock had a hole at the toe. My voice, little more than a whisper: ‘Never mind.’ With a shaking hand, I raised the pen. I couldn’t even look up, but I felt the cop take it back.

  There was a brisk knock at the door, and then Sally entered, Valentine at her heels. She frowned at me brusquely, then asked the nearest cop, ‘Look at that color. He gonna pass out? You sure? Good. Leave us alone.’ A low murmur from the cop, and then Sally snorted and said, ‘Yeah, I think we can handle him.’

  Her wry tone — something familiar, at last — brought me back a step from the edge. The cops shuffled out, and Valentine took a post by the slider to block me in case I decided to go for the balcony. Sally dragged a chair over from the sturdy hotel desk, flipped it around with a twist of her thick wrist, and sat facing me.

  ‘You were found with an unauthorized hotel security key in a room that isn’t yours over the dead body of your declared enemy and plaintiff with a murder weapon containing your prints. What do you have to say?’

  The room smelled of dust and Windex. Just beyond my right foot was the space corresponding to where Keith Conner’s body lay, stiffening, four or five rooms up the hall. My throat was so dry I wasn’t sure I’d be able to speak. ‘I’m an idiot?’

  A curt nod. ‘That’s a start.’ She checked her watch. ‘We have about twenty minutes before RHD rolls in and takes over—’

  ‘What? How the hell am I supposed to trust Robbery-Homicide? ’

  ‘That’s not exactly your—’

  ‘If they take over, I’m finished. They’ve got me from every angle here. No one else will believe anything I say.’ I’d come off the bed, and she gestured sternly for me to sit back down. I said, ‘Why can’t you keep the case?’

  Her thin eyebrows lifted a few millimeters. ‘Do you have any idea what this thing looks like? The press has already caught wind of Keith Conner’s demise, and comparisons are being drawn to River Phoenix and — I shit you not — James Dean. The DA called me twice on my drive over here. That’s the DA herself. This is a dead movie star. Valentine and I haven’t worked a movie-star murder since . . . well, that’d be, uh, never. You bet your ass this thing is going upstairs, and upstairs from there. So if you have something you want us to hear, you’d better talk fast.’

  I did. Though my thoughts were scattered and my voice quavered, I forced myself to pull it together and lay out for them everything that had transpired. Valentine stayed with his arms crossed, expressionless, the only sounds the occasional thwick of him sucking his teeth, Sally’s pen scratching at her pad, and helicopters chopping the night sky, circling like hawks, their beams livening the curtains at intervals.

  Sally looked at me blankly once I’d finished. ‘You’re serious.’

  It didn’t seem like a question, but I said, ‘If I could make something like that up, I’d still be a screenwriter.’

  She said, ‘The cops were tipped by an anonymous call, made from a courtesy hotel phone. A man claimed to have spied someone matching your description forcing Keith Conner into Room 1407.’

  ‘That’s the killer. For a frame-up to work, he had to plan the time of death for right before I got there. Keith had just been killed when I—’

  She held up her hand. Stop. I waited, desperate and hopeful, trying to read her face. She looked back, mad at herself, or maybe me.

  ‘You have to believe me,’ I said. ‘Because no one else will.’

  She chewed her cheek for what seemed a very long time. ‘With innocent suspects, the more you sweat ’em, the angrier they get. It’s a great rule. Half the time.’

  A chill moved through me. Had I been angry? Angry enough?

  ‘The other half?’ I asked.

  ‘They don’t get angrier.’

  Valentine said, ‘That is a problem.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Sally cracked her knuckles by squeezing her fist, as close to worked up as I’d seen her. ‘I don’t like generalizations. I put stock in global warming and the second amendment. I think war is sometimes the answer. I believe in Yoda, Gandalf, and Jesus. I like veal and porn — not in that order and not together. It’s a complicated damn world, and I think this thing stinks to high heaven. So I’m gonna do something alarming. I’m gonna take you seriously.’

  I blew out a shaky breath.

  She pointed a finger at my chest: ‘But for us to be able to have a chance to help you, here’s what you have to say—’

  The door banged open, and a tall, lean man in a suit ambled in.

  Sally kept her eyes locked on mine, even as she said, ‘You’re five minutes early.’

  ‘Kent Gable, RHD.’

  ‘I’m Sally Richards. This is Detective Valentine. He’ll give you his first name if he’s feeling social.’

  ‘My partner’s up the hall in 1407,’ Gable said. ‘Thanks for holding down the fort. We got it from here.’

  Sally kept staring at me expectantly. A loaded look, as if it could convey what she’d been about to tell me. Valentine’s gaze was on me, too. My brain lurched through possibilities.

  ‘We set up a cordon outside, but the area’s thick with media.’ Gable swiped a hand across his clean-shaven jaw and finally looked at me directly. ‘Why isn’t this man in cuffs?’

  I placed my hands on my knees. ‘I’ll cooperate fully with Detective Richards and Detective Valentine. But only with them. Anyone else, I’ll lawyer up.’ I didn’t sound confident, not at all, but it was the best guess I could muster about the move Sally needed me to make.

  Valentine’s nostrils quivered ever so slightly, and Sally exhaled with quiet relief, a vein standing out in her forehead. She blinked once, long, then turned to face Gable, who was staring at me, slack-jawed. ‘We’ve had some interaction with the suspect over the past week,’ she said. ‘He had a note requesting us should he wind up in troub—’

  Gable said crisply, ‘I know about the note, sweetheart—’

  Valentine made a pained face.

 
‘—but I don’t think that means the suspect writes his own ticket.’

  A standoff. All of us staring at one another, the three of them standing, me seated on the bed like a schoolboy watching grown-ups argue. Totally at their mercy.

  Valentine cleared his throat. His mustache twitched. ‘You know whose ass is on the line with this one? Even more than ours? The DA’s. You might know from the newspapers that her office’s performance on celebrity trials hasn’t exactly been stellar, not even with your boys taking point on those investigations. Now, if we have the key suspect in the Keith Conner murder talking, my guess is the DA’s gonna want that suspect to keep talking instead of getting busy building a legal dream team.’

  The Barney theme song chimed out. Sally palmed her cell phone. ‘Speak of the devil.’ She offered Gable a sugary smile. ‘Excuse me a minute, dear heart.’ She walked past him and out the door, and he followed, a fresh urgency in his step.

  Valentine walked over and crouched before me, his mouth set in a sour curl. Behind him, early-morning light seeped around the curtain, edging his notchless rise of hair with copper. ‘I worked a lot of years with a lot of cops. And lemme tell you, that woman has the best gut instinct on the force. Don’t underestimate her. Her and I, we play this front. That I don’t like her, I’m a bigot, whatever. Works well for us, gives us some angles. But lemme tell you: that’s out the window now, along with everything else. I know how you feel right now. The fear. I can see it in your eyes, smell it out your pores. But you still can’t know, not yet, how bad this is. Sally and I, we don’t have to play no good-cop /bad-cop. If we get a chance, you tell us everything you know and we will do what we can to save your life. That’s the only play here. The only play. You got it?’

  I said, ‘I got it.’

  The door handle jangled, and Valentine and I looked tensely to see which detective would re-enter.

  Sally leaned in, one hand riding the lever. ‘Better get the handcuffs on. We need ’em for the cameras.’