“You,” she whispered. “You get away from me. You stop bothering me with your idiot questions and you leave. Me. Alone.” She took off again.
I started to follow, but an angry glance back from her stopped me. She stomped eastward as fast as her silk stockings and orthotics would carry her.
Julius Caesar leaned forward and scrunched her nose sympathetically. “Don’t worry, honey. If she’d really wanted to kill you, she could have found something more reliable than Ambien. For example, rat poison.”
“Thank you,” I said absently, heading back to the hotel. I would need a pen and paper to tally how many parts of that interaction I’d grossly mishandled. And yet it would seem that I very likely had an attempted murder on my hands.
Chapter 7
But if you so much as touch the box, the juice comes spurting out. The design is atrocious,” Asa was pleading into the phone, holding aloft a juice box as evidence. “Hello? Hello? Did customer service hang up on me?” he asked incredulously, looking at the receiver.
I scurried behind the desk and dropped my wallet into the backpack at my feet. “Try drinking your juice out of a glass like a grown-up,” I suggested.
“The woman at Apple and Eve said the same thing! This is very irregular. They’re supposed to fawn.” He turned his pudgy palms to the ceiling, looking like a bewildered balloon.
“Surely, Asa, you can find love elsewhere. Hey, where’s Lockjaw?” I asked, trying to sound casual but beginning to perspire. The lobby seemed unusually warm. I shook off my sweater.
“I get plenty of love, Zephyr,” Asa said huffily. “But I like free stuff. I didn’t hear you complaining when I brought in the Oreos. Or the pantyliners.”
“No, that was extremely thoughtful of you,” I conceded.
“Or the dental floss or the cereal bars.”
“The cereal bars were disgusting.”
“The cereal bars were disgusting. But what did you think of the bath oils? Didn’t you think the cucumber aloe was exceptionally smooth?” Asa asked earnestly, his face furrowed in concentration, the Plato of perks.
“Oh, good, we’ve resumed our blinding levels of focus and dedication. At least no one’s running out the door fifteen minutes after they’ve come on shift.” Hutchinson oozed into the lobby. I was now thoroughly convinced that he spent his days glued to the security monitor.
I was about to apologize, when I caught myself and invoked the Tag method.
“Actually,” I said haughtily, addressing my computer screen, “Mrs. Hodges had asked me to find out whether Spa Belles or Bloomie Nails did a cheaper mani/pedi. I was following up on a guest request.”
Hutchinson cleared his throat. “Guest request” was one of his father’s favorite phrases, a clarion call to duty, a crystal-clear delineation of priorities.
“Right, well.” He peered at a mosaic on the far wall of the lobby. “Just make sure checkouts are on time this morning. We have a dozen arrivals, a bridezilla is dropping off gift bags, and I’m going to be out the rest of the day, so I won’t be here to put out your fires.” He scowled at each of us in turn and then strutted toward the door, his arms swinging a little too forcefully.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Asa breathed as soon as Hutchinson disappeared. He reached for the phone. “He makes my toxin levels go sky-high.”
I turned to Asa. “Can you cover for just ten more minutes?”
“Zephyr,” he whined. “You’re going to get in trouble! You’re going to get me in trouble! Where are you going, anyway?”
“Come on, Ace.” I patted his soft shoulder as I left the counter. “It’s like we’re Janet and Michael Jackson. Before he died, I mean. Never in the same place at the same time. Could be the same person, right?”
His eyes lit up. “We do have very similar hair!”
“Maybe you should give Revlon a call,” I suggested, heading for the elevator. “If we both used the same conditioner, we could be twins.”
“Oh, Revlon blocked my number ages ago.” The elevator dinged. “But don’t worry, Zeph,” he said resolutely as I stepped in. “I’ve got Clinique on speed dial.”
* * *
The fifth-floor hallway was silent, with no evidence of Saturday evening’s medical drama. Three of the six rooms up here were vacant, including the one previously occupied by the New Zealanders, which had required the services of a professional carpet cleaner. A fourth was being used by a German couple who designed playgrounds from recycled materials; that pair had been up and out cruising the city’s jungle gyms by seven every morning. Two women who came every month to carry on their extramarital affair were in a fifth room. They made a point of loudly discussing their husbands whenever they passed through the lobby; I don’t know whom they thought they were fooling, but they often slept late, so I wasn’t concerned about them, either.
I lingered outside Samantha’s room, willing myself to go in. My plan called for quick and deft maneuvering, not loitering. And yet I stood there, examining the ceiling, formulating excuses. If I encountered a chambermaid, I could say I was checking the placement of smoke alarms. Or making sure no paint was peeling. Or confirming that the spacing of the ceiling tiles was—
The elevator dinged, announcing the imminent opening of doors. I thrust my key into the lock and leapt inside room 505. I waited for a moment in the dark, heart threatening to pound itself up and out of its assigned location, then dared to look out the peephole. Maria Lopez, the oil painter who worked as head chambermaid to pay the rent, was beginning her rounds. She was starting with the Germans’ room. I took a shaky breath, reminded myself that I was within my legal rights to look but not touch, and flipped on the light.
My first thought was that I liked what Samantha had done with the place. Even though the room was the mirror image of the others on this floor, hers looked like a home. She’d put down a thick Turkish rug and brought in two of her own lamps. There were thriving plants, one of which sat on a wooden chest that replaced the hotel’s standard boomerang-shaped glass coffee table. There was a coat rack, a small bookcase filled with paperbacks and framed photographs, and a mauve shelving unit that held a small collection of ceramic dishes—two plates, two mugs, two bowls. On a lower shelf were a box of cornflakes, a container of Metamucil, a basket of single-serving nondairy creamers—like the kind you might pocket at a diner if you were so inclined—a bottle of vanilla extract, and a bottle of Tums. She’d even replaced the McKenzies’ movie-star photos on the walls with prints by de Kooning and Picasso.
Her bathroom, surprisingly, held few personal effects. My recent experience at the Hudson Street Nursing Home had indicated that the need for bathroom shelf space increased with age. Here, there were only a toothbrush and toothpaste, a travel-sized bottle of lotion (interestingly, from the Larchmont Hotel, a competitor on 11th Street), and a single bottle of generic aspirin.
What had I expected to find? Annoyed with myself and increasingly anxious, I sidestepped a potted ficus tree, noticing that the tin watering can beside it sat in a saucer filched from the hotel bar. So far, that was the most incriminating item I’d found.
I started to pick up a dead leaf that had fallen onto the polished desk, then thought better of it. The desk was covered in tidy piles of papers, and along the back stood more framed photographs. I bent over to study them, keeping my hands behind me. Most of the photos were of Samantha and an unassuming bald man I presumed to be Husband Number Two. But there was one sepia-toned photo of a young family that made me yelp.
Everyone in the picture—father, mother, brother, sister—was Caucasian, except for the little Asian girl in her father’s arms. New York State law be damned, I grabbed the photo and squinted at it. The family was posed in front of a pickle store on Essex Street and, judging from the make of the cars in the photo, it had been taken about seven decades earlier. Samantha had been adopted! Adopted by people who could have shared gefilte fish recipes with my ancestors, it would seem.
If Samantha had been adopted, then h
er adoptive family—apparently Jewish and presumably explaining the mystery of her shtetl style—was way ahead of their time; today, in New York, anyway, every other Hannah Schwartz or Esther Goldman originally hailed from some dusty, forsaken town in the farthest reaches of China. But a Japanese kid? While I couldn’t even begin to imagine the circumstances surrounding that adoption, I did allow myself a moment of triumph: one, albeit tiny, mystery explained. I put the photo back after wiping away any fingerprints with my shirt.
In the hallway, a door clicked closed. I darted to the peephole and spotted the jollier of the cuckolding women headed for the elevator, a Mets jacket slung over her arm and a cap perched on her head. I wasted a moment considering what I would do with a lover if I was cheating on my husband. If you planned to conduct an affair over a long period of time, you might very well end up doing pedestrian activities like attending baseball games. Did they worry about being broadcast on the JumboTron at Citi Field? Did a gay lover rather than a straight lover make it easier to concoct a lie?
Easier than concocting a lie explaining my presence in room 505. I darted back to the desk and quickly surveyed the contents.
Atop one pile of papers was a receipt for $14.73 from Duane Reade—vitamins, a package of nail files, and a carton of Newman’s Own lemonade. Another pile held AARP, Real Simple, Notary Public Monthly, and a brochure for RVs. I tried to picture the retrofitting that would need to be done on a Winnebago to accommodate a driver of such staggeringly short stature. Raised seat, raised pedals. On the plus side, the interior would probably feel roomier to her than to the average occupant.
The Sprint bill at the top of the third pile offered evidence that Samantha had not, in fact, just stepped out of another century in her silk stockings. Below the cellphone bill, part of a Chase bank statement was visible, and a number caught my eye. A number that took up a lot more space than any number ever had on one of my bank statements.
$500,000.
I looked closer.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five zeroes.
I considered the stack of paper, studied it from a few angles. Hands clasped tightly behind my back again, I bent down and gently blew on the Sprint bill with a force a little harder than that of, say, the air-conditioning suddenly coming on but lighter than if a pigeon had flown in through the … closed window. Oh hell, I’d already broken the law by touching the picture frame. I removed the Sprint bill and was treated to an unobstructed view of Samantha Kimiko Hodges’s transactions over the past thirty days.
Most of the items were not that different from my own. Debits of $7 for MetroCard purchases at MTA kiosks; $10.32 for a meal at B&H Dairy, where dill was put to generous use in all soups; $5 for a very short taxi ride; multiple voluntary admissions of $1 to the Met, which must have irritated the ticket sellers; two purchases at the Museum of Sex that I tried not to ponder for too long; and a debit of $2,500 from the Greenwich Village Hotel, an excellent housing deal in Manhattan if ever there was one.
And then there were the credits: two from the Social Security Administration of $1,200 each; two of $1,400 from a Vanguard money market; and then the one stand-alone transfer into her account of $500,000, the source of which was posted as “Summa, Inc.”
My hands began to shake. I tried to straighten the papers but instead sent them flying, tornado style, to the floor.
Don’t cry, Zephyr, don’t cry, I warned myself as I crouched down and gathered everything up. Some of the bills had stayed together, but most had slipped out of order. There was no time to guess how they’d been organized. I slammed the documents on the desk, making sure the bank statement was back under the phone statement, and fled.
I raced down the stairwell, the word “Summa” flashing from the wall of every landing. I threw myself against the lobby fire door and slipped behind my computer at the front desk.
“Whew!” said Asa, drawing his hand across his forehead. “Now, can we all just please stay put for a while?” He unwrapped a chocolate Zone bar and settled his elbows onto the counter to enjoy it.
I clicked out of EZ-CheckIn and Googled “Summa.” Thousands of results popped up—including “Strengthening Underrepresented Minority Mathematics Achievement,” a couple of entries for summa cum laude, and the thoughtful question, “did you mean sumo wrestler?”—but nothing that was helpful to me. I pressed my fingers to my eyes and tried to recall the details of my initial briefing with the McKenzie paterfamilias.
On the day I began work at the hotel, Ballard and I had met at Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop at 6:45 A.M., a place utterly foreign to him and a time then unfamiliar to me. He was a very sweet Santa Clausian man—even told me with a hangdog look that he’d always wished for a daughter, too—but very long-winded, and somewhere between a cataloging of his wife’s pottery achievements and recollections of truffle hunting with his son, I’m afraid my attention may have wandered. He’d mentioned his nephew Jeremy only briefly, saying that he loved him dearly even though he was only an adequate squash player and a so-so scientist who ran an outfit called Summa. I was almost certain he’d said Summa, but my notes were back in my cubicle.
“Asa,” I said hoarsely. “Do you remember where Jeremy works?”
He studied his snack and licked some chocolate from the wrapper.
“Who’s Jeremy?”
“Asa!” I hissed. “Jeremy Jeremy. Jeremy Wedge. Jeremy the McKenzie cousin who left on a stretcher on Saturday night?” I looked at him incredulously and wondered whether it was time for him to cut back on the Deadhead soirées.
“Oh, him. Because I went out with a Jeremy last week, but he’s not out of the closet at work and I don’t do closeted so I told him—”
“Asa!” I put my fists at my sides to keep from taking a swipe at my friend. “Do you or don’t you remember the name of the place Jeremy works?”
“He’s head of the parks department tree-counting prog—”
“Asa, I’m going to try this one last time. Jeremy Wedge. Do you or don’t you remember where he works?”
“Um?” Asa searched the ceiling. “Some kind of genetics-institute thingy. Probably trying to figure out a way to weed out the gays.”
“Institute, right!” I refined the search and, sure enough, up popped a link, which took me to a single page featuring a series of pink and purple swirls suggestive of, in my opinion, douche packaging. Beneath the logo was the tagline “Investigating Intelligence.” There was a Manhattan phone number but nothing else.
The smart thing would have been to go back to the SIC to check Summa’s LUDS and MUDS, search Better Business Bureau records—hell, start with a background check on Jeremy Wedge. Instead, just as an emaciated blonde sailed through the doors clutching about twenty Takashimaya bags, I dialed the number on the screen.
It rang as the bride-to-be positioned herself in front of the desk and pretended to look patient.
“Asa?” I said sweetly, showing him that I was on the phone. “He’ll be right with you,” I told the woman, who was so painfully hip that she most definitely lived in a 3,000-square-foot converted meatpacking plant on Stanton Street. When the weather turned cold, she’d wear a below-the-knee, quilted nylon coat, frayed jeans that dragged in the dirty snow, and a knit Peruvian hat with the strings hanging down the sides of her face. When she finally gave birth, she would, naturally, push a Bugaboo with latte holder attached. She was as far from being a Sterling Girl as a woman could be.
“Summa,” sang a female voice on the other end.
“Oh.” My stomach sank. Had I really just dialed without a plan? Was I so tired and so confused by what I’d found upstairs that I’d gone ahead and called?
“Um, I was wondering … um … what … where—” I fumbled.
“Ms. Herman! Did you have an easy flight in?”
My brain somersaulted. Why was that name familiar?
“Mmm, yes, yes, I did, thank you. How did you know it was me?” I shut my eyes against the spiraling screen saver, which was making me seasick.
Herman. Zelda Herman. Somewhere along the way I must have missed a step.
“Ha-ha, of course,” I chuckled weakly.
“You’re confirmed for two today, my dear. We’re very much looking forward to seeing you again.”
“Oh. Me, too. Absolutely. Um, could you remind me … the closest subway stop?”
“A Rhodes scholar but probably can’t remember your own address, right? Typical, my dear!”
“Huh.”
“The One to Canal. Go west, young woman, cross Canal, and you’ll see Desbrosses. Number twenty-five. Even after a year, I’m certain you’ll recognize it. Listen, sweetheart, catch a nap, relax, and we’ll have dinner at Capsouto Frères afterward. You know there’s nothing to be nervous about.”
I scribbled the address on a piece of hotel stationery. “Well, that’s good,” I bellowed, suddenly afraid I was going to start laughing uncontrollably. I was so far out on a limb, there was nothing to do but jump. “I’m really looking forward to this!”
“You are?” The voice on the other end seemed to falter.
“You betcha!” I cheered, and hung up.
“So please make sure that the vegan snacks go to the younger Zurlansky room and not the older. Because the older Zurlanskys are very hostile toward vegans,” the bride warned Asa, chewing on her lower lip. She would have been a great candidate for No Divas.
“They are often a bit sickly looking,” Asa agreed.
The bride looked surprised.
“Vegans, I mean. I don’t know the Zurlanskys,” Asa explained.
I still had my hand on the desk phone when my cellphone buzzed in my pocket with a text. Two texts. We weren’t supposed to use our phones when we were on duty, so I held mine below counter level and read them.
And the other:
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